Time and money are two things I believe dreams value a whole lot less than I tend to  do. Ever notice how when you try to look at a watch in a dream, it’s hard to see the time? Or the time keeps changing? And as for money, dream stores are usually trying to sell you something that doesn’t have a price on it.

In last night’s dream, I sensed that my Dream-maker was poking fun at my tendency to be pre-occupied with both time and money.

I dreamed I was staying in a hotel, where I noticed people were very free with their riches. At one point, I found myself in a conference room in this hotel, seated beside a man and his grown daughter. The father was giving his daughter a gift. She opened the rectangular box and pulled out a beautiful wristwatch with a deep blue band and matching face, whose circumference was ringed with diamonds.

“Oh,” she said, sounding unimpressed. “I don’t want this.” She handed it back to her father. “You told me yourself that this is kind of immature.”

I leaned in toward them. “I like it though,” I said. And the young woman handed it to me, as her father nodded his approval.

I sat admiring the watch, amazed at my good luck. Diamonds! How beautiful!

Throughout the night’s dream, I kept showing off my watch to various dream characters, exclaiming again how these wealthy people had just handed it over to me, “Just like that.”

But also throughout the dream, the wristband kept slipping and sliding. No matter how I adjusted it, the watch just didn’t fit.

Finally, in a dream-within-a-dream sequence, I found myself in the office of my old therapist. “What should we talk about?” I asked. I hadn’t had a session with her in decades, and had no idea where to begin.

“Had any dreams?” she asked, and I began to tell her the one about the watch.

On waking, I realized that the dream was playing a little game with me.

Why, I wondered, would wealthy people so happily hand over a jewel-encrusted time-piece to me, a stranger?

For one thing, the dream knows better than I do, that those well-off people were better off without a fancy, expensive idol to time. I thought I’d walked off with riches, when really I’d taken the burden of materiality and time off their hands. After all, hadn’t the father told the daughter that the watch was “immature?” It was as if he was testing her, and she passed, by passing along that useless bauble to me, who hadn’t yet grown out of worshiping time and material wealth and security, rather than the timeless gifts of nature and pure being?

And if I weren’t quite sure what position the dream was taking on the topic, the scene with the therapist sealed the deal. By asking me to tell her a dream, she reminded me, even before I woke, that this glittery gift was just the mist and magic of a fleeting illusion.

And, this dream was a gift that just kept giving:

As I do every morning, I put on my watch shortly after getting out of bed. Ready to rush off to work, I ran out to my car, looked down at my wrist, and saw that the hands on my watch had stopped. It was too late to go back inside and get a different watch, so I was stuck with this frozen timepiece instead. I tucked it into my pocketbook, and each time I reflexively glanced at my empty wrist, I felt the dream flashing its glittery smile back at me.

When that happened, rather than rush on to my next appointment, I began to move in slow motion. It was my little way of saying no thank you, to the false gift of the dazzling watch from my dream, and being grateful instead for the true gift: the one that was laughing with me from some invisible place, beyond the diamond-encrusted time piece.

© 2012 Tzivia Gover

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