Category: Life is a Dream

I have been sleeping badly, in recent days. 

On Sunday, I woke up too early but then took a mid-morning nap. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it works, I often have very strange dreams.

I was on an amusement park ride, a kind of swinging thing, where you swing in parabolic patterns, I guess. Moments of freefall at the ends of the swing arcs. And it was indoors, and I was on the ride alone – no one else was there. But there was no sense that I was trapped, exactly. It's just what I was doing. And somebody was reading some bit of philosophy-type text, over a low-quality loudspeaker. I was having a hard time understanding it, as I swung down… up, to the top of an arc, feeling the pit of my stomach drop… and down… whoosh, and up again. Like that.

Not much of a plot – but that was the dream. Quite vivid, anyway.

Work is really feeling demanding, lately. We have our annual hagwon talent show coming up, which involves extra prep. 

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

I had a very strange dream in the pre-dawn hour. 

I was traveling by airplane. Maybe LAX to MSP or something like that. 

It was strange, because all the passengers looked like they'd been drawn directly from my facebook feed – all relatives and friends and long-lost acquaintances. And everyone was staring at their smartphones. 

Then the captain announced that we had a problem. We would have to make an emergency landing. Oddly, everyone was pretty calm. The airplane spiraled down in a wide loop, and I saw snow-covered mountains – the Rockies? We landed almost as smoothly as at an airport, but on a blustery, snow-covered alpine meadow. People got off the plane, but it didn't seem like anything was wrong with it. And everyone had cellphone reception, so people were announcing the landing on facebook and other sites, and people were watching news of our own emergency landing. 

But there was some delay in getting us rescued. There was only one helicopter arriving, to ferry out the 100s of passengers. So it would come and go, taking out only a half dozen at a time. A lot of us would have to stay the night. We camped out in the airplane, but it was quite cold. I felt sooo cold.

On the news in the middle of the night, that everyone was looking at on their cellphones, a scandal was erupting. It turned out the same pilot had made an almost identical emergency landing, in the same location, some years ago. How could that be? Especially since there was nothing obviously wrong with the plane. All the passengers and crew realized the pilot and copilot had disappeared. That was just too weird. On the next helicopter ferry arrival, some police arrived, with police dogs, who began looking for the pilot and copilot. 

I was just too cold. I didn't care about the pilot and copilot, I wanted to get out of there.

I woke up, and I had kicked my covers off. I sleep with the window open, and the building's heat had been turned off April 1 – the room was cold, it was chilly outside. So at least that's where the cold came from. The rest is just plain weird. The dream was far too coherent, in some ways. Almost like a movie or novel. It could be one.

I don't know where all the material came from – I haven't been watching any TV lately, so there's no airplane thriller movies enrolled in my dream-queue. I haven't looked at facebook in months, so I don't know how that happened either. It was just strange. What does it mean?

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Wow, that was a weird dream.

I was in some Simcity version of San Francisco – the city of my childhood, mediated by the simplifications of game theory and the fever dreams of utopian urban planners. I was driving one of my old VW Beetles (I owned 3 different ones, over the years – the one I was driving most resembled the last one I owned, with its vato-ized steering-wheel and missing gearshift knob).

I wanted to the drive across the Golden Gate bridge. I was approaching from the south, on those raised viaducts through the Presidio, but the city's skyline hovered off where Marin should be. Furthermore, the toll plaza had been converted into a campground. "Isn't this the plot of some post-apocalyptic movie?" I thought to myself, inside the dream.

Reaching the bridge, there was some strange change in procedure – my car would be taken across the bridge by a robot train, while I had to walk. I shrugged, like Kafka's K, and went with the flow. I left my car to the robot trains, under the management of an angry Mexican, and started walking. I was with some companions, mostly visitors to me while I'd been in the cancer hospital: Peter, Grace, Curt, Helen. They were ignoring me.

The walk across the bridge was quite challenging. Reality became Inception-like (as in the movie "Inception," which actually I didn't like that much, but the CGI cinematography is compelling). The bridge began to twist and tilt and bend. But unlike in "Inception," the twisting, tilting and bending was all completely mechanical. The Golden Gate bridge was a giant clockwork mechanism with a million moving parts, like a Transformer car – but instead, a bridge. And it wasn't becoming a robot, it was simply becoming a bridge with a life of its own. So the deck of the bridge moved and shifted and tilted vertiginously until I was first standing on the underside of the deck, and then on the top of one of the great, red-painted towers, without having walked at all, but merely clambered around as the direction of down shifted.

I did not enjoy being atop the tower – I have a fear of heights, after all. I looked down and waited, hoping the bridge would transform again so I could walk safely to the end. When it kept shifting and instead I ended up hanging from a cable, I let go and fell a short distance to the highway deck again. I ran to the north side of the bridge, and found myself in downtown Vancouver, BC. Looking back, the Golden Gate bridge was now the Lion's Gate Bridge, but Stanley Park had been filled up with rowhouses in the San Francisco style. Vancouver is a city I visited several times in my adolescence, but I would not consider the city deeply familiar – the main thing that links it to San Francisco, aside from their somewhat similar urban patterns, is that it is a city from my childhood, rather than from later in life.

I looked around for the robot trains, and I saw them, but my VW was missing. I began to walk. The sun was hot, and I began looking for the ferry. Why did I need to find the ferry? Why did I expect to find it in downtown Vancouver? Walking in the hot sun reminded me of Mexico, so soon I was on the outskirts of La Paz, the southern Baja desert shimmering in the heat. The heat was oppressive.

That made me wake up. I'd put my head under my blanket, like a turtle, and it was too warm. I'd slept later than usual – much later.

Whenever I sleep much later than my usual 6-7 AM wake-up time, I imagine that my body's immune system is fighting something. And the dreams get weird.

Case in point.

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]