Worms or the bears came down into the valley

Today, I was going to write about worms. Everyone has sat in the window seat of plane looked down at the clouds, through the ice blue sky to the cities below and realized that their place in things is limited. Or they have sat in front of the ocean in silence, watching the tide come in and out or listened to a slow rain tapping its way along the roof. I don't know whether these moments bring people a profound sense of peace, or profound sense of dread at the vastness of the world and our fairly limited part in its continuance. If I'm honest, it really depends on the day, which makes the whole thing even more confusing.

That's why I wanted to write about worms. Today, after the rains all the worms crawled up to the cement to die. They lined up in rows on the long cold surface and spent their final minutes escaping the flood only to die in a place rarely seen, a new world.

I've been having a recurring dream lately. I'm the sort of person who doesn't remember dreams, and I've never had a recurring dream before. In the dream, I'm traveling in an extreme wilderness towards the top of a distant mountain. In the dream, like in ever dream, I'm traveling with people who are some vague amalgamation of all the people that I know. And in every dream we reach a point where the wilderness turns dangerous. It's some sort of valley where hundreds of bears are fishing for salmon. And because its' a dream a portion of this valley is patrolled by dinosaurs. Once, I got the people in the dream to travel with me beyond the point of safety. And when I woke up we were running from these monstrous bears that were going to catch us. And here's the part that I don't understand. Every time I have this dream, no matter who I am traveling with, I always reach the signpost where the valley turns dangerous, and I beg them all to come with me. I plead for them to travel through the valley and towards the mountain, knowing that we may all die.

I've never put much stock in dreams. Perhaps because I don't do it often, or don't remember it often. Freud kind of spoiled it for us all. Here's a guess, like a traveler in the night sky looking at a large island of lights in the darkness below, "that's Kansas City," someone says. Who the hell knows?

I think perhaps that the reason that I want to climb the mountain and to walk through the valley of the shadow of death is to experience something firsthand. It seems to me that a good deal of the modern life that we've crafted for ourselves is contingent upon the industriousness of others. I watch people on television performing an act. The actors and writers all busily going about the business of keeping me entertained. Are we Rome? While I sit and watch or listen or read and do nothing myself. I watch all of these busy people as far away as if I was traveling in plane overhead through acres of darkness. I suspect that when I sleep my sub-conscious craves for something real, something that is uniquely mine, a new world.

But then again, and I mean this, perhaps it's just because I've got such a deep seated fear of being eaten by bears and the explanation is just psychological fluff piled on top. Because we need an explanation for everything now where do we go to when we've killed off all the mysteries of our childhood? We look at the stars, I suppose, and reflect on what a small part we play in this dark, cold, and ever expanding universe.