Murder v. Midlife Crisis

I've been too busy with my midlife crisis to write much lately.  I have also been watching far too many late night detectives solve grisly crimes in a matter of days or hours.

I find these shows comforting which seems odd; by rights it should feed my fears of under-achieving since most days it's all I can do to put clothes on, much less intuit the plan of a serial killer from the microexpressions on the face of a traumatized victim or the angle of hanging art in their apartment.

Last night I dreamt I was solving a murder which I dubbed "acellular" because all the components of a crime were there, but there was no body.  It was all "in vitro".  And no, *I* am not even sure how this biochemical analogy works.

My world of deadlines and minute personal drama lacks the urgency of solving murders and rescuing kidnap victims.  But what it lacks in importance, it makes up for in the amount of fear and anxiety every small real life crisis generates.

I do not feel stressed, waiting suspensefully for the crime drama's protagonist's latest hunch to pan out.  I know that despite the dark artsy dungeon and the look of sincere concern on the faces of the police on the scene, the girl will be found, 90% of the time still alive.  I know the psychic's vision or the PI's intuition will be initially misleading but ultimately key to unraveling the mystery.

Meanwhile, I agonize over things like how to word that email, and live in constant fear that my experiments in the lab are not only not working but irrelevant.  And 90% of the time, I am right.  The email's recipient misunderstands me.  The Western blot fails, the clone has a mutation, my brilliant idea was published ten years ago. 

Real life is mundane but for all its unimportance, exhaustingly tense.  Watching brutal crimes solved in a neat 42 minutes on the other hand... priceless.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another episode of The Killing cued up in Netflix.

Dream job quickie

Sometimes I have dreams so far-fetched that there is simply no life equivalent to compare it to.  Last night, I dreamt that postdocs in my field make $80,000 a year.  The mind truly boggles at its own imaginative capacity.

Hiking, tigers and car theft rings. Oh my

I dreamt I was hiking with a friend by accident - a trail called Hike the Rails.  We'd stopped at a tiny rest area to stretch our legs and while we were in the bathroom, someone stole our car.  We waited for hours at the side of the rural road but no one else drove by so eventually we began walking a wide clearly marked trail that passed through the rest area and led deeper into the woods.

We walked till nightfall before I finally regained phone service and could map our location; we were on a cross country hiking trail that followed old railway beds.  The closest marked highway was 50 miles away.  We were unprepared but many people were walking the trails and we were able to cobble together a tent, sleeping bags, and a small amount of food. 

The forest service came through to check for our permit and, as we hadn't planned this trip, we didn't have one.  My sister appeared and paid the forest service agent to fake the paperwork.  My sister insisted we not mention the theft; after he left I argued with her, frustrated that we hadn't asked for his help.  But my sister said there was a larger conspiracy at work and the agency couldn't be trusted.

Abruptly I was in a friend's living room.  She had a miniature pet tiger confined by an invisible fence in the corner.  The tiger was nearly sentient and very well trained but everyone warned her it was still wild and would turn on her or her other pets without warning.  She often sat on a couch nearby with her legs stretched into the tiger's space, and allowed him to rest his tiger head on her ankles.

The other pets - two dogs and a cat - were constantly trying to get at the tiger behind the fence.  Initially the barrier was an invisible noise fence that deterred animals as they neared the boundary.  This kept the tiger confined but the other pets simply jumped through it, willing to endure the momentary discomfort in order to reach their target.

Next she put up an invisible electric fence that dispensed a pwoerful shock if you crossed the set lines.  This worked on both the tiger and domestic cat but the dogs persisted. 

I was constantly anxious that the tiger would eat one of the dogs or bite on my friends' feet.  Once the tiger yawned, a slow back tilting of the head that revealed massive shiny white jaws.  I panicked as its head came down, jaws wide, but at the last minute the tiger closed his mouth, licked my friend's feet once and settled back in to nap.

I walked out the door of her house, and into the parking lot where my car had disappeared.  It was now a giant parking lot outside a mega box store and the police were questioning me.  Apparently there had been a string of car thefts from this lot, that resulted in thousands of families stranded all across the country.  This was why I'd encountered so many families while hiking.  It had appeared literally like a migration. 

Ex sex without the sex

I was working as a nanny and I had the night off, which was very unusual - in my dream life as in real life I worked many hours at my job.  My science experiments do need a lot of babysitting so maybe the distinction between child care and biology research isn't as sharp as one might think.

It was the end of my shift and I was getting set to board the elevator that served as the door to the penthouse - my employer's lifestyle was opulent, to say the least.  The door opened and my last long term boyfriend stepped out, pushing a rack of mens' suits.  He had just flown in on business from Toronto, and wanted to know if I was free for dinner.

I have not dated men in any serious way since meeting my first girlfriend 15 years ago, so our relationship was literally in different decade.  In my dream I was still married but separated from my wife.

We went back to my place to change.  I shared a renovated very open floor plan 70s-era two bedroom apartment with my sister, who was in the living room virtual-snowboarding on the X Box when we arrived.  We chatted with her while I scoured the hall closet for an outfit.  My ex came up behind me, spooning me upright.  I leaned into him.  Sighed. 

I remembered suddenly that we had another roommate.  "When is mom due home from work?" I asked my sister.  She told me 430.  I checked my phone: 438.  Not enough time. 

I woke up.  Looked in urban dictionary for "c-blocked by your dream mom".  Found nothing. There *was* an interesting thread trying to decide on a female equivalent for b-balled.  No one had proposed the term I heard from a friend in grad school: t-walled.  Hilarious.

When I stopped dating men I was 27.  I knew virtually nothing about women as erotic partners, aside from the years I had spent in my own body.

As an aside, I find the common* straight male assumption that women have a "home field advantage" in lesbian interactions just a little annoying.  It's not that I can't see the value of knowing the terrain; but these same straight men never mention their own hypothetical home field advantage as a plus should they ever suddenly wake up gay one morning.

(*this statement is not based on a blinded, controlled scientific study but on hundreds of datapoints collected from dozens of straight men in too-many-to-count conversations between the ages of 19 and 40.... but if I had ever bothered to track the numbers, I would bet it is at least statistically significant.)

The dream felt curiously healing.  I stood for a few minutes in front of the mirror and realized that today I don't hate my body.

It's 824 am.  Sunday.  Time to go babysit the science experiments.  In the afternoon I'll be dancing with one of my favourite leads.  His partner is a great lead too.  I think I'll wear something nice.  Something I might wear to dinner, if I was trying to seduce my ex.

Apocalypse the series

I dreamt the apocalypse was coming and no one would believe me.  I kept seeing it happening like a prophetic near-future overlay, fading from present to future and back; it felt completely imminent.

I dreamt I was working at a big pharma corporation and had a secret meeting with two of my co-workers - minions like me - and three children of the company's top executives.  We talked about money and privelege.  I began disgusted with the existence of the 1% but they debated gamely, all had integrity and came across not like Paris Hiltons but as educated, smart and simply fiscally lucky and I felt somewhat better at the end at least about these particular kids having been born into such economic advantage.

I told them the change was coming fast and it might not matter so much then anyway.  We talked in theory about whether it would be better to be in the city on the streets, in buildings or out in the country when it happened.  It was universally decided that inside of an office building there are not enough places to hide from killer robots, alien invaders, zombies, or homicidal humans.

The dream changed and now I was a very wealthy young woman.  I discovered a file suggesting that my mother had been part of a cloning project, and began to doubt the identity of my father.  I searched records, recruiting the help of a few trusted friends.  I confronted my mother, determined to understand and expose the conspiracy, but she denied everything and I felt doubly betrayed.

The grounds of my house were like a tropical paradise with faux built pools, waterfalls and gardens; everything was controlled down to the perfect climate and groomed vegetation.  You could walk barefoot anywhere and never step on a weed.  You could wear a bikini day and night and never be cold. If luxury had an actual lap, I was living in it.

I snuck out and watched some of the events unfold from the vantage point of the sunroof, a transparent better-than-glass barrier that roofed the entire property.

My mother was joined by a psychiatrist and at first it seemed this woman was going to be her ally and possibly inadvertantly mine; they talked about my cloning conspiracy theories and the psychiatrist did not just dismiss them out of hand.

Then a close friend of my mother's returned from a routine doctor's visit with amnesia and a fresh surgical scar over what would be her left ovaries.  My mother started to consider that I might be right.  The psychiatrist gave my mother something to calm her nerves.  My mother fell asleep, the friend disappeared, and I realized the head shrinker was just a plant to keep my mother quiet and controlled.

The company was breeding humans to a purpose, though the end game was still unclear to me.  I walked into a shoe store to order a pair of boots.  I had decided to permanently separate myself from my old life.  I talked with the shoemaker and decided that if the breeding led to a better race of humans that were more in line with my own philosophy it might not be so bad.

I woke instantly, heart racing, 540am, sat up, and my first clear thought was that I was wasting my life, I took a wrong turn, and now it was too late.

The art of happiness - dream remix

How do we derive meaning?

I woke up with this question, at the tail end of a dream series that could have doubled as a graduate seminar in philosophy or spiritual studies.

My dreams were not unusual - there was an anxiety dream about trying to find a bathroom in the middle of a cactus garden; there was a dream about being on a train tour with writers and politicians and making a plan to seduce the aloof, sensual female author in my sleeping car; I became friends with the woman who showed me a secret entrance to the hotel pool while I was scouting for an escape from our prisoner of war compound.

But all night, my dream experiences were analyzed through the lens of meaning.  I was hyper aware of when and why in each dream my engagement and happiness were high and when they were low.

How do we derive meaning?  My dreams said:

From our social network - by being part of friendships or partnerships or families
From our experience - participating in adventure or documenting and organize the events of our lives or immersion in art/writing/food/sex
From our contribution - doing meaningful career or hobby or volunteer work or raising families or creating art
The one I missed and thought of on waking - faith 

Death, divorce, loss of a job,  loss of faith are life events considered extraordinarily stressful.  What do they have in common?  From my dream perspective, it's all about identity, purpose and connection.  When we lose someone we love to death, divorce or some other breakup we lose the meaningfulness of having our relationship to them.  If we are disowned or excommunicated, we lose the identity and connection to community.  Lose a job, we lose our answer to What do you do? and a concrete daily task list.  If we become too sick to work or participate in activities we lose engagement and satisfaction.  Loss of faith sends us into a limbo where it is no longer clear how to view and organize the world into meaning; it may challenge the very notion that life has any purpose at all.

My own happiness, sense of purpose, engagement, satisfaction, depends on connections, identity, activities.  If I lose a job or a person or an ability, the other things in my life are supportive.  But if I lose many things at once, or one thing that is supremely important, it can be hard to keep waking up to the world.  It loses its color, satisfaction is replaced by despair and eventually engagement by universal disinterest.

How do we derive meaning?

When I am low, I can't answer this question.  I don't see a purpose to being.  My little human life is so short in comparison to the lifetime of the universe, my existence unlikely to matter or be recorded, and I am so often caught up in the minutiae of survival and the prison of my own ego that I don't put my energy into the things I'm really good at, that are truly satisfying, or that I believe matter.

Depression is both a medical and spiritual condition.  It is certainly physiological.  It can be rescued pharmaceutically.  It can be brought on by sensory overload, by overwhelming demands, by loss, by trauma, or illness.  But it is fundamentally about being able to participate in life in a way that is experienced as meaningful. 

Write something

My favourite authors write like angels; my writing seems more like Pan.  Coyote.  A mythical trickster shapeshifter.  Unreliable, neither on your side nor against you.

In the 565am dark I woke with this question: what is writing for me?

It's been years (maybe 20?) since I wrote on a regular basis.  I feel it beginning to dry up, like my fertility, something juicy and vital that I'm not using, so it's ebbing away.

Writing is a lens - distorting, magnifying, resolving.  Bringing focus to my experience.  I can shoot the landscape. Wide-angled, I get mountain ranges; close-ups, grains of sand, shards of veiny rock, one rust-eaten leaf.

It organizes my time, makes bullet points of lists, notes in meetings, tracks experiments
then unravels into daydreaming, fantasy, impossible physics and far-fetched desire.

Writing is a sickness, a lucid fever dream.  It wakes me dry-mouthed and hungover in the predawn and teases me with turns of phrases lovely or disturbing, smoke signals hanging bright in the gloom, threatening to disappear whether I move toward waking or retreat into sleep.

Writing is a decision, an act of will, to leave the roiling cobwebbed dark, turn on a light, and chase the vapor trail thoughts into words.