Strange, but true . . .

Q.  Can an emotional dream in the dark of night bring two people together for a real daytime marriage? A.  Love’s fickle enough that a lot less than a psyche’s well-crafted dream has made it all work.In his book “Night,” Alfred Alvarez tells of a divorced man in London grimly playing the field, but sort of “interested” in one particular American girl.  They lived together awhile, fought too much, it was on and off. “After about two years of this I had a dream.”  He was seeing another woman now, but it too was rocky, though he imagined he was in love.  In the dream, he and the American girl were dancing, just like old times.  “I pushed her out at arm’s length and looked at her.”  Her hair was now white and, he realized, so was his.  “We’re old, I thought in my dream, and we’re together--and perfectly happy.”He awoke still happy and couldn’t understand it.  They had always enjoyed each other’s company, but somehow that hadn’t seemed enough, “too natural, not sufficiently doomed...  But the dream was telling me what I refused to know:  that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.” A few days later they ran into each other on the street and he told her of the dream.  Soon they got back together, and six months later were wed.  All of this Alvarez recounted 35 years later, and the couple was still married.Just like countless thousands of other “dream” lovers.Q.  “Nobody is considered dead until warm and dead.”  What’s meant by this wilderness medicine rule-of-thumb? A.  A person in deep hypothermia following an accident in extreme cold may lose vital signs but be revivable once inside, says Frances Ashcroft in “Life at the Extremes”: A 29-year-old Norwegian woman in a skiing accident was wedged between rocks and ice, and drenched by a waterfall.  When rescuers arrived over an hour later, she was clinically dead, her body core at 13.7 C.  They began CPR and headed for the hospital, where a resuscitation team was able to revive her.When a five-year-old boy fell through the ice on a river, he was trapped without air for 40 minutes.  When frogmen fished him out, he had no pulse, wasn’t breathing and looked blue-gray.  But after two days on a respirator he recovered consciousness and started to talk.  Eight days later he was home, and with no apparent brain damage. Small children usually do best in such ordeals because “they are quickly chilled, their oxygen demands fall rapidly, and they enter a state of suspended animation.”