Lies of Omission

While living in Japan, I was invited to hike Mt. Fuji with my host mother's friend. Having never done so before, and being of a somewhat adventurous mind, I agreed. In the week before, the topic came up in conversation regularly since my fellow teachers often asked what my plans were for the weekend. I asked people if they had ever hiked it before and what they knew about it. Most everyone had never hiked it themselves, but they said things like

"I hear the view is very beautiful."
"I understand the hike can be difficult. Maybe you should wear good boots."
"I have never gone myself, but I think you will have a good time."

Or even more informative things like

"Isn't it in Yamanashi prefecture?"
"You can see a beautiful lake from the top."
"You can see Fuji-san from Chiba on a nice day."

Thank you, Encyclopedia Britannica. 

With a pack on my back and new hiking boots strapped to my feet, I joined my party for the ride to Fuji-san. I was just as excited as everyone else at the outset, and even two hours in when a third of the party fell ill to altitude sickness, I was still having a marvelous time. I grew up in a canyon and loved hiking as a young adult. Tokyo had afforded me little opportunity to climb anything more than stairs, though there were lots of those. So hiking Fuji-san was a remarkable opportunity and I treated it as such. 

The first two hours of the hike are through what one considers normal mountain terrain. There are scrubby trees, rocks, birds, and insects. It was a beautiful, peaceful retreat from the never-ending life and noise of Japan's capital. If I had been with my childhood friend, I'd have thought I was home. 

In the second two hours, the terrain suddenly dropped away and you are surrounded by almost nothing. No vegetation. No birds. No insects. Just the rocks and topsoil, the hikers above you, the hikers around you, and a diminishing view of the trees below. And it didn't take long for that view to disappear. 

We halted for the day at an inn where we would overnight before ascending the rest of the mountain. I didn't know it at the time, but would soon realize that the inn was strategically located on one of the last bits of firm rock available to stand on. The last two hours of the hike are a seemingly interminable set of short switchbacks in straight volcanic topsoil. No more rocks. I've never missed rocks so much in my life as I did in the last two hours of that hike. Without them to stand on and hold dirt in place, it's a wonder we made progress at all. I would take one step, my feet would get sucked into the earth, and I'd fight to make forward movement. It was about a hundred times worse than trying to run on dry sand.

There is one thing to be said for what I was told about hiking Fuji-san. The view is exquisite. I won't ruin it with words. I tried to take pictures, but even those don't do it justice. If you ever want to feel close to heaven, hike Mt. Fuji. But I won't lie to you: It's hard and it ends with a public bath.

Yup. You read that right. Nobody told me, but it's standard operating procedure for everyone to hike Fuji-san and then go to a public bath together. The bath part, by the way, is not worth the view. Who knew that just two years after my first (and I had thought my last) communal shower, I'd be surprised into another naked social with a bunch of Asians. And this one was worse. I didn't think it could be worse, but it was so much worse. 

See, in China, with all those random cousins and nobody speaking English, we'd been left to take up a couple of stalls on the far side of the room and just silently acknowledge that this was clearly awkward for us. But that's not how it goes in Japan. No, no. In Japan, it's a public bath, not a communal shower.

The Japanese are so much more polite and organized about everything. From the moment you walk in, the attendant bows to you and asks, Please may I take your shoes? then bows again to give you slippers, a stool, a hand towel, and a robe. A robe! There's something China needs to learn about. But just because they're polite about it, doesn't mean this is an activity I ought to be participating in! 

For the second time in my life, there I was, standing, shoeless, in a locker room while an entire party of Asians awaited my nude arrival. Again, thankfully, this was not a coed experience, but that was very, very small comfort. Once again, everyone was undressed and through to the bath room while I was still staring at an open locker contemplating an escape. Only this time, there was just me, no Bath House Buddy. 

I went through with it. If I hadn't been so annoyed at being somehow tricked into it, I would have thought it rather nice. I stepped into a wonderfully aesthetically designed room where an artistically shaped deep pool took up the right hand side of the room while several spigots positioned at five-feet intervals lined the C shaped section to the left. The faucets were set about three feet off the ground. Now I knew what the stool was for. You sat below the shower head and washed yourself thoroughly before joining your party in a long heart-to-heart in the bath. 

I tried to take as long as possible cleaning myself and pondering ways to get out of the sitting and talking portion. Nothing feasible came to mind. After half an hour, I resigned myself to my fate and joined the ladies who were eagerly waiting to practice their English with me. So not the place to do this, ladies. So much worse. And for the record, buying me lunch afterwards does not make it better.

When I returned to work on Monday, everyone was so curious to ask me about Fuji-san, only this time they all seemed remarkably better informed about the subject. They all had things like this to say now

"You made it to the top? Are your legs ok? Well they won't be tomorrow."
"It's a volcano, you know. It's supposed to erupt any day now. I wouldn't hike it myself . . . "
"The terrain is really difficult. Not really fit for normal hiking. You must be in really good shape."
"A man who hikes Fuji-san once is an adventurer; a man who hikes Fuji-san twice is a fool."
"That must have been so difficult! But at least you enjoyed the onsen (public bath) after, right?"

I hate you all, you friggin' liars.

The Problem with Movies

The problem with movies is that it seems to be the only creative frame of reference for anyone attempting to imagine a concept or incident outside their sphere of experience. So when I say things like, "I have nested dreams," or "I've learned to control one or two things about my dreams," the only thing people have to relate to (unless they dream like I do) is their time spent watching a movie. In this case, it's always the same movie: Inception.

My dreams are not like Inception. If the way I dreamed were to be turned into a movie, nobody would go to it and everyone who did go would hate it. Hate it.

I have always had vivid, intense dreams. More often than not, something whimsical and clearly fantastic happens in them so that there is never a question of whether I am awake or asleep. If Tinkerbell arrives while I'm pulling weeds at my parents' house and hands me a Mickey Mouse alarm clock that dispenses pixie dust and proceeds to tell me that I'm wanted on Mount Olympus for a dinner honoring Mercury, then I am reasonably certain that I'm dreaming. When I continue, in that situation, to shake pixie dust on my head and lift off the ground to fly over the world, then I know I'm dreaming. (Actual dream, by the way.)

But starting when I was about ten, the simplicity of determining what was dream and what was real became, well, difficult. It began with a nightmare. I have a few scattered mental images of what that nightmare was about, but don't remember it in its entirety. This is deliberate. That dream was one of the most traumatizing nightmares of my entire life, and it took me two years of devising and employing mental exercises in order to paper over the memories and eventually forget the dream. This lengthy endeavor opened the door to a simple thought: that the possibility existed for me to have some measure of control over what goes on in my head. If I could, through persistence and practice, eliminate the memory of a dream and coach myself away from dreaming about it again, then perhaps I could instigate some changes in the dreams themselves.

The possibility may exist, but taking advantage of it is something else entirely. After years of practice I have very, very limited "control" over some of the things that happen. It also seems that my dream-mind prefers that my conscious mind not interfere and so devises new ways to trick my conscious mind into thinking that I'm not really dreaming. This last point is what leads to "nested" dreams.

Here. Imagine, if you will, this scenario:

You work a schedule that prevents you from sleeping with your spouse at night together in your bed and instead has you returning home to kiss your spouse goodbye for the day as you prepare to sleep for the next eight hours and your spouse departs for a day at work. You find it easier to sleep on the couch and comfortably curl up there and listen for the front door to announce to you that your spouse has indeed quitted the house and you are alone. More than anything, you're waiting to hear the deadbolt click into place so that you can rest a little easier knowing burglars will first have to pick the lock or bypass the deadbolt in some other fashion.

Waiting seems interminable and you hear a sound, but it's not the deadbolt locking. You get up to investigate and at the top of the stairs see that your spouse is crouching at the front door trying to stare out the lock on the door handle. "We have a peephole, sweetheart," you proceed to say. Spouse leaps from his position and bounds up the stairs to tell you he thinks there's a felon walking down the street. Naturally, you call the police and are engaged in answering the dispatcher's questions when a sudden noises startles you and you wake to find you're on the couch, waiting to hear if the deadbolt has fastened.

It was a dream. And from the sounds of it, your spouse has left for work. You don't remember hearing the deadbolt fasten, but that is more indicative of you falling asleep before your spouse reached the front door than of him forgetting to lock the door. You check your phone to see if Spouse has texted you. He hasn't. But a moment later your phone lights up and . . . it's someone from work. They're wondering if you can cover a shift for them tomorrow. You want to yell at them for waking you up after you've just got off a grave, but that won't help matters much. Just as you go to text them back, you realize that the sound of the clock ticking has vanished. You know this to be a sign that you're not awake anymore. You look for more signs. You can't hear yourself breathe. The texture of the blanket is wrong. When you get up, the carpet doesn't feel like carpet. This must be a dream.

You fight out of the dream and are once again on the couch, phone in hand, Spouse presumably out the door. You check the phone, for real this time, and there are no new messages. You should probably just put the phone away and go to sleep, but you like to know that Spouse makes it to work without getting in a traffic accident. So you roll over, put your arm over your eyes, and get ready to doze—

Something isn't right again. You're used to the feel of your arm on your eyelids and the real feeling of it is missing. You lift it off and turn over. Things are still not right. The blanket is supposed to smell like the dryer sheets and it doesn't smell like anything. And there's a rustling sound that doesn't match anything you can see. 

You fight awake again. Are you awake? There's someone at the door. You can hear them knocking. But you're not sure you're awake. Things seem right. The sun has moved. The clock is ticking. You smell the blankets. . . . They still don't smell. You rub your eyes. Your left eye doesn't stab painfully the way it's supposed to (souvenir of the most absurd paper-cut accident ever). Clearly you're not really awake. 

But now it's a fight between your conscious and subconscious minds. The subconscious fights to convince you you're awake when you're really asleep. The conscious fights to wake you out of a false state of wakefulness. 

This, this backing and forthing and testing and trying and never being sure is how I spend most of my nights. 

Well, say some, in Inception they have those totems to help them tell if they're dreaming. Not so simple. There's never any one reliable factor that indicates conclusively to me that I'm awake or dreaming. I have to add things up and make sure analytically that things fit together. It's the only way.

Well, say others, in Inception if you die in the dream world you wake up! Not that simple. I once dreamed that I was being shot in the head every hour on the hour. I didn't wake up.

Well, they say, in Inception they blah blah blah blah . . . .

Wait. This must be a dream. 

How Do You Spell That?

Antenna. A-N-T-E-N-N-A. Antenna.
Facilitate. F-A-C-I-L-I-T-A-T-E. Facilitate.
Thorough. T-H-O-R-O-U-G-H. Thorough.

I never mind that people ask me to spell things. To be completely honest, I hardly even notice. It's an involuntary reaction. When someone asks, "How do you spell . . . ?" I automatically respond. I never think between the query and the response. I just spell.

I've never known how these situations arise so often. Every job I've had since I first started working has been filled with momentary orthographical queries. And it's not those open situations where five people are standing around and one aimlessly asks, "Hey! Does anyone know how to spell 'chromosome'?" No, it's usually a quiet aside directed specifically at me. I'm not sure how people get the impression that I'm a walking, talking dictionary or that maybe I'm the Ken Jennings of spelling bees. Most people don't even know what my major is. And I never go around correcting people's grammar or, certainly, not their spelling. Yet there's this persistent phenomenon that wherever I go, people ask me to spell things.

I don't even always know the answer. Plenty of times I have to go look it up and get back to you. "Receive" gets me almost every time. And "reversible" used to give me a head turn. I have tricks to remember the tricky ones. Reversible? Ends with and "ible" cause if you reversed the word the "i" would still look right. Opposable? Ends with an "able" cause opposability makes your thumb able to face your fingers. Occasion? Always two "c"s and one "s" cause an occasion never calls for two "s"s. Judgment? No "e" cause there is no "judge" in judgment. 

But those aren't things anyone ever knows. I don't sit there and tell them why I know it's spelled P-R-E-V-A-R-I-C-A-T-E. I don't tell people I spend my spare time looking up the history of the word "effervescent" or ponder the usage of "vet" as a verb. So why do they ask me to spell stuff all the time? For all they know, I might tell them something completely wrong. I am not a certified spelling expert! And your computer comes equipped with spellcheck in almost every program! It's not always right. But most people don't know that! Common experience leads people to rely on computers much more than the coworker on graves who has had very little sleep. Yet there I am spelling "inebriated" at four in the morning. 

Now, I must reiterate that it doesn't bother me that people seem to think my life is an impromptu spelling bee. I merely find it curious that such a specific behavior is so universal among the people with whom I associate. The reason for it is just mysterious to me. It's as though a balloon artist traveled to Antarctica and, without telling anyone his occupation, was handed a kit and asked to make a balloon penguin. How do they know!?! Beats me. No matter. I'm going to embrace it. In fact, I'm thinking of having a business card made up:

Maile

Orthographist

And the back side will read

I lost every spelling bee I ever entered.