Similar to Friday night, Saturday night in New York City resulted in maximal exposure to the nightlife that is the Big Apple. We stayed out and about in the Village and Lower East Side (or “LES” if you’re hip) and made it back to my buddy’s place to fall asleep around 4:00am. I managed to get another 6 hours of sleep before waking up to sounds of car horns in the street as well as sounds of my stomach grumbling. I slept for an hour on the bus and went to bed an hour early that night in order to make up for lost time. I easily could have called it quits earlier than 4:00am but in the city that never sleeps it’s not easy to slow down and call it a night when there’s so many things to do and so many $1 slices of pizza to eat.
My dream last night was more involved than my first night in NYC. I dreamed that I died out in the ocean. I was on my friend’s sailboat with a bunch of people and we ran straight into a storm (probably because I just finished reading the book Trawler, I highly recommend it by the way). Everyone on the boat had sailing experience except me so they weren’t terribly worried. The aggressive pitching and yawing was making me sick and making it almost impossible to stand up let alone sleep. In the middle of the night on the boat I awoke to some kind of emergency happening outside the cabin. I ran up to see what was the matter, not bothering to put on my life jacket, mostly because no one else had theirs on and in the midst of chaos I didn’t bother to ask anyone where they were. It was raining and the seas were rough. As I came out to help half groggy and fully unstable I slipped and started sliding toward the edge of the boat. I tried to grab onto something but I slid right into the ocean, all in a matter of seconds. I sucked down some water as I tried to stay afloat but I quickly realized that I was done for.
In real life I am an astoundingly poor swimmer. I almost didn’t make it through a sprint triathlon 1/4 mile swim last summer. I sink like a rock even with a full breath of air. In swimming lessons as a kid they wouldn’t pass me to the next level because I couldn’t learn to float on my back. Thus, I have spent zero time around water throughout my life, never properly learning how to swim. I trained a little bit for that sprint triathlon last summer but without a wet suit to increase my buoyancy I’m not sure that I would have made it at all to be 100% honest. So in my dream, the combination of the heavy seas without a life jacket meant drowning within 30 seconds. I didn’t actually see myself drowning and dying in my dream but it was very clear that I was seconds from drowning, a very scary and very real scenario.
