When Sleep Becomes a Marathon You Don’t Remember Finishing
I spent eight hours asleep and woke up feeling like I had run a marathon, because in my dreams I had been running—running from something I couldn’t name toward something I couldn’t reach, through landscapes that shifted every time I thought I understood their geography. My body had been lying still while my mind had been in constant motion, creating a exhaustion that rest was supposed to cure rather than cause.
The cruel irony: I went to bed to recover from the day’s fatigue and woke up more tired than when I fell asleep, having worked the night shift in my own unconscious mind, laboring in dream factories that produce anxiety rather than restoration. My sleeping brain had decided that rest time was productivity time, that unconsciousness was an opportunity for additional consciousness, just in a different form.
The running dreams never allow you to arrive anywhere or escape from anything. You run and run and run, but the distance between you and your destination never decreases, the threat behind you never falls away, the finish line never gets closer. It’s exercise without progress, effort without achievement, movement without advancement—the perfect metaphor for anxiety itself.
Why does the sleeping mind choose running as its default metaphor for psychological stress? Maybe because running captures the feeling of urgency without the clarity of purpose that characterizes so much of modern existence. We feel like we’re always running—toward deadlines, away from problems, through obligations—but rarely toward anything that feels like an actual destination.
The exhaustion upon waking isn’t just physical phantom fatigue—it’s the emotional exhaustion of having spent eight hours failing to resolve whatever the running represented. The dream offers no closure, no solution, no arrival, just the perpetual experience of effort without resolution.
But maybe the running dreams are trying to tell us something about our waking lives: that we’re running when we should be walking, fleeing when we should be facing, moving when we should be still. Maybe the exhaustion is the unconscious mind’s way of protesting the constant motion that characterizes conscious existence.
Tonight I want to practice the radical act of not running—in dreams or in waking life—to see what happens when I stop fleeing and start staying, stop pursuing and start being present wherever I already am.
