Humanity (5/21/12)

Once again, a dream about Grey’s Anatomy. I was watching some of the characters (Meredith Grey and Derek Shepherd specifically) operate on a patient. They cut open his abdomen and with the help of a nurse, smeared some translucent grey paste on the wound. Then the patient exploded. Derek  was vaporised by the force of the blast, though somehow Meredith and I viewed this from quite a distance, standing on a hill and watching Derek dematerialise in a whirlwind of colour. Meredith screamed and cried, I was rather shocked because apparently it mattered. I had a brief discussion with the nurse about why the patient exploded, he assured me it had nothing to do with the grey paste. (I should note that when I woke up from this dream, I was mildly amused because this is a good approximation of what happens in Grey’s Anatomy.)

Then it was nine months later. I came to on a rocking chair in front of a television in a bare, uncleaned room. There was dried dog crap on the floor and my seat had apparently become crusty from me sitting on it so much. (???) I had apparently been greatly affected by Derek’s death and was now suffering psychogenic amnesia wherein I’d forgotten the last nine months of my life.

I went outside, where it was like a grey city, and sat with a group of people, one of whom was Meredith. She was pregnant and rambled on about how she was going to name her child “Forever” because that’s how long she would love Derek. I thought this was cheesy and went against feminist values. She said that her daughter, Zola, had died. I told her that I had lost my memory and I cried a lot. In fact, over the next few minutes, I cried over everything. I realised that I had gone through my first year at St. John’s College but now I had forgotten it all. This made me cry. I looked on Facebook and found that I was now friends with a girl I haven’t spoken to in years. I couldn’t believe I had missed all this. I cried.

Some strangers came along and harassed Meredith. She suddenly became a 60 year old black woman with glasses, sagging breasts and a toddler stuffed up her yellow shirt. I yelled at the strangers and cried.

———

I woke up and went back to sleep and had a completely different dream, this one about going between countries once again, though in what direction I can hardly tell because sometimes I seemed to be heading to Australia, sometimes to America. It started off in what was apparently a plane, and I sat next to some girl whose appearance now escapes me. We were strangers, I think,  but we talked a lot. We could see the scenery in some giant window ahead of us and it seemed as if there was no one nearby. The plane zoomed away from the earth and the lights of the cities appeared as squares of different colours- mostly red and blue. The girl hypothesised that god would be angrier if we could see the blue lights from space than if we were to see the red ones. I thought about this and agreed, because most of the planet earth is blue and that if we were to perceive the blue lights at such a distance, then it meant that humans had over-ridden the importance and majesty of gods’ creation.

The plane flew further and further away from earth and we were able to see continents taking shape, formed as they were by red and blue lights. The red lights were the only ones visible after a while, so god must have had yet to be angry at us.

Then we floated downwards through darkness, through near-empty space, strapped into harnesses that were presumably attached to parachutes. My friend and I shared a harness with a third girl, who looked like someone I’d seen in the supermarket earlier that day. Others fell around us, bunched in groups of three, but it was almost entirely silent. The tall trunk of a maple tree stood in the darkness before us- we drifted down along its length and I never saw any leaves, just the texture of its bark. It was lit with an odd light that came from nowhere but fell only on objects, draining them of colour and turning them grey, doing nothing to bring illumination to the darkness of outer space. But, far off in the distance, to the left, was the planet earth. From where we were, it seemed to be the size of a basketball We saw it on its nightwards side, criss-crossed by human lights. Perhaps we floated in between time because we could see it revolving- Asia and Australia passed by our sights and headed towards dawn, the Americas came into sight.

We discussed this distant and eerie scene, the beauty and madness of what humanity had made, for we had created a planet that shone out in the universe. I thought of how my family in Australia would be entering dawn now, while my home in America would be falling under the night. As we talked and drifted, we slowly turned to the left, in opposition to the movement of the earth. As time passed, we were losing sight of the earth, craning our heads to see it.

“Perhaps it a kind of narcissism to admire all this,” she said.

“Yes, but it is not narcissism for oneself but for humanity as a whole.”

We craned out necks to see the last sight of the earth and saw it just as the Americas passed by and gave way to the great dark expanse of the Pacific. And so it seemed that the earth turned away from us as we turned away from it.

I felt that we wavered precariously in the nothingness, and so I closed my eyes to the sight of the maple tree, afraid of slipping from the safety of the harness and falling endlessly into the abyss. 

Then a voice announced to us that we had made our landing, just as my feet touched ground. I stumbled a bit and opened my eyes to find myself in large room that looked like a train station. There were those old fashioned black and white clocks and a shiny tan marble floor. I was no longer in the harness and I was now with a group of students, the context being a school trip to somewhere. There was a tall boy who I was apparently going out with. He had short dark hair and a nice hat of some sort. He showed me this stand that sold food but also sold small packets of marijuana. The packets were in bowls on the counter, next to the cash register, and people would say “Can I have some of the garnish?” or something and they’d be given one of the packets for $5. My boyfriend bought one and put it in his luggage.

Then we were on a train, though the interior vaguely resembled a plane. The universe passed by the windows; galaxies of all colours just floated on by, glowing bright an beautiful. I remembered what my dad had told me- that when traveling in space, the stars don’t appear to move because they’re so far away. (He has told me this in real life- he is an astrophysicist). I told this to the people sitting near me, including my boyfriend, but they just gave me weird looks.

Then the train began to slow, for we were now on a rather steep hill. It was lush and green with grass and gnarled trees, but for the spaces beside the train tracks, which showed the reddish dirt. The colours were vivid under a bright white sun. A ravine ran alongside the tracks, full of rushing, spraying water. One of the other passengers (a boy who I had known in passing in middle school) started screaming nonsense about how we’d all die because of the ravine.

I seemed to see it all as if there was no train and it was just me speeding along through the air (these seems to happen quite frequently in dreams, I think- perhaps my mind has difficulty combining the two sensations?) I smiled, feeling that I was coming home because I had been here before. The train came to a stop and we were all told to come out of the train for a bag inspection. This, too, had happened before, and for the next few minutes, I watched things happen with an ironic smile, knowing that what would happen next could not be changed and that everything would be fine. For, once outside, my boyfriend remembered the marijuana in his bag and started to panic, trying to get back int other train to remove it. He was restrained by our chaperones but I knew that everything would turn out fine in the end.

———

I arrived at what was apparently BWI airport, though it looked like the front of my old high school in America. It was night time. I caught up to my mother, who walked through clouds, and I suggested that we visit our old home. I felt that she had to find out that our neighbours’ old dog, Lacey, had died, and that they had gotten a new one, named Maggie. (This has been on my mind in real life you see.) However, she refused to go because she insisted on doing other things first.

We wound up in front of an old computer, watching a documentary. The documentary started out as an 80 year old woman scuba diving to the wreck of the Titanic (while wearing a cute little swimsuit mind you). Then a sea serpent came out of nowhere and she fought it with a glaive. I thought this was silly and tried to use the computer’s keyboard to exit out of the video. I typed but the noise of the keys tapping was painfully loud. “Christ, that’s bloody loud,” said mother, and I stopped typing but the noises continued. (This was probably the sound of the rain on the window in real life.)

Then the old woman was fighting the sea monster in the train station. She cut its head off and cursed profusely. I suggested to my mother that we go to our old home but she refused. We wound up in the parking lot of my old school.