And the Fever Dreams Have Begun (or Careful with that Axe Eugene)

31 March 2020

Funny stuff has happened recently. By funny stuff I mean my mind has been traveling to weird, weird spaces.  While I have been making sure to get a good night’s sleep, a minimum of 6 ½ hours but usually 7 or more, I have been having the most vivid dreams.

On an average night I have dreams, some odd and some tied directly to the events of the day. Some of them even make their way into become short stories or blog posts.  But the dreams of late have been slowly turning into pandemic dreams. 

I am locked at home.  I am isolated from all but my family.  The news is 80% bad and it is all about coronavirus. I am sleeping more and sleeping after less activity than I would usually have.  No wonder the dark of this world is seeping into my nocturnal life. 

Two dreams stick out in particular. The first was very intricately detailed involving among other things Lansing Community College’s main campus being leveled to become a practice field for the U of M Marching Band.  As God is my witness, I have no idea where that came from.  However, the gist of the dream was that someone I had not seen in years, an old college friend, showed up at my East Lansing home.  Being a good comrade, I agreed to meet with him.

When I left the house and got into my old friend’s car, I was not thinking about the coronavirus.  While my friend lacked symptoms, issues arose.  No matter where we tried to go to grab a beer, every place was closed.  We ended up with a couple of bottles of beer between our legs as we just drove around and talked. When he dropped me off at home my own family wouldn’t let me back in.  They were outraged that I would expose them to such danger. When I awoke, I was in the part of the dream when I was searching for someplace, anyplace, to stay.

Of the dreams the second was the mildest.  It was simple and straightforward.  I had travelled to someplace warm, either California or Florida.  When I got there, I tried to get in touch with people I knew.  To a person, every one of them refused to see me because I was coming Michigan, a coronavirus hotspot. And of course, feeling lonely and dejected I awoke. 

Normally my dreams are messy and weird.  Like I am riding up a Swiss mountain on a narrow-gauge cog railroad stuck in a car stuffed with department store manakins while Barry Manilow is playing “Mandy” on the piano at the end of the car. Or, in the alternative, I am walking down a street and a pair of leathery hands reaches out from under a just slightly raised garage door and tries to drag me under the door.  The hands could be coming from a street grate or from behind a partially open door in a dark alley. For these types of dreams, I usually wake up with blood curdling screams.  Nothing like being on the road with another couple sharing a room when that stuff happens.  

I have always racked up my weird dreams to my own fears and neuroses.  I am afraid of unexpected horror and I am drawn to surreal imagery.  But the recent dreams seem tied to something that I think is broader.  My guess is that my dreams are part of a large worldwide shared series of experiences.

My guess is that other people have now spent several weeks locked up are looking at the people they are sharing their lives with, and have stared at the staples of their diet found in their larders. Having engaged in these multi week reviews some no doubt are contemplating keto diets or Weight Watchers online and/or are drawing up very detailed plans for mass axe murders. There are only so many times you can watch somebody chew like that, or endure them leaving the toilet seat up.

Who knows how many times each of us has been done in by our family members in dreams in recent days (or should I say nights)? Could be days, because my guess is that all our sleeping schedules have gone to odd patterns.  Naps and odd longer blocks of longer sleep periods are probably the norm. But hidden between those snores and chirps of somnambular breathing are images of grisly and macabre dispatch.

My guess is that by the end of April, if not sooner, we will all need some serious mental health therapy.  I would urge all of us to engage in some form of meditations in the meantime to keep you away from the knife sharpener. Be it on your knees in prayer, or in a twenty-minute stroll with headphones listening to the most beautiful playlist you can construct, or sitting on a mat cross legged and emptying you mind, we need to do something to lessen the burden of isolation on our minds.  Pay attention to your dreams. Don’t let the hands beneath the door get you.

Because of the title I am embedding a copy of Careful with that Axe Eugene.  This is for you prog rockers still left out there.  But beneath it I am including a live version of Jason Isbell's Flagship.  Next to John Prine, Jason Isbell is the artist we need now.