NC as Waking Dream

Last night I had a strange and wonderful dream. I'm afraid many of the details are hidden just on the other side of a veil in my memory. What I do remember is being with a group of people. My relationship to them felt like we had been on a sort of retreat together, but we had grown close very quickly. The most peculiar and wonderful thing was that we all had an animal familiar sort of thing with us. I had a seagull (perhaps Jonathan Livingston Seagull) who followed me everywhere I went and represented some part of my soul like a daimon in the Golden Compass books (read immediately). Everyone, or at least everyone on the retreat had one of those in my dream. We played and learned tricks with other people's daimons. It was a time of elation and discovery removed from the usual rhythms of daily life (even within the context of the dream).

The strangest thing that I remember now is that when I woke up from that dream I wanted to cry with joy. I wasn't quite at tears, but I remember letting out a few dry sobs. They felt audible, but I can't honestly say if they were or not. Looking back on it now, those sobs of joy may have been a dream too, but the emotion was perfectly real. The reality of emotions exists in the strength with which they affect your mind and body, not what they are in response to. Really, neither waking or dreaming seems an accurate description. Perhaps it was the state described by the Spanish word fiaca- between waking and sleep.

I remember my dreams sometimes, but I usually don't feel obligated them to write them down. The ones with a big feeling attached to them I usually try to at least tell someone about if not write it down. I had one in NC about leaving a bar with my friends and going to this weird, underground hospital for deformed children. They may have been offering me a job, or I was supposed to help or something. I think that place was acknowledged in a later dream. It stuck with me for whatever reason.

I've had big dreams about watching shimmering golden eagles fly over a convertible I was riding in with a couple of friends. I got ice cream with my friends, then they left and I talked with one of the golden eagles about love.

Another time I had a dream about running around a giant hotel with long, wide hallways filled with fascinating things (don't you hate it when you're describing a fairly innocuous sounding dream, and all of a sudden it sounds extremely Freudian?) and anyway at the end of the dream I was getting ready to turn into a phoenix, and that was cool. That was years ago, but it stuck with me too.

The whole NC experience was kind of like one of those dreams. Different in form, and definitely content, but similar in weight. I was somewhere different, and big things that involved me were happening. One day I knew I would wake up in Chicago and be laughing with my friends about the crazy experience I just had, but for the time being the days were long, and my job was taxing on every level. Things would go wrong, things would go well. This thing was missing. That thing was printed for no reason. This volunteer wasn't helping. That one was generally very helpful, but not today. The fate of the world depended on us. The impressiveness of our numbers depended on us. Would we succeed in stretching McCain thinner? Yes. Would we succeed in winning NC? No idea. I followed the polls on fivethirtyeight.com and electoral-vote.com daily and I never had any idea if we were actually going to pull out the state. I would come home late to Lyon's delicious cooking and the therapy of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow.

The whole experience had a different color tingeing it- A different rhythm guiding the clunky dance of my days and weeks. The people had a different way to them as well. The thing had the weight of real life, but a different form, and certainly different content. If felt like a rite of passage or a powerful dream.