The Sheltering at Home Chronicles. May 13, 2020. Week 9
My psyche is no slouch. It’s keeping up with current events, and it’s invented a coronavirus nightmare to match the times.
To wit: I’m out in a crowd, I forgot my mask, coronaviruses are lurking everywhere, and I can’t find my way home to solitude and safety.
Friends report having the same brand new nightmare, with variations on the theme. A neighbor tells me she frets in her sleep that her adult son has wandered off into a crowd of people. Nobody is wearing a mask, and she can’t call him back.
I had no idea the human unconscious was so smart. But apparently, our underbrains are tuning into the news along with our waking brains, and right now they seem to be doing a quick and timely update on that anxiety dream classic — “I’m at the Office and I’m Stark Naked.”
No matter how much we deep breathe, meditate or pray. No matter how much we unload our troubles into the kindly ears of generous friends and therapists. No matter how evolved we strive to be, it seems we can’t outsmart those unconsciouses of ours. Our anxieties find ever new ways to track us down and arrange for us do the — necessary? — middle-of-the-night worrying.
Terrible Toothy Fox
My anxiety dreams have morphed over the years. At age 8, it was “There’s a Terrible Toothy Fox Under My Bed and He’s Going to Get Me.” A few years later it was, “A Bad Guy Is Chasing Me and My Feet Are Stuck in the Mud.”
In college it was “It’s the Second Week of My Renaissance Poetry Class and I Can’t Find the Syllabus.”
Later in the semester it might have been, “I’ve Got a Midterm at 8 a.m. and I Can’t Find the Classroom.”
Either that or, “It’s 8 a.m., I’ve Found the Classroom, and I’m Stark Naked.”
As my dad, who assembled his armory of idioms early in the 20th century, would say, “You can’t win for losing.”
Our Ever-Vigilant Psyches
Human beings are kind creatures. We’re also greedy, creative, xenophobic and off-the-charts smart.
But, when all is said and done, we are creatures. We are creatures forever on the look-out for the bad things that can happen. No matter how safe and sound we think we are in our tidy 21st-century modernity bubble, there are indeed Toothy Foxes out there. There are Bad Guys. There are Coronaviruses.
(There aren’t that many naked people, however. We might be working from home these days, but most of us remember to get dressed before heading to the home office.)
But — thanks to our ever-vigilant psyches — we are ready for the day. We’ve done all our worrying during the night. We’ve got our masks at the ready, and we won’t be caught with our pants down. Not today.
More of the Sheltering at Home Chronicles at “Post-Coronavirus, What Will Happen to All That Hugging We’ve Been Doing?” More about the dreams of my youth at “Confessions of a So-So Wife: The Night I Forgot to Make Dinner.”
People wake up and wonder why they feel short on sleep! A lot of work had been going on. Hence a need for an occasional nap or two!
And with a little luck, sweet dreams during the nap.