Some Extremely Strange News

For the first time in a long time I woke up feeling fantastic.

I took Koko on a long walk through the Presidio Park trees to the Marina Green, where we watched the enigmatic kite flyers do their thing. It was a beautiful sunny day. I was absolutely stress free. Having a happy ending to one of my dreams felt so liberating, like I might not be trapped in a world where I am eternally helpless. For once, I wasn't worried about going crazy, and I wasn't thinking about work, and I wasn't feeling like I had to keep busy. I stopped in a cafe for some tea for me, and some water for dog.

We sat down outside. At the next table over, a girl was watching a news video on her tablet. She asked politely if it bothered me. I replied that it didn't, not a bit. I looked down at the show; it was a story on outdoor adventures gone wrong. The usual sensationalism. Just before I was about to dismiss it and get back to my tea, I did a doubletake. The woman, the climber. Her face was in a grid of four portraits of the people they were starring in their show. I blurted out "Woah, that's - I think I know her. Mind if I watch with you?" She agrees with a flirty smile and scoots her chair over a bit to make room.

The video goes into commercial break. Giving it a second thought, I'm sure it was just a memory from the dream, like deja vu, triggered by the theme of the story and a similar looking brunette woman. No need to get all worked up. Sheesh. The girl engages me in casual conversation. I don't really remember what we talked about.

The news comes back on. I watch now with only mild interest as a man tells his story of almost drowning in the bay while trying to recreate a pontoon bicycle he saw on Kickstarter. Jeez, dude, really? The next story is of a snowboarding accident where a kid cut in front of the guy, he hit a jump, went off trail, and spent 3 hours in the snow with a broken leg before someone noticed him. I had begun daydreaming at this point, until the news guy did the pre-commercial teaser. "Next we talk to the survivor of a rock climbing fall who narrowly escaped an encounter with a wild animal, after the break."

I choked halfway through a sip of my tea, spluttering a little. The girl asked if I was ok. I nodded as I coughed the tea out of my lungs, eyes watering.

This was starting to freak me out. If this is the same woman... Are my dreams coming from news stories? Am I hearing stuff like this and subconsciously recalling it while I sleep? But I never watch the news, that crap is depressing. I generally make a considerable effort to avoid it. I guess I could've heard it while I was out somewhere, like I am now. But I swear the dream was the first time I had seen the woman.

The commercial ended. I leaned in and the tablet owner enthusiastically joined me, to the point where our shoulders were touching. She angled the screen to give me a better view. After a short recap and intro from news guy, the show cut to a female reporter standing next to an occupied helipad in a small complex of white paneled trailers and buildings.

"We're here at Plum Valley EMS to speak with a woman recently plucked off the side of a mountain after a potentially deadly rock climbing accident. That she survived the fall with only a dislocated shoulder and fractured wrist is an impressive story on its own - but gravity wasn't the only challenge that Deborah Wilkins had to face." Cut to the reporter walking into what looked to be an emergency care room, similar but not quite like a hospital, equipped with only the essentials. I'm watching, wide-eyed. "Deborah" is sitting on a gurney, smiling weakly at the reporter, who sits down next to her.

"Thanks for speaking with us so soon after your ordeal, Deborah."

"Oh, you can call me Debbie" she says shyly.

The reporter laughs softly with her. "Ok, Debbie. So you mentioned earlier that you were out on a weekend hike, something you do pretty often, and you were almost to the end when your troubles started. When did your hike take a turn for the worse?"

Debbie fidgets a little with the wrapping that was now around her wrist, looking for the words. "Well, it was my fault really. I wasn't using all of the safety equipment the way I should have, and as I was climbing the last face, I... Well, I saw something that gave me a scare, and I lost my grip."

The reporter jumps in. "And what was it that you saw?"

"It was... a mountain lion." The reporter does some dramatic face gesture and leans in with the microphone. "It was just sitting on a ledge, watching me. I don't know how long it had been there. It was so calm. It was terrifying."

"I can't even begin to imagine! So, it was the mountain lion that caused your fall?"

"Well, it didn't do anything to cause my fall, it was just that seeing it really startled me. If I had been secured to the rope like I should have, I think it would've been fine. But I slipped, and without anything to hold me, that's when I fell and hurt my arm." She begins to lift the injured limb, winces, and lets it fall again.

"Incredible, that you weren't hurt more, isn't it? Your rescuers said that the cliff you were climbing was almost forty feet tall!"

"Well, I wasn't too high up yet, but yeah, I'm really lucky it wasn't worse."

"And so there you are, with a broken arm, stuck on a mountain, with a mountain lion lurking nearby."

Debbie laughs nervously. "Yeah, ha, it sounds pretty bad when you say it like that."

"Now, most people would have had a nervous breakdown in that situation. But you kept your wits about you. What was running through your head at that point?"

"Well, 'OW', mostly" Debbie laughs again. "My arm was hurting pretty bad, and it made it hard to think. But I felt like prey. The look in its eyes..."

"The mountain lion?"

"Yeah. When I saw it, it was so... Predatory. Feeling hunted really overrides pain, I guess. I don't know where the crazy idea came from, but I set up a sort of trap to scare it off."

"The rescue team took some photos of the 'trap' you're talking about, we'll show those to the viewers now." Cut to on-scene photos of: you guessed it. A reflective blanket tied to a rope. Chalk dust is scattered on the groun"They said you used an emergency blanket you had with you, and the climbing ropes, to scare off the mountain lion when it approached you. How on earth did you set something like this up with a broken arm?"

"I really don't know. I don't feel like I had the mental capacity for anything so elaborate. But, I broke my arm in high school during a soccer game, and I guess doing things one-handed is kind of like riding a bike - it comes back to you. And I've always heard that you're supposed to act big and intimidating if you ever come face to face with a mountain lion. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Survival instinct. I felt like I was on auto pilot." The reporter nods along. Debbie is fidgeting again. "To be honest, I didn't think it would actually work. " She looks down and speaks softly. The camera zooms in for a more intimate shot. "I thought, 'This is it, I'm cat food, that's how I go.'"

The show cuts to the reporter speaking outside again. "But that's not what happened. The mountain lion did come back for her, but Debbie managed to scare it off by making herself appear larger, and by making loud noises. In the U.S., mountain lion encounters are becoming increasingly frequent as hikers and campers explore their territory..." The show starts displaying statistics, meanwhile, I start freaking out internally. Seeing the woman and the images of the scene was like reliving a memory. It was surreal. While I was still in shock, they returned to Debbie for one final shot.

The reporter reaches out to Debbie to shake her good hand. "Thank you again, Ms. Wilkins, for sharing your story with us. After your incredible encounter, what advice do you have for other outdoor enthusiasts?"

"Well... Always use the safety equipment. Even when you think you know what you're doing and you've done it a thousand times before, nature always has more surprises for you. And if you do find yourself in trouble... Listen to your instincts."

I rocked back in my chair. Tablet-girl looked up. "So, that's a friend of yours?"

I blinked, wide-eyed, back at her. "Um." I swallowed and shook my head to try to clear it. "Yeah, yeah. She was an old... You know... College..."

I struggled to find something to say other than 'Yep, had a dream about her. Just like that story, actually. Weird, huh? I often dream about people in danger.' Instead of that, I spit out whatever words I thought sounded most normal.

"That's insane, I can't believe that happened to her." I looked around, still stunned, and stood up. "Um. I should probably." Full sentences were beyond me. The girl was watching sympathetically, trying very hard to show that she understood my emotional upset, and felt for me. "Thanks for sharing."

I turned abruptly and pulled on Koko's leash. He had stood up with me, guessing it was time to go, but I interrupted his post-nap stretch as I hurried away from the cafe. He trotted along dutifully but gave me a big, breathy huff to voice his discontent.

"Whaaaat is going on..." I said softly to myself as we power walked in the direction of home. I tried again to remember if I had ever seen that news show before. But seriously, I don't watch that stuff, ever. And I'm sure the dream was the first time I saw the climber, or 'Deborah Wilkins'. I stop suddenly, mid-stride, unintentionally jerking the leash again.

Koko is now thoroughly confused by my erratic behavior. He cocks his head and hesitantly tries his 'play' stance, feet out, butt up, tail wagging, wondering if this is maybe a new game. I give him a distracted, ear-ruffling head rub.

A thought had occurred to me. What if the whole day had been a dream? All of mine had felt so real lately, it didn't seem that unlikely. The only difference was that I was never in them as myself, or anywhere near my actual life. But there was nothing to say that couldn't change.

In my recent research on dreams, I had read about reality checks, to be able to tell the difference between dreams and real life. Stuff like looking around for signs, clocks, written stuff that should make sense. Checking to see if physics still worked - if you jumped you fell at a normal rate, if you pushed on something it remained solid. Writing down a few math equations and seeing if they made sense when you reread them. I tried all of them that I could remember, and for all I could tell, this is still real life. I've now written a whole blog post, and I still haven't woken up yet. I started writing as soon as we got home, out of habit - what happened today was as unsettling as one of my dreams, and it felt good to lay it out in writing. I still have no idea what to think, though.

I have some research to do. I need to Google Deborah Wilkins and see what more I can find out.

Dream Journal 07b: The Climber

Looking up and seeing that the mountain lion had disappeared was infinitely more panic-inducing than seeing it in the first place. The woman rolls over on the side of her good arm, face contorting in pain as the bad arm follows limply. She slowly and arduously climbs to her feet, eyes flicking up to the ledge every few seconds. After doing the equivalent of a diagnostic check to confirm it was only her wrist that was badly hurt, she turns her attention to her gear. She wrestles her backpack off with difficulty, and unceremoniously pours the contents out on the rocky ground.

I feel her curse silently.

The item in her bag which probably would have been the most immediate help is shattered. She gathers up the pieces of her smartphone and begins reassembling it as well as she can. The backplate has snapped, so she holds the battery in place as she tries turning it on, all one-handed. The device chimes its boot-up noises, and her face lights up with hope, however, the decimated screen remains black. She presses on the screen, and gets some haptic feedback every once in a while. It must just be the display that's borked.

As her focus narrows on trying to operate the phone with no display, the rest of the scene fades for me... I'm only aware of the frustrated blur of her attempts at pressing a sequence of button locations from memory, and the throbbing pain from her wrist. Until the sound of a displaced rock, bouncing down the walls of some chasm, echoes out from the crevice between the rock faces, diverting our collective attention.

New fear surges, and the phone is forgotten. She peers into the darkness of the open spaces there. At the level of the plateau she's standing on, the crevice is about five feet across. She hadn't paid it any attention before, since her goal had been up and not in. The two large granite formations lean against one another to form most of the anatomy of the crevice, but there are smaller, vertical chunks of rock that have settled haphazardly within it, creating a dark maze of smaller spaces.

And then, there they are. Those green eyes. As soon as she sees them, they're gone again, but where they had been there's a flash of an unmistakeable shadowy shape. It had been deep within the crevice, with many passages between that were too small for an animal so large. It was impossible to tell if there was a path from the wildcat to the woman's current spot. It's a grim situation.

I run through her options. Try to use the rope to climb up to a safe height? Not a chance with a route like this and her arm in that state. Try to rapelle down? The fall in that direction was much higher, one small mistake and she was done for. The phone works, she just needed the time to stumble through the invisible buttons required to make a call. This is the best place to try to call for rescue. She just needs it to be safe. Think, what does she have at her disposal? The backpack's contents had been:
-hooded zip-up sweatshirt
-utility tool
-a few energy bars and a plastic bag of trail mix
-compact reflective thermal camping blanket
-bottle of water
-zippered bag, contents unknown
-first aid kit, including athletic tape and a fist-sized bottle of rubbing alcohol

There's also her climbing gear, the two fixed ropes, and scattered rocks of all sizes. It's enough. I have an idea that might help her.

She had also turned her attention to the small pile of affects she had left near the spot she had fallen. She downs a couple of aspirin from her first aid kit, grabs the hoodie, grits her teeth, and wraps both sleeves tightly around her broken wrist. With a great amount of pain and difficulty, she wrestles the body of the sweatshirt over her head and around her back. It's an effective sling.

I'm impressed.

Turning back to the crevice, she's now at a loss. She fidgets with her good hand, but otherwise stands still.

Time to see if my idea will be of any use to her. When she was climbing, and I had been desperately wishing she had just clip on to the rope, I had felt something. A flicker of a change in her actions. She had been about to grab it. I had to try again. I begin to visualize what I have in mind as vividly as possible. The reflective blanket. The athletic tape. Her chalk bag. The ropes.

Her gaze diverts to her supplies.

The rope from the route below first. Pulled up a bit and wound around a rock. Then, the rope from the route above. There's plenty of slack at the bottom, slid around the first rope, it can be pulled tight and hard to fly up and away from the ground and the wall it's hanging against. While it's still slack, lay it across the edge of the blanket. Fold the edge over, secure with tape. Loose edge toward the crevice, pour chalk into blanket. Fold loose edge just a bit over the rope, creating a pocket of chalk. When/if a loud, bright surprise would come in handy, yank on the end of the rope, rope snaps up, blanket flutters, chalk goes flying, any giant cats present crap themselves and go running. In theory. I run through those steps mentally, over and over.

She's looking from item to item of her dumped out pack, wheels turning. Her good hand is twitching around a bit, as if it's restless to do something. She kneels down near her stuff, reaching out to touch each item in turn, and as she's moving from one to the next, her fingers come to rest on the rope. She lifts it, furrowing her brow, her pensive expression that of someone who has remembered something, or is experiencing deja vu. She looks back at the rope from the route below.

Yes!

Like someone who has just realized the solution to a puzzle, she starts putting the pieces together. Even one handed, the contraption isn't hard for her to set up. She's clever with the use of her feet and teeth.

I wonder briefly if she's had a broken arm before.

The tape fights her a little, clinging a little too easily to the shiny surface of the blanket. She gives the rope a careful experimental tug. The blanket crackles noisily and spreads with the momentum of the rope.

I can hardly believe it. She's pulled it off, just like I had pictured it.

She has a little less chalk left than I was hoping, but it'll have to do. She pours it all in and tucks a tiny amount of the other end of the blanket over the rope. It's done. She was industrious about the task, and it seems to have not taken very much time, not that I have a very good sense of that sort of thing. There haven't been any more noises from the crevice.

I seriously hope that the most good this invention will have done is to give her piece of mind. As cool as it is, I do not want to see her use it.

She takes the end of the rope and returns to grab her phone. She also picks up the bottle of alcohol and the utility tool. A small boulder pushed up against the upper wall gives her a good place with an amount of cover from the crevice, but not so much that it obstructs her view. She posts herself just behind it, opening the bottle of alcohol, flipping the tool's knife out, and setting them both carefully down next to her. The rope lies in her lap just under her good hand, and she gets to work figuring out the phone. She never goes more than a few seconds without glancing toward the crevice.

Everything blends again into a pattern of invisible button pushing and expectant examinations of the crevice.

She's trying a listen at the phone's earpiece, like she has a few dozen times already, when she hears it. A dial tone! She lets out a yell of excitement before quickly quieting herself and checking the crevice once more. Nothing there. The phone rings, once, twice. She's biting her lip, probably praying to every god she knows that this person picks up the phone. It rings a third time, and halfway through the fourth a woman's voice answers. The climber wastes no time.

"Hello! Oh thank you, please - please, I need you to call emergency services - " The woman on the other end responds, bewildered, but eager to help. The voice is enough for the climber to recognize the person, it must have been one of her phone contacts. "Rebecca? I'm so glad you answered. I hurt my arm and I'm stuck on a climb, and I really, really need EMS to get me out of here as fast as possible..." She gives the woman her location and a few brief details before hanging up to let her make the emergency call. She lets her head fall back against the wall, and breathes a sigh of relief. "It's gonna be ok." She whispers to herself.

I've felt the suspense and elation and relief all with her. But something doesn't feel right. All the noise she was making, it's nagging at me -

She whips her head in the direction of the crevice, and there it is, the big cat, bounding out of the shadows.

She drops her phone to pull and yank hard on the rope. It pulls tight, snapping up and dragging the blanket with it.

The reflective material catches the rays of the now-setting sun, shining blindingly. The loose end slips away from the rope and the chalk poofs out in a white cloud.

The mountain lion skitters sideways, looking, for all his size and might, like a startled housecat.

The climber has already dropped the rope, grabbed the bottle of alcohol, and is up and running at the predator she has just spent several hours living in fear of. She's screaming a battle cry at the top of her lungs, and flinging the liquid as best she can in the direction of the beast.

Bewildered, it scrambles back, turns, and hightails it the way it came.

The climber comes to a halt, breathless. She drops the empty bottle. After her second monumental adrenaline rush of the day, she's completely drained. Her free hand is shaking. She brings it up to her face and rubs her eyes.

Deep breaths.

She walks back and slides back down to her previous position, grabs the knife, trembling.

I don't see any more details. She calms, eventually, and nibbles at the snacks she has brought. I see it all in a blur. A bird lights on the edge of the plateau and startles her. Far below, the trees are rustling in an evening wind. As the sun slips below the horizon, and the moon reaches toward the stars, she sees a red and white helicopter flying straight in her direction.

-------

I wake up.

Dream Journal 07: The Climber

The rock face is solid and unyielding. It's been well traversed, and there aren't any unexpected weak points in its surface. Climbing it is a breeze. It takes me a moment before I realize that the arms reaching up and finding handholds are not my own. Certainly, definitely not my own. The fingernails are painted violet. It comes to my attention that the climber is a slender brunette woman, geared up for an extended outdoor climb. A trail run, by the looks of it. She's blazing up a thirty foot route, solo toproping with ease.

It's a peaceful, sunny day, and there isn't anything but nature for miles around. The look on her face is nothing short of blissful. Her serenity is infectious, and I find myself absent-mindedly enjoying the smallest details of the scene. The air is of that perfect temperature where you can hardly feel it at all but for the wet, green scent of deciduous trees carried on the slightest of breezes. I can feel the rock against her hands somehow, and it's pleasantly warm from the sun. The climbing rope, in contrast, is rough and unruly, a bit sticky from being handled by countless chalky hands.

It's just slowing me down.

The thought wasn't my own, and she hadn't said a word. Nevertheless, I understood the sentiment clearly. It was a bizarre feeling. It reminded me somehow of the dialogue in a silent movie. The woman arrives at the top of the climb, distracting me from my confusion. She swings herself up and over the lip onto a small plateau about the size of a school bus, nestled into the conjunction of two masses of granite. Enjoying the feel of solid ground beneath her feet, she siezes the opportunity to take in the view. The trail she had climbed so far was moderately steep, enough to bring her above the treeline and put the surrounding land on display. It was beautiful.

After a glorious, timeless, moment of appreciation, she turns her attention back to the challenge at hand. She sits down on a knee high rock and pulls a topology trail map out of her back pocket. It looks as if she has marked out this trail by hand with a fine line green marker. There are little arrows and notes at various points along the trail. She traces the line with her chalky, callused index finger, stops just near the end, and confirms what she seems to already have known. The next face is the last, and she'll have triumphed over the upward portion of this journey. She stashes the map and looks up, hands on hips, assessing what she has to work with.

A fixed rope hangs down the center of the route, just like it had been on the last. This must be a well-known trail, more for leisurely day-climbing than adrenaline pumping adventure. She's ninety percent through her climb and has hardly broken a sweat, and this face is only about half as high as the last. It starts to click in my mind, what she's contemplating, and I feel a sudden wave of dread.

She nods her head decisively and moves toward the base of the wall. She dips her hands into the chalk bag on her belt and launches herself enthusiastically up, not wasting any time scaling the first five feet or so. She doesn't bother attaching herself to the toprope. I can feel her exhileration - the freedom of being able to move unencumbered by safety measures, and the raw, buzzing gnaw of fear that there's nothing between her and an eighty foot drop but air. She loves it.

I love it. I also feel like vomiting.

The further she moves up the more hammering my sense of foreboding becomes. She's swinging gracefully from nub to edge to crack, and I try to convince myself that I should just enjoy it the way she is, that she's obviously got the hang of this, that she'll be fine. But I can't tear my attention from the rope hanging just a few feet away. She could just clip in, it wouldn't take that long, she could still enjoy the climb, maybe not as freely, but is the momentum really worth it?

Halfway through reaching toward the next hold, she glances at the rope, hesitating. As if echoing my screaming thoughts.

Slowly, her hand starts to reach a little further, in the direction of the rope.

I almost relax.

And then she sees it.

Her eyes have refocused, beyond the rope, to a cave-like feature in the rock wall perpendicular to this one. There, only seven or eight feet away, calmly and patiently staring back at her, are the bright green eyes of a mountain lion.

I feel a heart plummet like a lead balloon and I don't know if it's mine or hers.

The big cat is crouching at the edge of the large crack between the two rock faces. Its large, velvety paws are wrapped delicately over the edge of its perch. Its thick tail flutters just a little at the tip.
I am absurdly captivated by the pattern of black spots on its nose.

The green eyes don't blink when the woman loses one of her footholds. Suddenly, everything is happening too fast. Her two remaining holds aren't secure enough to hold her entire weight. In a split second she has to decide which is going to fail first. She focuses all her energy on her last foothold, and launches herself as much as she can in the direction of the rope. There are only a few horizontal feet between her original position and where the rope hangs, but in the time it takes her to close that gap she's fallen at least three times that far. It's all too fast. She feels the rope against her fingertips, slithering past at a sickening speed. It wobbles as she touches it, and by some miracle, she feels it around her wrist, she can pull it up and grab tight with her thumb, she can actually manage it, and

SNAP.

The rope pulls tight and she screams. She can't feel herself falling anymore. What she can feel is fire spreading up her arm. She fights to focus, to assess her new situation. Everything is hazy with pain. Before she really gets a grasp on what's happened,  she's sliding down again. Slower now. She can see the rope, and it is indeed wrapped around her wrist, and again around her thumb. Both joints are at terrible, unnatural angles. The rope must've caught on itself and her hand, snapping her around and interrupting her plunge to certain death. But it wasn't caught anymore, and it was sliding along its looped path with increasing speed.

Out of everything that has just happened, I am inexplicably tormented by the rope burn she's getting, and can't feel.

There isn't much further for her to fall. She hits the ground, the plateau she had just been resting on, with a thwack of climbing gear and skin on rock. In the end, the collision will probably only have given her a few bruises. She lays still, gasping for breath. With the imminent danger of falling gone, and adrenaline levels dropping, she is slammed with a surge of pain from her wrist. She shuts her eyes tight and tears squeeze out the corners. She tries to steady her breathing. Deep breaths. No more panic. Action will be required again soon. She opens her eyes to search the crevice for the wild cat. It's nowhere to be seen.

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And I woke up. The familiar ache of panic and terror gripping me, and this time with residual soreness in my wrist. I could feel all of her pain like it was my own. But she's not done yet. Her story isn't over. I have to go back to sleep. I can't leave her on her own.

Dream Analysis from an Irishman

I met Kelly at a skeevy place on Geary St, half a block down from the Pizza Hut. He's always the one I call on when I need a real friend to rely on, and the location is always of his choosing. No contest.

----------

"Ye say yer dreamin' about little boys now? No yer right, that's definitely a cause fer concern."

I lean my forehead onto my lukewarm beer glass. "I knew I could count on you, man." Kelly Blake lets out a bray of laughter that I equate to that of an ass. He's sitting on the bar stool next to mine, not a bit out of place in a dive like this. His fiery hair is cropped short these days, I assume to accompany his attempts to 'buff up'. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten a gig as a bouncer, because he looks the part. He's dressed in dark jeans and a short sleeve army green knit pullover that's a bit too tight on the arms.  Quite the contrast from the scrawny kid he was when I met him.

"They're just dreams, sham. Why're ye in such a huff about it? I have all sorts of questionable dreams. Never bothers me!" He brayed again and took a swig of his signature Bushmills.

The jukebox is jamming out tunes that I actually approve of, something rare in this day and age.  'When the clock strikes twelve we'll cool off, then start rockin' 'round the clock again...' The bartender has just poured herself and a girl in a black leather fringe vest each a double shot of vodka. They link arms and down the glasses together, to an off-tune chorus of cheers from a grungy group of men in the corner. Kelly really knows how to pick 'em.

"Don't they ever bother you when you wake up though? Feel so real they crossover?" I stare ahead at the sparkling bottles adorning the wall behind the bar. Multi-colored christmas lights are tacked along the top border of the fake wood paneling, running underneath a gigantic stuffed tiger head. Overexposed, flash-heavy photo prints of previous patrons are lined up under the twinkling lights. Kelly gets the idea this is something that's actually bothering me. He leans forward and sets his elbows on the bar.

"A bit, mebbe. But I suspect my morning dream remnants are a little different than yers." He chuckles, but more gently this time. "You have any idea why these dreams are botherin' ye now, all of a sudden? I've never heard ye mention this before." He gives me a curious glance, the sort you might give a family pet when you're trying to figure out whether or not it's sick.

"Well, I've never had anything like this before. I've always slept like a baby. You know me, the biggest worry I've ever had is whether I'll be working on electronics or mechanics tomorrow. I don't even know the definition of stress. I think someone else's dreams have snuck their way into my bed." I immediately cursed my choice of words. He burst into another wild, hearty bout of laughter.

"If only someone else had snuck 'er way into yer bed, then I wouldn't be listenin' to yer bitchin' about dreams!" He slapped his knee, and I couldn't help but laugh with him. I was a constant source of comedic fuel for the Irish jokester. Somehow I was always picking the phrases that set him up perfectly. It was probably one of the reasons we were permanent fixtures in each other's lives.  We spent the rest of the night talking only minimally about my latest psychological issues. Instead, he reminded me of all of the simple, real joys of life, like he does. First was the inevitable failed attempt at seducing the bartender. She ended that with a short and decisive arm-wrestling contest. I've never seen a woman with such impressive biceps. This of course developed into a loud and impotent altercation with the dusty fellows from the corner. Spitting and snickering at them, we stumbled onto Geary street sometime after midnight. We accepted the opportunity to take a philosophic stroll around the Tendernob neighborhood. "Y'know, I hear that dreams are yer subconscious, speaking to ye about things ye don't have the balls to face" he says, somberly.

"That's what I always thought too. Memories coming back for closure or some shit."  I pause a moment to wrestle a hiccup-belch that's made its way halfway up. "But these aren't like that at all. I haven't ever seen any of this, it isn't like anything back home. It's all so real, and completely new to me."

Kelly's quiet for a minute. "Maybe yer a bit gone in the head?" I nod in contemplative agreement.

"I knew there was going to be some cost for my creative genius." We both chuckle. The cool night air and the company of one of my oldest friends has an anchoring effect on me. Despite all the discomforting thoughts floating around in my head lately, I still feel like myself with Kelly.

"I dunno, sham. What are ye working on these days? Mebbe ye need to sweat a little more. Mamo was always telling me, 'A good day's work is a good night's sleep.' Mebbe ye need a change of pace?" Coming from Kelly, this made a lot of sense. His current job was laying subway train rails. His previous had been assembling industrial furnaces. I doubted he ever had trouble sleeping at night. It was a decent argument - industrial design kept my mind busy, but I never lift anything heavier than a pen at the office. On the other hand, I had a really rough time picturing myself shutting the brain off all day to pick up heavy things and put them down again. My buddy watched as all these thoughts bounced around my head. "Ye think too much. Ye ask me, that's definitely yer problem. Try wearing yerself out some more." The night eventually ended, and we went our separate ways until next time.

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I've been trying to take his advice since then, and it's been doing a mild amount of good. I tagged along with a friend from work to a rock climbing gym in the Presidio, and I ended up getting a membership. It's let me get some exhaustion in without being bored out of my skull. The challenge of the climbing routes answers the need for problem solving I've been feeling. I fall asleep immediately, and when I wake up, if I've had any dreams, they're thoroughly buried in my subconscious where they're supposed to be. The nights I haven't gone to the gym are still a bit restless, but nothing as bad as the boy in the rain. Maybe I've just been neglecting my health too much? If that's the answer, this whole dilemma was much easier to solve than I expected. I'll try to keep up the regimen and see how it goes.

Dream Journal 01: The Boy in the Rain

The boy must only be about ten years old... He's got one of those baseball jerseys on that they sometimes give out to the kids at summer stadium games. The jersey and his jeans are soaked with mud and torn in places. His face is wet, and I can't tell if it's from tears or... No, it's not just his face, everything seems wet. It's raining lightly. His little expression is tired, but fierce. He's tromping through a wooded area, swiping branches and tall weeds out of his way with little boy defiance. He is alone. He seems to have made up his mind about which way he's traveling, but he doesn't give off the impression that he really knows where that might get him. His footfalls slap the wet ground, whack-whack-whack, as if with every step he is punishing it for some great injustice. His lower jaw is shoved forward, and his arms are crossed - at least, until he steps wrong, loses his balance, and flails out for something to keep him from slapping the ground with his face instead of his feet. His startled expression, so different from his previous angry pout, is comical, and I start to laugh soundlessly. His hand hits and wraps around a bunch of vines hanging from low branches. They slow his fall and whip him around the tree at a sideways angle, but they don't hold. The laughter I had just a moment ago freezes and twists into sudden fear for the boy. The sound of the vines snapping is like a whip, and it's followed shortly by crackles and thumps of both the boy and parts of the tree tumbling down an increasingly steep, rocky slope.

The world tumbles in a whirl of greenery, mud and falling water. After what feels like an eternity of sickening revolutions, the boy thuds to a halt against a tree sticking out of the hill at an absurd angle. He doesn't move at all. The rain drips off of leaves above and patters on his head, slowly washing his thoroughly soaked brown hair away from his face. His eyes flutter slowly, once, twice, then open. He coughs, a deep, gasping noise that hurts me to hear it. His next few breaths remind me how small he is - they come from the bottom of his lungs, but they're still such tiny volumes of air. Children are not meant to make that kind of effort. It's all so out of place, bizarre, surreal. His predicament does not allow him the luxury of such thoughts. The tree that stopped him is behind his shoulders, but his waking movements have dislodged him, and he's begun to slide down again. In panicky jolts, he grasps at the tree and his feet try to find something to anchor themselves against. The wet has made everything slippery and mushy, and the bark of the tree disintegrates where he grabs hold of it. He cries out as he begins once again to gain downward momentum. He's sliding, and the tree is now out of reach. He spreads his limbs out wide, maximizing his contact with the ground and searching for anything to hold him. His left hand hits something solid, he grabs at it, loses it, but then there's another, and he clamps down hard this time. It's a fallen branch, not lodged in the ground, but large enough to slow him. His own momentum pulls it a few feet, but eventually he gets his other hand onto a limb and he and the branch once again come to rest on the steep hill. For a moment he just closes his eyes and catches his breath. After a short rest, he carefully inches himself up past the branch and rolls over, groaning. He sits up, anchoring himself on the branch, and looks around to assess his newly dire situation. He's fallen far down the hill, probably ten times his own body length. He pauses a moment as he looks at the muddy smear that marks his rolling path down. He turns to look at where he might have rolled to. The hill continues for a while more, putting him maybe at the halfway mark from where he had been before, before it ends abruptly in a silvery line. A river. He puts his head down on his knees, wraps his arms around his legs, and begins to sob. This is the part where mom or dad is supposed to step in and pull him out of this nightmare. This is the part where this boy, who has no place alone in a forest, needs saving. These thoughts are floating around my head, clear and loud but useless, not manifesting themselves in any way. Everything becomes a smear of dark, desperate gloom, with only the patter of the rain as a marker of time passing.

When his image swims back into view, he's straining to pull himself up the rocky slope, grasping at wet stalks and vines. Every time he reaches up, I wish someone was there to grab him and haul him up, give him a break. But there are only slippery rocks and tendrils of vegetation, and for every hard fought step up, he slides two down. I can hear his breathing, coming in short little panting gasps, speeding up in frequency as he gets more and more frustrated and... Scared. I can see in his eyes and the scrunching of his mouth that he's being brave, that he knows he can do this, that it's just an adventure that he can be the hero of. But the rain keeps coming, and there's more water pouring down the rough incline, and despite all the energy he's throwing at it, he's not conquering this hill. It's beating him. I'm yelling encouragement, but there's no sound of my voice. Thunder rumbles instead. The boy looks up, peering through a thick canopy of leaves to an evening sky that's growing dark. He glances down the slope, his eyes following the rivulets of water that race past him to jump off a short drop into a swift and swollen river. He squeezes his eyes shut and turns back to face the incline. With determination, he finds a solid foothold in a large boulder and shoves himself further up, away from the certain doom below him. He doesn't look left or right anymore, he's fixated on the spot just up, beyond his reach. As he grabs onto an upturned tree root, I can see him whispering to himself soundlessly, "One more. Just one more." It becomes a chant, and he's starting to make some progress. Another rolling rumble of thunder shakes the earth around him, and then a sharp CRACK sounds like the sky itself has split open. The boy flinches but doesn't stop his steady climb. The rain is now pouring down in torrents, undeterred by trees and leaves. It's no longer just little streams running past him, but a steady wash of water directly in his face. My heart feels like its dropped out of me. This isn't fair, this shouldn't be happening to him. I want to stop this goddamned rain, and flatten this goddamned hill, and I want him to walk out of this goddamned forest into his warm home so he can grab a mug of hot chocolate and sit under a blanket like kids are supposed to during storms. But it doesn't seem to matter. The rain doesn't stop, and the slope doesn't flatten, and now he's just clinging, with all his might, to stay where he is. He can't let go to grab the next handhold for fear of being washed down. And then something above him on the hill breaks loose. Some rock or tree or bush had enough of its foundation washed away to come loose and start a small avalanche. He watches with horror, and I watch him with anguish, as a wave of debris rushes toward him. He has nothing left to do. He lets go... He slips down the hillside, but not fast enough to escape the growing rockslide. I hear the prolonged crash into the river but everything is black. Black and horrid...

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And I woke up. Shivering, covered in sweat and tears. The forest and the rain faded almost immediately into my cool, dark bedroom. The pain of losing the boy, however, didn't fade a bit. It still weighs on me, even now, after I know it was all a dream. Koko is beside the bed, whining at me. I must have been thrashing in my sleep. Maybe it's just that I'm writing this all down right away this time, but this is the first time I've been able to recall one of these dreams in any amount of detail. The feelings are certainly familiar though, if more intense this time. He wasn't anyone I know, but I could feel what he felt, see what he saw, and to watch him tumble down... It hurt so much. Aren't dreams supposed to symbolize something about my real life? I've never felt this much agony in real life! Nothing this terrible has ever actually happened to me. I don't understand. And I've never been in a forest like that to know it in such detail. I don't remember dreaming much as a kid, but it was always sort of like reliving memories in different ways - never like experiencing something entirely new. It was all so real.

Has anyone else out there had dreams like this? Should I be drinking some warm milk or something before bed? It's nights like these that wear me out before I even start my day... Not only am I losing sleep, but the grief will stick with me... It's exhausting. I'm hoping that at least writing them down will help me deal with it a little better. It's only a dream. It's only a dream.

California Dreamin'

California sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Cold beer nestled in the sand. Golden Retriever bounding back  with his ball through the surf. Could it get any better than this? It's a question I often ask myself. It really seems like the answer should be a quick "NOPE" and I could get back to utter bliss. It just never seems to work out that way. It's not that I don't thoroughly enjoy the beautiful view, or the amber brew, or my furry best friend's company. It just always feels like there's an itch I'm not scratching. Somehow, I'm missing something important about how to enjoy life to the fullest. And I'm just the kind of person that won't leave well enough alone, quit while I'm ahead, and live the dream. I have to keep on dreaming for more. My name is Ryan Hughes, and I need to figure out my dreams.

I managed to secure my current digs by inventing things. I had noticed at an early age that people seemed fascinated by the funny little electronic and mechanical gadgets that were my constant hobby. When I was 7, the neighbor kid convinced me to take one dollar bill, a sticky handful of change, his skateboard, and a broken Fisher Price wind-up "tv-radio" in exchange for my first creation, an elastic-powered Tonka truck that drove itself for a few feet. I took the spring from the tv-radio, the axles from the skateboard, and some painted cardboard, and made a 4x4 that went even further than the Tonka truck. I traded that up too, and a few inventions later, I had a cap gun that created some fantastic sparks for Jamie Brown down the street, so that he would give me his busted Talking Whiz-Kid. I made some excellent deals for out-of-whack toys. After I cleared off the sensor on the Whiz-Kid, and got it working with the five chocolate-stained, bent-up program cards Jamie had thrown in, my little mind was blown to a whole new level. I spent hours painstakingly drawing out new bar codes on playing cards with white out and permanent marker, to see if I could discover new programs. It wasn't long before I had pried open the whiz kid and started using its circuits to drive various Rube Goldberg-esque projects.

My mom was an accountant and my dad was an electrician in the outskirts of Sacramento, and with me, my sister and my brother, they didn't have a whole lot of extra cash for fancy toys straight from the store. It didn't bother me, though, and my inventions, born from necessity, got me a job at a pawn shop when I turned fifteen. The old man who owned the place was a friend of my grandpa's, and he wanted me to make something out of the five rooms of old junk he had in the back of his place. He gave me a 50% commission on everything I made, and that seemed pretty fair to me. That job got me my first car, a run-down Cutlass that (of course) I fixed up and modified obsessively. It was that old boat that took me from Sactown to the Bay, because I just knew I was meant to be a part of the techy uprising that was going on in San Francisco. Silicon Valley was a young inventor's dream come true. I went to school for a few years at City college, got distracted, stopped going to school, made a few prototypes for start-ups that never quite made it. I never hit it big, but I never really cared, because I made enough to scrape by in the City by the Bay, and that in itself was a thing to be proud of, for me. I got an in-law suite in the Sunset three years ago, and a Golden puppy 6 months after that, and ever since I've been coasting, letting my brain take care of me and Koko. The industrial design projects from excited investors were easier for me than the wacky toys of my childhood, and soon I no longer had to worry about income. After a few successful working models, jobs started pouring in, and we were set. Mission accomplished.

Maybe it's just the ease of everything that has sort of fallen into my lap, or maybe it's the soft fog of the city, but lately I'm just not... satisfied. Everything that used to exhilarate me and light up my circuits, now seems a bit mundane. The joy I used to find in my inventions isn't anywhere to be found. It's been a slow build for a while now, this restless boredom, but it feels like it's peaking. I have trouble sleeping, and when I do I have crazy dreams. Vague dreams of struggle... of hunger and desperation. Such a contrast to my new, extremely comfortable life. The dreams leave me feeling drained and even more tired than when I go to bed. The most frustrating part is that I can't even really remember them when I wake up. It's just the residual feelings that get me. I've been doing some research over the past few days. I think I'll try keeping a dream journal to see if that helps - you're supposed to write down everything you can remember the second you wake up. At this point I'm willing to try just about anything.

Photo of Koko thanks to Graur Razvan Ionut and posted on freedigitalphotos.net