Not On the Same Wavelength

Dearest Rachel –

It was nice to hear your voice again last night, even if we clearly weren’t on the same wavelength – or even in the same time zone. And I’m not talking about those few hour differences that I’m still coping with throughout the last week (although they clearly have something to do with why I’m reaching out to you at this hour); I’m talking about differences of decades between our understanding of the world around us.

I found myself, in last night’s dream, on the Wesleyan campus for the first time in decades. Now, I’m not 100% sure that we’ve even visited the place since getting married in the chapel there, but what visits we might have made have been so brief, and so long ago, as to pass without memory. But in this scenario, while internally, I felt like my present-day self, there were those around me who were treating me as just another fellow student.

In fact, I started out on the steps of the chapel with another individual, who was clearly acting like my senior. We were meant to lead the ‘call to prayer’ (whatever that was supposed to mean – but you’ll see in a moment) that evening; however, while we were meant to meet here, it was not to be held on this end of the campus. Rather, he led me as we walked across the length of the quadrangle to the twin towers of Munsell and Ferguson Hall, the main girls’ dormitories (the former of which was your home for most of your career there). He brusquely handed me my sheet music, and told me to go up to the eighth floor on Ferguson tower (the lesser of the two buildings), and turn on the spotlight when I got there. Considering that both were seven story buildings in my day, this didn’t make a lot of sense, but maybe I accepted it as dream logic; I’m not entirely sure I was quite aware that I was in a dream yet or not.

Well, it turned out that the eighth floor simply let me out on the roof of the building – which, to an acrophobe like myself, was a terrifying experience. Thankfully, it seemed that there had been built a short wall along the edge of the building, roughly waist high, to prevent me from accidentally falling from that height. It still struck me as somewhat dangerous to allow college students, who cope with the stress of classes and exams, while still dealing with incomplete and fragile psyches, from having this kind of access to such an ‘easy way out,’ if the pressure got to be too much in their own estimation. But hey, what do I know? Besides, dreams can’t be expected to abide by such rules of logic.

I did what I could to set that aside, as I had an assignment to perform – the ‘call to prayer’. I found the spotlight, and flipped the switch (which looked like something out of a mad scientist’s laboratory – one of those huge, bifurcated levers). Instantly, a bright green beam shot out of the searchlight, aiming straight into the heavens, just as a similar one went on from Munsell’s roof, activated by my alleged senior. It was at this point that I watched him approach a microphone and speaker set up, and realize there was a similar one by where I stood atop Ferguson. He held up his sheet music and nodded toward me, gesturing that I should do likewise.

The music was written in standard notation, but the words were absolute gibberish to me. It was written in Latin characters, but it was clearly a language that I didn’t recognize or understand a word of. Add to that the fact that I was, for all intents and purposes, sight reading this (although my senior seemed to understand that we had rehearsed it enough times before that I ought to be familiar with it – perhaps I had simply leapt into this person’s body, like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap), and it was most disconcerting. I began, haltingly, attempting to follow my senior’s lead, as he belted the chant out with serene confidence.

I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you a word what I sang anymore after having done so than while I was looking at the sheet music for the first time. All I could tell you was that, and given certain other visual cues, I had essentially recited the Friday call to prayer for the Muslim students on campus, in phonetically-pronounced Arabic. Why they didn’t get a pair of Muslims to recite this, I’ll never know, but now I understood why we were on top of the twin towers rather than the Evelyn Chapel – they were the highest points on campus, and thus better suited as minarets. A handful of students came out onto the quad, getting on their knees, facing the library and the science center to the northeast (because Great Circle aimed toward Mecca), bowing face down in unison in that direction. I could swear that at least one of them looked up at the two of us, and glared specifically at me. Not that I blame him; I’m pretty sure I butchered every word.

On the other hand, my senior, while still completely serious, backed away from microphone and called to me, “Not bad for a first time.” He then twitched, as if distracted by a sound only he could hear, reached into his pocket, and opened up a phone. After a few words, he gestured to me (“It’s for you –enjoy your date.”), and flipped it with ridiculous casualness from the top of Munsell to the top of Ferguson, clearly assuming I’d catch it. And strangely enough, I did, although I juggle it between my hands before establishing a certain level of equilibrium and actually answering it.

It was you. Because who else would it be, in the middle of a dream set in the place where we met?

It seems you and Liz and some of the others were expecting me to join them in the TV lounge to watch some Doctor Who. And this is where it became clear that we were not on the same wavelength. Already somewhat off-balance from having to announce the time of prayer like some student imam, I found myself apologizing for being woefully out of date with the collection of episodes; after all, I only had through the end of the 13th Doctor’s first season on a hard drive…

“Hard drive? What are you talking about? We have the tapes down here already.” So, hearing a computer science major express puzzlement at the idea of a hard drive, while referring to an obsolete technology such as video tapes, as if they were current, even as the campus is clearly accommodating religions far beyond their own originally structured purview (to say nothing of my own internal perspective of having been your husband of some twenty-eight years now being treated as just another – albeit very close – friend), was getting disorienting. We weren’t on the same wavelength, or even the same time period – although I was starting to recognize that I was in the midst of a swirl of anachronistic chaos. Even the phone – which I think I forgot to toss back to my senior before waking up – would have been at least a decade or so ahead of its time in your estimation, while it had been obsolete for at least that long in mine.

It was too much to sustain, and I simply couldn’t; I woke up, at five-thirty, most likely with that phone still in my hand.

But it was good to have heard from you, even if we couldn’t understand what each of us was talking about, given where we were coming from. It probably saved me the embarrassment of apologizing for doing so many things in these last couple of years that you would have been totally unaware of.

Anyway, I need to get on with my reality for now, honey. Keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.