Dream Time in Winter

Lyric essay in the dark, the Anasazi, happy with nothing.

I woke from a dream when the car crested a hill and began to fly. Airborne, I anticipated the landing, the impact traveling up the spine through the filigreed rivers of nerves running head to toe. It was going to hurt. I wasn’t alone, and I could feel her fear and excitement as we defied gravity for a few suspended moments before it found us with its hammering fist. Woke before we crashed, checked the time: twenty-three minutes to four. Not good. Typically I wake around five. There was no way I was going back to sleep.

There was a dog piled up beside me on his own portable bed. I reached down in the dark to be sure he was real. Warm as a coiled snake. She was beside me, her breath too shallow. Beneath the covers, I found her with the tips of my fingers. More heat. It would be hours until she rose. When I made coffee minutes later, the dog followed me to the kitchen, his collar jingling as he shook off sleep. Another dog on the couch, the cat meowing at the back door, the lights of town boiling on the dark prairie and wind heaving itself against the house.

Why did I lose control? In dreams I often free fall. I don’t lose my teeth or stand before crowds naked, but I fall from high places. Only once did I do it lucidly, falling off the edge of a two-story brick building above a pizza shop in Albany, New York. Right before splattering on the sidewalk I decided I could stop the descent. Did so, as Kit Carson said often. Danced above the city like an orb of light until I woke with a smile. Many times, grizzly bears have charged me out of the shadows. The bears are messengers. I’ve never stopped them long enough for a consultation. I’m prey they destroy before I wake. Who are you bear?

It’s interesting how often I’ve had a version of the driving dream. The car hugging the road, orbiting sharp turns without sound. Somehow the borders of the world never detailed, dream a mythical place. Inevitably I top a hill and the wheels lift from the road, the car turns slightly askew in the air, and my gut drops like an anvil from the sky. Am I gripping too hard to a dysfunctional perspective? Am I trying to fly when walking would do? If only dreams were clear, explicit with directions. Here is how you assemble your life. Step one. Step two. The Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) people who lived in my native lands long before European arrival consider dreams messages from the soul expressing its deepest desires and needs. Unfulfilled, they may cause illness or misfortune. Makes one think. Ought to.

During one nightmare, more than a decade past, I was standing beside a shed and a swing set in Wyoming, listening to the voices of horse riders as they drew down out of the mountains. The wind carried their voices directly to me. I recognized one, a woman I worked on a ranch with for years. Before they arrived, something else did, a tall, hairy Sasquatch-like creature. In dreams intentions are non-verbal. It said nothing, and I knew already it was too late. The creature approached me, put the net of its sprawling hand over my head and squeezed. There was a pop. I lay in bed disturbed. What does it mean to die in a dream? What did this creature symbolize? What could the soul be so adamant to reveal that it would kill its own host?

Still dark ten minutes to six, the stars inked out by clouds. I haven’t lit the fire yet. Yesterday it was sixty degrees; this morning the wind is warm. Everyone is waiting to see how this pans out. People are noticing, but climate is politicized, so mostly we remain silent. I’m nearing the end of Craig Childs’ book House of Rain, an inquiry into Anasazi cultures and mass migration out of the cold, high country of the Colorado Plateau into the Southwest.

Ruins galore. Pottery transcending the utilitarian, painted in whorls of geometric precision, left behind for hundreds of miles, a civilization on the move. Abandoned pueblos and cliff dwellings and kivas and not many answers beyond a climate gone awry, bone dry in a dry land. I know we romanticize the Old Way. Certainly, I do, that life of action, life of animal, but it was hard, merciless. In some of the abandoned Anasazi structures archeologists found the skeletal remains of humans, their skulls cleaved by blows from weapons. Many of the skulls belonged to children, their faces cut off. Human bones under microscope revealing the nicks of cutting tools.

Not pretty, I know. Things must have been terrible, resources scarce. When our satellite internet is slow, I’m pissed. Most days, we sit at the coffee shop in town, drinking from blue enameled mugs. I’ve noticed that however much we have, our bodies remember the worst of history, anxiety soaring in accord with plenty. We are meant to work for it, meant to grind, to move.

A mouse in the house, the cat after it is how I know. Must set traps tonight. Still dark at 6:33. I hear the water pump in the basement, a snoring dog, air filters whirring, pulling shed hair and dust through HEPA filters, and the machine we use in our bedroom that sounds like chirping crickets, that sounds like home in late summer after the heat of midday has softened. Home: deep blue waters ringed by thick forests. Miss it. Do always. Bewitched place with heron rookeries no man visits. Hear the spring peepers there of a spring night, hear the heart of god. Promise you.

The cat was bitten by something last week, another cat, the neighbor’s most likely. The wound healed up on its own, but yesterday a minor infection rallied, a sac of puss developing under her skin. Vet today; antibiotics; the chopping fury of more wind. I’ll get in the river to soak for a few minutes. It’s never easy to enter or to remain, but I do it to cool the deep interior of the body, to strengthen mitochondria, to practice calm under fire, wire the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex if possible.

Seen a lot of people online label the cold plunging a fad of wellness. I take it they’ve never had to survive much. Nothing worse than a judgmental wimp in a bubble bath with a field of view narrow as a dime. Can’t help but notice all the men in my life never complain. Seen them filthy, dog tired, whipped, bereaved, humiliated, hands cracked by frost, elbow-deep in deer and elk, broke, burying family, fighting kings, seen them restore power lines at forty below, do what they must, and seen them plenty times in icy waters not espousing lame tangents. Seen them suffer chins up, provide, weep like gnashed trees oozing sap.

Mind has been scattered lately. Too much free time. Find myself remembering summer work, parting the dirt with shovels, planting riparian areas incised by floods, matrixes of willows like the dams of beavers to slow erosive waters so they percolate, fill the aquifers. Richest nation in the history of the world and everyone I know myself especially feeling like the rush is on. Can’t stop. Never enough. But then summer.

That high sun over green hills, the huge interior of the mind fed by the huge exterior of the landscape. Seeing bulbous clouds scud over the rolling sage, rain torn out of them by trees. Can hear the rain coming a long way off in that country. The sounds of peace growing more endangered by the day. Still hate the doppler tearing of cars. The Ancient Greeks thought the heavens made music. Aristotle disagreed. Turns out, he was wrong, or at least partly. No music in space, but a lot of noise. Ever heard a fire eating wind? Imagine the sun’s roar. We just can’t hear it, the frequencies far too low for our braided ears. Wish I dreamed instead of horses flying, but it’s always cars. Goddamn them. Love them, but goddamn them. You ever smell a horse? Try that with a machine.

Used to irrigate thousands of acres of fields in Wyoming with nothing but a shovel, a wide-brimmed hat, and rubber boots. Miles afoot everyday, me and the dogs, kestrels on the electrical wires, antelope in the fields scattering at first sight of us, feet soaked with sweat. Grass in spots waist high and cliffs above the river where golden eagles perched, zooming in on the action. Pay was middling to poor. The outfit gave me a one-bedroom house seven miles up a gravel road. Only house on seven miles of gravel. Ate a lot of beef from a rancher nearby, and potatoes from Idaho. Split wood, read at a picnic table under two pines in the shade days off. Watched life more than anything. Fished trout in the Wind Rivers. Possessed so little most would consider it nothing. Never been happier. Not even close. Think this is why, when I left there, that creature grabbed my head in a dream and squeezed until my cranium broke. Souls want what they want. If horses have been in a summer pasture overnight, you can smell them long after they’re gone. Ask someone who knows. They’ll tell you it’s true.

Before I left Wyoming (wolves howling near the house; mountain lion tracks in the driveway) I said to someone, if I live here permanently, I’ll make it to a hundred easy. Left suddenly, had to. Sick eight months later: blood cancer. I think it was the stress. No, it was the grief. Would I go back now? I’ve wondered this too. It’s possible.

But had none of the wretched departures transpired, I’d not be here now. Wouldn’t have woke this morning with her or the mouse or worked two years beside my brother, our father, seen my sister go from a waitress to nursing school, swam my home waters, ate sweetcorn grown in August, ran thousands of miles—to survive, like I said—hunted elk with my buddy, camped out there with him, met dozens of the finest, came to know the Berkshires, seen that I’ve seen, held that I’ve held, come to know that I know. Things happen. Allow them to.

That’s life. You’ve got to keep going. Cliched as that sounds, the people pointing out the cliche, why do they always miss the point? I’ve wondered about the past. I mean it is gone as the dead and yet many of us marry it, look in the mirror, see what is according to what was, abide by vows that cinch so tight they stop progress. Ever wonder yourself if you are being true? Noticed that I tend to live in circles, as if following myself through parallel dimensions, sometimes shunning the myriad versions as I try to grow into braver incarnations.

Seems to me like everything else that lives besides man knows how to be itself. Been there, too, and I suppose that is the way to fly in dreams rather than drop hard: listen to the soul while one can. Get out there on the crust of the earth and walk. Trust you won’t sink even though it’s emptiness holding you aloft. The Mohawk (Kanien’kehá:ka) consider the spirit world where dreams emanate a reflection of the waking world. The line between them porous, diaphanous, not so different than the idea a rib of Adam became the woman Eve. Stories always tell us obliquely things are inseparable. If the great Aristotle could be wrong, then who can’t?

It’s light now, and the dream time has passed. As far as I can see it is mountains and clouds, grasslands the color of a mountain lion. Virga to the east, falling rain that never reaches ground. Start the fire, call the vet, tell the cat she is going to be okay. Been there myself sweetheart. Love all ten pounds of you. Thought of the .22 and that damn tom who beats on you, but that isn’t right for yours is the order of things. I can’t interfere violently. Be amazed what you can handle. That’s happiness. Not having things, but handling them. Course a cat knows this. She found the mouse before I knew it existed. Guy in a bubble bath doesn’t know shit compared to a cat born knowing.

Set the traps tonight. See the stars in their courses whirl. Put the heaviest logs on the fire before bed. They burn the longest. Make elk neck chili. See thyself in the mirror. Nothing but potential, remember. Say prayers as questions. Sleep again. Dream again. Maybe better this time. Some physicists say without heat there is no time. Wake and find the heat beside you. Find it.