Pokemon GO!

(Wednesday, September 7, 2016)

I am at a large retreat center with coworkers. The property slopes into a long oval lake or pond. The atmosphere is foggy and grey. Every bit of the soil is covered by brilliant green turf, like a golf course. (Just as in waking life, this is very upsetting to me. I have seen shocking maps of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, which is caused by fertilizer and chemicals flowing in from the Mississippi River. When I drive through my newly-gentrified neighborhood, the perfect, weedless green lawns make me heart-sick, even angry. I am just fine with dandelions and creeping charlie.)

Everyone in the dream is working an app on their cell phones, me included. In one scene, Cullan and I are sitting in the back seat of a car (am I a child too?) and he demonstrates the functions of the app to me. Presumably Pokemon. I hold my phone in my left hand and a young boy’s sandal in my right. Even the sandal is running the Pokemon app on its sole (soul).

In another scene of the dream I am sitting in a room with my coworker Michelle as she trains her new hire. (In waking life, as in the dream, Michelle is morbidly obese. She has a kind, generous temperament, but it is obvious that the stresses of her job as Director of Communications are causing physical damage and great danger.)

I decide I have had enough. I cannot live in this culture any longer, with its toxic, fake green grass and its destructive work demands. I grab a bag of bread slices that others intend to put in the garbage, but I plan to salvage and feed to the birds. I head out the door. A shadow anxiety arises and I am afraid to scatter the bread crumbs till I have walked far away from the “monoculture” (fields without wildness).

Day notes:

As I age I feel more and more at home with spiritually-focused people and ideas. Less so with the capitalist, patriarchal, material world. I don’t even feel comfortable calling that world “real” any longer.

There is a Pokemon spot across the street from our house, at the edge of Circle Park. When we moved into the house 18 years ago, we found a young boy’s sandal. It still hangs in the garage on a nail.