The Instance of Mutual Dreaming

It only happened once, but it happened.

Roughly.

I got a note from my high school girlfriend, Ro. I don’t know if she goes by Ro now, but that’s what everyone called her in those days. I hear from her every few years, when something big happens in the part of rural Indiana we grew up in, or to report what I missed at a school reunion.

“Scott, I just read that your mother passed away. I am sorry for your loss.” She complimented the post I made just after the fact. And because I am incapable of simply typing, “thank you,” I typed:

“She was a lot of fun. We traveled to France and Jamaica and Napa with Mom and Jim over the years quite a bit. But even when we had them out [to Los Angeles] about a decade ago, she wasn’t getting around as well as we were expecting. And by the end, her sight was so bad that she could only tell it was me in the room from my voice.

But I did see her for one last pretty decent day, and what she remembered most was the really early stuff, how my brother loved Milne’s Alexander Beetle, and the simultaneous dream:

I was about 4 or 5, and we were living in a midcentury cottage in Muncie. We were around the breakfast table and I think we were having weekend pancakes. Just offhandedly she said that she had a weird dream about the big woven rug under the dining table. “I saw you!” I interrupted. “You were being chased around the rug by a lion, alligator and a hippo!” She froze and dropped the spatula. “How could you have possibly known that!?” Even dad looked up from the paper. “It was in the corner of my dream. Like up here,” I said, drawing a Picture in Picture layout before Picture in Picture existed. “You were up in this corner.” And then I went back to my pancakes like it was nothing unusual. But she was pretty spooked for a few days.

Years later when they invented the internet, and we discovered that it was a rare, but not unheard-of experience called Mutual Dreaming. Explanations for it are light on science, but it happened.

On that last visit to St Vincent Hospital (now creepily called “Ascension”), she remembered that too. “A Lion, an Alligator and a Hippo” she agreed, smiled and then drifted off for a short nap.

I left and got on a plane for home, knowing that we’d nearly secured a spot at a care facility, either for rehab if her kidneys rebounded, or hospice if they didn’t. Jim and my brother took her back to the house and made her comfortable. And so she could be with her dog.

A few days later we were with some friends who were already in from NorCal; they’d scheduled a trip to see us and go to Universal Studios Hollywood because their kid is 10 and on spring break with Super Mario World singing its very noisy siren song. And then I got the call from my brother that she’d died. Sooner than most folks thought. While I’m sitting with the kid, trapped on the studio tour tram, just before rolling through what had been the exterior set from The Good Place.”

I hit send.

I think the reason I shared the story with Ro was, there are a diminishing number of people I still know who knew my mom when she was still fairly young, and who could imagine her reaction as a young mother. By the time my wife met my mother, mom was settled and confident, and would have thought a mutual dream might be something perfectly normal after all the quantum spookery we’d all been exposed to since. About every decade or so, we’d be on bottle number three of rosé and remember, together, how weird it was.

I personally don’t think there’s any kind of mystical or psychic reason the people who have mutual dreams have them. I tend to think, at best, maybe siblings share, or children inherit, something structural in their synapse architecture. Or maybe we just saw the same commercial that day and both dreamed about it. Very precisely. With her dream encroaching in the upper left corner of mine like a separate network feed. I mean, I’m all in for team science. But might something else be at work?

The idea that whatever connection that made the mutual dream possible has now been eternally severed may have hit me emotionally, by hearing from Ro, this person from, like, four lives ago.

About a month before all this, March 6th, my wife and I were sitting outside on the pool deck, and a very large owl swooped over silently, and landed in our still-bare tree. The largest Great Horned Owl I’d seen in my life. It addressed us and lingered for about a half hour. It looked me in the eye.

Our March 6th owl, addressing me personally. Many Native Americans would recommend not doing this.

Later, my wife revealed that in many Native American cultures, Being addressed by an owl was an omen of impending transformation or death. And yes, according to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West:

Many tribes across the country not only believe that owls have a correlation to death, but also the afterlife. Tribes such as the Lakota, Omaha, Cheyenne, Fox, Ojibwa, Menominee, Cherokee, and Creek consider owls to be either an embodied spirit of the dead or associated with a spirit in some way. In some cases, the appearance of an owl… may be a harbinger of death.

Indeed, before the month was out, I was on a plane. Mom died April 3rd.

If you and I ever meet, you’d probably take me for a perfectly rational person. Luck is simply probability. Ghosts have explanations. Demographic behaviors are fairly predictable, and the same physics apply all around the world. The fact that you and I exist at all is because the molecules we’re made of won an incredibly improbable cosmic lottery.

But the next time an owl visits? I’m probably not looking him in the eye.