March 8th, 2006

I woke up this morning with a strange death-like dread on my mind; blackness, the kind of blackness that freezes out all emotion except dread, in my heart; and a vague memory of a dream where I lay dying on an operating table, the doctors so convinced of the futility of their surgery that they didn't bother to sterilize or use anaesthetic. Half a day later, the shadow still lies across my mind and the lack of sun in the lee still raises shivers and goosebumps of deathlike certainty.

I've never experienced such a powerfully morbid dream like it before, and it brings up a conversation I remember having in about 1995 with a writer friend, Frank. He asked me, "Do you ever spring awake with the words going through your mind, 'I'm going to die'?" And I answered truthfully that I didn't ever experience such a feeling. I didn't think there was anything wrong with Frank, but I did wonder if maybe we were more different than alike. Well, now I understand his question. And now I can answer him "yes". I realise that Frank was a little older, a better writer (at least at the time and maybe still) and more sensitive—more tuned-in to the world—than I was. I only knew him for a few years, but my respect for him grows every year since.

OK, so I had a nightmare. Or maybe a night-terror. I am an intelligent sensitive guy who is not afraid to show the world what's coursing through his veins, intellectually and emotionally. These things are bound to happen. But what do I do with the experience? Most men would shuffle it off: Laugh nervously and change the subject, or think about it slightly at odd times and soon forget it. But not me. I know the disaster that leads to.

So here's what I think: It's not a message, but it is an acknowledgement of "where I am" (man). Like a state of the union address. And the state I find myself in is an ever-increasing pursuit of many goals and projects. I finish one thing and don't even take the time to admire my work before I'm launching into something else. And the dream has done exactly what Bruce Cockburn describes in his song, "Wondering Where the Lions Are":

I had another dream about lions at the door
They weren't half as frightening as they were before
But I'm thinking about eternity
Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me

It's got me wondering.

Maybe I have to stop being so goal-oriented. If I am really intent on "getting there" at all costs, then perhaps I am being stupid: The Final Destination happens to be a coffin or crematorium, doesn't it? Is that the place I am constantly in such a hurry to get to? Feh! Forget that; I think I'd be smart to stop working my brains out with some vague un-thought-out destination at the back of my head (and always in the future) and start enjoying the smell of the flowers and the sight of the sunset.

And actually, that is something I've wrestled with a lot of my adult life: How deeply should we internalise the pursuit, and how much should we enjoy the moment? We could go to both extremes, couldn't we? We spend our entire childhood and teen years with "the future" in mind, but once we reach adulthood, we just keep plowing on, don't we? We don't even have a set of words we can describe "the future" with, either. We are just chasing a ghost forever a step or two beyond our grasp. Hmm ... I've heard chronically addicted gamblers describing their particular hell on Earth that way: Even when they win the sense of arrival is temporary ... fleeting ...

Where is that sense of arrival in our own lives? If we wanted to, we could always let it float so tantalizingly close, but far enough away that we never catch it, that we never have a moment that we can say to ourselves, "Who cares if there is a race? I'm enjoying the afternoon."

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