JANUARY 9, 2023 – Last night I experienced my usual kaleidoscope of dreams. In one segment, I was leading my wife on a chase through the back, cluttered offices of a bank. Our objective was to cash a check. She wore an N95 mask, but I’d forgotten mine, so I held my breath as we tore through the place. In due course I realized that all we needed was a teller, not a business banker.
In another segment, I walked the busy quarters of some commercial enterprise. I noticed a weak spot in the flooring and tried to reinforce it. The job required a claw hammer, but all I could find were specialty hammers, none of which had a claw for pulling nails. I searched a nearby unoccupied tool shed but found nothing except lights that someone else had left blazing. I turned them off as I exited.
In yet another section of last night’s free-wheeling, far-ranging dreams, I found myself in Midtown Manhattan sipping coffee in a swanky café perched on the second floor of a hotel. From my vantage point I watched the morning street bustle. Among the sidewalk crowd I espied a former co-worker wearing a knit shirt sporting the logo of Norwest Bank, where I was working at the time it acquired Wells Fargo Bank. I hadn’t seen the guy in 25 years and couldn’t remember his name but wanted to go out, stop him and say, “Hey! I like your Norwest shirt!” The encounter, I figured, would be an amusing simulation of a scene from a time machine trip.
My dreams carried me hither and yon through the night, until, with the breaking dawn, I woke and searched for bearings. I felt as if I’d spent all night on thrill-rides and was now stumbling out of an amusement park.
Over breakfast I read some news. Among the business in Brasilia, the secret concessions by McCarthy and the deluge in California, I seemed to have entered another crazy dream cycle. To even the keel, with my cup of Jafa I repaired to our front sitting room, brightened by the strains of Mozart and fresh rays of the morning sun—there to write this post. Between the first words above and the start of this sentence, the sun has already moved from one window to another; or more accurately, the earth has rotated several degrees. As I consider this planetary constant . . . the commotions on earth, within our actions and inside human thoughts shrink to minor disturbances.
Paradoxically, though none of these “minor disturbances” matters, every one of them matters much—to us living members of humankind and to all future generations. This paradox is accompanied by a correlative irony: despite our egregious flaws and errors, from headlong efforts at self-extinction to massive screw-ups in how we organize ourselves and relate to one another, we have the wherewithal to produce and cultivate a Mozart, performers of his music, and complex systems required to stage and record a performance of the sublime.
And most remarkable of all, when asleep, our brains dream “free-wheeling, far-ranging” dreams assembled randomly from vast internal stores of memory. The earth can rotate, the sun can shine, but such features are commonplace throughout the universe. You’d have to travel far and wide to find another a match for humankind.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
