The dream recurs most every night now.

I'm in a messy house, often my mother's or sometimes one of the homes from my marriage.

Not just, messy. Complete disasters as though a tropical storm had moved through. Every square inch of the floors and any surfaces covered with multiple layers of stuff and dirt and grime. Dishes stacked so high they're tilting and ready to fall. Think of the leaning tower of frozen Pisa. Potted plants overturned and the dirt tracked through the place. Enough dirty laundry that no industrious person could wash it in multiple lifetimes.

I've decided that something must be done each time.

And then I begin cooking for those who might help me to clean.

"We can't live like this," I say, as I dirty a dozen pans to make my famous zucchini-goat cheese frittata. (Note: It really is the bomb.) "But we have to eat before we clean." And I stack the pots on top of cookware that fed someone else six months ago.

I never make any progress before the dream ends. It's only worse.

I understand the message: I need to clean up a mess.

Have you ever read, Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams?" It's hysterically bad 121 years later. Let me sum it up by combining his underlying thesis and the pigeon German of John F. Kennedy: "Ich bin ein nipple."

Better is the is Carl Jung's "Dreams," significantly less sexual, Oedipal and oral fixation-y (a new word),

I get it: I've made a mess of things and I need to clean up beginning with the smallest of problems until I can face the entire mess.

I get it. Thank you dreams.

Peace and Carl Jung unto all of you my brothers and sisters.