I woke up from a recent nightmare…to find myself back in the other one. Let me explain. 

The dream was curiously simple and devoid of detail. Some oppressive pain was building within me. Like a pressure cooker it was mounting, my distress growing. Yet it was an emotional pain, a mixture of dread and fear and general heartbreak. Nonspecific. No cause and no object. But in the nightmare, it seemed to grow in magnitude and intensity until I was almost obliterated. That’s it. And it’s particularly hard to describe, because dreams are full of details, invariably symbolic. Not to mention action, also symbolic.

And the minute I woke at 4 AM half of the dream seemed to become utterly real. The nightmare pain felt like an intensification of what has been going on already. Something like this has been just under the emotional surface for months. And the take away from this particular dream? Tune in, know what’s happening and remember you are not alone.

To experience the longest day of the year in lockdown seems a bit strange. It has been our annual ritual to be in Britain this time of year. I have memories of coming home from a play at Stratford and looking up at the sky above my cousin’s house to see light at 11 PM. This year we were supposed to board a ship on Monday at Le Havre, then spend about a week decompressing from friends, family and my usual hyper excited romp through West End theater. Anyway, none of these distractions. This year we stay home and experience the summer solstice from our deck.

Which means experiencing everything else. Jane is quite worried about the virus. San Francisco has good leadership and an educated populace, which has people wearing facemasks almost everywhere. Which has kept the total deaths since February down to all of 43. But all this is about to change. The infection rate is exploding in some California counties. San Francisco, an urban island in a suburban sea, can’t very well pull up the drawbridges.

And there seems to be something about the day-to-day threat of a very nasty virus that does wear down the spirit. Every trip, even the small ones, seems tinged with menace. This is no way to live. 

A family grocer at the bottom of our hill, where I have been shopping for many years, has become a no-go zone. I made a brief early-morning sortie there about three weeks ago, executing Jane’s shopping list within less than 15 minutes. There was plenty of help. The store now only admits three or four customers at a time. So I had my 15 minutes of saying hello to the old gang. Then I had 15 days of vaguely watching out for the telltale cough, headache, or whatever is about to happen. I wasn’t worried, or so I kept telling myself, quietly watching the days pass. It’s like that.

And this is no way to live. I am a privileged, sheltered person who has the means to keep myself far from the viral action. Still, there is fear. And one also picks up the other fear, the general fear that comes of opening American’s wounds. Which is speaking from experience, can be dangerous. But also necessary. Scary things are happening. But good things are happening too. Still, there are those desperate moments in the middle of the night. Anger at the headlines. Fear of the headlines. It all gets to me at times. It all gets to all of us.

Jane has a wondrous and simple plan. Find a day next week and drive to Half Moon Bay. In half an hour we can be truly somewhere else. And that is the reality that one can easily miss. I haven’t been somewhere else in an awfully long time. I haven’t been out of my neighborhood, with one exception, in more than three months. Enough already.