Stepping In

A frequent motif in my dreams is where I step into a life I am (or someone else is) currently living elsewhere, to taste what that life is like.

It’s the experience of that “stepping in” that has made me consider that the notion of

alternate realities or parallel universes might not be such a crackpot idea.

In these dreams, I visit an ongoing life. Sometimes the person is me, but a few of the circumstances of my life are different (Mom is healthy, Dad is alive, I’m in a different profession, I live someplace else). At other times I seem to be visiting someone else’s life, and the dream is peopled with characters I’ve never met before.

What distinguishes this type of dream for me is that nothing that happens in them seems remotely dreamlike. Nothing happens out of normal time, scenes don’t shift suddenly, no one can fly, the sky isn’t green, there’s nothing that would say, “This is a dream.” It feels very much like waking reality, everyday life, a few normal hours—in someone else’s world, or in a parallel reality.

So in last night’s dream I was part of a group of writers who met weekly to really dig into each others’ writing and offer extremely constructive criticism. It felt like we all respected one another tremendously and liked each others’ work, and so didn’t feel the need to give praise or encouragement but say, “This doesn’t work, change that, that image is great but that other one isn’t.” Apparently we would take go home and work on each others’ pieces. When I arrived at the meeting, a woman who (in the dream) was a widely published and greatly respected novelist had taken my story—the beginning of a spy novel or murder mystery, I think—and had restructured it, and given me a cool acronym for an evil organization that was in the book.

The dreaming part of me thought that writers’ group would be a really great thing to do in this parallel reality.

After the meeting I went down to the basement—I was part of some sort of cooperative home arrangement in a large house, where some of us cooked for the whole group, some did laundry, some took care of the outside work, etc.—to see if my laundry was done. They had pressed my suit and gotten other clothes washed, but my vestments were not ready. Apparently I served as a part-time ministerial type at various functions, some religious, some decidedly not: I saw a home movie projected on a screen in the basement in which a thinner, younger me was on a football field but wearing clerical garb, including—absurdly—a full chasuble.

I told the launderers, rather sternly, that the vestments were a top priority, that because they went over the suit and the suit was pretty much hidden, the suit was much less important in the priority ranking. Someone very distinctly called the vestment in question an alb, which is the plain white floor-length garment that priests wear under other vestments, next to the skin, and the home movie showed me in a suit, not an alb, with a chasuble on top of the suit, so that tidbit was perplexing.

I can look at the whole laundry / clerical garb / business suit thing as dream imagery, and I get the message it has for me. Certainly the scene with the launderers watching this home movie of me down in the laundry room seemed the most dreamlike. But it still had the weight of real life somehow. There was nothing surreal or hallucinogenic about it; I assumed they were looking at the home movie to make sure the clothes for the upcoming event looked the same as they did for the one on the football field. They were just doing due diligence.

There rest of that day-in-my-life was so utterly mundane that I can no longer recall the details. I ate, I worked, I talked with people. Very boring, normal stuff. And that is precisely what makes this category of dreams for me (I have a number of different categories of dream-types, each with their unique characteristics) so interesting: nothing terribly unusual ever happens. It’s just someone’s life I’ve stepped into for the span of a few hours.

Vanished

An odd two-part dream last night. In the first part, friends haven’t heard from me for a week or more contact my brother, who has keys to the house, and they come in to find me . . . well, not dead, as I (and they) expected, but gone.

My car is missing too.

They soon learn that I have disappeared, vanished, fallen off the grid and gone Elsewhere with no notice to anyone.

They are shocked. Was I running from the law? Was I in witness protection? Had I left to start a new life? Had I been kidnapped—and if so, why in the world, since I’m not worth anything monetarily?

In the dream, Mom has died some months earlier, and I didn’t have a dog or anyone who depended on me for their survival. I think I have stopped newspaper and mail and cut off cable TV and utilities, and emptied my meager bank account. Yet no goodbyes to my dearest friends, my clients, my family. Not a hint that this was in the offing. No clues left as to my whereabouts.

A few months after my disappearance, I leave a cryptic, unsigned, untraceable comment in Indigo Bunting’s blog that tells her (and probably no one else) that it’s me, which sets her into a frenzy for a while until it’s obvious there’s nothing anyone can do to get me back. But at least she knows I’m alive and seemingly safe and sound.

I wake up a bit, and try to think why I have dreamed this scenario. Is it a reaction to stress in my life? I certainly wish from time to time that I could run away, but the vast majority of my stressors are internal, and when you run away, the one person you don’t get to run away from is yourself. I value my friendships almost more than anything on earth, and I love my work and my clients, so leaving them without a word doesn’t make sense. Do I want to gauge their reaction, to see how they would feel if I disappeared or died, to see how they really felt about me? But I think I know how they feel, honestly. I’m really quite secure in that.

I go back to sleep, and have part two of the dream. I’m somewhere out west, or west-ish, not necessarily the True West, as I call it, but west of here. I see myself looking at my surroundings with an odd expression, a face that is not exactly blank, but certainly one without any strong emotions like wonder or relief or anxiety or desperation or freedom or exploration. I look vague, and vaguely confused, as if I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing or where I’m going, and I’m not having much fun.

Funny, I couldn’t interpret it until I just wrote it down. It’s a general feeling of being directionless, a little rootless. Once Mom dies and my sense of immediate Purpose fades away, I’m afraid I’ll find myself without meaning to my life, on a vague search, but without knowing quite what I’m looking for.

Though I don’t like the part about leaving everyone I love behind. I don’t like that one bit. Maybe it’s my fear that I won’t be able to be where my friends are, and won’t be able to take them with me, and I’ll end up this solitary little tortoise.

I’d like to wake up now, please.

Poor Bears

The news is depressing, I’m afraid. A twelve-year-old girl was out walking her dog on a farm near the town of Sauðárkrókur,

on the

Skaga fjord in Iceland, when she spotted a polar bear.

There are, however, no polar bears in Iceland. The only place the bear could have come from was Greenland, about 300 miles away. And the only way it could have arrived was atop an ice floe.

The girl alerted the authorities. A group of journalists gathered. And last Tuesday, police were “forced” to shoot the bear, saying that it was “threatening the public.” They said the bear charged a group of reporters “in a panic,” that they had “no other choice” but to kill it.

I don’t mean to be snarky with the quotation marks. It’s just that this was the second polar bear to be shot and killed in Iceland in as many weeks.

With the first bear, an officer said no drugs were available to sedate it, so he consulted with the minister of the environment, who gave permission for police marksmen to kill the bear. But a veterinarian says that he himself had the drugs available in his car. He also criticized police for not closing a mountain road where people congregated after hearing news of the polar bear.

After many protests from environmentalists and animal rights groups, authorities had vowed to capture the second bear and have it shipped in a cage back to Greenland or give it to a zoo. The chief veterinarian from the Copenhagen zoo had been flown in late Tuesday to help. He named the bear Ofeig, whose name translates roughly as “he who should not die.”

The police “tried to get close to (the bear) with our vet, but they did not get close enough to shoot it with the anesthetic,” zoo spokesman Bengt Holst said. “Then the bear started running, and the police were frightened they would lose control. The bear could run very close to the populated area, so they decided to shoot it” (italics mine).

As you can see, that’s just a tad different from the police’s official stance in their press release, that the bear had actually charged the group of journalists.

That two polar bears have made their way to Iceland in recent weeks is further evidence that climate change is creating a more perilous environment for the majestic arctic animals. A warming climate means the ice — where the bears usually hunt their favorite prey, the seals — is receding and literally melting under their paws, forcing them to swim ever greater distances.

Environmental and animal conservation groups have long warned the polar bear was in danger, and recent studies indicated melting Arctic Sea ice could cut their population by two-thirds over the next 50 years. The U.S. last month listed the polar bear as a “threatened species,” meaning it is at risk of becoming “endangered” within the near future. Animals are listed as endangered when they face imminent extinction.

A Scottish tabloid ran this article:

MARAUDING polar bears could cause terror on Iceland after experts claimed global warming could bring the killer beasts across the sea. The alert came as police there shot two bears in just two weeks. The animals — which are not native to Iceland — are thought to have floated across the Arctic Ocean on ice platforms which broke free from Greenland. Climate expert Thor Jakobsson said: “Since two have reached the shore, more could be on the way!“

I would laugh if it weren’t so incredibly sad.

A poor bear swims for countless miles, climbs onto an ice floe and floats nearly 300 more miles, and, exhausted and nearly starved, finds land, food (experts reported that the bear had wandered into a bird reserve and had been eating large quantities of birds’ eggs), and safety. Then . . . BLAM! Buh-bye, bear.

I’m tempted to give Ofeig a different name: Sisyphus.