Q: A number of years ago I dreamed I was swimming with the great writer Mary Oliver and she swam directly over to me and said “I have something for you in my hands underwater. Take them”–I then woke up, whatever she had been holding an eternal mystery. So I have two questions: 1. What did Mary Oliver have in her hands? And 2. Why is it that we have some dreams, sleeping dreams, that feel more real than anything, even the most beautiful or traumatic events in real life? I don’t know what to make of it.

A: I’m sorry but there’s nothing more boring than hearing about a human dream. My eyes almost dried up and fell out of my head reading your question. Don’t believe me? Watch another human while they’re sleeping. Everything that’s going on in their little human peabrain is all about them, every thought completely internal, nothing of you in it even, never mind the rest of the galaxy outside their little human peabrain to be of interest to anyone but them, the dreamer.

None of which is to say the dreams of a Galaxy Brain wouldn’t be interesting to a human, and I refer only to night dreams, as of course a Galaxy Brain’s day dreams would explode your little human peabrain into tiny bits of pea protein.

So to set the dream scene.

When I was a young Galaxy Brain I was taught a prayer to recite every night at bedtime. I don’t know why because we weren’t a particularly religious family, although I suppose my uncle did want to be a United Church minister. Also my deceased father had been quite religious so we still said grace at dinner and went to church. But my mother wasn’t religious at all and only went to church because my father had.

Also church was good networking if you were involved in politics, which she was.

This meant we went to Sunday school, too, but only because the networking was more politically effective if you dragged your two youngest daughters along (my older brother and sister were refusing to go, so it was up to my younger sister and I to help in our mother’s preoccupation).

Fortunately, I quite liked Sunday school because the teacher was MOTHERLY and NOT INTERESTED AT ALL IN POLITICS.

Also she put up with atheist girls and didn’t try to dissuade us from our non-belief, other than suggesting we not be little shits about it, so advising my friend, Barb, that writing obscene messages in church bibles and hymn books was hurtful to older people who might well be atheists, too, but come to church for the community it offers.

Here’s the prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Grace was:

Bless O Lord this food in our house
And us in thy service – amen.

Later in Home Ec, which we travelled to a rougher school in a tougher neighbourhood to not enjoy – at all – the girls had a different grace:

Rub a dub dub
Let’s eat the grub.

They also enjoyed torturing me, particularly, by sticking their dirty fingers into batter, licking the (raw!) batter off, and re-dipping their dirty, now licked, fingers and doing it again. This was circa the early ‘70s, the long suffering teacher retired and returned to the classroom to teach grade 7 and 8 girls more suited to welding and bricklaying, how to cook and sew, like we were going to grow up to be homesteading pioneers and not working stiffs just like the boys taking shop and learning how to build knife holders and repair small engines.

(Although I have yet to meet a man who could do either any better than me, and who can’t cook reasonably well in spite of no Home Ec, but none have known how to sew, and in fact seem quite terrified of sewing machines, so I suppose this mindlessly sexist division of schooling was even more unfair to boys than it was to girls.)

Also, tragically, because I didn’t have a clue what was cool and what wasn’t until it was too late, I wore the overalls I’d made in grade school Home Ec on stage at the end of grade nine to accept the English award I shared with my friend Barb, which even Barb had advised against, no doubt fearing for her reputation as well as mine, but I was undeterred.

My older sister and mother would later have a fight over this fashion and social faux pas, my mother eventually conceding the point she’d failed me by forgetting it was grade nine, high school, not elementary school where I was already in dodgy territory, having worn a matching plaid pants, coat, and tam to school in grade six, but confessed she honestly just thought the overalls were “cute”.

(I went to an elementary school where almost every kid was streamed out of academics and into trades – which in those days included cosmetology – a rough school in a tough neighbourhood, where jeans and tee shirts were the rule once girls were allowed to wear them. Showing up to it in a plaid outfit from head to toe as I did in grade six was one of those miscalculations in life that’s stayed with me forever, mostly because one of the roughest and toughest girls, who would go on from starring in wet tee shirt contests to working the catwalk guiding molten steel through the plant, and who’d never spoken to me before this fashion and social faux pas of epic proportions, took me aside and advised me to never wear the offending outfit to school again, which I did not.)

So I said my nightly prayer armed with additional information provided to me by my ever helpful older sister, who warned if I were to die in a dream, I would die in real life. So if I was in danger of being killed by a clown in one, I should crouch down, shut my eyes really tight, cover my head, and concentrate with everything I had on waking myself up.

That’s when the killer clown dream started.

First an escaped clown from a jack-in-the-box (pointy hat, one piece white suit with red polka dots)

would hop into my room, pull me out of bed, and hop me over to the top of the stairs. Then it would instruct me to hop to the middle, then the bottom.

So dangerous, but I had to do it. There was no going back. Only forward.

(It wasn’t just hopelessly dangerous, hopping from the top to the middle stair, it was drilled into us in waking life to take one stair at a time after my brother tried taking two, tripped, and put his head through the wall, causing Gordie to have to come over from next door to fix it, which he seemed quite happy to do but my mother always acted like Gordie having to come over to fix something was the worst part of it being broken – even by my brother’s head.)

And of course the hops were in slow motion, lightly touching the middle, then through the air to the bottom. I was terrified but I never stumbled or got hurt because there was worse waiting for me and I had to get through the first level, the hops, to part two of the dream.

Video game designers should consult tail end boomers more often than they do.

Once at the bottom of the stairs it would nod sternly and I’d have to go to the top of the basement stairs and make one long hop to the bottom, where the sad faced clown was waiting in his tattered hat and shabby coat and big floppy shoes to lead me further into our cold, damp, dark basement.

The basement in the dream was our actual basement, too, so terrifying. During the day my older sister and brother had me convinced it was where Bloody Bones lived, and so when Gram would tell me to get something from the pantry, which was just at the bottom of the stairs, not all the way into the basement, I’d be super quick to avoid waking Bloody Bones, who was just around the corner in the closet with my father’s WWII uniform.

The worst was when Gram would change her mind and tell me to put it back and get something else, Bloody Bones having no doubt picked up on my scent from the first trip.

Fortunately, Bloody Bones didn’t exist in my dreams, just real life.

Even now I don’t like to go down basements when I’m alone in a house. Although ours was especially creepy with a wood board covering a hole around a pipe going to the sewer. Once, when just my younger sister was still at home, my mother away on a trip, she went down the basement to do laundry and the wall around the window opposite was covered in flies. So she backed up the stairs and ran next door to get David, one of Gordie’s twin sons I was best friends with growing up, and who would freak out over the sight of an earwig (especially after that Twilight Zone episode where the earwig crawls into the guy’s ear while he’s sleeping and he goes through the horror of it eating its way through his head and out the other ear ONLY TO FIND OUT IT LAID EGGS IN HIS HEAD ON THE WAY!) – so I was a little annoyed with her for involving him, but I probably would’ve done the same in her shoes.

Anyway, David came over with my younger sister and they both tiptoed down the stairs. Suddenly David saw what he thought was a rat by the board covering the hole around the sewer pipe. Except it wasn’t moving. So they crept closer, thinking it was dead, only to discover it was way more than dead – it was just its imprint left behind!

THE RAT WAS NOW THE FLIES COVERING THE WALL AROUND THE WINDOW OPPOSITE!

So they both backed up the stairs and ran to our other neighbour’s house, Gordie not being home, and got Lawrence, also of The Greatest Generation, to deal with the situation, which he did by somehow, miraculously, opening a basement window that probably hadn’t been opened since it was installed sometime in the late 1940s.

But back to my clown dream.

The sad clown would have a list of challenges for me to fulfill (I blame a competitive, as opposed to cooperative, school system for all of this, by the way) except no matter how hard I tried the sad clown would always say I failed. And when I’d try to read the challenges on the chalkboard he was holding, the letters would dissolve before I could figure out the words they were spelling. I knew he was cheating but I also knew I wouldn’t be able to pass the challenges anyway, the stress of my life being on the line too much, and so not being able to think clearly.

(After I had kids I would imagine – WHILE AWAKE – this happening with my kids’ lives on the line. Why?! Is it not enough to catastrophize about their survival chances just going about their normal every day lives in this galaxy?! No one told me about this curse of motherhood, although I suppose if they had there’d be three fewer Galaxy Brain offspring in it.)

That’s when I would realize I was wasting precious time trying to pass challenges I was doomed to fail, and so should do what my older sister had advised – now! before it was too late and I was dead! – crouch down, shut my eyes really tight, cover my head, and concentrate with everything I had on waking up.

And every time, it worked, I would wake up.

Then I would go to my mother’s room, wake her up, and ask if I could get into bed with her. And to her everlasting credit, she always said yes. Annoyed, for sure, but yes, and even though it was a double bed (oh wow… I just remembered my mother slept on my father’s side of it…) I had to stay way over as close to the edge as possible without falling over it. But anything was better than a no, because when my mother said no, that was it, all hope of a yes gone because she never – ever – changed a no to a yes.

(If you’re a parent reading this, change a no to a yes at least once.)

Eventually, though, there came a time when I would start to have the dream but instead of going to the top of the stairs with the jack-in-the-box clown, I immediately crouched down, shut my eyes really tight, covered my head, and concentrated with everything I had on waking up. And it worked, I woke up. Like Dorothy clicking her heels together to wake up, safe at home in boring old black and white Kansas, I’d always had it in me to tell those two clowns, no, I don’t have to do what you want, pass your made up challenges, just to go on living. I can wake myself up instead.

(I only ever had the killer clowns dream once in adulthood. It was while I was at university, living in residence, and it was as terrifying as ever. I had to get up and go to the common room, where someone, I forget now who, was up reading – not for school but for pleasure – and seeming like such a responsible adult in charge of her own life I remember deciding, yes, that’s what I want to be, too, and I went back to my room, to sleep, and that was the end of the killer clowns dream.)

Anyway, all my dreams still take place in the house and neighbourhood I grew up in, but the basement, if it’s in the dream at all, is now a wonderland of underground treasures, a dream come true for the real estate agent of a quirky and fabulously wealthy client looking to buy just such a novelty. This, I suspect, the result of my mother eventually selling our house for a song to an amicably divorced mother of a girl and a boy whose husband had recently realized he was gay, and who set about immediately repairing its foundation, replacing its windows and doing all the things Gordie would happily have done had my mother allowed it. More recently, after the death of my mother, a hint of her perfume is everywhere in the house of my dreams – White Linen by Estee Lauder – a reminder I’m an adult now, and wearing a plaid outfit out and about in the world might be just the ticket she’d advise to free myself from caring what other people think, because honestly, if I didn’t care what others think I’d hardly have a care in the world.

Which brings me back around to your boring dream about the great writer Mary Oliver giving you presents under water and what it means. I have no idea. Your dreams are yours, all about you, a world entirely of your own making within your little human peabrain. But if I had to guess about your waking life, I’d have to conclude it’s a wonder of wonderful adult wonderfulness.