Sunday blogs - heaven is a place you go to in your mind (on dreams, pt. two)

As many of you know, I have extremely vivid and often outlandish dreams. I especially had some weird ones this past week following my cyst removal surgery, having gone under full anesthesia and under the influence of Percocet and Zoloft simultaneously. I had a double dream on the second night after surgery that I still remember, which is notable because I normally have to write down my dreams after I have them in order to recall them correctly. The first part was about this space science team in the year 2040 or so that was working on how to time travel using advanced quantum mechanics, particle accelerators, a whole arsenal of techniques that coalesced in a giant, futuristic dome-like metal room that was fluorescently lit and looked up open faced at the space team like a 360 degree planetarium observatory. It also possessed the power to launch them in to deep space for efficient studying in the speed of two minutes with no significant communication errors, as if they were still right in the room with us like some hologram. Maybe from a realistic scientific standpoint it doesn't make sense at all, but in my mind it was seriously fascinating – I was somehow running some errands for the team and got to watch the whole thing unfold, see the space team experimenting and interacting with folks down on earth. I don't remember what conclusions were made at the end of the dream, if any, but the fascination was very much palpable.

It seemed fascination and the other worldly was a theme that night, because my next dream involved one of my favorite recurring dreams where I can sort of “double jump” like in a video game, and I gain enough momentum to fly. I don't fly like a bird or anything corny – I kind of just hover like a ghost, maybe 10-15 feet above ground, and nobody on earth bats an eye. Maybe I'm invisible to them while I do it or something. And I remember being by myself, floating on through a small town that reminded me a lot of the Norwegian suburbs mixed with a Miyazaki movie town. Everything was incredibly still and quiet, and audio felt like it was semi muffled in relationship to the light air sounds from my “flying”. It was night time. I passed through an old stave church where folks were congregating in the main hall, families and kids, a familial warm orange light coated the scene. I hovered out of the church, passing by all these small town homes lit by strings of fairy lights and ember lamps, until I got out on a pebbled pavement road that ran adjacent to a skinny wooden pier. There were no houses by the pier for a long time – just a string of lights softly illuminating the pier, and the water was so, so still and calm. You could hear the buzz of insects tucked away in the grassy hills, and the full moon was glowing over the dark water. I seemed to know exactly where I was going. Towards the end of the long pier, there was a barn with three steps leading to the entrance. And everything in the barn was rustic white. The light was on in the barn. A simple king size mattress lay on the floor under some overhead white netting. A sanctuary. It felt so utterly magical and safe, like I could die there without panic, like I could live out the rest of my days in that room and feel protected from everything that ever hurt me in the world. While I did say the town I started in was reminiscent of parts of Norway and Japan, respectively, the barn was interesting because I couldn't place it in any previous image of a place I had in my head.

Heaven is a place you go to in your mind.

I woke up at 8:30am to my cyst removal area being extremely tight and uncomfortable, my mom who had been caring for me while my recovery rendered me partially immobile lying next to me on her phone, brow furrowed deep in work emails. The morning light in Brooklyn felt so harsh compared to the warm cloak of the dream I had just been in. The natural reaction I've had to waking up these days is this sluggish “ughhh...not again...” feeling, one we can all relate to – the feeling that you're tired of waking up and facing the day, facing your obligations, facing life which unavoidably requires responsibility, pain, discomfort, albeit sprinkled with moments of love, joy, hilarity, sensuality, what be it. It's the roller coaster. Sometimes I just wish I could stay still, right here. Right in that barn off the pier with the glowing string lights, where the water hardly laps against the edge of the pier. And I could decide when I'm ready to come back out of it.

The space dream and the barn dream both solidified the fact that, whether I wanted to consciously admit it or not, I have been looking for reasons to escape my present life. There are certainly times in the past couple years where I reach this lovely stretch of deep closeness and gratitude with my present life. I'm out of my internal thoughts, off of my phone, and usually doing work or creating things I love with some intense consistency. I think a lot of freelancers and artists relate to this feeling – having a good stretch of consistent creation, conflated with a healthy pay situation, all things that warrant the reward centers and the fulfillment centers of the brain all at once. I often feel this way when I'm deep in an artistic commission, when I'm on tour with my band or a band that I love and have grown with, when I'm performing somewhere new, or when I'm composing in an incredible environmental setting. When one is healing from surgery and forced to set aside time as to not cause things like scar tissue buildup or tearing sutures or exhausting the body that has undergone aggressive physical change and trauma, you don't get any physical escapism. It's definitely aggravated by the fact that it's now suddenly getting warm and sunny in New York, you can finally sleep without the comforter and you start making plans to go to Rockaway Beach again. Your serotonin lifts with the sun's advent and the bright blue sky we had waited so long for – but only for a mere second. It doesn't stay. And so the feeling drops with a drag in its step.

These kinds of situations always stir up my should and should nots, why at precisely the moment that I have my strongest sense of self worth everything seems to take a turn for the worse, why I still seem to let in the wrong people if I know better, whether I'm doing enough, all the time. I cannot just float gently to that barn on the pier where everything is still and tranquil and holds – it is just a place in my mind for a night until I wake up and realize everything is just the same as it was. You become a better version of yourself and folks screw with you just as much, maybe more than you used to be aware of, and sometimes it hurts just like it used to right when you thought you were past it. You still have to call the car repair shop at 11am, pick your kids up from school, go to work with a violent hangover, a cost for every element of glory. It feels like a cruel game sometimes, and we all wish we could tap out and stop being forced to play. But the truth is that there is no spiritual salvation, even for the holiest of individuals. We only ever get glimmers of it our whole lives, strung together like rows of poems and odd artifacts rather than a deeply permeating chapter in some grand story of our lives.

Someone recently said that life seems like it goes by faster when you're an adult because you're having fewer novel experiences. When you're a kid, not only is your brain constantly growing and changing its structural makeup, but you have all of these first times that are exciting and all-consuming. First time riding a bike, first time kissing someone, first time graduating from school, first time having a job, whatever it may be. It could be a testament to the fact that we grow criminally unimpulsive and self protective first and foremost. But is it worth guarding a chance at our ever fleeting, ever hard to grasp and hard to stay, moments?

I'm still trying to get used to it, but there may be something to that fascination we feel in our highly imaginative dreams, in our restless yet constantly riveting childhood memories. There's a reason why kids aren't so easily worn out, after all. They don't care about finding heaven so long as they can wait for the next moment to merely catch it in the crevice of their palms. It's not that heaven is a place on earth, but it's that newness we need to inspire actively in our lives that gives us better days to look forward to.

I'm no expert at optimism – never have been. But I'll be thinking of that barn, of tapping in to slowing, precious time like Salvador Dali's clock, to the next town on the pier, the opportunity to play, the moment that comes after the rain.