Do you ever find yourself thinking about absurd things that couldn’t possibly happen in every day reality?
I know I do—it’s a form of daydreaming that’s more akin to lucid dreaming and it usually happens just before sleep.
Those moments when you first get into bed and allow yourself to think back over the day—those are precious times when you turn off the lights and turn down your thoughts and begin to drift.
If you allow your mind to go where it wants to go, you’ll find yourself watching a series of images that some folk refer to as a stream, a flowing river of conscious thoughts and emotions that gently meanders through our brains.
And gradually, you end up in a familiar place as I do—I end up out in the woods building a shelter to protect me from an impending night of rain.
Of course, someone is there with me and in my case it’s always Sara Thompson and that’s problematical you see, because she is bitterly angry with me and hasn’t seen or spoken to me in two years.
The absurd thing is I have this overwhelming sense that she is deeply conflicted and misses me but both of us are too proud and stubborn to take the first step and now it’s been too long to repair whatever harm I’ve done.
That’s right—this separation is on me—I caused it by making a few drunken remarks that I tried to take back but it was too late. She left Victoria College where we taught and joined the faculty of York University teaching Victorian Lit to graduate students and never looked back.
And that was that—end of story, or so I thought.
But gradually over the course of several months this lucid dreaming thing began to become my nightly ritual and even though it was absurd, it was also strangely comforting at the same time.
I thought of us as twin flames—soul mates seperated by Fate but meant to be together.
Every night I’d allow my thoughts to drift before sleep and I’d end up in the same dream, imagining myself taking part in a faculty outing at a camp grounds and by coincidence Sara ends up there.
In the dream she’s still simmering with resentment at me, but somehow we are thrown together in the same group and end up being separated from the others and lost in the woods.
A storm is coming on and she’s frightened, but I reassure her by building a shelter and lighting a fire.
We spend the night safe and warm in our shelter and manage to talk out our differences and reconcile.
Of course, I wake up every morning disappointed and alone but that doesn’t stop me from repeating the ritual again that night when I go to sleep.
I know it sounds pathetic and needy but that’s where my story starts to get interesting.
Life is not always predictable—sometimes, we experience a remarkable epiphany that I can only describe as the Coming of the New, or the Advent of the Unexpected.
Not convinced? Wait until I tell you what happened today.
