Telling Our Cross-Cultural Stories Can Feel a Lot like Sharing Last Night’s Dreams

I’m on a subway in a crowded city . . . a group of orange-clad monks carrying bright-blue IKEA bags enters my car . . . now I’m not on the subway . . . I’m on a bus . . . some children next to me are nibbling on chicken feet . . . the bus stops for a dragon parade . . . with lions . . . a cat waves at me from inside a 7-11.

Sound like a bizarre dream to you, or just another day in a life abroad? Sometimes it can be hard to be sure.

We’ve all woken up from a toss-and-turn night with a vivid story in our minds that we can’t wait to tell to somebody, whether or not they are interested in hearing it. Sharing that dream can have a lot in common with telling stories about our mundane, or not-so-mundane, adventures overseas. How? Let me count the ways. . . .

1. Someone from back home asks you what life is like where you live. You tell them, and their eyes glaze over as your details get further unmoored from your passport-country’s culture and happenings. As the common touchpoints diminish, the interest often decreases. You won’t believe what happened to me last week! can sound an awful lot like You won’t believe what I dreamed last night!
2. You’ve told your dream, with vivid details and outlandish plot twists, to your friend, and they reply with, Oh, wow, that reminds me of a dream I had. It’s like when you tell someone about your monthly trek to a remote jungle outpost, and they regale you with a story about their trip to the Grand Canyon.
3. Most of my dreams wander around and I wake up before there’s a great resolution. That sounds a lot like some of my cross-cultural stories. Not everything gets wrapped up with a bow.
4. Have you ever wanted to go back to sleep so you could see your interrupted dream to its end? Have you ever heard that with practice, you can control the outcome of your dreams? Have you ever told a story during home service and you find yourself longing to be back overseas so you can reinsert yourself into the story again?
5. We often want to find meaning in our dreams, and people often offer up their dream-interpretation skills. Is God trying to tell me something? When you share what’s going on with your cross-cultural work, you may want to decipher what God is orchestrating, and others may want to jump in and explain it all. They may even want to work on tying that bow for you.
6. I think we’ve all had a version of the why-did-I-forget-to-wear-clothes-to-work-today? dream. And we’ve all had some embarrassing story from a language or culture faux pas overseas. Sometimes both are fun to tell. Sometimes, not so much.
7. Some refuse to tell the details of a bad dream because they’re afraid it will make them come true. Cross-cultural workers sometimes hold back details of their lives because they know they are true.
8. You know how much harder it is to remember the specifics of a dream the longer it is after waking up. In the same way, when you’ve been back from living abroad long enough, you start to get hazy on what really took place over there. While I was swapping memories with my wife a few weeks ago, she said, “It’s almost like it didn’t happen.” . . . Was it a dream?
9. And sometimes, sometimes, you find someone who listens to you with interest, and asks insightful questions, and then simply listens some more. Whether you’re talking about a dream or a true story, they listen because they know how much it matters to you. Ahhhh, what a someone. And when that happens, you happily ask, Have you had any crazy dreams lately? or Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?

[photo: “2012 Chinese New Year Parade,” by Jason Pier, used under a Creative Commons license]