Night Swimming

(Pat Blashill has retreated to the hills to grow a beard and argue the merits of The Moody Blues. While he's gone, the EuroTron 869 will be posting some classic moments from the golden years of Euro Like Me, including this gem from January 2004.....)

Snowy holiday with Anette and Adinah and pretty much all of Anette’s family in Austria. Except that holidays are more hectic now that we’ve got a little girl to take care of—she hasn’t been sleeping so well, what with different beds and and different faces and new foods (chicken! Sugar cookies!) and jet lag and so much silence out here in the country life.

The quiet nights have maybe been playing with my mind too. I’ve had really vivid celebrity dreams: I was hanging with Prince one night, and doing deals (obliquely) with James Truman the next. The other night, I dreamt I was with my once-lover K., and she suggested we just swim home. We must have been across some ocean from home—maybe she was suddenly here with me in Europe. But her idea was we should both just walk into the ocean, and as she explained, it’s a well-known fact that if you do this, and then just be still and let the ocean current carry you, you will float home in about three hours or so. ‘Of course,’ I thought, that sounds like a relaxing way to get back Home. Because in dream logic it made perfect sense that we could float across the Atlantic (and later when I woke, I found myself wanting to find out if anyone had ever swam or floated across any ocean).

But this was one of those meta dreams, where you start to think outside of the dream too, and I started to question this whole ocean floating deal. ‘Surely,’ I thought, `It would take us longer than three hours to get back there, to home, and hey, maybe crossing a fucking ocean like this isn’t even possible, and oh, am I in a dream here?’

Still in the dream, but thinking like a wakeful man at the same time, I started to think, ‘She doesn’t mean to get home at all, she means to kill herself.’

I woke up thinking K. has a death wish.