The Most Incompetently Laid Plans of Mice and Men

It’s ended up being kind of a strange weekend. Saturday was fine—I visited A. at the medical facility, and didn’t do much else. A perfect day! And I got irises. Things began to veer off course on Sunday.

One of LaBerge’s suggestions for learning to have lucid dreams is to wake up one hour earlier than usual, stay awake for 30 to 60 minutes, then go back to sleep. Since more is always more, I woke up TWO hours earlier than usual, and then stayed up for about SIX hours.

Then I was determined to get those two hours of sleep I felt I still had coming, and lay in bed for some hours hoping to fall asleep, but never did. Finally I gave up and proceeded with my day, but by then it was pretty much four p.m.

Tom came over in the evening and we watched Sean Penn’s movie Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer of the same name, a true story about a young man, Chris McCandless, who breaks free from his family and privileged life just after he graduates from college. He starts by contributing his entire law school fund—$24,000—to a charity. Then he abandons his car, burns his paper money, and embarks on a series of exhilarating and brave adventures, ending up in Alaska, where he dies, unable to cross back over the river that is now a rushing flood, so different from the tame aspect it displayed when the young man easily crossed it months earlier.

(I read the book, and if I recall correctly, there was actually a bridge not far off, but this isn’t mentioned in the movie.)

I was wondering how Penn was going to sustain our interest over two and a half hours or more in a story that basically has one character, but he did it brilliantly. It’s a wonderful movie, and Emile Hirsch is perfectly cast in the lead role. The scenery is gorgeous, too. Songs by Eddie Vedder.

I’m not one hundred percent sure I think it was so great of McCandless to leave his family to worry about him for so long, only to get the most heartbreaking of news in the end. I think a person who wants to be a free spirit and have a genuine experience might also have found a smidgen of compassion for people he knew must be frantic over his whereabouts and to have put their minds at ease, even if they weren’t great parents.

While watching the movie, I ate a sufficient number of chocolate-covered almonds to make it impossible to go to sleep until three or four a.m. Plus, LaBerge’s MILD technique, which I was practicing faithfully, can tend to wake me up. I’ll get the hang of it. It’s a process. (Though I did have, for the third time in four days, a dream that pertained to flying, so it was worth it.)

By the way, he (you know which he) mentions in passing that once you learn to be lucid while dreaming, you might be able to be lucid while NOT dreaming, but asleep, a state that is supposed to be akin to a very deep meditative state.

He also points out more than once—he makes a point of this in all three of his books that I have read or am reading—that even our waking lives are constructed by our brains out of the sensory input we receive, just as our dreams are constructed out of a much more restricted cache of sensory inspiration.

We create our waking lives out of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, other physical sensations, and mental factors—memories, thoughts, wishes, etc. When we dream, we do the same, minus nearly every kind of raw material other than mental factors. That’s why dreams are so unstable. They are not drawing on objective reality.

But while waking life does draw on objective reality, it is not itself objective reality per se. We make it with our minds, and could potentially wake up from our waking lives the same way we “wake” from our dreams into lucidity. A lucid dream is to a non-lucid dream as (what?) is to our waking lives. One reason people meditate is to try to have a direct experience of that what.

I had meant to go to Rainbow yesterday, but since I got up so late, I didn’t have time and had to defer that trip to today—Labor Day. You can’t go to Rainbow on Labor Day, nor on Gay Pride Day. (You can go on Independence Day, if you want.)

Well, that isn’t quite correct: You can finalize your shopping list, assemble your empty bulk food containers (for spinach, strawberries, carob chips, beans, walnuts), get your second sturdy Jandd grocery pannier out of the closet (after removing the spare helmet that lives in it), take out the trash and compost and recycling for that clean slate feeling, wash any dishes that may be in the sink, sharpen the big knife, sharpen the little knife, check your bike tires for pieces of embedded glass, pump up the same bike tires, meditate, get dressed, put on face sunblock, put on arm sunblock, close and latch the various windows, put on your helmet and bike gloves, and pedal over to Rainbow—you may certainly do all of that, and I did, but on Labor Day, you may not enter Rainbow and buy groceries.

I considered proceeding to Whole Foods, but just didn’t feel like it, so I must now think of a Plan B. In any event, I’m going to make bread, but my kneading career, such as it was—I can't say I had really mastered the technique—is over. I think shoulder arthritis or something is upon me, and the last time I kneaded, it hurt quite severely, so I’m going to let the food processor handle that part.

It’s a beautiful, idyllic, sunny day today. With so many people out of town, it almost seemed there were more cyclists than motorists in the Mission today.