Mountains Made Low

I was looking forward to PBS BritComs last night. Turned on the TV in the midst of Antiques Roadshow, to turn it down and continue reading one of my Christmas books (Jim Butcher’s Fool Moon, the second of the Dresden Files books, which I’ve finally gotten round to reading). I haven’t read much, lately. The fall semester was hell on wheels on a number of fronts (reading, writing, exercising), what with teaching six classes and learning the ins and outs of running my program — the spring term should be much better (here’s hoping!).

Anyway, I was reading some brain candy (after having finished the first Dresden book, Storm Front, earlier in the day), getting ready for some mindless British humor, and otherwise enjoying a quiet Saturday night in. But sometime between 9:00 and 9:30, I just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and I have no clue why (well, not entirely true, but we’re going to go with it — those of you reading who know will know what I think).

I faded in and out of sleep on my couch for several hours after that. I remember, briefly, being awake during As Time Goes By (10:00-10:30), again during The Vicar of Dibley (11:00-11:30), and once more during the post-BritCom fare, Our Ohio (11:30-12:00). Sometime right around 12, I turned off the TV, became ever so briefly aware enough to put on my pjs and go to bed, in the bed. Around 3, I awoke to terrible cramping, the solution to which is best left no further described, and then went back to sleep. At which point I slept soundly until a little before 8 this morning.

So the last time I remember being truly awake was 9pm. The first time I remember being anything resembling functional was 8am. That’s 11 hours. I know I’ve had a full-blown, followed by a half-assed, cold since last Friday (Christmas day). I know that New Year’s and me just don’t get along. But 11 hours of sleep? Really? And I feel like I could take a nap now?

But there’s something else here, too, because though I was (granted, off-and-on) asleep for 11 hours, the word unconscious in the title of this post may be somewhat misleading, because I don’t think the processor in my brain switched off at all. While it was not at all “active sleep” in the traditional sense of tossing and turning and tearing up the bedclothes, to which I have been somewhat subject recently (either that, or as I’m becoming convinced, the sheets that are on the bed at the moment, just don’t fit quite right), my brain did not stop working.

But I’m not convinced that my active brain did anything good, either. Oftentimes, when my brain doesn’t turn off as I sleep (and I’m not talking about typical dreaming here, but the sort of dreaming which seems to last all night), I wake up raring to go, because — no matter how much I may or may not remember, apart from that I was chasing something all night long — my conscious mind seems to be…I don’t know, is reassured the word I’m looking for?…by the nocturnal exertions of my unconscious mind.

Not so, today. There is, it seems, still more work to do, and that bothers me, because it’s stealing my waking focus.

Which is annoying.

Very, very annoying.

An unplanned overseas trip. Incoming cell phone calls, upon arrival, where outgoing calls don’t work. Missing shoes. A hotel room. Driving the bed from that hotel room into a parking garage, and causing a major traffic snarl in the process. A blonde who wants the bed for her own transportation needs. A priest and two nuns, one with a cane. Being accused of stealing the bed. The priest trying to help.

This is not my normal stress dream. That one usually involves driving a pick-up truck (either my own or one of several I remember my dad owning in my childhood and teenage years), with no brakes. Yes, the brakeless dream has recurred in my life for probably the past 15 years or so when things feel generally out of control. I’ve got used to it. I even remember, in the first semester of PhD school, toward the end of the semester, having that dream, nightly, for two or three weeks on end. I didn’t think much of it since the seven women whom I entered the program with were all reporting stress dreams of their own — being that they were women, they all declared that their dreams involved them finding themselves in sudden and unplanned possession of a baby.

But I’m convinced that the dream that I awoke from this morning was some manner of stress dream. I’m sure Dr. Freud would have a field day, what with all the bed imagery. But I’m going to resist that, and instead say that I really wish my subconscious would stick to simple messages. A truck with no brakes, hurtling down a road, unable to stop, and as often as not winding up in some kind of body of water — well, that’s a fairly straightforward message. And I know what to do with it, even if there’s very little — as in grad school — that I can do about it.

This, though, I don’t know what to do with. There was not a particularly out-of-control feeling to it, just a great deal of suddenness, an enormous feeling of almost cloak-and-dagger level secrecy, and, of course, way more members of the Roman clergy than should haunt the dreams of someone who isn’t even Catholic. I’m betting Sigmund would have fun with that last one, too.

And while I’m paging Dr. Freud, here, there was not, in the whole mess, any cigar I could point to and say “Thank God! It’s just a cigar.” It felt much more like every figure, every object, every image in the dream — if they had been labeled — would not have been marked with a vaguely reassuring “…nur eine Zigarre” in Freud’s assuredly Teutonic hand, but rather with a variation on Magritte’s flowing Gallic notation: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Except perhaps in a gaudy shade of flashing neon. And writ large.

It was a dream, in short, seemingly based on a story by Lewis Carroll, adapted by David Cronenberg, directed by Quentin Tarantino, and with production design by the tandem of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso.

Definitely, not the usual. And definitely unnerving. Particularly as a dream on the near edge of waking.

Though writing about it has helped me exorcise it — a little bit, at least.

She was curled on her side, peacefully asleep. Beside me. In my bed. Breathing slowly. Resting easy. Like she owned the place, you might have said. This, in itself, was strange, because I rent.

A million thoughts ran through my mind, seeing her there, because I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember how she got there. Until I saw her, I hadn’t even remembered that she was there. I mean—don’t get me wrong—she’s not a stranger. But as soon as I realized both that I was not alone and who was with me, I had questions.

Well, not so much questions as a barrage of doubtful thoughts, most of them involving the word not. First was the long laundry list of reasons why she could not be right where I saw her. This list was followed closely by a second, shorter list: the reasons why she should not be there.

But she was.

And I pushed the lists aside in my mind. The couldn’t list was clearly wrong, it clearly was possible. And if the couldn’t list was wrong, maybe, I hoped, the shouldn’t list was, too.

So I raised my hand and brushed back the wayward strand of hair that had fallen down, across her cheek, as she slept, placing it behind her ear and tracing the length of her hair with my fingertips. This small action, this lightest of touches, wakened her.

Her eyes fluttered, then focused. Focused on me. And she smiled. She smiled that incredible smile that I’ve seen so many times, and it was made the more incredible by the fact that simply seeing me had been its only cause. I started to say, “Good morning,” but I never finished.

Instead, I woke up.

I’m sort of amazed by the fact that my post earlier in the week about my recurring dream has generated as much chatter as it has—almost none of it on the blog itself. (KAS did post a very sweet comment, of course, and I’m happy to know that she thinks that highly of me, though I don’t necessarily 100% agree with her assessment of the situation.) I’ve gotten a lot of “back channel” commentary on the post though: email, IMs, and other ways of commenting that aren’t quite as public as the blog—at least more such chatter than my posts generally engender. Usually, after all, when people have something to say about a blog post, they comment on the blog post.

And the people who have commented seem to be taking the dream, particularly given its continuing recurrence over the span of years, quite seriously. Of course, I found it important—at least intriguing—enough to post (after having written the post early Sunday, thought it over for 24 hours, and sought pre-posting feedback from two friends).

So I thought I’d clarify. There are two elements of the dream that are at least somewhat shocking to me in my waking life. One is probably quite obvious to anyone who’s read here for a while. That is, quite simply put, in the span of time I’ve been having this dream, kids have not been in my plan; not that the prospects for such things have been limited in that span (though they have), but that I’ve really thought that having and raising kids was not in my plan, even if the prospects were there. I’m quite happy being an uncle to my sister’s two amazing kids, thank you very much. That, I had thought, and still think, is quite enough for me.

The second thing is, of course, that the little girl in the dream has “my eyes.” There was a time in my life when kids were in the plan. And while the discussion on this topic was on-going at that time, I always had sort of assumed that any kids in my future would be adopted.

I say this because I’m adopted, and for all the challenges that you hear about (mostly overblown, to my way of thinking) in raising adopted kids, my parents did a wonderful job raising me. I have always thought that, if I were to take on this child-raising thing, I’d want to do what my parents did: take in a child who needs a loving home, and provide that home.

But, like I’ve said, there was an on-going discussion. And I was open to that discussion. In part, this has to do with the fact (as crass as it sounds—but remember: I’m adopted) that I’ve always thought that homemade gifts are better than store-bought ones. And what is a child, really, but a gift of love that two people give each other?

Please remember that, as I write this, I’m speaking as a “store-bought” kid. It doesn’t mean that I think my parents thought of me any differently than my sister (who’s “homemade”), that I thought they loved me less, or treated her better. Quite the opposite, in fact; which is my point in bringing it up.

People believe that there’s something special about the bond between parents and “homemade” kids. That there’s something important in that bond. I can’t say aye, no, or maybe to that, since I’ve never experienced it from either angle. But I have experienced being adopted from the child’s side, and I can say that I don’t feel any the poorer for having been raised by people who chose to open their home, their lives, and their hearts to me; people who welcomed me and became my parents. People who never treated me any different from my sister, who came along a couple of years later and was “their own.”

I never saw any difference from my end, so I always believed that—if there are kids in my future—I (well, I am always part of a we in this line of thinking) would adopt them. Lots of kids in this world who need homes, who need parents, who need families, who need love, after all.

So I’m shocked by the dream image of a child looking back at me with my eyes. That possibility, in the past, always remained under discussion, but it was never really real to me. I’ve looked at dream dictionaries, which seem to say that dreaming about a child you don’t have is about you, and had insights offered (like KAS’s idea of the dream being my subconscious way of telling myself something about me). And I just don’t know. That, though, is why I blogged about it…. To try to figure it out, sure, but also just because it has been so shocking to me over the past couple of years. I have no idea what to do with the images.

So, of course, I put it out there. And writing about it, now twice, hasn’t really garnered me any insights. It has, however, netted a couple of good conversations. At it’s root, I’ve put it out there primarily because it’s caused me to question more than one thing (the two surprising points) that I thought I pretty clearly knew about myself. Hasn’t changed my thinking yet, but it’s got me thinking about a matter I was pretty sure (okay, damn sure—100% sure) was closed in my mind.

And you know me: always thinking out loud—or at least on the blog.

Last week I wrote a post about knowing souls, and knowing about people’s importance in my life before I’d ever met them in person. As I said at the time, weird mojo, Kemosabe, but it really doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of the weirdness. And don’t worry—I’m really not ready to plumb any of those further depths here, yet, anyway. I’ve probably, with that post alone, revealed enough of my neuroses to last most of you reading here a lifetime or more. (And yet you all keep coming back for more; who’s neurotic now?—still me? okay.)

While I’m not going to do much in terms of plumbing the depths, I do want to let you, my constant readers, know that I’ve met someone. It’s not what you think, though. It’s not what most people mean when they say that, anyway, and I guess it’s not 100% accurate to say it, at all. Because I haven’t exactly met this person. But in the sense of someone who seems important in my life who I haven’t met, I suppose you could say I have.

It’ll probably sound even stranger to you when tell you I first encountered this person I haven’t met yet, not quite two years ago. There have been several (6 or 8 or 10) encounters since then, too. But I’ve never met this person. You see, I’m fairly certain that she doesn’t exist. But for those of you more or less familiar with the circumstances of my life over the past two years, the timing of my first encounter with her must seem highly coincidental. And maybe it was. But she keeps coming back; and in the time that I’ve been encountering her, she hasn’t changed at all.

When I first encountered her, to tell you the truth, I was pretty sure that the message was that I had missed her. That she was someone whom I might have known, would have liked to have known, and should have known, but had through my own actions and the actions of others missed out on.

But now I’m not so sure. If that’s the message, why should my subconscious keep delivering it for years, after all? Why make a point that has already been made?

Because now I’m starting to think that this person I haven’t met yet is someone I may yet meet. Someone I may yet come to know, no matter how much I have protested, even somewhat recently, that I wouldn’t want to meet anyone like her. And I think, the more often I do encounter her, that maybe, just maybe, I’d like to meet her, like to know her, like to be part of her life. No matter how much it has seemed, even to me, that I wouldn’t in the past.

You see, I’ve encountered her several times. Always in my home. And although each encounter seems new to me, it is clear that the location, the situation, and I myself are not new to her. She’s comfortable, and she’s just as much at home in my house as I am—whichever of the houses I’ve lived in it may be. Each time I encounter her, I walk into the room, and see her sitting on the floor, focusing on the papers spread on the floor before her. Hunched over them, shoulder-length dark hair falling forward and obscuring her face.

Working with great dedication at applying a crayon to a coloring book.

Then she hears me, and turns her head, and that dark, almost black hair falls away from her face, and she looks up at me. I see that her eyes are my eyes: not quite brown but not quite green either, flecked with yellow. And then I see a light come into those eyes that I had never even imagined, as I cross the room to where she sits. And as the eyes light up, she drops her crayon and extends the left hand that had been holding it to me. Tiny, slightly pudgy fingers reach up, and the light in her eyes is matched only by the smile that splits her face.

As she reaches up, waits for me to take her small hand in my larger one, and calls me Daddy.