Tisha B’Av

For my non-Jewish friends, this is kind of the Jewish version of Friday the 13th, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, the Inquisition expelling the Jews from Spain, etc.

Some years, I connect with it more than others. But every year, I can’t help but remember the Tisha B’Av when I sat with Mom on the Tayelet, reading Eicha while looking over the Old City, bracing ourselves to fly home for my grandmother’s funeral in the morning. Struggling, at eleven, to understand and respond to all the different layers of grief and connection in that moment.

And one of the things I like best about the holiday, aside from that annual, emotive reading of Eicha, is the story of Kamsa and Bar Kamsa, the idea that what brings about destruction is the senseless hatred that we need to eliminate from our own hearts as well as from the world at large, that hurting a friend or embarrassing a neighbor can cause as much damage in the long term as remaining silent about the torture of prisoners. It’s an opportunity to rethink some of the ways I interact with the world.

Mind playing tricks

I had a strange, vivid dream last night that I’m not going to bore you with, but one small tangent of the dream was that (while running through a hotel trying to find the con artists who just ran a speed-dating seminar), I checked back in with a webcomic that I used to love, Valentine-like Hearts, and discovered that they were doing REALLY well, and actually had a movie coming out! Very exciting.

So I wake up, eager to check back in with this webcomic and see if they really do have a movie coming out, or at least catch up on what they’ve been doing in the past couple of years, only to do a google search and discover that there is no such comic. At all.

Now, this is kind of weirding me out, because I KNOW that this comic exists. I know that I spent something like two days going through their backlist a few years back. But the more I think about it, trying to remember those two days, the more I realize that this webcomic is actually a VHS anime that was in someone else’s basement IN ANOTHER DREAM a few years back, where I was trying to rescue Uri from an evil campus with cobblestones streets and way too many rhododendrons.

This kind of thing actually happens to me every couple of years, where some aspect of a dream is consistent with a previous dream and because I have previous memories of the situation, the dream feels more authentic. It becomes hard to check my memories and remind myself that, for instance, the Cthulu-esque nightmare I just woke up from isn’t real.

Am I alone in this? Or do other people have these kinds of serialized dreams, too?