The Rembis Report And Other Fascinating Topics - Volume CXXXII

When taking into consideration every possible activity that I participate in, I would have to say that the thing I do most is think.

It should be no surprise that you, too, and everyone else in the world, and every animal on the planet, does a fair amount of thinking, all day long, every day. But do you think about what you are thinking about? Is thinking something that you actively participate in, or are your thoughts more random and scattered? What do animals think about other than safety, food, and sex, if they think about all of those to begin with? Do they make plans? They build dens and nests, just like we build houses. Caterpillars wrap themselves up in their own silk and emerge as butterflies. Is that something they think about? Or is it just what they do?

We can never know.

What is a thought? Where do they come from? Sometimes they just show up, out of nowhere. You get an idea and you can’t let it go. How big is a thought? Are some ideas literally bigger than others? The smallest unit of measure is a Planck length, and those are pretty darn small. They are even smaller than quarks, which make up atoms.

A thought can not be measured. It can only be supposed. So, just for the sake of argument, let us suppose that a thought, while it can not be discovered and remains unseen (yet, we know exists), could be an electronic signal at the subatomic scale that only exists within living tissue, like a brain. If so, perhaps we could explain microbial intelligence. Those little guys are thinking about something. Therefore it would not be out of the realm of possibility to suppose that a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis to a butterfly is pondering something. Maybe it is planning what it will do and where it will go when it awakes. Maybe it is wondering what it has done.

Maybe they dream, just like we do.

My brain does not shut down. I have ideas constantly. They pile upon each other. Story after story after plan after idea after memory after newer and fresher ideas, all day long.

You have heard people ask interviewees “What keeps you up at night?” My answer is “Nothing, I sleep like a rock.” I really do. I slept through a fire alarm once. But my brain does not shut down. I still have thoughts. I dream vividly.

It is nothing I can explain. As far as how dreams work, anyone else’s interpretation is no better than my own. For a while now, I have been thinking that alternate, or parallel universes, actually exist, and dreams are nothing more than manifestations of our lives in those places.

I may have mentioned this before. Or, maybe I mentioned it in some other reality and I am recalling it via spooky action at a distance, almost qualifying proof of quantum entanglement. Or maybe I have thought about this idea so much that it is now a well-defined theory to me.

I wonder if those places I dream about are real. To explain this in greater detail, I will henceforth refer to my true life, the one where I am awake, and know I exist, and send out a Rembis Report every week, and you have opened it, and are reading this, as “waking life.” I will also refer to the places I dream about as “Dreamlands.” This is only for clarification to avoid confusion.

In my nightly dreams, I have what equate to real lives. I almost always dream, but I don’t always go to the same places. As far as locale is concerned, I have more than one Dreamland. There are four distinctly different places where I go. None of them exist in waking life. None of them are fantastical in any way. There is no magic. I do not fly or have super-powers or know anyone who does. My Dreamlands are American-style towns or cities, not foreign to me. There are no strange rules or languages I do not understand. My lives feel real. In two of these places I am married to my dear, sweet wife, Ellen, as in waking life. In the other two I am single. I am unsure of my age in these places. I am an adult, but do not feel 59 years old, as I am in waking life. I do not feel 59 years old at all, even here.

The places are contemporary. They do not hearken back years, nor are they flung into the future. I know different people in each one, who do not exist in waking life, but I see them in Dreamland. The same familiar people I have seen multiple times in Dreamland. Oddly, I do not remember anyone’s names upon waking. There are narratives that I can feel, but only recall bits and pieces of what we did or spoke of.

Lucid dreaming, knowing that you are in a dream while you are dreaming, has been well documented by sleep researchers. I only recall one instance where I was certain that I was experiencing the definition of lucid dreaming, but for the others in the dream, when I told them that they were a dream, they laughed.

It went like this. There is one Dreamland where I have a group of buddies I hang out with. I know them well and have seen them many times. These five guys and myself were drinking beer in a park in early evening, sitting and standing around a picnic table under a shelter, just talking and having a good time. The thought came to me that these guys were not real, that I had dreamed them up, and that I was in a dream. So, I told them that. They laughed. Somebody suggested that I was drunk. I suppose that would have been possible. I wanted to test the theory, so I asked them what my name was, and they all confirmed that I was Mike Rembis. Then I asked them what year it was. It was the same as in waking life. I asked them who the president was. They said it was Donald Trump, the same as in waking life. I tried to explain to them that I thought they were part of a parallel universe, an alternate reality, and they laughed. Then I woke up.

Was I right about that, when I told them they were part of another world? I know they were a dream as far as waking life is concerned, but do they and I exist elsewhere? In a place that I only go when I sleep and do not always remember?

In that particular Dreamland I tend to stay out at night. I am single and have a run-down house that I keep fixing. It is on a main street, but not too busy, and a busier street is a block over, where I walk over to stores to shop for groceries, although it is mostly residential. I don’t have a car. There are railroad tracks and an oil-soaked parking lot next to my house, and some trailers, where some company I work for does business. I sometimes go to check on the trailers, like I work there as a watchman or caretaker. This is a regular gig. I also have another small house a few blocks away, where I live upstairs from some people. So the other house that I fix up - I am not sure if I own it, or just work there. Sometimes, those guys, or other people are with me at the house that is being fixed up. I only recently got the apartment. I am unsure of the larger narrative.

In the other Dreamland where I am single, I am a cook at a restaurant, a dishwasher at another restaurant, and a part-time bartender at a bar where I never remember the name of it upon waking. I am not sure if it is all the same place, but the jobs are definitely separate and well-defined. This is in a rural area with mountains in the distance. I have seen it at all times of day. Sometimes I fall right asleep and the next thing I know - I am washing dishes. It’s a busy restaurant. And, it is not like I stop, and go on to another dream all the time, just dreaming of washing dishes for a few minutes. I wake up recalling the whole shift, eight full hours, taking out trash, bussing tables, pouring water from pitchers to help out the waitresses - I wake up tired, like I worked all night. Sometimes, I wake up thinking about that job, and something I missed, or need to do the next time I go there, and after a minute, I realize that was a dream.

This Dreamland also has people I know, but not from anywhere else, not waking life, not from another Dreamland. Other than the dishwashing shift at the restaurant, everything else is pretty quiet and low-key. The cooking job is easy. So is the bartending. Those shifts never get busy at all. I have a car, but I am not sure where I live. The town is in a valley with a huge bridge crossing over it. I think it is for trains. There is a casino there that I am quite familiar with. I gamble on slot machines. Poker machines. I play roulette, my favorite of live gambling in waking life. It is a nice casino. Other than the constant dings and trills of the slots, there are no big crowds. I am not sure of music. It has nice carpets and women like to walk barefoot there. The main slots area is three steps down into an oval pit with about 20 machines in the middle and the rest ring the outside walls, except for the steps. The drinks are icy and the temperature is perfect. I don’t ever recalling any big wins or heavy losses. But I have friends I know, and I like it there.

I never get the names of any of the places in my dreams either. I don’t know where they are or what to call them. They all seem to be in northern regions because sometimes I see snow, but not often. Sometimes, maybe it is a lucid decision, I look for a street sign and try to remember it, but I don’t.

I had a more detailed dream about another Dreamland last week. I have been going to this place for a long time now. I have dreamt of it for years. I have for all of these, but this place I recall dreaming many times, so I sort of have a narrative.

In this Dreamland I have a five-story yellow house. It is not a mansion. It is long and tall and has no elevator. The stairs are on an insulated back porch that is wooden and basically unfinished. You can’t call down more than two flights because nobody will hear you beyond that. The walls absorb all the sound. It is an old house. That back porch is drafty, and every landing only has a small window to look out. Every floor has windows in the main rooms, though, and every floor has the same floor plan. The fifth floor, which also has an attic space above it, has some old boxes up there. We don’t use it for anything and rarely go up there (because the steps are quite a hike), except to look out over the town once in a while. But you still get a pretty good view of from the second floor, which is where Ellen and I spend most of our time. Our bedrooms are there. The first floor is basically one big long living room and kitchen.

There are kitchen facilities, bathrooms, and bedrooms on each floor. I guess it was designed as an apartment building, but who wants to walk up all those stairs? Not us or anybody we know. There is something creepy about this place. I don’t know why we live there, or where I work. The third floor seems to be abandoned. Like we acquired it partially furnished, with closets and boxes filled with somebody else’s stuff. I go up there and sort through things once in a while. The third floor has a room with red walls, and another with pink walls. The fourth floor is completely abandoned. I don’t think we have plans for it.

Last week I dreamt that a family was moving in across the street from this house. Their house is similar to ours. We did not meet the new neighbors, but watched them from a distance, taking stock and sizing them up, just like you do in waking life. It was a family of two parents with three or four kids, and an old man. A U-Haul was backed up to the front porch and they were unloading it. An argument ensued among the family. They got loud. It was apparently about what was going where and who was in charge of directing the move. Nothing to get too excited about, but Ellen thought maybe we should call the police. I talked her out of that, because there was nothing violent happening and people argue, simple as that. Plus, do we really want to be those people who call the cops on your new neighbors before they have even completed their move into the neighborhood? No. So, we left them alone to move in and nothing happened.

Most of my dreams are typical and mundane. But they feel so real! It makes you wonder if they are.

In the Dreamland with the big yellow house we live in a larger town, that may be a city. I know the streets from driving around so much there. I can picture the grocery store. I have never been there in waking life. On one of the main streets the road curves and turns ninety degrees. At that corner is a traffic light for the street perpendicular to it, and if you get stopped at it, you end up looking right at a Les Schwab tire store. In waking life I used to go to these stores when we lived in the western U.S. This is not the only real thing from waking life that I find in Dreamland. I typically have Coca-Cola. I see CNN and The Weather Channel on TV. Cars are all the same makes and models we have here. I am not sure what I drive. The music I listen to there is the same as it is here. It is not like I am creating Dreamland, it is like it already exists.

My fourth Dreamland is the most developed of them all. I will go into greater detail on that next week. There is a lot to convey and much more I want to expand on about the process of thoughts and thinking, so I have decided to make this another multi-part series. Three parts for sure, maybe four. I don’t know yet.

You are probably wondering why I named this essay Albatross. There is a lot more to it than just the metaphor of my dreams somehow being a burden, when they are truly nothing of the sort. Our long-range flying feathered friend with the legendary wingspan serves as inspiration in many ways.

You know when you are on a long flight, and you have time to sit and stare out an airplane window? That is as close as you are ever going to get to actually being an albatross. You have time to think.

What do you suppose the birds think about on their journeys?

CLICK HERE to read Albatross - Part II

Thanks for reading.

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