Along the way, Didi and Gogo meet with three other people, leading to the cyclical repetition of actions and dialogue. Godot is repeatedly promised for “tomorrow.” He never appears in the play, leaving the characters in a state of existential uncertainty. One of the play’s recurring themes is sleep. There are two instances when Gogo falls asleep in the play and has nightmares. He wants to tell Didi about them when he wakes up. Gogo doesn’t want to hear the dreams, for they convey a state of entrapment.
It is almost as if the characters in this Becket play are lingering in a state of Limbo—somewhere between life and death. As I noted in the third essay in this series (Bergquist, 2026c), this state is closely aligned with the experience of nothingness, for one is neither “here nor there.” In this essay, I noted the gray tones represented in Sibelius’ Swan of Tuonela and the existential despair attending Kierkegaard’s description in Sickness unto Death of a boat adrift on the deep and troubled sea. Both portrayals represent something of the emotions associated with Limbo (and Becket’s tormented play).
The state of Limbo is also aligned with William Bridges’s “neutral zone” while one is embarking on a major life transition (Bridges, 1980). In a video recording available in the Library of Professional Coach Agnes Mura and I (Mura and Bergquist, 2020) offered a metaphor of pushing away from shore in a fragile boat and finding oneself in the midst of a foggy sea without a clear vision of the shore to which one wishes to travel nor a clear view back to the shore from which one embarked. This is Bridge’s ‘neutral zone,” which commonly experienced whenever we are embarking on a major new project or addressing a significant challenge (such as COVID-19). It is while waiting in the boat for the fog to clear or for our boat to be somehow pulled to the desired shore (God’s or Fate’s intervention) that nothingness is present and deeply experienced.
It is in this state that we must initiate the second step. We must imagine the nature of the shore to which we wish to travel and the purpose of journeying from the previous, safe shore to the new shore. It is in the engagement of imagination that we create something out of nothing.
Imagining
We wait because we can imagine. A member of the Qumran community could imagine the waters pouring down from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, and the Sea, in turn, coming to life with an abundance of fish. And in this imagining, I can create a complementary vision of a world of mercy and justice flowing down from Jerusalem, leading to a new life for all members of our community—and perhaps all members of the broader human community. And, as a member of the Anatevka community, I can similarly imagine a world in which all humans (including Jews) are treated with justice and mercy. I am willing to wait, given this vivid image. And perhaps there is no option other than to wait, because justice and mercy are not to be found in the world where I now dwell.
Intuition
Let’s move back for a moment from the desert of the Mideast and the bleak winters of Russia. I turn to the wisdom of Carl Jung (1971), who distinguishes between two important psychic functions. One function is what he calls Sensation (Sensing). This is our capacity to view the outside world. Via sight, sound, touch and feel, we can take in and process stimuli from the external environment. The second function is one that Jung calls Intuition (Intuiting). This distinct contribution by Jung concerns our capacity to generate internal images that operate independent of the external world.
