Happenstance...

I woke up this morning on the edge of a dream. It was kind of a fun dream at the beginning - I was in some town in New England, going to school, kind of like Hogwarts only for adults. I think Andrea was going to school with me. There were problems - we had to schlep a mattress to class for some reason, and a blanket, and while there's nothing at all wrong with schlepping a blanket to class, schlepping a mattress, particularly when you're on a bicycle, is another story. But after a few classes I realized that we didn't have to schlep the mattress, so that was good.

Anyway, after one of the classes ended I had to go somewhere by myself, for no obvious reason that I remember, and I took a shortcut through a nice section of town with a lot of cool stores. On the way through one of the stores there was a glass clock. Not delicate glass - more of the kind of glass that is translucent, that they make plates out of, painted with a kind of paint that was probably shiny at one time, but that had gone matte and would rub off on your hand if you rubbed it. Very retro - the sort of thing that a car dealership might have given you in the fifties when you bought a T-bird coupe.

Oh, and it was red. Anyway, the clock was on the ground, in my way, so I picked it up so I could pass. Later on, I noticed I was carrying two clocks, one of which, the aquamarine one, I did not recall picking up. And I realized that I hadn't put the first one back, and that I couldn't remember where I'd got it, but the second clock, the aquamarine one, I knew came from a store that I'd been to before, so I went there to return it and ask the owner to whom the red one belonged.

The owner thought the whole thing was funny, but said that she had a blue clock. So I showed her the aquamarine clock, thinking that it was probably what she meant, and she said "no, blue." And then I dropped the aquamarine clock, which shattered. She laughed, and told me that I could probably find another at a country fair or tag sale.

Now at this point I'm thinking "wait, I didn't do anything intentionally wrong here, why am I suddenly responsible for going out and buying another clock, which is probably going to take me the rest of the summer to track down, and is probably going to set me back a lot of money?" And yet I did feel obligated.

So the thing about this is that it's kind of an absurd situation, as situations in dreams tend to be. But it's interesting in that I think it's not at all dissimilar from real life situations that we actually experience. I've definitely had that feeling in real life before, where I feel this kind of karmic debt as a result of a series of happenstances that I did not orchestrate, yet that somehow appear to be my fault.

A karmic analysis of the situation is problematic. If there's any conclusion I can draw from this, it's that a lot of the stuff life throws at us shouldn't be taken literally.