Bloggie Dream #1

There’s a dream I often have, in which I’ve moved into a new house that has another house beside it. The second house came with the first house, for some reason.

The second house is a place I’ve neglected, every time I have this dream. I haven’t even gone inside since I made the purchase. But I know that the second house is full of precious things, like books I’ll want to read and which will speak to me. And when I go inside, which I do every time I have the dream, I’m amazed that I’ve neglected it for so long, it feels so good to be in there.

Last night, I had the dream again.

This time, in back of the second house, I found a row of enormous stacks of shelves. They were full of books, but other things, too. There was no roof over them. They’d been rained on. A lot of what was on the shelves had been ruined, but I didn’t mind..

I found a display rack loaded with vinyl records that were already mine, because they were in the house and the house was mine. I hadn’t known the records were there, before.

I went through them and found they were things I wanted desperately to listen to. I was so happy to find them.

And, in the dream, I remarked to someone there that I finally got the joke. I told the person, whoever it was, that I’d had this same dream many times, and had always thought the second house was a metaphor for something. It stood in for a creative zone I hadn’t ventured into; or it represented the Alexandrian Library’s worth of literature out there that I haven’t spent any time with.

I should read Don Quixote.

But the second house didn’t mean anything like that, in this instance of the dream.

I remarked aloud, in the dream, that the dream wasn’t trying to tell me anything cryptic. It was informing me quite plainly that the second house was full of records, and that I should go and get them.

I laughed, in the dream, at how literal this thing was that I’d assumed was not literal. And I hoped that when I woke up I’d go out to the second house and get and play those records.

And now here I am, left with that to mull over, while I wait for the new year to begin, and I wait to find out if my kids can go back to school. The school district has declared that masks for kids in schools are optional, which means that virtually none of the kids will be wearing masks. Which means that my kids will almost certainly get COVID, if they go back to school.

That our governing bodies aren’t looking out for us is not news to me. But it makes me a little light-headed, still, to see that reality on display, to witness the brazen defense of business interests at the expense of the health and safety of human beings. We’re only supposed to quarantine for five days, now, if we get sick; authorities have come out and said it’s because we can’t disrupt the economy the way a longer quarantine would.

What are we to take from that?

I know what I take from it: that to the people in charge, our lives don’t matter. That a handsome balance sheet means more to them than the health of our bodies. That my government considers my life expendable.

Again, that’s not exactly new information. But that doesn’t make it any easier to take in.