Dear God, please help me navigate this transition in my life. I am no longer standing on firm ground. I am lost, and while taking action, I am unsure of any result. Breathing feels like I am taking air into my lungs but still suffocating. Looking around, I see options, but they are all fake. I want to walk a true path that will not waste my life.
It is 3:00 a.m. I lay in bed under a navy blue comforter, and I could not fall back asleep. I am disoriented in the dark from the dream, and I pray to help orient and ground myself. My whole month has been filled with applying for new jobs and interviewing. After a short prayer, I remember the dream.
In the dream, I am crouching in the back of a delivery van, knees bent, strapped in with a harness. Next to me is a face I recognize from a LinkedIn profile, a potential boss I will interview with next week. He is wearing a hard, dark grey helmet with a GoPro attached. He is checking something on a monitor in front of him that hangs from a ceiling mount. In front of me are two more people strapped in, busy with monitors, and up front, two more people in seats. The driver in one of the seats I recognize as Bill, owner of a bread bakery I worked at 30 years ago. He grins in recognition when our eyes meet. I used to deliver Bavarian rye loaves and sourdough baguettes to restaurants in San Francisco. The early morning light comes into the van as if through stained glass windows. Still in the dream, we drive past San Francisco’s The Painted Ladies, a row of Victorian houses you can find on a postcard, before turning right and heading toward the green strip of the Panhandle and eventually the oasis of Golden Gate Park.
My dream evoked a fluid world, not only a kaleidoscope of images but a kaleidoscope of time. Past and future careers were mixed. Lying under the blue comforter, I reflect on my journey in the van. I kept thinking we would jump out and skydive. For a moment in the dream, I saw San Francisco from above, but it was now like a Wayne Thiebaud painting. Layers of oil paint create sunshine and color buildings and streets whose hills you could fall off.
In my everyday awake life, heights terrify me—ski lifts, Ferris wheels, even looking out from a two-story balcony. Solid ground is my place, but my dreams and prayers tell me otherwise. New opportunities will elude me if I only stare at my feet.
Wayne Thiebaud was one of my art teachers before I graduated and started working at the bakery. His paintings went beyond describing a scene—an invitation to live in their evoked world. In one lecture on color, I remember him saying, “Dollar bills are green, but I want the viewer to reach out and take one. I give the dollar an orange undercoat. Now the green pops off the canvas.” He wanted people to try and eat his cake and pastry paintings and feel the vertigo and disorientation of the steep hills of San Francisco streets.
Sitting up in bed after praying and reflecting on the dream, I notice how quiet the house is. The quiet allows me to sit with my thoughts. In the darkness of the room, a quote from the Frank Herbert novel Dune surfaces, “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.” In a few hours, my daughter will wake up. We will walk on frost-covered ground beneath an empty blue sky. We will walk down a narrow path covered with yellow leaves to visit a tree covered in pale, whitish-brown oyster mushrooms inside a green cathedral of trees. I imagine God mailing me a postcard with six colored houses in a row and an encouraging message. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and slide my feet into brown slippers. I stand on the ground, but I see possibilities, and I am not alone.
Note: I thank my editors Jonny Bates, Chris Coffman, and Shirley Rivera.
Epic Ken Rice 