Nightmares are a curious fixture of my nightlife. The only good dreams I can remember have happened in the last two years, and I can count them all on one hand. While I grant that probably says something I am not ready to hear about my relative emotional health, that issue is not my focus right now. Besides, this is about a series of good dreams that I had.
Where to start?
The Sopranos was an excellent HBO show that started airing near the turn of the millennium. I wasn’t yet a teenager when the series started, so I saw none of it while it was on the air. I once went through the first season when I was finally old enough to watch it but went no further. If you asked me why, I would probably tell you it had just been rented, but truthfully it is not something I could tell you with any certainty. Whatever the case, here I am now, at long last having gone through the first season again and now continuing into the second season, watching this brilliant show about complex relationships between a mob boss, his families, and healing.
Tony Soprano, the patriarch of the title family, is a violent and dangerous man who has remarkable self-control. That is not to say he exhibits no impulsive behavior, but rather that it is a rarity when the viewer sees him doing something stupid that really could have been avoided. Those same instances are often what lands him back in therapy. When he does get violent, it is a visceral act; while not often gruesome, it is often deeply personal. I as a viewer understand that I am probably supposed to be left with a sense of revulsion, but in truth his violence almost always leaves me feeling satisfied. Soprano’s relatability is one of the most endearing aspects of the show; I can understand and even empathize to a point with him, and so acts that would be difficult for me to stomach become simply… satisfying.
COVID tried to kill me.
There was no segue at all, I know, but there is no connection between COVID and The Sopranos save what went on in my head, and why would I bother talking again about my nightmares? Well, my COVID dreams were not nightmares.
I feel comfortable calling myself a film buff. Drama tends to be my generic specialty, but horror is probably a close second. You might reasonably suspect that horror is responsible for most or even all my nightmares, but the truth is that what goes on in my head at night almost never has anything to do with something I was watching earlier that day. In fact, I have gone to bed afraid that I would have nightmares about whatever it is I watched, and those fears almost always go unrealized. I say “almost” only because I cannot say with any certainty that these films have never affected my nightlife, but I can say that I have no such memory. Both Tony Soprano’s violence and the violence enacted on behalf of his interests are often graphic, but most important for the way I witness violence and the way it interacts with my unconscious while I sleep is that I “get it.” Though I may not always agree with the extent to which the violence is taken, I am very rarely reaching out of myself in some futile attempt to stop it. When I am, it’s not Tony Soprano’s men who are the perpetrators. I bring this up because it is not, as one might expect given my unusually high sensitivity, violence per se that affects me. What affects me, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, is what scars my emotions and chips away at my sense of well-being—that which attacks on a visceral level my values in a way that I am powerless to stop.
You will pardon, I am sure, that digression.
After two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and one booster shot, COVID finally stormed its way into me and did its best to destroy me. The real and lasting damage it did was financial—I lost out on nearly $1,000 of work because of that wretched virus—but its physical presence was unpleasant to say the least. For the most part it was effectively a supercold, with congestion becoming a problem such that my sinuses would no longer let me distinguish between two stuffed nostrils, but instead signaled to me that I had no nose at all and what nose had once been there had in fact been replaced by a crater of cartilage that now knew only mucus.
The aches were the worst of it. In the nights I suffered through the symptoms, I woke early in the morning to my arms—first my arms, then my legs a few days later—feeling as if they were sacks of skin in which the muscles I had were melting at a pace that mimicked molasses. The pain was too dull for me to cry out at any point, but the ache grew quickly from dull to agonizing. I can remember feeling my arms, too, in the middle of the night, thinking I couldn’t feel any of the muscle I had built up over the last few months. I was effectively hallucinating, as one is wont to do in both a sick and groggy state in the middle of the night, that my arm had been reduced to skin and bone. Even as I did my best to flex and reassure myself, convincing myself was out of the question. My emotions were enslaved to the virus. My rational mind was just awake enough to know I didn’t need to be freaking out, so at least I had my dormant intellect rescuing me from certain despair.
Now, at last, to the point of my writing all this.
Every night I suffered from this overcongestion, from these aches, was accompanied by a dream featuring the Sopranos. These were good dreams, too, which at this point probably shocks you just as much as it did me. For the life of me, I can remember only two of them now in any detail. The second featured two men who, if they were not Paulie and Silvio, obviously represented them, transporting a bale of “hay” which was very obviously composed of chopped up and shredded corpses to a location that was most convenient for me. You’re probably asking, “Convenient to do what?!” and that is an excellent question for which I have no answer. All I remember was that the general atmosphere was very jovial. The first dream I had was even funnier, though: Tony Soprano instructing my white blood cells like they were his personal henchmen to clear up my nostrils. “Either that side, or that side, or both.” If you can read that in his voice with his pointed, commanding tone, you can hear it exactly the way it sounded in my head. As funny as it would be to say I saw Tony Soprano himself directing large, anthropomorphized cells, the truth is that I saw only him with his determined face and pointed finger as he gave out the orders. That makes it no less funny, as the memory makes me laugh to this day.
I had bad symptoms for four nights and had dreams of the Sopranos every time. Once the symptoms abated enough for me to wake up and go about my life as normal, they stopped. It may have been the one good thing that came from having COVID. I want never to forget the week that the Sopranos were my friends.
With care,
~ Grigori