The Eternal Sideways-Slanting Sun

There was a night just recently when a had a series of dreams that melted into one another beautifully and seamlessly without logic, or with logic and without symmetry. There was a dream where I was rushing to correct a scheduling error. They scheduled my vacation for the wrong week! I'm not going to Tunisia next week, but the week after. I need to correct that.

I'm going to Tunisia. Next week. This is exciting.

In another dream, I moved fluidly between Jacksonville and France. In Jacksonville, I was leaning against the driver's side door of my uncle Tom's truck, telling him and my uncle Mark that there was a place in France that made me think of them and everyone back home. Then I remembered the place, and in a flash I was there. Not in a flash... There was no transition. As quickly as I could remember the spot, I was there. Even in my dream I couldn't describe it: A mountainous river-mouth, on which the sunlight shone in eternal sideways-slanted rays - a perpetual dawn, or dusk. Everyone's idea of heaven. A peaceful, meditative vantage point, which in waking life I realize was an idealized portrait of the Gironde Estuary, which is a two minutes' walk from my front door. Windy and grassless in the real world I share with others, in my dream it is a peaceful, grass-covered and breezy place, golden in the light of a perpetual sunset-sunrise.

The rush of emotion, and the strength of the memory, left me nostalgic when Rebecca stirred beside me.

"We could probably turn the heat off," she said.

We. You mean I could, I thought. I didn't say it, but chuckled inwardly, snarkily. Keeping inside the mild chauvinism that likes to dote even as it grumbles about doting. It was a little warm. It was very early in the morning, and I stumbled into the kitchen. I can't believe how strong the memory of that place was. But it doesn't exist. Not as I envisioned it in dreaming. Was I, in a dream, remembering a place I visited in another dream? Or was I wrong about remembering it; did my mind create a feeling of déjà vu ex nihilo, tailor-made for this dream?  

I thought of John Locke, whose work I read in college. I remembered that he thought that what is essential in forming an idea of personal identity is unity of consciousness over time, and that what unites my consciousness today with my consciousness yesterday is memory. I thought about that and I wondered about unity of unconsciousness. Such a strong memory of a place that I could never have been to in real life. I'm not the first person to wonder whether waking life is the dream and dreams are the waking life, but does the fact that my dreams seem connected (sometimes) by memories of other dreams mean that I have, in a Lockean sense, unity of unconsciousness?


Is there a me that goes about my days, and another who dreams, both of whom persist, endure, persevere, whatever in separate spaces in my mind: Two separate, or mostly separate entities, whose paths occasionally cross, who occasionally see through each other's eyes?

I turned off the heat and went back to bed. As I climbed into bed and the bedsprings creaked, Rebecca protested mildly at being awakened. I had a strange thought:

- Hey lady?
- Mmmmm? She hummed, half-asleep.
- Did you just ask me to turn off the heat?
- Mmm... no...
- Oh... I'm going to turn it back on, then.

It was a little cold.

In the morning, I woke up  happy to be in France; missing everyone back home.