Do You Lead Multiple Lives?  

Perhaps a few of you are old enough to remember a TV drama back in the mid-1950s. The program known as “I Led Three Lives” ran for three years and starred actor Richard Carlson in the lead role. He played a Boston advertising executive, Herbert Philbrick, who was recruited as a Soviet Communist spy. Philbrick was really an FBI counterspy for the USA. I was a kid when the show aired, yet I can remember watching it with my parents, even if I didn’t fully understand these spy stories.

You could say that I lead three lives myself. No, I’m not a spy or a man with different identities, like Herbert Philbrick. Still, my second and third lives, like Herbert Philbrick’s, often seem more vivid and dramatic than my normal day-to-day life.

My second life occurs while I’m sleeping. Sleep is obviously a necessity for human life and wellness. Unfortunately, quality sleep for some folks seems almost unattainable. Life can pile on trials and tribulations that make deep, restful sleep difficult, draining our personal energy and reducing the quality of our waking lives. Shakespeare wrote that sleep “knits up the raveled sleave of care.” A good night's sleep can be like hitting the reset button of life itself. Beyond the restorative power of sleep, it provides a unique form of entertainment in the occasional presence of dreams.

The pure pleasure of deep sleep and immersion in dream worlds seems vastly underrated to me. Within my own dreams, I have many of the same personal characteristics and perspectives as I do in my hours awake. There are a few key differences, though. Maybe like me, you have one or two special skills or superpowers in your recurring dreams. I need my enhanced personal attributes to handle the heightened uncertainties, mysteries, and challenges presented in these dreams.

Most of us are creative writers, if only indirectly so. In our dreams and nightmares, we author short and often intense narratives in which we are the main character. We often forget or ignore these dreams, but some of us can vividly remember at least aspects of our dreams and our altered identities. I wonder about these shifts in identity or personality in our dreams. Are we more often fearful in facing threats and bogeymen, or are we more adventurous and bolder in responding to these challenges?

Of course, we have many other venues for stimulating entertainment than our dreams. It seems difficult to meet an individual or group of friends without the topic of conversation turning to books, films, or TV series that “we’ve just got to experience.” The quantity and diversity of these many entertainment options permit people to find choices that match their individual curiosity and interests.   

My third life comes when I find time for leisure reading, listening, or viewing. My somewhat privileged, normal existence doesn’t often test me like the volatility and risks facing fictional characters in dramatic narratives. With a bit of imagination and suspension of disbelief, I can identify with others and submerge myself in the fictional lives of certain characters. 

Scholars use the term “narrative rationality” to describe how much of what we know and how we act derives from the narratives that we’ve have seen, heard, and read. Some of our earliest knowledge came from the bedtime stories read to us by our parents or through books we first read.  Books like The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift series, as well as movies such as Shane, The Alamo, or Old Yeller captured the interests of many preteens of my era.

Another scholarly term is “vicarious learning.” We don’t have to experience directly the rewards or consequences for certain human conduct to learn. We can follow narratives in which characters in these stories are punished or praised for their decisions and actions. Such lessons might not be as powerful as direct experiences, but these many stories offer us a breadth of human challenges well beyond those we might normally encounter. As we identify with diverse characters in contrasting situations, we can also develop more understanding and empathy toward others that we might not possess in our more locked-down, first-person existence.   

I don’t fault or regret almost all my direct experiences in normal life, but my other two lives have been a luxury of even more discovery, pleasure, and enrichment.

It’s natural in the mid-2020s to feel uncertainty and worry about the future. Often the media seems to have a vested interest in gaining readership or clicks by dramatizing more serious human threats. Yet, we shouldn’t overlook how many lucky Americans still live fairly secure and largely unthreatened existences. We often confront the scariest terrors only second-hand in our choices of true/fiction crime, science fiction, and horror stories. And we can free ourselves from even these terrors. We need only put aside the book or electronic device or merely awake from the nightmare.