And here we are back in the Leonard Cohen afterworld (as if we ever left) and a few lines from Side Two of I’m Your Man:

There’s a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues

Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it’s been dying for years

I miss concert halls. I miss bars. I even miss people, and being half-introvert, I don’t often say that, think that or feel that. When it comes to human interaction, I tend to gorge and retreat, much like my relationship with Costco peanut butter pretzels. As a stranger in a suburb where I rarely leave the house while helping run a business in a faraway city where I rarely walk downtown without running into someone I know, I’m perfectly positioned to indulge in this sort of behavior. Most days I relish it, but right now, as the Rust Belt winter continues its slow, lonesome crawl toward spring, I’d swap Hudson for Boise in a heartbeat, and not just because there’s still snow on the ground in Northeast Ohio. Our social life was one of the big tradeoffs with the move, and when you make a decision of this magnitude, you have to be okay with the tradeoffs. And mostly I am. But that doesn’t mean I never miss it. That doesn’t mean it never hurts for a hot minute on a cold day. Sometimes it’s downright hard, and lately it feels that way. Maybe that’s just late-winter talking, but I can’t deny that I was already missing Boise – our Boise life, as it were – as the first plane left the ground to fly me back east on the early morning of December 3.

This mindset stands in stark contrast to my temperament in March 2020. As the world settled into the pandemic those first few motionless weeks, I found myself, with a slight tinge of guilt, really enjoying the break – from everything, but mostly people. For several years in my late-30s and early-40s, as the disappearing days piled up and I grasped for more time to spend on the meaningful things in my life, I had fantasized about some magical secret month on the calendar where I had no obligations and no one to answer to, and in a twisted way, my wish was granted when Covid made the scene and a blanket of quiet wrapped around the emerging spring. But now, as we approach March 2022 and the second anniversary of the shutdown, I can’t get enough of people – at least, in my dreams. It’s safe to say I’ll never be described as “unrelentingly social” in real life, but right now I’m taking every waltz in my dreams: a pro baseball game with college friends here, a late-night DJ gig at Neurolux there; a strange subculture house party in one dream, a lame adult-contemporary dinner the next; I’m back on campus almost every other night. The pandemic is barely there in my dreams, which is fascinating in its own right, but people are everywhere, often in bizarre combinations of friends, family members and minor characters from different chapters of my life, and we’re all having a great time. After minimal human contact over the past two years, this hectic subconscious social schedule is warm, at times weird and, above all, welcome. As is the increased volume of my dreams. I’ve always been an active dreamer, but nothing like this, nothing this cinematic and relentless, yet it still pales in comparison to my wife, Erica, who is treated on a nightly basis to fantastical technicolor journeys through the depths of her mind. Sometimes her dreams are dark and disturbing action films that she’ll wake herself up to flee, but mostly her dreams are bold and beautiful communions with the natural world, particularly the ocean. She frequently has the power of flight and other supernatural capacities. I haven’t flown in a dream since I was a child. Maybe I lost something along the way.

Until recently, my adult dreams, while nonetheless vivid, historically have been boring and/or stressful, or a frustrating theater of failures, humiliation and emotional amputations: leftover detritus from my work day; simple tasks I try and try to complete but cannot finish; baseballs I continue to swing at and miss; people who, for one reason or another, leave me in the dust. Taken together, it sounds like I’m a candidate for a series of vigorous therapy sessions, but as someone who spends a significant amount of my waking life processing my waking life, I’ve come to embrace the drab utility of my dream world as an extension of my over-analytical personality, and every now and then something interesting happens in there and I have something to talk about the next morning. Lately, it’s all been interesting. In the absence of regular socializing, dreams have turned into cheap entertainment, a place to travel without restrictions, and as a family we share them with one another regularly. Sometimes our dreams work their way into our running dialogue; we continue to reference, for instance, what is now known as my “cat raccoon” dream, in which our cat Cinder turned into a raccoon that still looked like Cinder and suddenly possessed the ability to walk upright on her two hind legs. I could elaborate, but none of it would make much sense and there’s only so much tolerance others have for a deep dive into a dream that wasn’t their own.

Have you noticed a similar shift in your dream world? Apparently, it’s a thing. There’s mounting evidence that suggests the pandemic has rewired our brains – maybe permanently – and it’s affecting our subconscious, too. In October 2020, Scientific American published an article on this very topic, which the author called a “dream surge,” and it’s happening all over the globe: People are dreaming more, and our dreams are noticeably weirder. Which explains why my mind recently took me to an interactive art installation in the high desert outside of Boise, a pseudo-violent mixed-media happening involving smashed Coca-Cola bottles from the ’70s and fresh human blood, where I kept pulling tiny shards of glass from the bottom of my bare feet as I walked around encountering ghosts from my recent past. While the article helps explain the oddity and intensity of this dream in the context of my typical REM activity, the notion that our dreams are suddenly stranger merely scratches the surface of what researchers are discovering about our brains’ altered sleep states during the pandemic. One sentence in particular sticks out: “Two other widely claimed dream functions are extinguishing fearful memories and simulating social situations.” I can’t say I’ve had much experience with the former, but when it comes to “simulating social situations,” my dreaming brain just keeps dropping me down in the middle of the action, and I’m thrilled to be there for a change.

Having moved during the pandemic to a sleepy suburb with little in the way of an established social network, we are currently far removed from the action. Some days it feels like that part of my life is dead; that is, until I get on a plane to Boise and I’m right back in the middle of it. Here in Hudson, we have to start over in many ways, but do I even want to? We’ve made some good friends and we get out of the house a bit, but I’ve mentioned several times to several people that we’re simply borrowing Hudson for the school system, and it’s doubtful we’ll stay here after Magnolia enters adulthood and my parents pass on. Hopefully it’s a long time coming with the latter, but in the meantime, I don’t know if I’ll ever make the effort to rebuild what we had — and still have – in Boise, much less call this place home. Home, after all, is wherever my people are; it’s more a state of mind than a zip code, and anyway, the world is too big to stay in one place for too long.

Even if you aren’t dreaming more, it’s likely you’re sleeping more, and there’s a reason for that, too: The world is edgy and exhausting right now, and your brain is sick of dealing so it’s telling your body to shut down. Humans have something called a “surge capacity,” a threshold for managing short-term calamities that have a defined beginning and end, but a pandemic does not have a start/stop button – at some point it is, then at some point it isn’t; it’s not like a blizzard where you can prepare, endure and clean up the mess, then put it behind you in tidy emotional fashion. In the absence of a discernible end – we’re stuck indefinitely on “endure” – we get “resilience fatigue,” a term used to describe why, when we keep on keeping on without knowing how long the race is, we end up feeling more pooped than we would if we were sprinting toward a predetermined finish line. The lesson here seems to be, even if you avoid the plague, it’s still gonna get you one way or another, if not your body then your mind. I haven’t lost mine yet, but I’m fortunate to have people in my spaceship to prop me up, and vice versa. Erica and I have been hanging out a lot more, and by that I mean we’re in the same room together more. We’ve always had a strong gravitational pull toward each other, but lately, with the weight of winter weighing heavier, that pull has been tugging like a rare-earth magnet. Our life together has been one long waltz, and sometimes that dance means sitting in the same room with computers on our laps, head-down in our work with the hi-fi helping us through an unforgiving February weekday. It’s not a concert hall, and it’s far removed from Vienna, but it’s good all the same. It’s called getting by, and this half-extrovert is grateful for the company.

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