Talking through the nightmares

I don't know what else to do but write. Kevin and I attempt to articulate what we're thinking and feeling about the state of affairs of Minnesota and the nation.

I have lucid, vivid dreams every night, but rarely nightmares.

Sometimes this changes in response to shows I watch. I get very into the story and mold the characters in my mind as if we have a history together. I suppose that’s a nod to good storytelling, but it’s jarring to mentally step out of.

After finishing Stranger Things a week ago, I’ve had an embarrassingly hard time letting it go. I’ve been reading articles about pop culture references that were sprinkled throughout the show (so fun) or watching interviews with the actors, as if I’m viewing my own friends on talk shows.

I get depressed, in a lull of sorts, after a series I really enjoyed – mourning the loss of excitement (the pretend loss of good buddies?). I don’t know if I looked forward to the next episode because it’s just fun or because I clung to the flight from reality.

I have detailed, vivid dreams, but not often nightmares.

My dreamscape has been different this week. Which impacts the complex interplay in my REM cycle more? Finishing a years-long sci-fi drama? Or reacting to the unbelievable spectacle unfolding in our real world?

I’m not sure, but here’s what I dreamt a few days ago:

We were in Duluth, but it looked like a much bigger city with skyscrapers. My sister-in-law was driving us on a twisting freeway. I was in the front with her, and Cali and Ian were in the back.

She took a sharp turn, flew off the road and over Lake Superior – I felt that falling sensation, then we nose-dived into the frigid water. As the car swiftly sank, I thought, “I can get myself unbuckled, out the window and to the surface, but I can’t get myself and the kids out fast enough.” I woke up not when we smashed into the water, but when I knew that I couldn’t save the kids in time.

Last night, I dreamt that we had a third baby, who was really Ian as an infant again. He needed milk but my breasts were dry. We were with Kevin’s parents and, for some reason, we were reluctant to leave the house to get formula and other needed supplies. I had the sense that we were hunkered down for our safety, because something was happening in the realm outside.

As we discussed what to do next, one of us set Ian on a shelf and he fell off and died as he hit the floor. Kevin turned my face away, saying that it was too graphic for me to see how his legs had broken off. I woke up deeply distraught and I can’t shake away the image of Ian as a tiny, helpless baby in my arms.

On a larger scale, I feel like I’m holding something both infantile and ancient, trying to keep its limbs together. It’s so many things.

I remember the first few days after Cali was born – crying and crying because she was outside my womb and I couldn’t physically shield her within my own body anymore. I grappled with the knowledge that, for every single moment moving forward, she’d grow apart from me. I wanted to cram her back inside.

After the nightmares this week, I feel nostalgia for when I could physically hold my kids and be their protector but also the apprehensive cord that existed then and ties to now – a fear that something will happen to them and I can’t do anything to thwart it.

I feel intense anger but don’t know where to direct it. I’m so unsettled and upset. I hate feeling like we are pawns in a playbook of the powerful.

I feel sadness, having expected more from all of us – the adults that are supposed to make the world safe and right for our kids. Maybe it’s coincidental but Ian has been messaging me “I love you” from his watch, while at school, multiple times a day. I think our children feel it.

I feel anxious in the sense that I’m agitated and miserable but can’t find the source of that energy. I feel like I’m still dreaming, because how I feel and what to do are hazy and surreal.

To complicate matters, my brain is a mess hall of compositions fighting for thought space. I’m reading too many books at once – Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are from Vienna, which takes place in Italy during World War I; a book about gut health; Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation; and the Tyranny of the Minority, sequel to How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky; with breaks for TJ Klune’s hopeful and humorous style.

I think I consume words when I don’t know what else to do, or rather when I can’t be still.

How can I be still when the words of Anne Frank and George Orwell and Margaret Atwood sound like today, when it’s acceptable to do and say things that torch dignity and lives?

Kevin and I tried to articulate what we were thinking and feeling last night, in response to Renee Nicole Good being shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis.

I was reminded that my husband has eyes for the perverseness of privilege and his place in a larger story. He thinks about things in an admirably selfless way. I don’t mean to say, “look at how amazing my husband is”, but rather “woah, I have so much to learn”.

I am appalled at how my brain doesn’t connect what’s important. I’m humbled by his thoughts.

I want to be a better person. I want to make careful choices. I want to tell the truth. I want to believe in people again.

Kevin and I have talked about how our instincts, he and I, would be different if shit hit the fan, if it was bug-out bag time.

I’d want to keep our family safe by fleeing. He’d want to go into the fray to help those who can’t flee.

Below is not a transcript of the audio above. It’s a continuation of the conversation started in the audio.

Me: I think my priorities are different. I put family before country. I don’t feel love and pride for America, at least not right now. If a large portion of Americans believe and feel how MAGA does, then they’re not my people and this is not my country. What would there be to stay for?

Kevin: It’s not that I care about America, the country. I care about the people who can’t defend and protect themselves. I’m not saying I could take a gun and go to the front line of a war. But I know I can’t abandon those who don’t have a choice.

(I can’t believe we’re even talking about this.)

Me: Do you know what the final step is in the checklist of becoming an autocracy? The tyrant declares a national emergency which supersedes the balance of the branches of government. He wants fights to break out all over the nation.

Kevin: Well, yeah, if there’s chaos ... that’s the only way that Trump gets to stay in charge.

I guess what I’m trying to articulate is the cerebral funnel we’re sliding through. We are marching through the calculated levels of hell, with Orwell’s prophetic quotes echoing in our ears:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

When you don’t know what the truth is, you lose sense of what’s real; and when you lose sense of what’s real, you don’t know what to do; and if you don’t know what to do, does that mean it’s too late?

We are standing on air.