This Didn't Happen. To Me.

So I’ve been really, really tired for quite a while.  Part of that was because I was having some medical treatment that just makes you tired; I mean, that is a known side effect.  Also, things have been insane at my office.  I won’t go into the whole deal, but the short version is, we had to call 1300 people on the phone, get their consent to settle, verify their demographic info, and stuff like that, all on a very tight timetable.  Which took a lot of hours. But besides all that, it turns out I’ve been sick (!). 

I had emergency dental surgery about 2 months ago.  The dentist took a bunch of X rays, as they do.  After the procedure he told me that my left maxillary sinus looked “weird.”  “I’m not a doctor,” he said, “but I think you should have one check it out.” So I called my Regular Doc.  She said that if somebody needed to poke around with an endoscope in my sinuses, it should probably be an ENT and not her.

She gave me some names and I called around for an appointment.  There was like a 6 week wait for a new patient appointment. In the meantime, of course, I Googled my symptoms, which I kind of hadn’t noticed up until that point. They could have meant a number of things, among them nasopharyngeal carcinoma. (This is the bad side of Dr. Google.  The good side, of course, is that you’ll know the terminology when you get in there.)  A friend of mine died of this. Obviously I didn’t want to have it.

Well, good news.  I don’t.  I have a garden variety sinus infection, which I’ve apparently had for a year or more (!).  I had sinus surgery in 1997 after years of chronic sinus infections, and this is not at all what used to happen. No pain. No fever. Not going to bed for a week and wanting someone to shoot me.  So you can forgive me for not knowing about it.  Anyway, I’m being treated now, and I should start to feel less tired. Also, I’m planning to sleep all day Saturday.  You have been warned.

Speaking of sleep:  I had probably the strangest dream of my entire life a couple of nights ago.  Most particularly, it was strange because it wasn’t strange at all.  When I'm dreaming, about 90% of the time there’s a part of my brain that kind of stays awake and makes pithy observations about what’s going on, especially when things get weird.  That didn’t happen this time around.  What’s more, there weren’t any leaps of logic or brightly colored scenery like there usually are in dreams.  It was all just straight up narrative.  Kind of like it was actually happening, though it didn’t happen.  To me.  That I’m aware of.

So I'm a 28 year old male. I'm in college. I go to a literature class and I'm late because of work. The professor makes a joke about it and everyone laughs; I kind of wave abashedly and sit down. This is one of those dreams where everybody is speaking another language (Spanish, in this case) but it's fine. When class is over I head to the bookstore to pick up some pens and notepads and grab a bite to eat from a little campus restaurant.  Then I hop on my bicycle to ride home.  It's a 1970s era Schwinn, dark green, looks pretty new. Groovy baskets on the back, too.

If I had to guess I'd say I live in Chile or Argentina in a medium-sized city in the early 1970s. I have a modest house in an older neighborhood. My girls run out to meet me.  They look to be 4 and 6. I walk them in while they tell me stories about their day. We talk for a while and then they head off to bed because it's late.  

I sit down on the couch with my wife. Her name is Tonna. I tell her that going to school and working is really hard, and it was a lot easier when I was a younger man.  She pats me on the shoulder and reminds me I'm going to graduate soon, that I'm doing this so my girls can have a better life.  And she knows I can do it.  Some smooching happens.  I fall asleep on the couch.

I wake up because there are men in my house.  I can hear them but I can't see because there something over my head. I hear somebody crying and I think it's one of my girls.  I start freaking out and two or three guys grab me and drag me out down the front steps.

Next thing, we're in a boat.  We're hitting all these waves. Chop. Chop. Chop.  I must be right next to the outboard motor because it's so loud.  It's the only thing I can hear.  This seems to go on for a long time.  I probably pass out again. 

Then I can see a little.  It's still very dark but there's some pink and orange streaks starting to appear in part of the sky.  The boat is a small speedboat, nothing fancy.  We're in the middle of a broad river, probably half a mile across.  The boat has stopped.  There are bright lights in the back and somebody's pounding on the motor with a wrench, swearing.  I glance at the sky and realize it's going to be light soon.  If I'm going to escape, now's the time.

I throw myself over the side of the boat.  The second I hit the water I realize I have a problem.  I can't swim because my hands are tied.  I can't get my head out of the water.  I'm drowning.  I hold my breath as long as I can.  Finally I let out the breath and gasp in water.  I can feel my lungs filling up.  I'm definitely going to die.

Someone lands in the water next to me.  Somebody's grabbing me from the boat and they manage to get a rope around my chest.  (Interruption here for one of those odd observations.  It didn't really feel like a rope.  It felt like a silver chain.  I mention this because people who have had out of body experiences sometimes talk about being tethered to their unconscious bodies by a silver chain.  I'm just saying.  It was odd.)  Two or three guys on the boat and the guy in the water are able to get me back in the boat.   

Somebody pounds all the water out of my lungs just as everything starts going all grey and swimmy.  I manage to get a couple of breaths and maybe I'm not going to die after all.  One of the men is yelling my name. ("Fernando!!" Because of course.  The old ABBA song.)  And I recognize him.  It's my cousin, Miguel.  I start yelling.  "Leave Miguel alone! Don't hurt Miguel!" 

And then I wake up(!).

Only I'm not awake.  I mean, I am awake, because I'm trying to get out of my blanket and pry the plantar fasciitis thingy off my foot so I can stand up. But the dream is still going on. I was looking at the group of men in the boat.  I was looking down the hallway.  I could hear somebody screaming. I could hear a cat meowing.  And I was literally halfway down the hall before I was really all the way back.  And one of my cats was sniffing around my ankles and meowing like where have you been?

I don't know what to make of this.  I don't have dreams like that.  I dream fragmented chunks of stuff with an early 80s dance mix soundtrack.  And sex.  I dream a lot about sex.  I'd almost think past life experience or something, except I was alive in the early 1970s.  I mean, unless time works differently over there.  Or it could have been a 1960s Schwinn and I just couldn't tell the difference.  But I always thought last time around I was a Russian cosmonaut who died in some horrible training accident that they never told the outside world about.  No particular reason, though, except for really wanting to be an astronaut when I was a young kid.

Or, I guess it is possible that my own pet theory about reincarnation, which differs somewhat from the Buddhist theory, might actually be correct.  I could write books about this, but basically. the re are two Buddhist ideas that are totally in conflict with each other where reincarnation is concerned.  There's this idea that we've all lived many times, and it would stand to reason that some of us remember some of that. (I do.) Then there's this idea that there is no ego, no "I".  This notion that we exist as independent beings is just an illusion.  

What I think, briefly, is that we're all the same being, parts of a whole.  When we die, we go back into the soup, and when we're born, some of the soup gets ladled into our craniums and becomes our consciousness.  That's why more than one person remembers being Napoleon, say.  Because we've all been everybody, and Napoleon had a pretty memorable life, so it stands to reason that a lot of us would remember parts of it. There was an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation that explained this pretty well, though I hated it because Q was in it and I hate Q. 

Well, anyway.  Times like this I wish I had a night vision security camera in my room to see if I was actually there the whole night or if I disappeared for a couple of hours in the middle.  Of course, there’s a very good reason why I don’t have a night vision security camera in my room, besides all the other obvious ones.  I am not at all sensitive to paranormal stuff. Not at all. I'm not saying there aren't ghosts out there, because lots of together people I know have encountered them, but I have not. Cameras, however, record what they see.  And I know, I just know that if I had a night vision security camera in my room, it would absolutely pick up a black, menacing, shadowy looking figure coming out of my closet and looming over me in my sleep.  If that happened, of course I’d have to burn the house down and flee with all my possessions and wife and cats in a cardboard box. 

Well, maybe more than one cardboard box.