Ted Danson Is Haunting My Dreams
(I recently started therapy, don't worry.)
Ted Danson is haunting my dreams.
Just last week, he was here, roaming around my subconscious. I was lounging in a resplendent New England mansion, but there was a snowstorm outside. Unfortunately, I had a meeting scheduled with my Nemesis™ that could not be delayed. I decided to make haste, and climbed into a black, luxury sports car…where I found Ted Danson in the driver’s seat.
In my dreams, Ted Danson is extremely — almost oddly — large. He is incredibly tall, making me feel childlike by comparison, and he has big, bony hands. His eyes are a crystalline blue, and his smile is gentle and soothing. “Are you ready?” he asks, gazing at me. I feel my stomach lurch. I am most certainly not ready to confront my Nemesis™, but Ted makes me feel like everything will be ok. He drives me through winding roads, snow gently falling upon us as we go. The entire ride is quiet — he doesn’t talk and neither do I. When we pull up to the home of my Nemesis™, I am shocked to see they live in a resplendent New England mansion that bears a bizarre resemblance to my resplendent New England mansion. I then look behind me, and Ted Danson is gone. When I go to knock on the door, my Nemesis™ answers, and I wake up, horrified.
Under normal circumstances, I probably would have gone back to bed and forgotten this dream. However, I made a commitment to myself to start seeing a therapist, and (unfortunately) I followed through. As part of our ongoing work together, my therapist asked me to start a dream journal. Every session, I share one particularly outstanding dream with him, and we go back and forth about what it might mean and what my subconscious might be trying to tell me.
I have a theory that, by virtue of knowing it’s being monitored, my subconscious is deliberately fucking with me. The straight boy I pined for in high school? In my dreams. Full moon coming up? I’m floating in space in my dreams. Watching too much Gilmore Girls? I’m following Lorelai Gilmore through a labyrinthine suburban shopping mall. (That one qualified as a nightmare.)
Every time I wake up from dreaming, I reach for my phone and groggily jot down the general sequence of events. Some recent entries in my Notes app include:
“Sword fight with Miley Cyrus in a warehouse, leather jumpsuit”
“Frida Kahlo yelling at me and I’m naked”
“Ted Danson is driving me — again?!”
In my second Ted Danson dream, I am at an outdoor Amtrak station, presumably some place in Connecticut or New Jersey, and I’m trying to get home to Boston. I have a ticket in my hand, and I’m looking for my train platform. Suddenly, there he is: Ted Danson. He’s wearing gloves, and he offers to take my bags. “Come this way, the drive will be faster,” he says. Even in my dream, I know this is a lie. I also know taking a car is a gigantic waste of money. Why ditch the train and hire a driver when I paid for an Amtrak ticket? Those things aren’t cheap, you know! Anyway, I end up following Ted Danson through a parking garage and into his car. This time, I’m in the back seat of what appears to be a luxury sedan. So off we go, just me and Emmy Award-winning actor, Ted Danson.
Once again, Ted and I do not make small talk on our drive. Once again, we face winding roads. Once again, it snows. When we near the street of my childhood home, Ted points out the window. There, I see that a caution sign with a flashing yellow light is blocking the road. There’s also a brown labrador retriever sitting at the end of the street, perfectly stoic, snow accumulating on his head. (My first-ever pet was a brown labrador retriever.) “We’re gonna have to find another way,” says Ted, to my dismay.
Ted Danson then manages a very precarious U-turn — snowy roads, oncoming traffic and all — before whipping the car around and finding another entrance to my street. As he makes his way up the driveway, I sigh with relief that the ride is over. But this time, Ted does not disappear. Instead, he helps me get my bags out of the trunk. My mother comes running out of the house, thrilled to see me. The snow has disappeared — there’s not a trace of it on the ground. “Oh, Ted, you forgot this last time!” my mom says casually, as though she is longtime friends with Emmy winner Ted Danson. Then, she reveals a used arm sling, and hands it to Ted, who is very grateful.
In the most confusing part of the dream yet, I reach into my wallet and hand Ted Danson, who presumably has a lot more money than I do, 40 dollars in cash. “I know you and your wife are having a hard time,” I say. “I hope things get better.” Ted Danson is very grateful, and he gets into his car and leaves. As soon as he pulls out of the driveway, I wake up. I reach for my phone and type, delirious with sleep, Why is Ted Danson haunting me???
By the time therapy came around on Wednesday, I was practically itching to get Ted Danson out of my head. My therapist, focused on more important issues, like my waking life, insisted on opening our session with a survey of my general work-related trauma instead. Finally, with 15 minutes left on the clock, he asked me to share any dreams that had been bothering me for the past week. In tremendous detail, I described both of my Ted Danson dreams, and watched his eyebrows raise in amusement.
“So, who is Ted Danson to you?” he asked. And before I could even say a word, the power went out in my apartment.
No, no, no, I wailed, running around the house, trying to see if any outlet was magically working so I could regain my WiFi connection. (Our apartment has no cell phone service — please someone move me back to New York City, I am begging.) There was no saving the session. I now had 10 minutes of my appointment left, and I was wasting them running around in the dark. Somehow, with one bar of cell service, my therapist got through to my cell phone: “I’m afraid we’re out of time, so we’ll have to pick this up next week,” he said, sounding amused. “Funny about the power, though. I wonder if there’s a synchronicity there.”
Synchronicity is a term coined by the late psychologist Carl Jung to describe “the acausal connection of two or more psychic and physical phenomena.” In other words, it’s a heightened or spiritual way of thinking about coincidences. Jung felt that some coincidences were not senseless — instead, they could be the universe’s way of showing someone a sign. He even wrote a whole book about synchronicity, developing the theory further with the physicist and Nobel laureate W. Pauli.
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. What on Earth could yet another L.A. power outage have to do with my nightmares? And what the hell does Ted Danson have to do with anything?
Of course, our unfinished conversation left me in a tailspin. I became obsessed with Ted Danson. I’ve told anyone who will listen to me about my dreams. “Wait, which Ted Danson is it?” one of my colleagues asked me on a Zoom call. “Like, was it Three Men and a Baby Ted Danson, or Cheers Ted Danson?”
To be honest, I had no idea what either of those productions were until she mentioned them. (I Googled, got caught up to speed, and will be watching neither.) Contemplating the question, I realized I only knew Ted Danson from watching NBC’s The Good Place.
Even more confused, I decided to consult the closest thing I have to a spiritual guru in my life. I texted my friend, astrologer Chani Nicholas. I sent her five minutes worth of voice notes about my dreams, which she politely listened to without advising me to take a long nap, and then responded simply: “Who is Ted Danson to you?”
Not this question again.
On The Good Place, Danson plays Michael, otherwise known as “television’s most endearing demon.” The series opens with the main characters believing they’ve made it to “The Good Place,” a sort of sanitized and secular version of Heaven. Later on, they find out that the whole thing is a ruse — that really, they’re in The Bad Place, being tortured into an eternal cycle of guilt and shame. The puppetmaster behind the whole ordeal is the demon Michael, who has a sudden change of heart by season two and tries to help his damned subjects negotiate entry to The (real) Good Place. As the show progresses, Michael goes from loathing humanity to loving it — learning lessons from his new friends that help to counteract his otherwise demonic tendencies. He also acts as their guide to the complicated inner workings of the spiritual realms, navigating Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory with comedic aplomb. “This is magic,” Danson told Vanity Fair about the series. “We’re talking about ethics and decency and what it means to live a good life, and that there are consequences to your actions.”
I relayed this information to Chani, who responded with a one-word text: “Bingo.” It then became clear to me why Ted Danson was in my dreams, and who he was there to represent.
Just last week, I read a book about Tarot by Rachel Pollack, called Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I specifically remembered Card Nine in the Tarot deck, called “The Hermit.” Pollack writes, “The card means a withdrawal from the outer world for the purpose of activating the unconscious mind...but The Hermit also signifies a teacher who will show us how to begin this process and will help us find our way.” In folklore, The Hermit was often depicted as an elder living in the woods, withdrawn from society and the rigid dogma of the Church. In that way, The Hermit represented an alternative, less trodden path to wisdom and enlightenment — usually involving many trials, tribulations, and ego-shattering escapades.
Further down the page was my answer. “Jung and his followers have described their patients’ many dreams of wise old men guiding them on mysterious journeys,” Pollack writes. “In many cases, dream analysis discovered that the dream guide actually stood for the therapist. The unconscious can recognize a Hermit teacher before the conscious mind can.”
I felt like the sun was shining on my brain. In a purely physical sense, Ted Danson fits the archetype of The Hermit: he’s an older man with silver hair. And in The Good Place, he plays a character with valuable knowledge of the spiritual world, not unlike The Hermit. In my dreams, he is always in a car, literally driving me through winding roads and treacherous weather conditions to confront something that’s a source of major conflict for me — family and deep feelings of animosity or heartbreak.
In a way, Danson’s character does something very similar on The Good Place. He helps the protagonists find their way from The Bad Place to The Good Place. In other words, he helps them find the light in the dark.
Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. There I sat, in complete darkness after my power went out, yelling at my computer screen to turn back on so I could figure out why the fuck Ted Danson was haunting my dreams. And then, a brief phone call from my therapist, who had nothing revelatory to say, except, of course: “I wonder if there’s synchronicity there.”