Dreaming

AI generated image of a winter nightmare.

I had a dream last night. I was going to say weird dream, but most of my dreams are weird, so I dispensed with the qualifier. In this dream, I was hosting a dinner party. Once all my guests arrived, Knowing I had no food for the party, I told them I needed to go to the store to pick up something for dinner, so I left them. Then, rather than going to the grocery store close to my house, I drove to one 40 miles away in an old mall. There was a concert going on at the mall, so I had to fight my way through the crowds to get to the supermarket. By the way, I stopped to grab a bite to eat while I was at the mall. Then I entered the supermarket and, of course, I woke up. My first thought was "what the hell was I working out in my head?' I still haven't figured that out.

It is very difficult to write dream-like sequences in a narrative. The problem isn't coming up with weird images and assigning meaning to them, it's that dreams have an internal logic that make them make sense to you when you are dreaming. Capturing that logic for the writer is what is difficult. Dreams tend to be very illogical affairs, graphically. So how does a writer describe scenes that intentionally don't make sense in a manner in which for the character makes perfect sense, in the moment? It really is a challenge.

Occasionally, I will have a dream in which the internal logic does not work. These are the dreams when I will note--during the dream--that I must be dreaming, but it never stops the dream. I then develop this almost split consciousness, in which I experience what is happening as real while my mind reassures me it is not real. For me, this happens most often during nightmares. My mind just refuses to go along with the narrative, even as I continue to experience it.

As we approach MLK Day, I feel like I'm caught in some kind of shared dream. It's troubling, because it doesn't make sense to me, but for a number of folks it clearly does. How are we celebrating the moral values of 'beloved community' while masked armed agents are violently tearing apart our communities? I'm surprised the current administration has not tried to cancel the federal holiday, since they clearly don't believe in any of the values that it stands for. That sounds a lot like their endorsement of Christianity though; no lived values are apparent.

All this talk about Greenland just verifies what we all heard on the Access Hollywood tape. This is a man who believes he can just grab whatever he wants and no one will stop him because of who he is. I hope our lawmakers realize that they must say no or they risk destroying everything that has been built since the end of WWII.

We cannot abide cruelty. It's cold again this weekend, so do something nice for someone in your community that needs help. None of us have achieved anything entirely on our own.

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