Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Moving singing walking dancing choking sleeping eating
Thinking breathing hearing feeling seeing
We hunt the rhythm and listen for the chords
Trying to do the things that need done
To keep what we need
Get what we want
And strive for what we hope for
Kisses go unfelt
Words fade unspoken
Skin is left untouched
And dreams wither
But we go on
Because there’s too much time left to stop
Alan had a dream. He often corrected himself, calling it a “visitation,” when he shared it with others.
It wasn’t Alan’s first visitation with the dead. Others had come back to tell him something they thought he needed to hear them. The first came when he was seventeen. A dead aunt visited, warning him that his uncle was preparing to pass. Uncle Paul was his favorite, taking Alan on a fishing vacation every summer in an act of empathy that Alan didn’t appreciate for decades. Uncle Paul was so young, just forty-two, when he died of a heart attack while getting an Iron City beer from the frig. A Steeler game was on television. He wasn’t missed for almost a quarter. It was too late by then, back in that era. A snow storm was bruising the city, and the ambulance couldn’t get through.
There’d been other visitations since, but Granny’s visitation was one of the strongest, perhaps because he’d developed a comfort level with them by then. She’d only been dead for ten years, dying in nineteen ninety-six, a month short of one hundred years, yet, there she was, in one of her voluminous blue and white flowered dresses, in his room, accompanied by the smells from talcum powder and coffee. From Alan’s first memory on, she announced, “Let me make a pot of coffee, and we’ll sit awhile,” whenever his family visited her.
Addressing him in a stern but kind voice, she said. “Let Barbara do what she needs to do.” Not permitting time for a response, she was immediately gone.
On awakening, Alan thanked Granny for the visitation. It took a morning of thought through two large mugs of coffee before he accepted what she was telling him. Though it was probably going to pain him, he’d let Barbara do what she needed to do, whatever the hell that meant. He would just have to trust Barbara.
Really, he was trusting two people, if you think about it, maybe three.
This song hit the scene in nineteen eighty-four.
Remember that year, with portends of George Orwell’s prescient novel hanging over us, fueling worries about privacy and government spying? “There are laws against that,” people say, smirking. “It could never happen to us. We’re America. We’re a democracy. It’s the Soviet Union and those totalitarian states like it that should worry.” The U.S.S.R.’s collapse a few years later seemed to vindicate our innate American superiority. We’d won; the communists had lost. Yes, we were so silly to be worried.
Into this era came a German group with a hard-rocking message: “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane.” I didn’t know much about the Scorpions before “Rock You Like A Hurricane.” I knew of them, but little more.
I thought of them today because of my stormy dream. The dream rocked me like a hurricane with its unceasing gloominess and desperation until its climax. I didn’t awaken afraid, but thoughtful. Thinking of the dream, I remembered this song, and its use in Dave Eggers’ novel. Odd, how the mind works, with everything connected and nothing terminated, but spreading and sprawling into new connections.
But with that, I think about the weather again. One difficulty in modeling weather is the planet’s complexity and dynamics. Everything is connected, but tracing the source back to the wings that began the storm can be tricky.
So it is with thinking.
This dream, one of two remembered from last night, was wild.
I was part of an intergalactic crew. We were a small crew. I don’t know anyone’s names in the dream. My commander was a female and not anyone that I recognized.
I seemed to be in a television show. I was younger than I am, and appeared nothing like I ever had, except being white and male, with brown hair. I had the strange powers of being prescient and a great jumper. Both skills were nascent, and I spent large parts of the dream trying to improve both. At one point, I’d developed my jumping sufficiently that I could jump higher than a pub’s wood counter, and hang in the air several seconds, apparently suspending time and gravity. I was still learning about it.
Meanwhile, the series’ story line seemed to be that our little band was trying to help some small creature escape the powers that would capture and experiment on him, and return him to his home planet, across the galaxy. We were constantly being chased. People were trying to ambush and cheat us. We were in several fights.
In one episode memorable to me because my character played a greater role, I noticed that our vessel’s systems were alerting us to being followed. I notified the Captain. Meanwhile, we went planet-side, to a small bar. There, we met with someone to make a deal. I don’t know those details.
I remember that I knew from my prescience that someone was coming for us. So I announced, “I’ll take care of this.” Leaving the group, I went to a front foyer to await our attackers. Cold, heavy rain fell through the darkness outside. I wasn’t a big person. Other men were standing in the foyer. “Are you waiting for a fight, too?” I asked one. He looked down at me and nodded.
The attackers arrived and I gave them a thorough thumping via my special skills. Then, deal done in the bar, we departed the fix, heading for our space vessel and on to our next adventure.
Strange, but true. Well, in my dreams, hey?
After twenty years in the military, I suppose it’s not surprising that my identity is linked to my time in the ranks. I’ve been retired for more time — twenty-two years — than I served — twenty-one years — so my continuing dreams about identity and being in the military disturb me.
In this latest one, storms were raging. I was the new MFWIC – mo-fo who’s in charge — and was geared up and entering a tense situation. Everyone was waiting for me. But arriving there, I discovered I lacked my military identification card. I knew I’d forgotten it. That embarrassed me. I fumed about the loss without saying anything, but none dared approach me, as all were aware of the situation. All I could so, though, was stew with frustration while waiting to go back and get a new ID.
Returning to the staging location, I didn’t need to say a word. Nobody else did, either. Everyone was waiting for me to get there. As soon as I did, a young female airman in old BDUs wordlessly went about providing me a new ID card. Once she did that, I turned to leave and begin again, more than ready to do so.
And the dream ended.
We’ve reached day one hundred fifty-three. Hump day’s pregnant belly is becoming visible over the horizon, that day on which half of this glorious year commonly called twenty seventeen will be completed.
Completed. Done. In the rear-view mirror. Under the bridge. In the books. Finished.
Which will mean, writers, you will have half a year remaining to accomplish those tasks, goals, objectives, and plans you established for yourself somewhere back in the neighborhood of day one.
Think about what you’ve done.
Consider what you want to do for this year, and then put this year in the context of the other years of your life.
How does it look?
Dreamed of doing the dishes last night, along with being on a highway and trying to help others find their destination, and having a pair of fours and eights.
In the dishes dream, I was washing fine china in a gray plastic tub. The china had a pretty, delicate pink flower motif on them. The water in the tub was clean, warm and soapy. Filled to the brim, it was outside. There was a bit of crud on the china, so I was using a nylon pad to try to scrub them clean. That wasn’t working, so I went for a walk to find a better solution. While doing that, I eavesdropped on young people around the neighborhood. I became confused when a young woman called her dog, because his name was Michael, which is my name. Why is she calling me? We had a good laugh over it.
The highway dream featured a heavily traveled highway. I was in an open-air car, as most of us were. Small, the cars weren’t important and were barely noticed in the dream. I heard some others talking behind me. Realizing that they sought information on different topics and were lost, I understood that I could help them.
The dream became a little strange, then. Traffic started moving. I pulled off at a split where the congested highway headed into the desert. Traffic stopped behind me. As I hurried to explain to the others where to go, I flipped through scenes of information. None of it was technologically advanced. Some, for example, were flip-charts tied together by twine. Barely held together, the scenes came alive whenever I stopped on one. In this way, I tried to help them to the information they needed. But I was wrong about what they needed. One in particular was searching for information on whittling but I’d presented him with information on something else. I also kept getting distracted by other interesting pieces of information I saw. Then I noticed that the highway traffic was backing up. Knowing it was my fault, I apologized to the others and took off, seguing into the third dream.
In this final remembered dream, I was first shuffling cards, then looking at cards, and then being dealt cards. All I know is that I kept discovering that I had a pair of fours and eights. That same combination kept coming up, red fours and black eights, although I don’t recall the suites.
The dreams are enough to keep me wondering for the rest of the day.
Here’s a Friday two-fer.
I’d planned for a celebratory song today but this one dominated one of my dreams last night. “When the Levee Breaks” is an old blues song. I became familiar with it through Led Zeppelin’s cover of it in nineteen seventy-one.
In my dream, it was my wake-up song, playing every day on my radio at seven in the morning. I know this because I was explaining that to other people. I told them, I’d begun doing that in June, so I’d been doing it for a year. During that time, I’d found a new shortcut, I explained. While explaining that, I pointed out a window at a new white concrete highway that was alongside a shoreline. The sky was so blue and the sun was so bright, it awed you into silence. Vehicles were on the road. It looked like typical commuter traffic.
We joked a while about hearing that song everyday. I know it was “When the Levee Breaks” because one other asked, “What is that song?” Then he answered himself as I answered him, “”When the Levee Breaks,” by Led Zeppelin.” He nodded, laughing along as we spoke. He said, “It’s a good song. I don’t know if I’d want to hear it all the time.” I answered, “I only hear it in the morning.” He replied, “Well, even that might be too much, if it’s every day.”
I awoke from that and the other two remembered dreams feeling like a dark cloud had been lifted. You decide, though: will hearing this song every morning be too much?
Illness interrupts life, if you’re fortunate. The less fortunate end up in hospital, hospice, or a grave. For me, the latest illness is an interruption to my usual routines.
Being sick allowed some thinking time. I remembered that I’d dreamed of trying to help a general get to a hospital a few days before my illness, and wonder if I was attempting to warn myself. I dreamed a bunch when I was sick, about broken plumbing, stolen baseball gloves, fake roses, taking charge to organize people and processes, family, and flying.
I dreamed of flying a lot during the illness. It wasn’t like Superman and other superheroes would fly, horizontally, with their arms stuck out in front of them, as though diving, or with my arms swept back like wings. No, my flights were like I was walking through the air. I would step up into the air, find my direction, step toward it and be there.
There was some goofiness. I sang to myself. One of the things I sang was, “You say , “Meow,” and I say “Hello. Hello, hello.” I don’t know why you say meow, I say, “Hello.”” I just kept messing with the Beatles’ song, substituting meow for everything “you say”.
It was a mild illness in the relative spectrum of how these things go. The illness has faded to a harsh cough, a throat that’s sore when I cough, and some mucus. Energy is back up to about eighty-three percent of normal. The sensation I couldn’t get warm is gone, the aches have receded, and clarity has returned to thinking.
So just resume everything.
I don’t know how to describe last night’s dreams. Many and layered, I would awake from them, think about them, and drift back into the dream, or begin a new one.
I dreamed mostly about writing. I would dream I was writing. I dreamed I saw my books on shelves in stores. I dreamed I was signing autographs. I dreamed I was holding one of my books. Of course, I was pleased, proud and delighted to experience these dreams, even as I knew they were dreams.
Then I would dream I was writing again. Some of the dreams were staples of my blog posts of catfinitions. Other times, I dreamed about novels being conceived and pondered, and the novel in progress. I wrote scenes in my dreams, awoke and thought about the scenes, and returned to dreaming and writing. At one point, I awakened from a dream with an insight into something I’d thought of before, regarding ‘the cards’, and the sequencing of them. I hadn’t been comfortable with my execution of this as originally conceived, but here it was, explained in full in my dream. “I’ll need to think about this tomorrow,” I promised myself, because I didn’t want to awaken myself by thinking.
Then, in a break from dream writing, I dreamed I was singing in Spanish. A crowd of people were gathered to hear me. I don’t know what the song was, and was surprised in the dream when I realized it was me singing Spanish, because I don’t speak nor understand Spanish. I didn’t resemble myself in the dream so much as Fernando Alonso, the twice Formula 1 World Driving Champion from Spain. He and I look nothing alike but I knew in my dream that it was me.
In the morning, feeding cats, looking out windows and mentally perusing my dreams, I saw some of it as helpful for the novel in progress and other writing being contemplated. More, though, was wishful, optimism crystallized in dreams.
***
After writing the post and thinking more, I became curious about singing in a language I didn’t know in a dream, and so I did a search. This article was found, to add another twist to the dream.
After reading the article and watching the video, a connection to what I was writing in my novel leaped into my understanding. In it, with all of its entanglements, was the entanglement of a brain coping with something irrational and attempting to apply a veneer of logical explanation. This is done by appropriating others’ memories of the history they’d learned to apply an intelligent setting, from their perspective. In the way that it all works in my novel’s setting, something that works well for one person is borrowed and applied by others as being true, and becomes the basis for the reality of ‘now’ shared to create our impression of our lives.
Fun stuff, and a h/t to my dream brain and Psychology Today for boasting my insights into my writing.
Michael Seidel, writer 