So both Chip and I had dreams about having our passports taken last night. Weird, huh? In my dream, thugs stole a suitcase in which I had not only my passport but also my wedding rings and some cash. I had to shake down the thug I could find, threatening him, demanding that he give back my stuff. Chip, in his nighttime passport drama, tried to use his to vote and was told that he couldn't use his passport for that and that the election officials were going to confiscate it because it was expired.
In both cases, we figured out as we were discussing the coincidence this morning, we pleaded to get our passports back, citing the abundance of memories contained in the little blue booklets. Odd, huh?
But the more I thought about it, the more the armchair psychoanalyst in me made some weird sense of it. Both of us strongly associate our American-ness with our passports because of our time living overseas. We learned to pass as locals after a while, but once our "papers" were required, there was no hiding our country of origin. (Not that we were ashamed of being American, but it did with some regularity lead to discussions in which we were required to explain/justify/defend/ponder our native land.) There were times that those documents felt like our most tangible piece of the United States.
With the election looming, I think what losing our passports represents is our barely repressed terror that we're going to lose our country if this election doesn't go the way we're hoping. (Apparently I'm envisioning something violent, while Chip is more concerned about election theft by lawyer.) Either way, we're clearly worried. The only thing for it is for the damn thing to be over, one way or the other.
Let's hope by Wednesday night we're dreaming about something a little more normal--and a little less coordinated.
If you're American, please vote tomorrow. More specifically, please vote for Barack Obama tomorrow. Nobody wants to hear more about my dreams.