T

February    15th

ONLY    BAD DREAMS

“Clear  your    mind    and get a   hold    on  yourself    and,    as  when    awakened    from    sleep   and realizing   it

was only    a   bad dream   upsetting   you,    wake    up  and see that    what’s  there   is  just    like    those

dreams.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS,   MEDITATIONS,    6.31

he author Raymond Chandler was describing most of us when he wrote in a letter to his publisher, “I
never looked back, although I had many uneasy periods looking forward.” Thomas Jefferson once
joked in a letter to John Adams, “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!”
And Seneca would put it best: “There is nothing so certain in our fears that’s not yet more certain in the
fact that most of what we dread comes to nothing.”
Many of the things that upset us, the Stoics believed, are a product of the imagination, not reality. Like
dreams, they are vivid and realistic at the time but preposterous once we come out of it. In a dream, we
never stop to think and say: “Does this make any sense?” No, we go along with it. The same goes with our
flights of anger or fear or other extreme emotions.
Getting upset is like continuing the dream while you’re awake. The thing that provoked you wasn’t
real—but your reaction was. And so from the fake comes real consequences. Which is why you need to
wake up right now instead of creating a nightmare.