{"id":294,"date":"2008-08-04T09:42:45","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T16:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/294"},"modified":"2008-08-04T09:52:08","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T16:52:08","slug":"analyze-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/294","title":{"rendered":"Analyze This"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I fell asleep early and slept a hard, lousy sleep. The kind of sleep of the half-dead wandering in the wilderness forty years, finally felled to respite on a stone tablet of some sort. Sleep that in some ways may be the best after forty waking years, but is colored by resting one\u2019s temple directly on unforgiving rock.<\/p>\n

As one might expect from such sleep (or from me, at least), there were dreams. Several of them were far-ranging colorful swirls of mayhem, but the last two were calmer, more sober, and vividly memorable.<\/p>\n

The first was set in an igloo, starring documentarian Morgan Spurlock and his wife, who were presumably spending the next thirty days<\/a> living there. I got inside the igloo and immediately realized how enclosing the space felt, how solid and impenetrable the iceblock walls. It immediately occurred to me: \u201cIf someone wanted to kill you, all they\u2019d have to do is block up the entrance with snow, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

Morgan and Alex laughed and shrugged this off, and I pointed out something about having a backup ventilation system, like a chimney. They mentioned that the howling winds of the Arctic (we\u2019re in the Arctic, interesting) make the cross-flow of air from two openings unbearably cold. They seemed really nervous when I went out to go to the bathroom and I assume got more so (I guess I sort of somehow knew they were getting more nervous in the dream, even though I couldn’t see them) when I took my time getting back. They were worried I was thinking about blocking up the igloo once they fell asleep, but really I was just afraid of going back in and making myself vulnerable to someone else doing the same.<\/p>\n

The second dream was more concretely explicable and pretty much impossible to misinterpret. I was at a fair or festival of some kind with friends who felt vaguely close and comfortable, but who I could never quite identify or see. There was a handmade sign for horse-riding and people asked if I wanted to go. Why not? How hard could it be?<\/p>\n

So we clamored up on horses, but one of my friends wanted to walk alongside me rather than board a horse himself (I could somehow detect his gender). He expressed concern for my safety. I got some aerial views of the parade ground for the horses as we were all marching in a line, feeling vaguely reminiscent of mules in the Grand Canyon (without the precipitous drops or elevation changes of any sort). Then back to first-person, whereon I was having a great time, but kept sliding forward in my saddle. Which somehow moved me not towards the mane of the beast, but toward the tail. I was facing the wrong way on the horse, but it was still moving in the direction I was facing. And this didn\u2019t yet occur to me as the slightest bit odd, it was just frustrating that I kept getting jostled forward (backward on the horse that was walking backward), almost thrown over its rear.<\/p>\n

Finally we came to some sort of traffic jam, wherein horses all held up and whinnied a bit at the sudden stoppage. My horse reared up on its forelegs, almost pitching me backwards and off, then did the opposite and almost ditched me the other way. I was clinging to nothing (there had never been any reigns) but somehow holding on while my friend insistently urged me to dismount before I got hurt. It occurred to me that people could be seriously injured or even killed by getting thrown from a horse and I had never once really internalized the danger of this process, especially since my horse now seemed to be utterly out of control. This feeling felt exactly like realizing I could be blocked up and asphyxiated in an igloo, and I woke up having somehow tied these twin realizations in a knot of new fear of the world around me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I fell asleep early and slept a hard, lousy sleep. The kind of sleep of the half-dead wandering in the wilderness forty years, finally felled to respite on a stone tablet of some sort. Sleep that in some ways may be the best after forty waking years, but is colored by resting one\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,28],"tags":[5,68],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-day-in-the-life","category-what-dreams-may-come","tag-a-day-in-the-life","tag-what-dreams-may-come"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}