March 13, 2026
Doctor, doctor, gimme the news, I’ve got a bad case of Ascension blues…No pill’s gonna cure my ill…~ with apologies to Moon Martin (Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor))
For months, I’ve woken up most mornings with a subtle and pervasive dread. Sometimes I remember dreams, sometimes not. As I start my day, my first thoughts are not of delight and anticipation for what the day might bring, but an all-encompassing sense of futility and uselessness.
A dystopian personal future leers at me. By conventional reckoning, my family is quickly using up their allotted years on Earth. A sly inner voice insinuates: They’re going to die, one by one, and leave you alone. There will be nobody to take care of you when you’re old and frail…
If it was just occasionally, I would dismiss it as leftover darkness from unremembered dreams. I wouldn’t see it as a pattern. But it’s happened so frequently that I know the drill. The dystopian dregs will dissipate at some point between arising and heading out for a walk. A strong cup of coffee, the company of my cats, the reassurance that my elderly mother survived another night… These things contribute to chipping away at the dread.
What is this persistent malaise?
*****
I would ask, How can I get rid of this unwelcome shadow walk?, but years of futile wishing for same has smartened me up. Every morning, as the dread is leaving, its coattails not quite out the door, I chide God. I ask for explanations. I wonder aloud how things around me can be emanating beauty and peace, but I ignore them while focusing on a grim present and fearful future.
Perhaps God has responded and I haven’t heard, but I usually assume the response is in the subtle dissolving of the malaise. This occurs when I notice tiny purple flowers in the meadow at the end of our street, or search for the duck and her drake floating tranquilly in the creek. The world seems to engage me when I venture out of the house, leaving angst behind.
One day it occurred to me that regularly awakening with an overload of shadow might be the ghostly tentacles of something lingering from the unconscious darkness of sleep.
*****
Med beds and our golden New Earth future don’t exist at six in the morning, in the dark, with the remembrance of how to believe in chimeras buried under layers of psychic dreck.
My dreary present and imagined miserable future seem more likely than anything promised by metaphysical channeled words. Pragmatism rules. Show me a med bed. Give me a replicator. Heal my aging family and ensure that they can live long, delightful lives, if that is their choice. Ensure that I may live a long and delightful life, as I choose.
I don’t get instant fulfillment of those requests. All I get are tiny purple flowers in the meadow, and the possibility of seeing the luminous iridescence of the ducks as they glide on the creek. Frail vessels of Nature to hold all my hopes.
*****
The temporary morning fatalism seems to be an aftereffect of battling whatever darkness I encounter in those unremembered dreams. I wonder if any of those demons are of evil-AI origin… perhaps something, or someone, is doing its best to wear me down and wear me out on the uneven battleground of the astral plane.
I’ll remember to unleash the awesome power of my old-soul-self before I sleep: Leave the demons in dreamland, and don’t drag the battle into my day-life tomorrow. In the morning, I’ll ask for luminous, divine, hope-saturated Light as soon as brain engages upon waking.
And I won’t dismiss the brightening power of strong coffee, and my cats, and the reassuring, still-breathing presence of my elderly mother, slumbering peacefully through the morn.
