Soap and water

I don’t sleep well in June. The sky lightens very early, and I find myself awake at 3 or so and up for the day. This usually goes on for three or four days until I get tired enough that I sleep almost through the night, and then the cycle resumes.

I had a dream on one of my sleeping nights. In my dream, some kind of disaster was underway. I don’t recall if it was manmade, like a war or a terrorist attack;  or a natural disaster of some sort. If the latter, it was a dry natural disaster. Maybe an earthquake. I don’t remember any water.

******
Although come to think of it, there was water, but the water came in the form of a shower; or rather, the lack of water came from the lack of a shower. In this dream, I was surrounded by a desperate crush of escaping humanity; escaping from what, I don’t remember. And I was the only person trying not to escape, because I wanted to take a shower, and that was all I could think of. Even as the situation grew ever more serious and urgent, I dithered around, gathering my soap and my shampoo and looking for a shower.

I had to look for a shower, because I wasn’t at home. I was near or in a hotel of some sort. I don’t know why I wasn’t home, but I know that I wasn’t staying in the dream hotel. It’s now been over a week since I had this dream, and the details have mostly faded, but I remember that my dream self knew that I had no right to be in that hotel or to use its shower.

As I schemed and plotted and planned my illegal shower, the wild animals began to stampede, two by two as if Noah’s Ark had just come into port. Was there a zoo nearby? I don’t know; I just know that animals joined the humans until the street was teeming with creatures desperate to be elsewhere. I remember that I was also planning to join the exodus; I was just determined to take a shower first.

I saw people I worked with in the hotel; two of them are remote teammates whom I have never met, but whom I recognized immediately. I wondered what they were doing and why they weren’t running; and I’m sure they wondered what I was doing and why I wasn’t running, but no one asked any questions. Maybe we all just wanted a shower. It’s not unreasonable to want to be clean, even when you’re running away from a mass extinction event.

*****
I never did find out what the disaster was, nor why a shower took precedence over escape. I woke up and that was that. But the odd disoriented emergence-from-a-weird-dream feeling persisted throughout the morning. I should have written it all down right away; maybe I’d have remembered more.

*****
There should be a point to this, shouldn’t there? And I suppose there is. Every day of 2020 feels like looming disaster. I wake up every morning expecting the hammer to fall, assuming I slept in the first place. But every morning, I thank God that it’s another day, and that my family and I are alive, healthy, and as safe as we can be. I thank God that there’s a roof over my head and a bathroom with a shower that dispenses clean hot water every time I turn the faucet. It’s an uncertain and scary time, and it’s good to be clean.