Dan Hansen's Dream Nightmare

This morning I was thinking how often I write "I find it interesting that...." I half thought it might be interesting to roll up a batch of my favorite blog entries and assemble them into a book of observations called, "I Find It Interesting."

This morning I saw the following dream that my friend Dan posted on Facebook and thought it so rich in detail and cognitive meddling that it seemed deserving of a wider audience. I myself used to keep a dream diary when I was growing up, from seventh grade till I went to college. Even though I broke off from the practice, I still occasionally recorded these nocturnal diversions and twenty years ago placed a few of them on my original website at ennyman.com.

Here's Dan's unusually distinctive dream:

My powerchair had a loner control box recently installed due to a malfunction of the old one. Kaleb Anderson had emotionally blackmailed me into going to some sort of social entanglement that was "for my benefit." Of course I knew what that meant. It was backhanded Kabe-speak for "I want you there to make myself look better as I yammer on in agreeable platitudes to exotic cultivated women you'll never talk to." I knew this was going to be a sticky tar pit and I might not get out alive. But as always, just to shut him up for 5 minutes was worth risking ego death.

We exit the accessible taxi cab and entered some sort of cultural center. It was a cross between The Louvre with brown ochre carpeting and a shopping mall for David Bowie fans wearing comfortable sweaters. There were no stairs in this place, which I'm sure made everyone sparkle with diversity awareness. However instead of stairs it was an MC Escher maze-work of very steep ramps. Supposedly all these various intriguing events were taking place, of which I saw no signs of. Yet that was never really the point was it? What there was ample supply of were groups of bundled subcultures mingling within one another. They all seemed to communicate in a subdued officially uncodified syntax of auto-positive. This was coupled with steely exclusiveness in their eyes.... as if they had daddy's car keys and no-one was going to take them away. What terrified me the most were the numerous disabled people there with that same unspoken exclusiveness in their gaze. It was unclear if I were behind enemy lines or I was the enemy in friendly territory.

Immediately Kabe disappeared. (I knew exactly what he was up to.) This both relieved me in not having to witness his industrial motor-mouthed machinations, but it also provided that all too familiar hopelessness of being stranded like Tom Hanks in 'Caste Away'. I had no choice but to figure out the ramps of treachery to escape the unsettling eye gaze maze. So I tried going down a steep ramp on my own. This resulted in my wheels skid-sliding down the carpet uncontrollably, ending with my control box smashed and damaged on a hand rail. I was trying to ask for help but I wasn't able to describe the help I needed because the damn control box that had been replaced earlier had buttons and settings written in French.

Just when I thought the horror could not be out-climaxed I noticed my catheter bag flopped out on the floor. It was the size of a giant parachute laying flat and limp oozing urine all over the cultural center. People began screaming and fleeing in terror, some were frozen like petrified deer, others were angry at me like I was a terrorist who just murdered their chances of sex that night. I was getting yelled at and I snapped back, "Fine, I'll be your effing Villain!" At that point I had a nervous breakdown. My control box started shape-shifting into various console game controllers and 80's toys such as "Simon Says". I yelled out, "Can you see that?? It's CHANGING! Do you think I'm crazy?" I heard a couple female voices say, "I see it." Mostly I heard men yelling out, "Yeah, he's crazy." That's when I blacked out from system overload.

When I came to I was surrounded by lab coats and mental health specialists trying to "normalize me" Clockwork Orange style.

The End.

* * * *
I found it especially interesting how Dan wrote the title of the Tom Hanks film as Caste Away, instead of the actual Castaway. People with disabilities are treated as a separate caste in our society, and in many cultures are indeed castaways.

Thank you, Dan, for granting permission to share this dream story with a wider audience. 

Air

Swiss Miss

In the fall of 1970 I was introduced to the music of the Incredible String Band, unaware that they had been introduced to U.S. audiences by virtue of their appearance at Woodstock the year before. The simple character of their songs expressed a joyful celebration of life and seemed to express that awe-attitude with which children first see the world, unfettered by social games and pre-conceived expectations.

Every now and then this song from their album Wee Tam returns to me in its entirety.

Air

Breathing, all creatures are

Brighter then than brightest star

You are by far

You come right inside of me

Close as you can be

You kiss my blood and the blood kiss me

It's a wonder how the air we breathe goes right inside of us, not simply into our lungs, but all the way into our very beings. The wonderful, incredible way in which oxygen is carried by the blood stream and its tributaries and capillaries to nourish and cleanse every cell in our bodies is a wonder of creation.

Breathing is something we usually take for granted. But until our last breath, it’s the ongoing miracle that sustains us.

At the end of a busy day we can sometimes collapse in our beds so weary and spent we have no energy left for anything, even reading. Yet we go on breathing, replenishing our cells, sustaining our bodies with vital air.

I am reminded of the instructions Tom Hanks gave himself in the film Castaway. “Just keep breathing.”

And I am likewise reminded of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a book whose opening chapter was initiated by visits to a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps while his wife was suffering from lung issues. The thin air at high altitudes was likely more accessible to lungs whose passages have been swollen or constricted by asthma or tuberculosis. In other words, breathing is something most of us take for granted, but many can not.

Air is something real that we all believe in yet seldom see. That, I find, is a fascinating concept.

Whatever else you're doing today, please keep breathing