Mutual Dreaming
by Evan Symons

When you wake up from a really personal dream do you ever wonder if it was real?  I’ve always hoped that the dream I had with Sinead O’Connor where we talked intimately for what seemed like hours was two sided affair.  It certainly seemed like it was more than a fantasy.  In a fantasy, I would have ripped her clothes off.

I wrote the lyrics for the song Dream Operator in 1992 without any personal proof that mutual dreaming existed.  I kept searching for the experience.  I had just gotten this rather responsible job handling car supply for BC Rail.  Thousands of dollars of business is at risk if your performance isn’t adequate.  I had this extremely messed up boss who worried about his department worse than a mother grizzly protects its cubs.  He’d always come in on Sunday mornings to check up on me.  This one particular weekend, car supply hadn’t been properly planned on the Friday and I’d spent all Saturday trying to straighten things out so that my boss wouldn’t think that the rapture was eminent.  I was completely consumed by what our conversation would be like and sure enough, I found myself dreaming about it that Sunday morning before I went to work.  The real conversation that took place that Sunday morning played out almost identically to the dream.  Finally my boss says to me “Do you believe in Deja Vu”.   Like a lame ass, all I could muster was a yes, but I didn’t tell him about the dream.  At least I now had some proof on mutual dreaming.

One night when I was dreaming, my friend the rock star Sean Chikara from the world reknowned rock and stroll groove sinister band Red Sugar was acting like a complete maniac.  It was like he was on speed or something.  We were in my home town of Prince George and he was driving this car that I think was my old 1968 Valiant that I’d had in 1981 like a insane demolition derby driver.  Finally I got so pissed off at him that I made him pull over or something.  I picked him up and through him into the ditch that was filled two feet deep with this weird metallic blue star trek ooze.  He came out with the weirdest grin on his face all blue and shiny.  The next morning I called his girlfriend to see if he was all right.  I told her that I’d had a weird dream about him.   She laughed and said that Sean was okay, but his friend Sandy from California had just called with the same question.

Speaking of my old 1968 valiant, I should mention that I was out with a friend getting ready to go partying this one Friday night, and I casually mentioned to him that wouldn’t it be cool if we got in an accident where it was totally the other person’s fault and I could get the insurance money.  Twenty minutes later after we’d gotten some beer, a drunk driver made a left turn off the highway, but came down the wrong side of the meridian, hit us head on, then fled the scene.  Someone followed him and saw where he went and told the police who then picked him up.  He blew over .2 on the breathalyzer.  The car was totalled and I got a 100 bucks more than I paid for it from the insurance.

When I was in my early teens I worked at a market garden for a Croatian family whos patriarch (who was in his mid 70’s at the time) had mined gold in Barkerville and had met Bing Crosby there.  He used to drink home made wine and moonshine with my step father and they’d argue all night.  As time progressed, I wanted to get in on the action.  One day, Nick was explaining to his young daughter that the Amazon River was the longest river in the world.  I knew it was the Nile and took it as an opportunity to get into a disagreement.  He kept not wanting to see that the Blue Nile portion made the Nile longer.  We argued for at least an hour and I had a blast.  I later got fired for throwing potatoes at his son Phillip.  A few years later when I played for the Croatia Soccer club, everyone knew me as the kid who through potatoes in the field.  BC Rail needed some hay because they wanted to use it to try and curb erosion on the rail grade.  I suggested that we buy some off Nick.  I didn’t really want to deal with him, so I called Phillip.  The first cheque we made payable to Phillip.  When we went to pick up the second load, Nick came right out and said to me in his famous accent “I don’t like you.  You make the cheque out to me until I die!”   Later I got Phillip to plow my garden with his tractor.  For some reason they didn’t want me to pay them cash but work in the hayfield for a day for it (which was kind of a rip off given how hard haying is).  I got in a car accident and screwed up my back.  I went to Nick’s other son Joe’s wedding reception a couple of months later.  Nick was in the wedding line up where you go and greet everyone as you came into the reception.  He confronted me right there on the spot so I gave him forty dollars cash and told him that I’d hurt my back.  He was wearing his famous gold chain with the big nuggets that he’d found in Barkerville.  The next time I saw him on the street and he said to me “Evan” (like he wasn’t sure it was really me or something), “Why don’t you get a haircut, you look like a porcupine!”  Less than a year ago, I had a dream with Nick.  I kept wanting to get into a scrap for old times sake but he kept saying that he was too old and just didn’t care about it anymore.  I knew he was going to die when I woke up.  A few days later, my mother emailed me to tell me that he was sick in the hospital.  He died within a week.

The problem trying to find more examples is that most of the dreams I remember these days are intimate dreams with women.  It’s not every night or anything but at least a few times a year.  It’s awesome when it is with someone you haven’t even thought of for years.  It seems almost more real then.  It’s kind of scary when it is with someone you talked on the phone with for an hour that night.  It’s too embarrassing to talk about and the other person might think you are a freak especially if they don’t remember the dream.

I found a book in the library called Mutual Dreams by Linda Lane Magallon.  I will leave you with a quote from her book.  “Like other neophytes, I had the mistaken notion that in the field of mutual dreaming, I could only score points if I particpated in dreams that left my jaw hanging and popped out my eyeballs.  That is, I thought they had to be epics that were virtual carbon copies of one another.  Or they were only those dreams in which I meet you, you meet me, and we go off and share an adventure together.  I didn’t realize that in order to create World Series dreams, we might have to play a bunch of sandlot baseball first.  Please take the pressure to produce championship-quality dreams first time out of the batter’s box.  You might just discover, as I did, the fun of playing simple games of catch.”