Sylvia's Journal

I woke up from a deep dream exactly when it was time to ‘go to work.’ This only means going downstairs to my computer and start preparing for a phone conversation with someone in South Africa. But before I could do that I had to write down the dream.

I was in a court room that could also have been a theatre room or an old fashioned physics classroom. I had my day in court, together with Axel and a third party who I did not really recognize. His name was Jeff and he was vaguely familiar. Sometime he was present and sometime not. The courtroom was full of people I did not know, spectators I assumed. It was hard to find a place to sit, which made the uncomfortable plastic chairs look appealing. There was a woman in mini shorts; I assumed she was the judge because she took charge. She took us out in a limo. We had to visit places. Axel was still in his plastic corset and, albeit in high spirits, looked crippled even though he walked OK. I can’t remember much about this Jeff other than that he was tall and slender, healthy looking and vaguely familiar.

We had to wait for our friend Lynn from New York who was a witness. She showed up huffing and puffing and annoyed about her bus trip from Manhattan on what was a very hot and steamy day. Lynn too wore hot pants, like the judge. Lynn and I started chatting. I told her we had just come down from upper New York State ourselves where we had been in a B&B. We were reprimanded for chatting and not paying attention as this was a serious moment. A new character had entered the room (and the dream). He, or it, wore a large alligator head and stood on a high platform, like a preacher in a gothic church. I noticed that all the woodwork was painted white. He demonstrated a trick with two frogs in a cage at the foot of the elevated platform. They that had their legs tied to electrodes. The alligator man did something on one side of the cage that involved fire and water. The otherwise dead and rubbery looking frog started to pump its leg on that side; then the trick was repeated on the other side. Now everyone crowded around the cage. I tried to figure out whether the frog was real or not. There was a number stamped across his body, like you’d see on a plastic toy, indicating some manufacturing data, but the legs did move quite vigorously.

Then we were taken to a side room where there were very lifelike mannequins, like the baby dolls advertised on Facebook, lying or sitting in various positions. One was in the middle of childbirth – I gathered it was for a trial about mismanagement of delivery. In a corner was our exhibit, three life-sized rubber dolls in various positions related to our positions in the crash. I was going to be asked a question but never heard it, because I had woken up.

My waking up felt like ascending a very long and steep staircase out of the underworld. Luckily I had remembered to program the coffeemaker which had a cup of coffee ready and so helped me download the images from my head via the keyboard into my computer. Some are lingering on but the details, or what I imagine to be the glue between the various scenes, is gone.

And now I am sitting here wondering what that was all about. Maybe the crash appeared in my subconscious because I had my hair cut last night. We always talk about life, which includes husbands, children, and what happens when things go wrong. For me the ‘going wrong’ is always about the crash and then the community that rallied around us which turned it into something good. For my hairdresser what is going wrong is the economy, she is hanging on by a thread. Luckily we are not, but the dream seems to indicate that I am conscious that one more calamity could jerk us like the poor frog’s leg.

I am home again. After a delicious dinner with all the raw veggies I had done without for the last 10 day, prepared by Steve and Tessa, I collapsed into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night I woke up to see a full moon lighting up Lobster Cove, which is beautiful in any condition. I am very grateful to be home again.

My first sleep home ended with an intense dream about a small plane crash. Before it crashed it had been hovering low over the ground next to an embankment. The pilot, a woman, stuck her head out of the window and confirmed a date and a time I would go up with her. I had met her before. I considered for a moment hopping onto the plane right there and then, that is how low it was to the ground; but I was heading someplace else and decided to wait until Friday, the day and time we had agreed on. The plane then banked to fly away. It hit something with its wingtip and crashed onto the embankment and fell into the water. For awhile no one did anything and then people began to jump into the water. I stood too high to jump and felt powerless as I watched the passengers trying to get out. Then the image of the dream changed and I was sitting next to the damaged plane trying to keep the two hurt people inside from drifting away. I discovered there were children on board, one infant among them. They were fine but stunned. I read children’s rhymes to them while keeping an eye on the parents (I supposed) who were in bad shape. Someone had called 911 and I was impatient for someone to take over who could really help. I woke up before help arrived.

The dream was so intense and so real that there was no risk of losing it, some details maybe but not the essential story. I contained elements from our crash (badly hurt, staying awake, parents, children) but had me in an outsider’s role, experiencing a tiny bid of the agony that our rescuers had experienced. In real life the story had a good ending, which is not obvious in the dream. Somewhere, in my unconscious, there is still a filing cabinet filled with crash-related stuff, within easy reach.

The journey home from Abidjan to Paris and then from Paris to Boston was endless; seemingly more endless than many of the much longer flights I have taken earlier this year, to and from Afghanistan and Tanzania. I did not sleep at all on any of the four legs, going out and coming back. On the last stretch home I felt like an overtired child that cannot get comfortable and relax enough to get back to sleep. The size of everything on the AF planes, seat, tray table, leg room, toilets, seemed smaller than I remember. I did fly another company (AF instead of NWA/KLM) so it may actually be true. The general discomfort was exacerbated by hot flashes that come on about every 20 minutes or so; on an 8 hour flight that makes for many uncomfortable, dare I say, inconvenient, personal climate changes.

During the last interminable 30 minutes of our descent into Boston I practiced what is suggested by a favorite quote: if you are patient you can wait much faster. Although uncomfortable, I remained very patient, having waited in that tight space for so long at that point, I was able to handle the additional 30 minutes (we made a 360 turn on our way down) like a saint. And then, when we landed, the delight to put away this small furry thing that is my fear that this flight will not end well. After my frightful experience flying out of Kabul, this fear has been a little bit more present than it used to be before.It is always there and pops into my consciousness from time to time although most of the journey I manage to keep it under wraps.

The patient waiting, during the entire flight from beginning to end, was facilitated by my iPod. On settling into my space at 10 in Abidjan on Saturday night I pressed the ‘90s music’ playlist and have been listening, from that moment on, nearly nonstop (with a recharge in Paris) to an interesting mix of sounds that came from nearly all continents, meditations in several languages, Nepali language lessons, acoustics and ballads sung in various languages. By the time we landed I was only on track 147 out of the available 503; enough leftovers for a few more flights like this.

I woke up with the name of an obscure Dutch film writer and producer on my lips. I know that because I googled it. She has a 9% star rating according to the website that listed her name. In my dream a grey-haired French-speaking gentleman linked her name with an interesting AIDS program that catered to village elders, in Ethiopia and in Southern France where I found him. The Southern France place looked like a luxury resort of the restrained kind as you would see in Architectural Digest; uncluttered, with lots of ochre-colored walls, statues and olive trees in the background against a perfect blue sky. The dream contained an odd juxtaposition of settings, people and places, as dreams often do, but, now that I think of it, quite fitting with the theme of going from work into vacation mode; Ethiopia will have to be put on hold for awhile.

And so this long awaited vacation has started, damp at 5:30 but sunny now, at 7:30 AM. I will kick it off with a flight if the weather lets me. Right now, most places we had in mind are IFR and enveloped in fog, called BR in the abbreviated aviation weather language. Our choice of destinations is, once more, Owl’s Head in Maine, and as alternate Ticonderoga in Upstate New York. Bill added Martha’s Vineyard to the list because I told him I want to fly there again later next week on my own, to see my colleague Wolffy who is vacationing there. We would go to Katama, the same grass airfield where Alison, Axel and I landed on July 3, 2007; it was a magical trip that took us from Beverly, via Provincetown (where we picked up Alison) to Nantucket (for lunch) and Martha’s Vineyard (for the beach), and then back in the early evening.

Today, one year ago, Axel came home from the hospital. Sita described the event nicely in her posting (on this site, dated December 23) entitled ‘Busted’ while I don’t even mention that it was about to happen. Given that I was in the (awful) middle of my withdrawal from Oxycontin, this is no surprise to me but may be to others. It was only on his second day home I was able to focus on him again as I finally exited the withdrawal tunnel, after several days of agony.

I am now officially a guest blogger on the Technology, Health, Development blog. I was introduced yesterday by editor Aman, together with my first post. Now I have more writing to do; I have about 4 stories in the cue. It felt a bit like getting an article published. This reminds me that I discovered yesterday that I am listed as the author of a book called ‘The Naked Bachelor’ with co-authors Kurt April and Robert McDonald. We actually did write a book together (Rethinking Leadership) but we know nothing of a naked bachelor. Amazon UK lists the book as currently not available. This is too bad because I would have ordered it and see what I wrote about the topic.

Last night we cooked up a vegetable storm with the bounty from our garden and local farm stands. I particularly liked the fava beans, which I ate like a snack. They remind me of my mother who considered them a delicacy. We kids thought they were yucky. It must be a maturity thing because now I love them too. They also look darling without their jackets. If my mother had undressed them and made up a story about them shivering birdies I might have liked them. And I could have written the story and published it as a book called ‘Naked Bachelor Beans!’

I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream that included a large jet making a belly landing in the middle of an even larger city. It was a frightful experience and caused enormous havoc. Some people survived but many did not. I think the dream was brought about by the movie War of the Worlds that I watched with Axel for a short while. I lasted about 20 minutes into the film,  until the large thing landed, just like the plane in my dreams, and started its destructive rampage. I went to my office and planned my flights for today, listening to the shrieking and wailing coming from the other room. I can’t quite handle these disaster movies with both sound and sight. If either one is missing I am OK.

We had another day of rain and thunder which is starting to get to me (to hell with those happy vegetables). The dampness is pervasive and intrusive in my office that never gets direct sunlight to dry things out. I spent several hours retrofitting a piece of writing for a virtual course that will assure me a place in heaven. I have done something like it more times than I care to remember. Despite all that experience it still took me most of the day.

In between thunder and rain, during a rare dry moment we dug up some potatoes and onions from the garden for our meal and I picked what may well be the last raspberry of the season. We had hamburgers, steamed potatoes (with much butter) and a tomato salad prepared a la Mamadou, the cook of Ton, our neighbor in Fann Hock in Dakar, now nearly 30 years ago. Salade a la Mamadou is one of our all time favorites, but we will only eat it with fresh local tomatoes, a short window in our climate. As such, it is a scarcity food and belongs in the category of treasure meals, like asparagus, strawberries, and new herring (in Holland).

The flight planning for today’s trip was complicated because there were too many options and I did not know where to start. Bill had sent me three possible routes: one up the coast of Maine (which is, this early in the morning, once again, not clear), one to Lake George (Ticonderoga) in upstate New York and one to the Connecticut coast. The latter two are more likely as the weather maps for these places are as clean as they get. When Axel emerged from watching the movie he found me with maps scattered, print-outs of routes, and two computers humming with more weather and route maps.

Before the accident I had hoped that this summer Axel and I would be making such trips, every weekend to another place, much like I am doing with Bill now. We would have gone to visit my colleague Wolffy on Martha’s Vineyard, Katie Blair in Maine, Sita and Jim in Western Mass. But now I know he is not ready to accompany me on any trip, and, frankly, I am not ready to take him. In fact, I am not sure I am ready to take anyone who is not a pilot on a cross county trip. Alison has indicated she is ready to fly with me to Martha’s Vineyard. The question is, am I? I am agonizing over this and know that I simply have to do it, but sofar I have been postponing this. The flights with Bill are (re)building my confidence but they also make me realize how much of a rookie I still am.

I am, however, ready to fly non-pilots over Essex county and have already done so back in March with my nephew Pieter and his friend. I am planning to take Nuha up sometime soon, when she gets back from her vacation in New Hampshire. I am looking forward to that. I want to share with her the beauty of this part of Massachusetts as I know someone coming from a hot and sandy place can appreciate in particular. Essex is at its best on a clear day in any season, from about 2000 feet high.

Last night’s dream was so vivid that I could remember most of the details as well as its emotional flavor. I had been rowing and trying to sort out some complicated cost share arrangement to cover the cost of the boat, as if it was the much more pricey arrangement of a flight. The two coaches who were present could not help me much and I left in a car. At a stoplight there were many beggars, as there are at most stoplights in cities in Africa and Asia. I bent over to make sure the doors were locked and inadvertently unlocked them and quickly two young boys slid in and started to talk enthusiastically in a way that signaled they were there to stay. Between that incident and home a father and an older sister joined in and I arrived home with my new expanded family. Everyone moved in. I remember vaguely worrying about health and dental insurance coverage but other immediate concerns pushed these thoughts away. The girl told me she wanted to be called Albuminem. The name suggested a whispy sort of girl but she was everything but that; plump and not very good looking. The boys wanted to be called Steven and Charles and I can’t remember the father’s name. We got busy moving them and myself into a new house that had seen better years but was painted white to cover over its defects.

While Axel was making breakfast I googled the word Albuminem and discovered on the Czech wikipedia page that it is a nounform of Albumin, a protein of blood plasma. Hmmmmm…how did my brain get there? For a moment I thought it was Polish which at least connected to a comment left on my blog by a Polish blogger two days ago whose blog I read and then passed on to a Polish colleague of mine. Maybe the brain heaps Slavic languages together. At any rate, the picture of Albumin (the plasma, not the girl) is awesome.

After my short row of yesterday morning it took me some time to get into serious workmode again and actually produce something or cross something off my to do list. In the afternoon it was time to get my second acupuncture session. We tried some new things, since there had not been much change since last week’s session. The acupuncturist used a vacuum cup that looks much like an upside down part of my Cona coffee maker and electrical currents around my foot. The session was rather painful this time between needles, suction cup and current. I hope it helps. We will try two more sessions. The last series of sessions were last fall and produced some remarkable relief.

Sita came back in her pinstripe skirt in very high spirits from a series of meetings in Boston. Her business is taking flight in a big way. We think she needs to employ her sister to stay sane. She has networked her way into the company of innovation directors of big (BIG) companies and the work keeps streaming in.

I cooked a poulet yassa for dinner in a nostalgic Senegalese mood. We ate it sitting by the fire after the temperature plummeted way down to remind us it was not summer yet. After dinner we watched Numb3rs while I tried to plot my flight to Owl’s Head near Rockland (Maine) using a new formula for cross-county planning I learned from my flying buddy Bill. The plotting involved working with numbers which required so much attention that the Numb3rs story unfolding on the TV show escaped me.

Bill just called to say that bad weather is coming in and so the flight for today is cancelled. We will try again tomorrow and hope the bad weather will have blown away by then.

Today is the day that my youngest brother Reinout jumps out of a plane over the island of Texel in Holland; a birthday present from the people who came to his party last week, to celebrate the half century mark of his life. It would not be my choice of celebration, falling out of the sky like that; imagine that, for fun!

I woke up to a glorious spring morning, as glorious as they get on Lobster Cove; the neighbor’s lilacs are out in deep purple color, Jennee’s tree, the beach plum, is full of pink blush dots and the bright yellow dandelions dot the juicy green grass everywhere.

I slept in today, till 7; such a luxury. I woke up from a concatenation of frantic dreams that stood in sharp contrast to my very unproductive day at work yesterday. I knew that my chances at a productive day were shot when I went into my second meeting in the morning and had not even looked at my to-do list. Rather than fighting it, I stopped swimming and let myself be taken by the current for the rest of the day. I selected pictures from my photo collections from the last 10 years for next week’s worldwide meeting slide show (this was actually a request so it could count as productive). It was a trip down memory lane and produced a series of ‘how are you?’ emails that may or may not trigger responses. One went to a Chinese consultant I worked with who is from Chengdu. I have been wondering whether he is OK after that horrendous earthquake. Another went to Mynamar, also full of questions.

The dreams were about a large hospital, somewhere in Africa or in a US inner city: full of frantic people, noisy, chaotic and utterly confusing; people were in pain and I did not know what to do. Fatou was there and knew her way around; I kept losing her from sight. My friend Xandra donned a nurse outfit and took care of a panick-stricken little boy. I hovered around and felt useless, not knowing what to do. And then Axel and I were outside and it was spring while the mountains were full of snow and skiers, but our paths were green and firm with raspberry bushes loaded with fruits. And everywhere around us people were moving fast, rushing up or down the mountains, too fast!

It is occurring to me that these dreams might be telling me that I need a real vacation and real downtime, not a few days here and there or a regular weekend. With no overseas trips on the horizon, this may actually be in the stars.