Mirror Image

The night of May 2nd I fell asleep reciting French verbs, or at least, I fell asleep murmuring  combinations of sounds that could have been French verbs, my throat sore from hacking up a bunch of r's for two hours. Those meticulously measured puffs of air were the only music I heard before my mind turned off...

Between waking up in my parents' bed and being consumed in a dark blanket of snow, my dreams took me to a space station that looked like something from Star Wars, with octagonal portals covered in blinking lights and screens. Andrew and I were wandering through the set as if we were in a museum, hands in pockets, eyes up and overloaded. He was wearing khaki pants and a fleece pullover, not his typical garb. But the shoes I remember; he'd hiked Scotland in them. Approaching an elevator where an attendant stood with her hands behind her back, we decided to try out the game contained inside, the game being a sort first-generation, true-to-life video game--virtual reality without the technology.  I took my spot, kneeling on a cheap, moving stage that looked like it'd been stolen from a carnival ride, while Andrew looked on.

I hit different buttons and pulled on the levers and handles protruding from the elevator walls as the stage moved up and down, sluggish and rigid. We were both laughing hilariously, knowing how ridiculous this had turned out to be. The game stopped and the attendant handed us slips of paper to color in.  I looked down at the outline of a little girl eating a slice of buttered bread, innocent and unwittingly coy, and decided to color her in blue and purple. With a colored pencil, I filled in the colors with vertical strokes, carelessly going above and below the lines. As we exited the elevator, Andrew handed me his little square of paper, looking me in the eye just a wee bit longer than was comfortable.  He had colored her dress with the yellow-green pencil, and her hair he'd colored red. Hanging cock-eyed above her red head he'd drawn in a yellow halo.

In the morning, I was haunted by the image of the little girl, her deep wishing-well-eyes watching me, and I wondered where I had seen the picture before. Later in the afternoon, in the car with my mom and sister, listening to Helplessness Blues for the second time through, it hit me (as most answers do when you stop trying to find them): the girl in my dream is the little girl from the "Grown Ocean" video. I couldn't remember the last time I'd watched it, and I was astonished that my mind had conjured up her picture.

I double-checked my theory when we got home, and sure enough, there she is at the 2:55 mark, except, in my dream, she was the mirror image. The mind always fascinates me, but more particularly, my dreams never fail to amuse and amaze me in all their mystery and overwhelming power of recall. Perhaps they possess some spiritual power, but it could be that they are nothing more than waking life in mirror image.

My dreams--asleep and awake--tend to look something like this video, in its brilliant but faded colors, where everyone lives in the forest and dances through life; because why bother taking it too seriously?  After all, as Robin Pecknold reminds us, life was made to end.