Wednesday, April 22, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon In the PINES By T. Lee Brown Connecting in the weirdness In addition to earning a handsome salary with robust benefits as a free- lance writer*, I do some coaching, readings, and cre- ativity guidance for folks around the U.S. and UK. In the last few weeks, friends and clients have brought up the strange reconnecting brought about by the Recent Weirdness, or RW. (I can9t bear to call it C19 or come with a new corona pun). Some of it9s literal: long- lost pals seek each other out on social media. Distant cousins gather for Zoom dance parties. Artists and writers delve into National Letter-Writing Month, plas- tering envelopes with good- ies from The Portland Stamp Company, sending them out to Instagram followers in far-off lands. But some RW connect- ing is more mysterious. Confined to their homes, stripped of the busywork and socializing that keeps them perpetually distracted and striving, the newly unemployed tune into their inner life. In the uncertain quietude, they sense the con- nections rippling through an unseen, etheric realm of visions, meditations and intuitions. Dreams become colorful and intense. Some people feel volcanic like Belknap Crater or Mount Saint Helens, their sleeping minds erupting with the hot magma of dreams. Some reasons are obvi- ous: following an evening of dystopic Netflix viewings, peppered with news alerts on their phones, stressed-out sleepers wander post-apoca- lyptic dreamscapes, chased by monsters from the id. Old traumas re-emerge, attended by new worries. With no alarm clock to force people out of bed and resume the day-to-day motions of pro- ductivity, they have the lux- ury of dream recall. Experts deconstruct this into mechanisms that sound rational and scientific. Here is how the sleeping mind plays out its daytime anxiet- ies, they say. Here is a sim- plistic explanation for why the dreaming mind brings a certain person back into our waking consciousness. But many experiences defy such explanations. A local woman finds herself receiving messages from the deceased loved one of a newish friend. The mes- sages make no sense to the woman; some seem down- right silly. But the friend immediately knows what the dead loved one is talking about. Each message cor- responds to something con- crete from real life. When one person fol- lows Alice down the rabbit- hole of sleep, they find their estranged sister waiting every night. Another finds her dreamworld visited by an old flame. Friends who haven9t spoken in years reach out simultaneously on their phones. A man who avoids superstitious, New Age claptrap finds him- self pulled into conversa- tion with the ghost of his mother. What to make of all this? A Jungian might say that our collective unconscious has been wildly aroused by the RW. An old-school ratio- nalist might assert,