February 2021

It isn’t surprising to me that dreams are thought to be portals to alternate realities, at least of some description. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but when I do, as I do this morning, they are strangely twisted landscapes in which alternative systems of logic apply.

I don’t actually believe that dreams are windows into anything other than the dreamer’s mind: I recall, many years ago, dreaming of a sequence of numbers that, in the dream, won a lottery. I went out and bought a lottery ticket, and kept buying tickets for some weeks. That number did not win anything.

I woke this morning from a dream.

I was returning from prison – I have no idea what I had been imprisoned for. I walked across the parking lot of a gas station under sparse Garry oaks to my townhouse, which seemed to have been built in the parking lot of a 1960’s era strip mall. When I got to the townhouse, I saw that the front steps had been taken away.

“This must have happened while I was in prison,” I said in my dream, with impeccable logic.

I opened the door somehow, though the knob would have been about four feet higher than I could have reached. I managed to climb in by bracing my feet on both sides of the door frame – again, this dream lodging obeyed its own peculiar logic. Once inside, I discovered that someone was in the middle of extensive renovation. A few dream-minutes later, I realized that it was repair, not renovation, for there appeared to be some rot and water damage that were being removed.

The stairs to the upper floor had been replaced, although they were linked together like the slats on a blind, and you could flatten them into a slide or move them back into being stairs just by pushing on them. The entire lower floor was a skeleton, all of the wall board stripped off, and the bare plywood of the floor exposed.

I decided to go upstairs to see what the condition was up there. I flipped the stairs into stairs and started climbing. After a while, I realized that I was climbing past figures cocooned in sleeping bags, figures that looked at me grumpily as I passed. When I reached the upper floor, I found that once again dream logic was present, for the upper floor was at least four times the size of the lower. I did not pause to reflect on the fact that this was not evident from outside the building.

I found that I had a roommate. I was unsurprised by this, so I suppose I must have had a roommate all along and just not thought of it. The unnamed roommate, who bore no resemblance to anyone I can think of other than Cousin Larry from the 80’s sitcom Perfect Strangers, was in his turn surprised to see me. He had no idea I was getting out of prison.

He had been busy, it seems. In addition to repairing or renovating the lower floor, he appeared to have turned the upper floor into a combination of a bed and breakfast and a call center. There were cubicles around, and the walls had been painted dark. Clumps of people gathered and talked, and there was a general swirl of activity that made finding him a little difficult.

There had to be a hundred and fifty people up there on the second floor of my townhouse. My roommate did not seem to consider this unusual, or even remarkable, and he balked at my suggestion that I needed a place to live, and all of these people, including the ones on the stairs, needed to leave.

I woke up, not having resolved this situation.

It’s been a difficult year. For you, for me, for everybody.

It’s one thing to acknowledge that. We all do, usually in a flippant sort of way. Oh, it’s just more of 2020, we say. Everything is crazy now. That part is true, but it’s a surface truth. Things are crazy right now, but what does that really mean?

I’m the sort of person who you would expect would handle a lockdown pretty well: I’m an introvert, a reader and a writer who makes a day living in a field where he can do his job remotely. I don’t socialize widely, I’m not a party- or bar-goer. I’m just the sort who should be able to survive a lockdown without much trouble.

That’s what I thought.

But that is not what happened. I’ve found myself struggling to stay focused. This isn’t from time to time, either, this is all day every day. I’ve never been someone who needs a lot of social interaction, but the complete lack of connection to anyone outside my immediate family has had a sort of wearing effect on me. I suspect this is true of a large number of people, but I’m not meeting them and talking with them.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all social animals. One of the reasons we consider prison (and even more so, solitary confinement) a punishment is precisely because of the social isolation. We employ it as punishment and control for children – that’s what time out is. Isolation for a short time.

I think that no matter where you are on the introversion/extraversion scale, prolonged isolation isn’t good for you. As much as I had fantasies of being alone at stressful times in my life, it isn’t good for me, either.

When the lockdowns started, I got back over an hour a day. I polluted less. I spent less. After the stress of the change, the first couple of months felt freeing – I was able to do my job without leaving my house. I was one of the truly fortunate ones.

But about six months in, I found that I was having real trouble making use of that extra time. I couldn’t get things done. I was in the middle of writing a book – I’d go days where I dithered and only wrote a few words a day. I had periods where I didn’t write anything at all, and other periods where I rewrote, then rewrote again. It wasn’t only that, either. I wasn’t getting things done around my house. Things that I used to take joy in seemed flat and uninteresting.

I realized that I was depressed.

I have battled depression at times in my life. I was a depressed teenager. I went through a significant depression in my twenties that I worked through and ultimately defeated. Since then, I have been able to head it off when I feel it coming on, using techniques I learned in counselling more than thirty years ago. I also suffer from seasonal depression – it was only a few years ago that I recognized this. Now I use a high intensity light for thirty minutes most mornings between October and March, and it definitely helps.

This time it has been a bit different. I think everybody is depressed, or at least more depressed than they were a year ago. You can’t talk to a counsellor face-to-face. I don’t know about you, but for me, teleconferencing is useful, but it doesn’t take the place of actual human interaction.

I miss people’s faces. I miss smiles. I miss cooking for friends.

I decided that what worked thirty-plus years ago wasn’t working for me this time around. I started investigating things that I could do to help myself. I landed on headspace. I realize that this isn’t for everybody, but it has been working for me. Daily meditation has helped me calm jackrabbit thoughts. I am less anxious. And now, two weeks in, I can feel focus starting to return.