And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
On Week 2 of our shared Covid, my daughter Olivia came out to the kitchen and asked me, “Are you having weird dreams? Is Covid giving us weird dreams?”
I looked at her and laughed. Covid or not, I always get weird dreams. But yes, they’d increased since coming down with this damned thing. I’ve been dreaming about babies, lots of babies, who are all Olivia, even when there’s more than one in a dream, and even when the adult Olivia is standing beside me. I’ve been dreaming of Michael, I know it’s Michael, but when I see him in the dream, he looks like my first husband. Eeeek!
And I dreamt I was asked to guest-teach a math class at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
I did a little research to answer Olivia’s question, and yes, it does seem that Covid gives people strange dreams. I told her we should just enjoy them while they last. They’re not nightmares. They’re just…weird.
But if she hadn’t asked me, I don’t know that I would have known any different from my every night life.
I dream in color. I dream long, often waking up in the middle, going to get a drink of water, coming back to bed, and then resuming where I left off. I sometimes wake up still speaking the words I was saying in the dream. I used to sleep walk, and after Michael’s death, I found myself doing it again. One memorable night, I woke up just as I was opening our front door to go out into the darkness. I must have walked down two flights of stairs. And…um…I don’t wear pajamas when I sleep. Luckily, the air was cold and it woke me up.
For a while after Michael’s death, the dreams got really strange, and so did the few moments after waking. I would look toward my alarm clock to see what time it was, and instead of seeing numbers, I saw little painted pictures. After looking away and then back, they became numbers again. I kind of miss those pictures.
I also lost orientation in my room. Waking up, I swore that someone had moved my bed. It was turned sideways and I couldn’t figure out how to get out. Eventually, the orientation corrected itself.
Now, obviously, and with retrospect, I can see with my writer’s eye for metaphor and symbolism that my dreams were showing me that I felt totally disoriented in my life. Everything had changed, even as the physical things in my life were still the same – my home, my furniture, and so on. I told someone that it was kind of like the cliché you hear, about the rug being pulled out from under you. Only for me, it was the entire floor. I was standing in midair, I knew my floor was somewhere, but I just couldn’t find it.
The dream, if it was a dream, I remember most from that time was waking up and looking over at Michael’s empty side of the bed. The wall just beyond the bed had a big hole in it, and inside, there was a balding man sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper. He looked up at me, smiled, and waved. I waved back and returned to sleep. When I woke, the hole was gone.
I know without a doubt that this was Michael’s father. I never met him, as he died before I met Michael, but I’ve seen pictures. And it felt like he was telling me Michael was all right. In the hospital after the accident, and in hospice, Michael told me he was seeing and speaking to his father. Seeing him in my wall (which is weird, I know) reassured me. I wrote a poem about this that is included in my new book, The Birth Of A Widow.
And now…possibly Covid dreams. Teaching a math class? At UW-Madison?
Math has long defeated me. I use a calculator for everything, and often, I tap in the wrong numbers. When I was a student at Madison, I took Theory of Arithmetic to satisfy my math requirement, and I only barely got a passing grade.
Yet my oldest daughter, Katie, is a math whiz and teaches math at the University of Louisiana – Lafayette. She didn’t get those genes from me.
In the dream, I was led into a huge lecture hall, just stuffed with students. I asked the person who led me in about a textbook, so I would at least have something to refer to. “Oh, no,” she said. “There’s no textbook. We just want you to teach.”
Okiedokie then.
As I approached the front of the hall, which had a raised stage, one of my writing mentors, Ellen Hunnincutt, who has also passed on, leaped up ahead of me, along with Kelly Cherry, also gone, who was one of my writing teachers at UW – Madison. They were dressed in old-fashioned clothing, Ellen in a tiered navy blue dress with a long string of pearls hanging down to her knees, and Kelly in a black flapper dress, with a huge hat that shadowed her face. But I could see her smile.
“What are you two doing here?” I asked.
“We’re here to cheer you on,” Ellen said.
Okiedokie then.
On this platform was a huge half-circle desk, with the opening facing the back of the stage. The desk was covered completely with those fuzzy black squares that jewelry is displayed in. There must have been over 500 fuzzy black squares. And in each one were neat little objects. Dice. Curtain rings. Seeds. Actual rings – jewelry. And, amazingly, the little pictures I used to see in my alarm clock. There was too much to take in.
“What am I supposed to do with all this?” I asked. “What does this have to do with math?”
“You’ll figure it out,” Kelly said.
I turned to face the class. There were so many students, and they were all watching me. I introduced myself, “Hi. I’m Kathie Giorgio, and I don’t know anything about math.”
They just kept watching.
“Okay,” I said. “Open your notebooks.”
They did. Off to the side, Ellen and Kelly shimmied.
“I want you to write down a list of the first numbers that come to your heads,” I said. “But write them as words, not numbers.”
And then I woke up, laughing. It’s a wonderful thing, to wake up laughing. And everything in my room was where it was supposed to be.
Later that day, in our family chat online, my daughter Katie put a math problem.
(5 – 2)² + 8 ÷ 4 =
Everyone else in the chat got 11. I got 14.
I thought squaring 3 meant you multiplied 3 by 2. So 6. 6 + 8 = 14. And then I couldn’t figure out how to divide 14 by 4.
“No,” Katie said. “To square, you multiply it by itself. So 3 x 3 = 9.”
Okiedokie then. But I still don’t see where the 11 comes from. And this is why you should never ask me to teach a math class.
Though I’d sure like to know what I had them do after I had them write numbers as words. And it was a delight to wake up laughing.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
