Darn That Dream

The wind was the first clue.

I woke up this morning some time before dawn to the sound of a harsh wind blowing outside my window.

Wow, I thought, that doesn’t sound like sunny Southern California at all.

Well, that’s because it wasn’t.

I had been dreaming and I quickly realized that I was nowhere near Los Angeles, where it was sunny and 75 degrees.

I was still in my home in Brooklyn on a cold December morning waiting for the sun to come up.

L.A. was a mirage and it served as the setting for a larger, and ultimately more painful, delusion where I reunited with my former best friend who ghosted me several years ago and moved out West a few months back.

I recall walking down a wide boulevard with the sun shining down on my face when my buddy came bouncing up to me from the opposite direction.

I don’t remember when we said to each other, but I do know he stepped right in to give me a strong and very sincere hug.

That feeling of his arms around me is so, real, so vivid that I still have trouble believing it was all in my head.

It felt so good to be friends with him again and I thought it would be great to have him around when I relocated.

But the dream didn’t stay pleasant for very long.

The scene shifted and I was suddenly looking down into a massive ditch where the earth was crumbling directly beneath a block of office buildings.

Oh, crap, California is earthquake country, I told myself. You don't want to move here.

And then I heard the wind blowing.

I Tumble Out of Paradise

So, let’s try and decipher this latest hallucination.

First, I was feeling good, having gone to a holiday light show at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens with my sister on Friday.

My inner disrupter feeds on agitation, so naturally he’s not comfortable with me being comfortable.

I think my former friend came back into my mind largely because I had recently told myself to stop thinking about him.

I want to stop ruminating about what had happened to our friendship. I vowed to quit the cyberstalking, which invariably results in additional heartache.

My psychotic subconscious heard this command, responded with a hearty cry of “Bite me!’ and cooked up this little melodrama.

I’ve been on vacation and I’m a little nervous about returning to work tomorrow after a week of going absolutely nowhere.

Christmas is almost here and I’m not feeling much in the way of the holiday spirit as I think of the grim winter months to follow.

On the political front, a group of retired U.S. army generals wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning about the risks of another insurrection or even a civil war in 2024.

And the omicron variant is flexing its vile muscles, sparking several Broadway shows to shut down and the Rockettes to scrub their “Christmas Spectacular.”

No wonder I needed a hug.

Dreams are reflections of our desires and fears. I got my friend back and finally moved to the West Coast, like I've been promising to do since the Carter Administration.

And then my shadow mind cranked out a disaster movie scenario to scare me out of taking any action. Ingenious, in a sick sort of way.

But dreams are also messages, and this one was telling me to get new friends, break out of the old routines and leave my fears in the wind.