Mountains Made Low

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.

On Wednesday night, I wrote here about the sleep situation at my house. In particular, that it hadn’t been good in about a week, and that I didn’t know why.

Still don’t.

But Wednesday night was a much better night for the sleeping. Still a little strange, which I’ll get to in a minute, but much better all around. I woke up yesterday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, yet feeling like I could have slept more, which is a difference because when my sleep is disturbed, I wake up feeling exhausted but like I couldn’t go back to sleep if I had the opportunity. So feeling rested and in need of more rest was a very good sign to me.

But it was still weird. It was weird because I remembered one dream from Wednesday night, but it seems it’s just “normal” run-of-the-mill dreaming, as opposed to whatever the (apparently) unbelievably weird and disturbing shit is that I have been dreaming the past several nights. I say this because I still woke up rested and refreshed, and in a positive, as opposed to disturbed, frame of mind for the first time in while, and the dream I remember having is universally classified as a nightmare by the dream interpretation folks.

Really.

What does it say about the dreams I’m not remembering—and that I’m getting more and more thankful, I think, that I’m not remembering—when a dream universally considered “bad” is an improvement, and I feel ready to face my day when I wake up.

I suppose it’s not really surprising, though, that “scary” dream images are an improvement over what can only be described as a sense of nebulous turmoil and chaos.

A sense which returned, in a minor way, last night/this morning, by the way. Not like it was, probably because it only, for sure, set in when I got greedy and said to myself, “No need to get up this early, you can sleep in today,” and got an additional hour between 7:30 and 8:30.

Note to self: if you wake up with no weirdness in your head, get up; rolling over and pulling the covers over your head is—apparently—just askin’ for trouble.

Complete. Total. Utter. Sheer.

Annihilating.

Exhaustion.

I cannot remember when it was that I last got a good night’s sleep. It has probably, though, been about a week. Last Thursday night, I think. Maybe.

Part of it, I’m sure, has been my work schedule this week (which will—I’m also sure—settle down next week). With the subbing for an out-of-town instructor Monday morning and this morning, I’ve put in two thirteen-hour days this week already, along with a regular, which is to say 9-hour, Tuesday.

But you’d—at least, I’d—think that the kind of tired that comes from long days at work, along with extra time in front of classrooms full of students (two extra class sessions, three extra hours) would be the kind of tired that encourages good sleep.

Always has been in the past.

And it’s not out-and-out insomnia, exactly. I do get bouts of that occasionally, and this stretch has included two mostly insomniac nights. But—fortunately, I think—the main problem hasn’t been insomnia. It’s been, instead, that when I do sleep, it’s not working. By which I mean that it hasn’t been particularly restful sleep. I haven’t had any trouble getting to sleep most nights, that is, but my sleep hasn’t been restful—or, the past couple of nights, even peaceful.

It’s mostly been dreams. But nothing about them that I can really put my finger on. Highly disturbing, but vaguely so. I can only really remember one or two images from these dreams, and these are disturbing, but I get the sense that the images I can remember aren’t nearly as disturbing as the ones I can’t. It’s just a sense, but I think it’s an accurate one.

The problem is, as when I wrote about the bout of insomnia, earlier, I can’t put my finger on it. I like the new job—I like it a lot. I’m a little stressed about still owning the house in NC, and a little scared about whether or not I’ll be able to sell it, but not like this, I think. And I just can’t nail down any other reason I might be sleeping this fitfully, or, on occasion, not at all.

I just don’t feel that stressed when I’m awake.

But there’s apparently some kind of turmoil, somewhere. There must be.

Otherwise, why?

And, yet, here I sit, exhausted and tired, but not precisely sleepy right this moment, writing. There’s a certain amount of head-shaking to be done at that, I think.

And I wish I could figure it out, because then I might be able to do something about it.

Might. Maybe.

At least I could try….

I wrote here a while back about the impact that weird dreams were having on my sleep schedule, and that they may have been brought on by my refusal to deal, in waking life, with the stresses of changing jobs, at least until I knew what the hell was going on with that.

I’d like to state, for the record, at this point, that I am dealing—actively and in my waking state—with those stresses: I’m leaving tomorrow morning to go to Ohio in an attempt to find housing for the coming school year (cheap housing). I’ve spend most of the non-rainy time in the past week or so in making some minor (and mostly cosmetic) improvements to the outside of my house, particularly the front porch, so that I can try to sell the bastard. I’ve got my teaching schedule set up for the fall semester. When I go to Ohio, I’m also getting as many bookstore boxes as there are from my mom to continue the packing process, which means, of course, that cleaning out my office at the old job is probably on the agenda for sometime next week.

See? I’m dealing!

Beyond that, though, some of my readers (two to be precise, call them my “readers’ advisory panel” for the blog) have seen at least one and possibly two other posts regarding my dreams that I never did post here (and that I never will—to be clear, though, although the content of the one I have particularly in mind was a bit on the NC-17 side, both readers (both women) did not find the content offensive or pornographic…indeed, they both described both the content and its expression as “hot”—but I digress).

When I dream vividly—sexual in nature or not—I have a tendency to want to write about it. That (before today) there was only one post in this blog tagged as dreams is evidence of restraint on my part. This is the case because I figure that my dreams are my subconscious trying to work out how the pieces of my life go together, in that big picture sense I wrote about this morning, and I figure that it’s, therefore, in my best interest to pay attention.

And (pop quiz!) how does Mike pay attention? That’s right, by writing. But I’ve often felt that my dreams are another of those things that come under the heading of “dirty laundry”—in this case, my mind’s own. So I often do write, to see what I can work out, but I rarely publish. Sometimes because I learn nothing. Sometimes because I can frame the insight I do gain better by considering it apart from the dream, and sometimes because the insights I do gain through looking at what my mind does while untethered from my conscious control brings a whole raft of other issues to light… a whole mess of my and others’ dirty laundry, which, of course, I also don’t publish.

But I got to thinking today, as I was measuring, cutting, drilling, driving screws, and trying to get this porch project finished up between bouts of rain (another round of work has interceded at exactly this point), and before I leave for Ohio to go house-hunting tomorrow, that it seems that the daily events of my life (good, bad, or otherwise) don’t have as much of an impact on my state of mind as my dreams, when I remember having them can have.

Yesterday was absolutely the day from hell, as far as I’m concerned. Murphy’s Law was in full effect: whatever could go wrong did. Yet, as I remarked on last night, I was in a good mood all day. Regardless of what happened in the day, I was fine. It was just a bad day, and though the hits kept on coming, so to speak, it was fine.

Today has been a fairly good day, events-wise, other than having to drag my tools in and out of the rain on several occasions, in order to get this project finished up. And even that doesn’t bother me too much. It’s just what it is. But even before the hokey-pokey with the tools, I awoke a bit out of sorts, after a long night’s sleep—more than 10 hours all told.

It’s not like I had a nightmare or a “bad dream” of any other sort. I rarely, as an adult, have those—only once or twice that I remember. But I awoke out of a weird dream this morning. And that has clouded the whole day for me.

I don’t remember the content of the dream, exactly, but I remember having it. And I remember that it involved trying to get from Point A to Point B, not knowing how, asking directions, and being told that it was impossible to get to Point B from Point A. I also seem to remember that the “points” in this dream were local placenames, but I didn’t—and don’t—ascribe any significance to those names, other than that they’re close-by, in or out of the dream.

But the sense of being adrift, or maybe lost, and the sense of frustration accompanying that have followed me throughout my day. Causing me to be, well, out of sorts is the only good way to put it, on a day when nothing has gone wrong but the weather, when I was positively chipper throughout the day yesterday, when the events would have said otherwise.

I guess it’s a testament to how much I think—overthink—the elements of my existence, that my dreams—memories of events that never happened—should have such a profound impact on my mood, when the events of my day, generally, do not.

In some ways, it’s enough to make me wish, at times, that I was more tied to my outer life. That a bad day would make me pissed at the world, rather than just moving through it with a laissez-faire, c’est la vie attitude—flat tire, dead drill, drenched clothes, and all. And that I could easily shake my internal weirdness as the sleep clears from my eyes and the coffee shakes the rust off my brain.

But I can’t. Yesterday was a bad day, in terms of events. Today was a weird day, in terms of emotions. Guess which one I’d rather have….

But the rain seems to have stopped again. Maybe I’d best get back to my tools.

…must give us pause. (Hamlet, of course, and this citation in a post title was purposeful. Really.)

At least, they must give us paucity of restful sleep. It’s becoming a cycle. I’m having weird dreams, restless sleep, and afternoon naps. Perhaps I ought to be working through more things in my mind in my waking hours, instead of drugging my brain with books, blogs, and the boob-tube. But, alas, I am not—have chosen not to, and will, likely, continue to choose not to. After all, I posted a while back about not sweating the logistics of the possibility of changing jobs until I knew for certain what was going on with that, and as time passes, and I continue to not hear anything about that process, I know the stress is building inside me. Sure the run-of-the-mill stress of “Am I gonna get the job?” and “If I’m gonna get it, when the hell are they gonna call?” But also the hidden—and actively rejected, in my waking state—stress of “I have a house here” and “What the hell am I thinking?” Enough, certainly, to cause stress dreams, since, as I’ve said, I’m actively refusing to deal with these stresses when I’m awake, at least for now.

And I’ve got to say that dreams are, for me, the most reliable measure of stresses in my life. When I’m stressed, I dream vividly: when the stresses are general, it’s simply absurdist; when they’re general and more intense, I get the driving with no brakes dreams—like life is out of control; when they’re specific, the dreams point to the issues quite clearly, in utterly absurd ways, and are quite memorable.

The past two or three nights, I haven’t yet had the “out of control” dream—so apparently I’ve still got a handle on things—but the other varieties have been there. Generally absurd, and not memorable except for a vague sense upon waking, has been most of it, which I think points to a variety of intersecting, but not easily definable, pressure points in my life at the moment: most, if not all, related to work, possibly changing jobs, and the financial situation that could lead to—all of these huge question marks in my life at the moment.

At least that’s what I think about them right now. After all, I spend my days reading, watching tv, blogging, exercising, enjoying summer. Not a lot of stress there, I think. Yeah, there’s a little bit of freelance work, a little bit of writing I’m trying to get done. But I’m not stressed about those things; they are happening or will happen when the time is right. No worries.

But I’m hoping that I can get back to restful nights and nap-free days once I figure out, one way or the other, what’s up with the job situation.

Here’s hoping!