This was not one of those long-drawn-out dreams. I suppose it lasted a couple of seconds. And I'm pretty sure it was a COVID-19 dream. The black crow, which I have often used as a symbol of death in my own poetry, was the virus. The umbrella was our stay-at-home policy. This thought was in my mind even as I dreamed. The other people with umbrellas indicate the community-aspect of this policy. We're hoping to kill the threat by keeping sheltered. Perhaps this dream was influenced by the metaphor used at Patterico's Pontifications.
Ultimately, it’s raining, we’re holding an umbrella, our arms are getting tired, and we see that we’re not that terribly wet … so we’re closing the umbrella. But that decision should be made, not on the basis of the fact that we aren’t that wet, but how hard it’s raining outside the protection of our umbrella, what our plan is for after we close it, and how bad it is if we get wet anyway.
All I see at this point is people upset that we bothered to use it in the first place because hey, after all, we’re not that wet.
He's speaking of the lockdown here. The umbrella represents the safety-measures we've taken. The idea that, since we haven't gotten all that wet, we ought to close the umbrella, does not seem to take into account the fact that it's still pouring outside.
But anyway, back to the dream. My pounding away was having no effect on the crow. That's how it seems, that our safety-measures aren't having that much of an effect. That's because it's hard to measure what hasn't happened, how many deaths have been avoided, etc. The joblessness around us seems far more real than presumptions about what might have happened but didn't because of our umbrella.
Well, this is getting confusing. Let's have some music:
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