The Waiting Room

Recently, I woke up from a dream. At least, I think I did. It was a strange age-related shimmery kind of experience. Very powerful. But, weird. To this moment, I’m not sure whether I had the dream, or it has me. All I know is that this residue remains.

I am in a waiting room with a bunch of pregnant old people. We are all pregnant with ourselves. There are a lot of people in various stages of shock — of being in swollen discomfort. A few are smiling and happy, but the majority are confused and anxious. There don’t seem to be any doctors or nurses around. There is only this pervasive atmosphere of expectancy. Over it all, hangs a feeling of great distance, as if something vast is in attendance. Then there is a pop, and someone disappears.

I call this dream ‘the waiting room.’ I am assailed by the sense that I am living something like it out. There is a deja-vu quality haunting me. No matter how productive my life seems, no matter how engaged I am, since grayness has come over me, I am somehow on hold. Something inside is waiting. I am swelling up, while all this nothing is happening, and I am becoming more and more a mystery that is about to pop. Any moment now I am going to break, disappear, and give birth to the real me. It could be a happy moment, or one poignant with grief.  I sense the immanence of my coming and going.

I want to stress that what I am describing now is not the dream, but some aspect of my current-time reality. Aging has brought with it some faint sense of expectancy. It isn’t death-dread, nor is it cultural doom, rather it is some graying mirage — a kind of prospect, of an unexpected and unanticipated tomorrow. I don’t know if I am living evolution out, or if evolution is living me out. I just have the sense that the story is getting longer, more nuanced, and totally necessary.

There is a part of me that chafes at the idea that before I am done being me, a new me might come onto the scene. I am getting tired, fatigue is setting in, the old is already too heavy. The new seems, whatever weight it will be, overwhelming. I wait with more than anticipation. Life is full of dreamlike twilight-zone suspense. I bulge in all the places I used to play.

For some reason the dream seems to correspond to some mysterious part of my life. I think it actually is an aspect of getting old in this uncertain time.  I’m not sure I want to body-forth new human trait, in a time when humanity hasn’t made up its mind about surviving.  I am not in favor of still-born potential.  There is a cloud of uncertainty hanging over me.

I am generally optimistic. I tend to think Life knows what it is doing. But, for some reason, an aura of caution has come over me. I’m guessing it’s my human part in the equation that troubles me. The verdict is yet to come in. Meanwhile, I, like everybody else, gets to wait.