DOUBLE JEOPARDY

I had this curious split-screen dream this morning, shortly before waking. It could have been two dreams, consecutive, of course, but they seemed simultaneous. Both involved phobias--not dreadful, all-consuming fears, but experiences that leave me with discomfort and some element of fear: one was vertiginous, the other claustrophobic.

In one dream I was following a long, steep, rocky climb in order to visit an artist living in a kind of cliff dwelling far above the valley below. Once there, I recall him boasting about his view of "Snow Valley", and looking out with him over this great expanse of sunlit space that led out to the ocean far off to the west. I was surprised, both that it was called "snow" valley when there was no sign of snow, and that it led out to the ocean. I recall telling my friend that I had no idea the valley reached that far. Standing way back myself, I also recall asking him to step back from where I could see him, at the edge. Noticing a narrow set of stairs that led up from the back of his living space, and I wondered whether this might allow me an easier exit than climbing down the cliff again.

In the second dream I seemed to be climbing up inside a reddish, sandstone mountain, through narrow passage ways and up equally narrow stairs. I was to deliver a Christmas gift to a child, but it was the mother I recall meeting in a kind of chamber buried deep inside the mountain. I don't think I knew her personally, and recall no conversation with her. But I did wonder, nervously, as in the first dream, if there was a way up and out, rather than having to descend the way I had come.

We are living in a time of fear--fear for the pandemic that continues to spread among us, and threatens to get still worse after the lack of social distancing in this past week's ubiquitous protest gatherings; and fear for what is happening to our country in the grip of a would-be dictator and the servile politicians and public servants who enable him. It is hardly surprising, then, that I should be having dreams like these. Curiously, though, even though they involved some element of fear, they did not have that terrifying quality of nightmares. I seemed to be experiencing them with a remarkable degree of equanimity. 

One thought: those up-and-out exits, preferable to difficult descent, might suggest a different and more "elevating" way of leaving life than the way that I came in!