Elf Sternberg

Just warning: I consider people writing about their dreams to be about the most boring thing to read ever. Dreams are literally the traces left over on your brain after it's done the full night's garbage collection on the previous day's memories.

But, like a programmer examining the traces of a core dump after a program has crashed, analyzing dreams can sometimes come up with something interesting if not about the content of the dream itself.

I almost never remember my dreams. When I do they often have a recurring setting: a rooftop of a factory at night. All sorts of things have happened on that rooftop over the years the most notable of which was George Takei fronting the Smashing Pumpkins in an unannounced, invitation-only, unplugged concert. I still have no idea why.

Another repeating dreamscape has started to leak in. It's a large waterfront with a boardwalk in a clearly magical realist city. It is not Seattle although elements of the Pike Place Market appear to make up part of it. It is also not Liberty City (from the Grand Theft Auto series) although again there appears to be parts of Liberty City Shoreside visible in the background. The weather and sea suggest New Jerse, although it's clearly on an isolated sound of some kind, just not the Puget Sound. The dreams typically involve navigation: finding my way around the water, or on land through bewildering one-way streets with nonsensical traffic lights, or the non-Euclidian layout of the stores' common weather-walk along the boardwalk.

Last night's dream involved trying to get home from the wealthier "North" part of city to the boardwalk (although the layout of the city suggests it's actually south of the boardwalk or maybe the west; it's not supposed to make sense) and as I made my way back to the waterfront the terrain became more and more dangerous: construction, pits, broken ladders, roofs and awnings to jump, and never once the suggestion that it was just a game or just a dream.

I'm not sure why that was all left over or how my brain glued it all together into something coherent.

But let me tell a different story.

My mother is 81 years old and recently had serious abdominal surgery. After four days in the hospital they allowed her to go home to sleep in her own bed. She seemed coherent and fine if just very, very tired when I left her for the night to sleep in the hotel across the street.

I woke up the next morning to a phone call from the home visit nurse. "Your mother has done something. You need to come over now and take her to the hospital."

The anaesthetic had apparently knocked my mother for such a hellacious loop that she was still addled five days later. She'd woken that morning to find this weird plastic thing attached to her body so... she found some scissors and just cut it off.

It was the plasma drain line for the bowel surgery site. The other end literally went into her guts.

We rushed to the doctor's office. Fortunately, he deemed that it "wasn't doing anything for her anymore anyway" and finished the line removal, using surgical glue to close the wound site. "Just keep it clean and replace the bandage every day."

"See?" Mom insisted. "I knew it was an okay thing to do!"

It was not an 'okay' thing to do. It was an open line into her abdominal cavity. She'd raised her risk of a deadly infection by a huge amount before the doctor closed it off.

After a few more days her mental faculties returned completely. She was able to do everything on her own such as balance her checkbook and read her emails and do all the things the modern world demands of her. I worry than when her metabolic reserved are taxed beyond their limits that sort of dementia-like symptoms will return but when she's well-fed and well-rested she's perfectly normal and still intellectually sharp.

Here's the thing: she still insists that she did the right thing with the plasma line. Her brain made up a story about the line, she adopted that story as the truth and she refuses to budge from that position.

This is what brains do: they make up stories. My mom's insistence is a story necessary for her to retain her self-image as a person in control of her life. My dreamscape stories are last-minute panics by my mind to make sense of all the garbage it finds when it comes back on-line after the sleep routines have done their duties.

That's what dreams are. This is why they're notoriously hard to remember when you wake up; your brain knows they're mostly literal psychological rubbish and would prefer you think about something else.

I dreamed that I saw baseball star Ichiro Suzuki during a practice game hit a line drive past the second baseman and into the outfield. He threw the bat after the ball so hard that it arrived shortly after the ball hit the back fence. He tagged second base, then turned suddenly, grabbed the bat nobody else knew what to do with and, like a golf club, smacked the ball across the field, further confusing everyone. Then he ran to third base and finally home. I woke up.

I had been trying to convince everyone that it was just a dream and it was kinda pointless to discuss whether or not the rules of baseball allowed such a thing. Dreams didn't have to make sense, I argued.

Then I woke up. Again.

It was 1969, and I was on The Muppet Show. I was Dr. Teeth, sitting in my finest white tux jacket trimmed with gold ribbon. Kermit came out onto the stage and introduced us, "And now, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem Band will play the Thelonious Monk song Straight, no Chaser. Yaaaaaayy!!"

We played. I was on fire. My hands flew across the keyboard, I tossed my head, the band backed me up with the kind of reliability they don't make in Detroit anymore. The music flowed out of us and into a maybe appreciative, maybe dumbfounded audience.

When it was over, I put my head down on the keyboard and started crying. Tears trickled down onto the ivories, and Ralph, who also plays the piano, came over and said, "Teeth, Teeth! What's wrong?"

I picked up my fuzzy head, blinked and said, "I just love playing me some Monk, man."

And then I woke up.

I am having the strangest dreams these days.

I started out on a castle spire, talking to a blocky, pixelated fellow who told me, in 1980's style white word ballons with half-millimeter blocky black borders, that this was a program called PerlNotes and that I should work my way down to the dungeons to uncover how the program works, write it myself, and make a million dollars.

That has to be the strangest dream I've had recently.

So, in order to find out if my back problems are caused by an overactive bladder, or vice versa, my doctor has me peeing into a graduated bottle for the next few days.

Last night, like usual, I awoke somewhere between 3:45 and 4:15 and went to the bathroom and did my business, measuring it out and writing the volume down in a little journal via flashlight, then went to bed.

Shortly thereafter, I got up and went again. I was a little confused about why I was wandering into the bathroom when I had just gone. I fumbled a little with the flashlight and the bottle, and then I felt a wetness on my hand as if I'd missed the bottle (ick-- told you it was TMI), but that was impossible, I'd just gone so I had nothing to give and I didn't feel like I was giving anyway. I pushed down the button on the flashlight and saw that the stream was coming out of the flashlight!

I've never had a lucid dream before, but I instantly realized that any situation this surreal had to be one. I turned my head towards the door and tried to say, "Omaha, wake me up!"

And then I learned that there are different levels of volition: one for what I was doing in the dreamworld, and one for what I wanted to do in the real world. I couldn't get the words out! "OooohhhhMMmmmmmm." My mouth was trying to form the words, but it was if my face had hardened like Play-Doh left out too long. "Mmmmmmaaaaaahaaaaaa...." It's like that scene in The Matrix when Smith says "How will you call your lawyer when you can't even speak?" only not as freaky. And then, with a transition so smooth it will be the envy of television programmers everywhere, I was transported to my bed, conscious and mostly puzzled, and intrigued about the whole incident.

Fortunately, I hadn't actually made a sound or moved at all, and Omaha never noticed. I went back to bed, undisturbed either by back pain or strange dreams.

There must be something in that dream, some insight into the nature of volition, that I can use in a Journal Entry. Into the hopper with it!