Between the moment of my awakening on Sunday morning at 6 am in East Lansing and the instant my head hitting the pillow on Monday evening in Lisbon at about 10 pm, I had only a short catnap on an Airbus 330 (maybe an hour) and another short nap on a ubiquitous blue Ikea couch in our living room (maybe 2 hours). So, if I figure this right, factoring the time difference, I had about 3 hours sleep over 38 hours. Of course, my mind’s wiring had been altered just a tweak by the ¼ tablet of Valium it takes to get my sorry carcass into the air.
As my mind moved from waking into the borderland of dreams, he old grey matter went absolutely nuts. My guess is that I stayed in REM sleep for six or seven hours. Dream after dream after dream paraded by in my mind. Each dream was vivid and every dream seemed to have meanings writ large on the surface and also buried in the context. People from every era of my life mixed together in these dreams with people from grade school intermingling with people from my later life’s workplaces in somewhat surreal settings.
At one point I woke up and found Francie awake. I rattled off four or five dreams’ details to her. So vivid, so intense and so nonstop, it was a wonder I felt refreshed the next morning. Since the night of endless dreams, I have had one good night’s sleep. Last night when my head hit the pillow I sank into the inky black abyss and when awoke there were no memories of anything, none, zip. Even though I had watched I crime drama before I fell asleep, usually fodder for tossing and turning, there wasn’t even a thread of dream memory.
With a day having passed I can only remember one dream in detail. On the surface it was a travel dream. Digging a little deeper it may have been a life metaphor. The short version is this, I was standing outside in late October cold rain waiting for a bus in East Lansing. I was accompanied by a high school friend and the receptionist from where I used to work when I was with the state. We were trying to figure when the bus would arrive because it was way off schedule. I made the decision to walk to the next stop up the line to see if I could find out any further information, like if the bus had been rerouted.
Anyway, when I was halfway between the stops a bus blew past me and my friends were onboard. I could see a second bus coming up behind. I ran to the next stop, paid my fare, and took my seat. Almost immediately the bus turned off the route I had wanted and began to take me far afield out into the boonies. I pulled all the schedules and tried to figure if I could get a transfer onto a line that would take me where I wanted to go. Nope. And then I decided to get off at a place I knew but which was nowhere near where I had planned to be.
Now given all the travelling I had done, with plane delays and gate reassignments and the like, this very well could be nothing more than a transference of the day’s events into a more recognizable form for me, the bus. But then again it could be a meditation on my general sense of impatience and impulsivity. While I have always viewed whatever has happened as serendipity, it might be my brain thinks my tendency toward rashness has led me far off the path. Perhaps my mind really thinks I have ended up at a stop I never intended to be at. Don’t know, dreams are weird that way. Awake and cognizant I got no complaints as to the place where I am.
