Snow Dog

(by Leslie)

Ziggy, our one-year-old Jack Russell Terrier, was born in Hawai‘i, and up till last week had lived all of her life in Hilo and Santa Cruz.

right after we adopted here, in Hilo

Needless to say, we were a mite concerned about how she would take to the frigid clime of an Alaskan winter. So, in anticipation of our trip, Robin made her a set of fleece booties. (This is the first thing Robin has ever sewed, I do believe.)

Dreamlife Feb 29 - Robin

Dream One

Type:  Computer stress
People: Just me
Featured: A mac turning into a PC (Quelle horreur!)

My computer was acting all glitching, so I turned if off and back on.  When I turned it on, it had wiped off everything I had ever loaded or written and—worst of all—it was now a PC!!!  I was backed up and it was still on warranty so I thought it might turn out ok.  But even looking at the PC made me very unhappy.

Dreamlife Feb. 28—Leslie

Dream One:

Type: work
People: just myself
Featured: cycling clothes

Interesting that Robin and I both had work dreams last night. In mine, I was back at the Grunsky law firm in my old office. (Dream sign!) A bunch of my cycling clothes were there in my office. In particular, I noticed a new helmet (much more snazzy than the one I really have) was sitting on a shelf, and I thought, “Oh, I’d forgotten I’d bought this new one.” It pleased me to see it there. In addition, I noticed that I had several different work blouses lying around the office, and picked them up to see which ones they were. (They were shirts that I do in fact own.) I guess the shirts were there as a change of clothes for after my ride.

Dreamlife Feb 28 - Robin

Type: work dream (stress?)
People: Jean-Marie, Sue M., Ian
Featured: staff meeting

Before I get on to dream content, I am bummed because I forgot one dream about skiing and scarfs. I had gone through the details of this dream many times so I could record it and was about to get up to do that when I remembered the work dream.  In piecing together that dream, it totally knocked out the ski/scarf dreams.  Also, in the dream below, something dark or tragic happened but I can't remember that either.  What remains is deadly dull. Really a bust of a night. 

Dreamlife Feb. 27—Leslie (finally!)

You may be thinking around now, “I thought this was supposed to be a blog about both Robin and Leslie. Is Robin the only one who is going to post her dreams?” Well, here’s the problem. I’m not a good sleeper. Never have been. Whereas Robin has been known (at least by me) to nod off mid-word at night while we’re talking in bed, it can take me an hour or two to fall asleep.

So when I do finally get to sleep, I am loathe to do anything that will restart my insomnia, especially in the wee hours of the morning when my sleep is generally the deepest. The thing is, one’s longest REM sleep period—and hence the best time for dreaming—coincides with these early hours.

Dreamlife Feb 27 - Robin

Type: Potpourri
People: Lisa and Donna DeAmicis, Steve Anderson, Peter McNeil, Leslie
Featured: people from my grade school years
Warning to potential readers: Even I found these dreams dull.

Leslie had been having trouble getting to sleep after a phone woke her earlier in the night. She was finally sleeping when Lisa DeAmicis shows up at bedside with her older sister Donna at 2 am in the morning. Donna was very loud and woke Leslie (to my irritation).

Dreamlife Feb 26 - Robin

Type: Quotidian with a futuristic twist
People: Daria/Julie Rowe meld, Wayne, Danny Basaldua
Featured:  BBQ professional licensing

I was trying to make a date with my friend Wayne but he was leaving town.  He was flying to Australia (which he said took 8 hours—in your dreams, buddy!), then LA, and finally he was moving to New York as he decided to become a licensed BBQer. 

On writing a dream narrative

Here it is, on just my second day of recording my dreams, and the difficulty of recording the dreams and making any sense to readers other than Leslie is near-impossible.  I mean, yes, I can write the dream in such a way that anyone can understand the narrative, but the intricacies of the dream connections and content will be lost without a ton of annotation. The really funny things will not be obvious.  It has always been evident to me that the brain has this wonderful and entertaining capacity to synthesize life experience and spin tails out of it that do make a whole lot of sense to me, the dreamer, but to you, the reader, will mean diddly.  So, I have come to some conclusions.

World Ice Championships, Part 1—Leslie

One reason Robin and I decided to come to Fairbanks now is that each March the city is host to the World Ice Art Championships. This event, one of the premier ice carving competitions in the world, is a month-long extravaganza featuring more than 70 teams. Competitors come to Fairbanks from around the world to create magnificent sculptures out of massive blocks of ice.

The competition doesn’t open until this coming Tuesday, but Elizabeth (one of the couple with whom we are doing our house trade) took Robin and me out to the grounds on Thursday to check out the scene. What we found were hundreds of blocks of glacial-blue ice, set out in rows and ready to be distributed to the teams of artists. (Note that the photo at the top of this blog is a shot I took of these blocks.)

yours truly, showing the size of the ice blocks
[photo: Elizabeth Shapland]

Dreamlife Feb 25 - Robin

Type: Potpourri
People: Ziesel, Craig
Featured: murals defaced, a musical number, "The Clashing of Swords"
Note:  I edited this to include annotations below the dream if you care to know more.  This is a practice I will continue.  See here for an explanation.


In dreamlife, the longest and most vivid dreams are at the end of the sleep cycle. They tend to be about 45-60 minutes in length. Below are the episodes I recorded when I awoke at 4:45. I know there were more, but for my first night, I thought I did well.

Somebody—she was an overweight lesbian with a bad haircut—was giving me a haircut in a gym. As she was doing this, the gym wall was being painted by a team. There was a mural on it. Some was quite ugly and some was ok. They were painting out the ugly (Good choice, brain!).

Dreamlife Feb 24 - Robin

Type: stress

People: Leslie and me

Featured: Facebook

I dreamed that Leslie and I did a “trial” separation. She moved out. My dream self knew damn well that was a step to divorce, which I did not want.  I posted on Facebook a plea to Leslie to come back home. Leslie came into the room and said in her you-are-so-stupid voice:  “Robin, that was a dream you had.  I never left. Why did you post that?  People are flooding me with emails about it.” I said:  “I’m sorry!  You know how dreams seem like reality.  I just got confused”.

What? Another blog? And why the hell are you in Fairbanks?

Robin posting

This is a joint blog of Robin McDuff and Leslie Karst. As most of our friends know, we are in Fairbanks, Alaska until mid-June. Since the same friends are well aware of the fact that we both dislike cold, this has led everyone to think we are either crazy or uninformed. It is most assuredly the former, as we know that Fairbanks is frigging freezing. It is the coldest city in the United Sates of America, by far. (There are colder small towns in Alaska, of course, but it wins for any place with a significant population.) So, how cold? Here's a handy-dandy chart:

Month	Record low	Record high	Average daily low	Average daily high
February	-58	47	-14	7
March	-49	53	-1	24
April	-24	74	20	41
May	-1	89	38	59
June	31	96	49	70

Check out that warming trend! OK, there is a chance for a freeze every day we are here, but by June it is really rare (what with the midnight sun and all, it better be). We are looking forward, in our four months here, to at least three really nice, warm weeks!

Now, it is true that I don't even like winters in Santa Cruz, which has a fairly temperate climate. I prefer the consistent warmth of Hilo, where the lowest temperature ever recorded was 53 degrees. (And the highest was 94.) Hilo has an average year-round temperature in the 70s. I want to live in Hilo and visit Santa Cruz. (Leslie wants 50/50.)

So, yes we are crazy. But we know what we are getting into. We have been to Fairbanks before—for a few days in early March many years ago—and vowed to come back for a longer stay. In terms of nature, we will get an opportunity to see more of the aurora borealis. Believe me, it is worth -50F. We get to revisit the ice sculpture competition, which is just awesome. We get to hang out with the people, who we found to be among the most friendly folks in America. (I have visited 48 states so I say this with lots of experience.)

What will be new to us is really experiencing winter and the bizarrely fast change of seasons, and the culture that comes with that. And, of course, the midnight sun. Right now, we get about 9 hours of sun a day, so only a little less than Santa Cruz. By the time we leave, we will get 21 hours and 48 minutes of sun. Impressive.

Beyond that, Leslie and I have been talking for years about doing a dream journal and paying more attention to our dreamlife. And learning to lucid dream (controlling our actions in our dreams.) Since our sleep will be disrupted here because of the aurora search—we will be waking to check the aurora activity level frequently—we thought this was a great place to initiate our dream project. We will blog on this a lot. Yes, we will be putting our dreams into the blog. Most of this will be very tedious to you, our readers, as other people's dreams are boring! But we will have a format where you will see if YOU are featured! Then it might be more interesting. We haven't started our dream journals—that will be tonight—but I will follow this blog with another quickie of what I remember from my dream last night to show the general format (which might change as we go, of course.)

The things we will blog about are going to be squeezed into one of four categories:

• Dreams: If you are interested in our attempt to lucid dream and what goes on in our dreamlife.
• Nature: If you just want to see pretty photos of Alaska including the aurora.
• Dogs: If you want to follow the adventures of mushers, skijorers, and Ziggy and her friends.
• Culture: If you want to know what culture emerges out of this unique northern setting.

The labels on the left side of the blog will take you to the particular subject if you want to, for instance, just see pretty pictures and have no interest in what is going on in our dreamlife brains.

Well, that's it for an intro. On to our crazy adventure.