Two Cracks on the Wall
I don’t think I’m ever going to make it in any satisfactory way — not in my lifetime. This is the thought that robs me of hope on certain mornings, when I wake up with a clear mind and with enough disposable minutes that allow me to stay under the comforter to mull things over. It must be “certain mornings,” because it may need ingredients to get that piece of “certain” to come about in the way that it does. I have no idea what is contained in the ingredients. All I know is that it involves a state of mind that feeds dreams and is in turn fed by the dreams afterward.
The other night, I was in the middle of a dream that I actually remembered. I was in a dark room, my living room, and I felt the first tremors of an earthquake. Since I was actually sleeping on the couch in my living room, my mind was identifying this as if it were really happening. In the dream, I was looking out the window, and I noticed that the wall that has a crack on it since we moved here had another one that I somehow understood was even older. It had been patched up without attention to craft, and the color of the filler didn’t even go with the color of the wall. How could I ever not notice such a thing in the three years that we have lived here?
Then, there was an instance of dream logic where I was able to see something from outside the house even though I was inside. In this view, I recognized the street even though it was nothing like our real neighborhood outside the dream. The worst part about the growing earthquake was that our house was the only one visibly affected. It was moving us around, and I could picture the center of this knot under us, as if we were going to disappear into the bowels of the earth — we, and no one else. When it was over, our house had been pitched to the side. We could see it from the outside as it was happening, like a shoe box that had been turned over. And we were trying to push it back off its side to put it back on its foundation.
I woke up in my dark living room, and I could see from the sliding glass doors looking into our backyard that there was no such second crack on the wall. But I knew where such an idea came from. This dream transpired in the first weeks of the virus quarantine. Anxieties were multiplying. I was not looking forward to the next day. I had to make a few unpleasant phone calls that had to do with our house and with our car. Official payments and paperwork that had not been completed on the part of institutions that had the responsibility of looking out for us. I had to summon anger, and I resented them for making me do this.
Since last year, I have been concerned with the crack on the wall that separates our backyard from that of our rear neighbors. It looks like it is progressing because of the neighbor’s tree near the wall that may be pushing into it. With the present quarantine, that problem itself has been pushed back, because we have more important matters to think about. But it’s still in the background, a little bit more in the distance but still visible.
While fixing up my first cup of instant coffee, I was trying to see if the pieces fit. Dreams can tell the future or have you meet with someone in another kind of reality. Dreams could also expose those fears we have inside us, and this was how I interpreted my little nightmare. It was obvious to me, although in the end, who knows? I was worried about those damned phone calls. I took those feelings straight to bed. They manifested with older fears, also related with the house, and I substituted one for the other. It was as simple as that. That dream was nothing more or less than a mirror held up to my subconscious.
It affected the rest of my day. The equation, therefore, may look like this: worries disguised themselves in that other realm as older, less significant worries, stirred with the idea of an earthquake, and they emerged on the other side to temper the coming day with nothing but shit.