One of the things I didn’t expect when I moved into Eau Claire’s Eastside Hill Neighborhood was all the wind. In retrospect, I should probably have expected things to be a little gustier when you’re living in a place with “hill” in the title. But then again, I’m not the most observant of people.

I’ve always gotten nervous when it’s windy. Even if it’s not stormy, and there’s just a really strong, tree-bending wind about, I get a weird feeling in my stomach and I get a little jumpy. I don’t like the soft roar of big wind. I hate it when the windows rattle. And obviously, I despise it when my hair gets all tussled.

I grew up in Eau Claire, but I’ve always lived in relatively low parts of town. So four years after moving onto higher ground, I’m still not used to the breeze factor.

Is it dumb to be afraid of wind? I mean, people are usually afraid of things like tornadoes and hurricanes and things involving the phrase “gale force” – not regular old ho-hum-sounding “wind.” It’s like saying you’re afraid of rain as opposed to typhoons.

[Note To Self: “Gayle Force” is a great name for your Crystal Gayle tribute band.]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not too crazy about tornadoes, either. Like many people, I have bad dreams about tornadoes. Well, to be more specific, I have bad dreams about “tornadoes a-comin’ at me” – tornadoes that never actually reach me. I’m always in a building or on a hilltop, and I can see the tornado coming at me and I’m all worried about it, and there’s usually some people to warn or some animals to save and I usually just stand there gaping in awe at this enormous swirling mass of horror. And then I wake up craving pancakes.

The pancakes have nothing to do with tornadoes. I always crave pancakes while in a conscious state.

    Anyway, I looked up “tornado dream” on a number of extremely reputable internet sources and found that such dreams supposedly signify a feeling of chaos or stress. They are the manifestation of feeling out of control in one’s life.

If you buy into this, disorganization and stress cause tornado dreams. Which means that most of the people living in modern society must be going to bed every night only to relive Dorothy’s crazy-ass journey to Oz (with varying degrees of a Technicolor ending). You’d think, with so many people all stressed out all the time, that just about everything in your dreams is somehow stress-related.

According to the internet, tornados may also represent an unpredictable and/or violent person in your life – a concept so obvious you needn’t be Sigmund Freud to come up with it. 

So ... am I stressed out? Often. Am I disorganized? Always. Is there a violent, unpredictable person in my life? Well, I’ve got a humungous cat that sits on my head in the middle of the night if I forget to feed him, so ... hell yes.

Well, now that I’ve found a correlation between my dream life and my daily anxieties, do I fell better? Or course not. Things like this are mildly interesting but mostly insignificant, just like Jimmy Kimmel.

This all seems pretty appropriate since we’re right in the middle of tornado season. In fact, weather is one of the more unpredictable things in my life right now causing disorganization and stress ... which is kind of scary. I mean, if general anxiousness makes me dream about bad weather, what will actual bad weather make me dream about? Needless to say, I don’t plan on sleeping until late June, because I now believe that dreaming will make my head explode.

Whenever I start analyzing my tornado dreams, I always end up at one important detail – the tornado never gets to me. Just like the very real, non-dream Strong Wind that swirls through the tall, fragile-looking trees growing all around my house ... nothing really bad ever comes of it. And that’s the thing about stress and disorganization – they’re mostly made up of feelings, and unless you let those feelings consume you, you’re probably going to be OK. I think you just need to grab on to a few of the truly important things in your life and let the rest of it blow past.

But if that cat sits on my head one more time, I’m going to kick it clean over the rainbow.