Fighting the Covid-19 Virus?

Was I blessed with help in healing myself or someone I love? I have never experienced such realistic physical effort and exhaustion in a lucid dream.

March 17, 2020: West Virginia reports its first COVID-19 case, meaning the disease is present in all 50 states.

Lucid Dream early in the morning of March 17, 2020

I’m slipping some shiny new quarters into a machine which abruptly disgorges a generous amount of other quarters, spilling them behind the counter. As I step behind it to pick them up, a man in black appears. He has come to take me somewhere, and immediately sensing he is a figure of authority I can trust, I follow him… The next thing I know, I’m outside on a very dark night sitting in the passenger seat of a car. There’s another person with us now, a man who, like me, is a passenger. The driver tells my companion and I that we have to go back. Immediately, he turns left onto a bridge and begins speeding across it in reverse. It’s a narrow bridge stretched over a chasm, and the tires seem to be following only two wooden planks, which makes it pretty scary how fast we’re moving. But I can’t really be too afraid, because I know this man is fully in control.

We make it off the bridge, and as the car slows down, then stops, I find myself looking out at what appears to be an old graveyard with hazy golden-brown monuments I can barely see. This is when I partially wake up and experience hypnagogic imagery resembling images of the Covid-19 Virus. Then, fully asleep again, I find myself sitting surrounded by other people. We’ve been led to this place resembling a waiting room, but it’s not; it’s more like a lounge where we’re silently relaxing after some experience. I’m drinking red wine, and the man who brought me here tells everyone what wine he served us. As he speaks, I see a vision of a red-and-white box of this wine sitting on the edge of a stone bridge that curves over a stream, and rising, I think—Well, why not have a little more for the road?

Turning left in the direction of this bridge where I know the wine is, because it’s a really good wine—this man wouldn’t have served anything else—I pass through an archway-door leading out to where this bridge and natural area is. Immediately, I spot a large midnight-sapphire-blue butterfly with something akin to a sperm-like black tail flowing behind it, which is a bit unusual. But it’s a beautiful butterfly, and I’m delighted that it’s clearly flying straight to me. When I raise my right hand, it promptly alights on my index finger. (It’s a very special experience, for I describe a midnight-blue butterfly in my book of poems to our Lord.) I keep walking with the butterfly perched on my finger, then it flies off again when I reach the bridge, where I realize the wine is gone. Maybe the man removed it temporarily?* (See footnote.) Then suddenly, a little brown dog starts barking at me as though I’m endangering its owners, a couple sitting on the edge of the bridge, so I simply rise up off the ground to get away from it. But the dog flies aggressively up toward me, and having no desire to fight it, I make it understand I’m a friend, which makes me realize I’m dreaming.

I want to go home, but I’m still high in the air, and when I turn in the direction I know is home, I’m confronted with the white wall of a structure so immense, I can’t see around it. I’m floating alongside an opaque round window set in this white wall high above the world. The spherical window is large enough for me to decide that I’m sick and tired of dream barriers, so I’m not going to try and find a way around. I’m going to open the wall up by getting through this window! Thus begins the process of somehow opening up a panel so I can now see through, or rather into, the window. It’s several feet deep, as deep as I am tall (maybe a bit smaller) and sort of tunnel-like. I promptly begin manipulating the mostly red infrastructure within, which is outlined in black and very tightly coiled, like a machine in a gym that’s really stuck combined with a triple folding deck chair that’s also nearly impossible to open up. The strange thing is, I really need to make a concerted physical effort to deal with this “mechanism.” Pausing, I spend some time floating directly outside the window studying the tricky and resistant infrastructure, lucidly aware I risk waking up, and yet I also know that I’m not going to wake up, that I can’t wake up, because I’m intently focused on this dream task it’s imperative I accomplish. I must get past this deadly hurdle.** (See footnote)

Gradually, I go deeper into this three-dimensional “cell” as I push “levers” and open up “sections” that seriously resists my efforts to create the space I need to get past this obstacle. As I find my dream body mostly inside the tunnel-cell, determinedly pushing and folding, I become aware that the back of it (behind me) is a spring-like mechanism evocative of a mouse trap, and for an instant I’m afraid that if I go deeper—like a mouse reaching for that coveted piece of cheese—I’ll set off the trap and be crushed. But I’m determined, and as I position my bare feet on it, I realize I can simply keep my feet on the spring lever as I push through, for I’m nearly finished dismantling/ rearranging/ neutralizing this killer barrier.

What’s truly amazing, and which I am very lucidly aware of, is how exhausting this process is proving to be. I can literally feel the strain on my dream body, as though I’m actually in my physical body making a supreme effort that demands all the strength I’m capable of exercising. I’ve never felt this way in a lucid dream, and by the time I finally dive out through the other side, I’m tired, really tired. But I’m fine, and I’m free.

Traveling through a spacious inner passage in this inconceivably vast structure, I know I’m heading straight in the direction of home. Almost at once, I enter the kitchen of a house, where I make note of a distinctive light-green refrigerator, and a woman sitting at the table tells me, “You were right. I slept really well. I feel good.” I’m glad to hear that, and sensing a man I’m close to lives here (the man I was with in the car earlier who was driven back across the bridge with me) I wake.

Footnotes:

*I had this dream before Churches were closed and the faithful were denied the body and blood Christ in the Sacrament of Communion. In my dream, the healing red wine had been temporarily removed.

**Usually, human cells are round, elongated or spherical. Once a virus gets inside a cell, it hijacks the cellular processes to produce virally encoded protein that will replicate the virus’s genetic material. Viral mechanisms are capable of translocating proteins and genetic material from the cell and assembling them into new virus particles. Hence the impression I had upon waking that I had been fighting a virus.