Checking in From Dreamland

I continue to be fascinated by dreams, their capricious nature and the tantalizing possibilities of what we might discern from their engaging theater.

A recent one has remained with me in part for it's seeming deviation from what I have come to expect from these nocturnal visitations. In a way it mirrored a common dramatic disappointment. You may have experienced it. You have scraped together the current absurd cost of a big name performance - parallel to say, what, a live version of Burton and Taylor's in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whatever that might be. You arrive at the theater, scurry inside, find your seats and open the playbill only to find the dreaded little slip of paper saying; "Tonight tonight Martha will be played by Beatrice Whosit and George will be played by Bartholomew Whatsome. You know the feeling. The understudies, striving mightily, are competent but you sense that they too feel the disappointment of the audience.

This dream was sort of like that. It was a narrative of no great import, but the casting was bizarre. I, naturally, played myself - well, my 30-40ish self, untroubled by the current twinges and lapses of memory that are my current companions. I am married, somewhat strangely, to a woman I had dated semi-seriously my freshman year of college. We had met at one of those "freshman mixers" that small liberal arts colleges were wont to provide. Apparently things had moved on from there. She had avoided multiple decades and still looked like her freshman self.

The story continued in that strange vein. We were debating the advisability of her parents - played by the parents of my oldest friend; who I had just visited in DC - adopting "our" dog, played by the Cockapoo mix I had while teaching in Wisconsin in the late 1970s. I do not recall the resolution, if there was one. Rather I simply awoke saying "Whoa! That was very, very, strange!"

So from where do these mysterious entr'actes arise, slipping between our waking realities? I suppose there are at least thousands of Ph.D dissertations, articles and books presenting their various experiments, explanations and theories. And were I still toiling in the halls of the academy, I would feel obligated to address the most compelling of them before advancing my interpretation. However, having left tenure behind me decades ago, I can cut directly to the chase - i.e. what I choose to believe.

As I have mentioned before I am particularly taken with the quantum mechanics notion of "many worlds." Or as I think about it - branching realities. Briefly, whenever we make a choice in our lives - where we go to school, what career we choose, with whom we fall in love, marry, have kids with, where we choose to live - those are all the path taken. The "many worlds" are created by all the paths not taken - and alternate versions of ourselves move on along those paths, into those many worlds.

I further choose to believe that those many worlds may not be as completely separate as the theoretical physicists might have us believe. That they may occasionally leak into each other. Things like deja vu, the feeling that you have been somewhere before, did something before, met someone before - maybe those are little bit of evidence of "worlds leaking." Huh? Maybe?

And dreams! Ah, there could be the mother lode. Perhaps dreams are like a sort of "many worlds blender." Those little leaks get whirled together in a strange psychic cake mix, and, when asleep, we cook it up into a dream that seems a single experience but is in, sort of reality, a hybrid, tri-bred, multi-bred blend of all the roads - both taken and not.

And that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Sleep well!