Dreaming in Carcassonne: Sports and Politics - Bilbao to Sete - CycleBlaze

October 9, 2017

Dreaming in Carcassonne: Sports and Politics

I can't believe it: two more intense, vivid dreams last night. I awoke and when I related them to Rachael, I choked up and tears welled up in my eyes.

Thirty years ago, in an especially lived, intense period of my life, this would happen fairly regularly. I would awaken, think it back through, and be amazed by the connections to the large, mutiyear software project I was working on. I would relate them to my coworkers, who were kind enough to act interested. I can scarely think of a dream like that I've had in the intervening decades. I quit remembering my dreams, and the rare ones that I did wake to weren't that interesting or vivid. Just dreams.

Something happened to me up on the mountain last week, and I've come through as not quite the same person. I think it reawakened a part of myself that's been dormant for a long time. A transition, for whatever reason, to whatever end.

Anyway, onto the dreams. Humor me if you're not interested, or of course just flip the page.

POLITICS

It will come as no surprise that I am liberal politically, probably with socialist sympathies at heart. We're sadly in a sort of civil war right now in America, and many of us feel passionately about this, and are scared for our country from both sides of the split. Maybe much of the world is too. This isn't a political rant - it's just context for the dream itself.

The news has just come out that Susan Collins, moderate republican senator from Maine, has abandoned her party, turned independent, and is going to caucus with the democrats. I can't believe it - it's the most promising political news I've heard in months. The senate is now split by just one senator. One more, and it's a tie. One more, and the democrats are in control. Tax reform will be dead, the Russia investigation will come under democratic control. Trump's reign of terror will collapse.

I cant believe it: a salvation scenario I couldn't have imagined. I can't wait to share it with my close friend Frank, who of course shares political views with me because that's where Americans are now. I wake up, and I actually reach for the iPad to send him the email I've already composed in my dream: do it, McCaine! Do it, Flake! Do it, Corker! Be the ones - save the people, save the children, save the country, now!

It gradually sinks in as I slowly reenter the real world - how could I have known that? I've been asleep. It felt so real though that I open up Politico to see what news - none, of course, at least of this sort. With sadness, I try to go back to sleep.

SPORTS

The setting: in the mountains somewhere, in the winter, spectating at a sporting event: it's a women's ski race of some odd sort. The five finalists are at the top of the mountain somewhere out of sight. The event is different, more like a foot race - they'll all depart together, racing to the finish line. We're at the base of the coarse, and nonparticipants. Off in the wings to the right is the sole other figure in the dreams: an older adult man, a retired racer himself of great reknown, and the father of one of the favorites, watching and hoping for her, and maybe vicariously for himself. He's her coach. It's the family line of business.

The race commences, up and out of sight. Suddenly, one, maybe more skiers cascade straight down the cliff of snow ahead of us, maybe two hundred feet, complete free fall. It's too far off to hear anything - there's only the snow, and an inert black smear at the base of the cliff. Surely one or more fatalities.

Seconds later, the remaining racers whiz past and exit stage right, off to the finish line.

On the right, the father emerges for the first time, standing atop a ridge, staring, motionless, perhaps praying for a miracle. It's his daughter.

Nothing happens in the dream for several minutes - or, of course, nanoseconds since it's a dream. Then, the miracle occurs. There's motion in the black smear. Slowly the fallen skier rises, faces her father, begins slowly walking toward him. She's unscathed. Somehow, we're suddenly in earshot and can hear them. That's pushing it a bit far, isn't it? Yes, but if it had worked I'd have won. They embrace, two dark silhouettes on an esker of snow.

End of the dream. That's when I wake up, deeply moved. I start describing it to Rachael, but I can't for a bit. I'm too emotional, choked up, tears are welling up - it's all too deeply felt, too vivid, too real. As I write this now, five days later, I still tap into that emotion and tears start welling up again.

This is all quite remarkable to me, and well outside of any my normal range of experience. So what just happened here? The only content background that comes to mind is the Tour de France of all things, and watching in horror as some favorite careening down a mountain loses it, flies off the road at fifty miles an hour, hurling unprotected through space toward a cliff or the abyss; or lies crumpled on the pavement as the other racers speed past, striving to avoid him and not fall themselves. Maybe that's a piece of it.

Or maybe it's a resurrection dream, and somewhere inside I feel like I've just come through my own near-death experience, and have been reborn. A miracle. I think this might be what it's about, and I think it's not that far off what actually happened this week. I'm not religious, but this leads me to think about religious experiences. Maybe this is really what those are about too - and the religion is an attempt to explain the inexplicable.

So maybe that's what happened to me this week: a miracle in the wilderness; a religious experience for an atheist.

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