(upbeat music) - [Tom] This week on Arizona Illustrated, a fully animated tour of our pandemic dreams.

- If you're witnessing your dream, you're listening to your brain speak to itself in its native language.

- [Tom] Reconciliation on the river.

- [Angel] There's so much to learn when these plants come back or what it actually means to have a healthy riparian area in an urban ecosystem.

- [Tom] And Tucson Cancer Conquerors.

- [Karen] Having support when you're going through cancer treatment, it's essential for that emotional wellbeing.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We're here on the campus of the University of Arizona, which recently transitioned to stage three of their instructional plan, meaning the classes of up to 100 students can now meet in person, and all students on campus for classes are required to participate in weekly mandatory COVID-19 testing.

And much as we do each week when filming, physical distancing and wearing masks are still adhered to in the classrooms.

Here is a COVID-19 update.

Arizona's coronavirus numbers continue to improve with new cases, new deaths, test results and testing positivity declining.

However, the Centers for Disease Control is urging caution as cases nationwide are on the rise.

And more and more Arizonans are getting vaccinated, with anyone over the age of 16 now eligible.

With summer's heat on the way, Pima County is shifting vaccination efforts indoors, including Tucson Medical Center's clinic now moving to the Morris K Udall Center at Udall Park on April 19th.

for information regarding vaccinations, visit azdhs.gov.

So much of our lives has been shaped by the Coronavirus pandemic, like how and where we work, teach and learn, our daily physical interactions with others, even our dreams.

Producer Cáit NíSíomón and animator Elena Lopez take us on a guided animated journey through our pandemic dreams.

(ethereal music) (rackets clacking) - [Muindi] I am on a floating island and this floating island is just the size of a tennis court and there was nothing else all around it, it's just sky.

I'm in a heated tennis battle with my opponent hitting a really great shot that hits the end of the tennis court and the only way I can return the shot is by jumping off the tennis court and striking it back.

But that means that I will plummet into this endless abyss.

(ethereal music) - [Jeremy] I'll be in a dream where I'm trying to literally stay on a fence and I'm off balance.

And sometimes they're just like, you know, I watched a movie with a dinosaur before I went to sleep and so my dream is literally just me riding a dinosaur until I tire of it, I guess, until I wake up.

- [Nina] James Van Der Beek was my neighbor and he's telling me James Dean's my neighbor.

And I was like, James Dean's dead, he can't be my neighbor.

And he's like, he's your neighbor, And that's why his wife doesn't want him coming over here.

And I was like, I don't know what's going on, but.

(laughs) - [Kitty] One of the hunters at our ranch, he grabbed my sister and pushed her up against the stair railing outside, and keeps yelling at us, "I'm gonna kill you "with the COVID baby, the COVID baby."

And then I forced myself to wake up.

It was so awful.

(ethereal music) (chimes ringing) - Do plants dream?

Are they always dreaming?

Are plants creatures that never wake up?

So we're learning a lot about sleep and, and what it's for.

And it seems to be that it might be for different things.

This is why we study sleep in all kinds of species.

There was a great paper that came out last year from a physics AI group, showing that actually when training artificial intelligence systems, by inducing a sleep like state, it actually dramatically improved the ability for them to learn and filter out junk.

I found that study particularly fascinating because you're talking about a machine that needs sleep.

Forget the research in jellyfish showing that jellyfish need sleep and they don't have brains.

Do you need a brain to sleep?

Do you even need to be alive to need sleep?

And so I liken this to how Phillip Dick talked about do androids dream of electric sheep, but this, it goes to the question of, "why did androids need to dream at all?"

Why did they need sleep?

And it seems that once you get to a sufficiently complex system, sleep emerges as something that's important to need it.

(playful music) - [Kitty] My dreams feel like there's so much going on in them whether it's emotionally or physically and then I'm thinking, well, who were these people?

I've never met these people.

Where are these places?

Why can I read German?

In my normal waking life, I can't read German.

(playful music) - So, in dreams, you never actually read anything, or you don't see hands doing things and you don't walk from one side of the room to the other.

You're there, then you're there, just like the cardboard cutout movie set, there's nothing there.

Does that make sense?

The cardboard cutout building doesn't need to have working plumbing.

It just needed to be a general store.

You knew it's a general store by looking at it.

It didn't actually have to stock any shelves.

So it's like when you open a book in a dream it doesn't actually have words, and it's also fascinating, when you listen to music sometimes in a dream.

(harmonious music) Actually the music doesn't actually exist either.

(record scratching) The idea of it is, and you have snippets of it but it's not actually a coherent linear thing.

(exotic music) - [Nina] My sleep has been good.

I dream almost every night.

A lot of celebrities have been showing up in my dreams and I don't know why.

Michael Jordan was over here singing mariachi.

(singing in foreign language) I'd like to know if it is just like a manifestation of what you're going through at the time or if it's just random things that are in your subconscious somehow.

- The way I like to think about it is if you're witnessing your dream, you're listening to your brain speak to itself in its native language.

And that's sort of what dreams are.

They're not really even meant to be observed.

They're experiences that your brain is having.

And sometimes you get to eavesdrop on it, but it doesn't need you to, and it actually could kind of don't want you to, which is why you forget them as soon as you wake up.

Think about it as your self communicating in a language.

It's the language of thought.

It's the language of feeling.

It's language of concept.

And in dreams, you get to play around with ideas.

You get to take an idea and reshape it from a person into a chair.

And so they say, why did I dream of that?

I say, I don't know.

Why would you dream of that?

They're like, well, I don't know.

That's why I'm asking you.

But this is your language of your own mind.

One funny thing is, you have the stereotypical dream of people leaving the house without pants on, which itself is fascinating, 'cause that's the vocabulary in your brain of that feeling of, oh my gosh, I forgot something important.

But something that I don't always pay attention to because when you're walking around in there you're not realizing like, you're not thinking like, Oh I'm wearing pants right now.

Like it's not something you pay conscious attention to but if you weren't, it would be important.

And so our brain uses that.

That idea is a common vocabulary word of doing something, something you normally don't pay attention to, you're missing it and something bad is going to happen.

And now people are dreaming instead of like leaving the house without pants, they're leaving without masks on, 'cause now they have to remember, but they're not used to remembering, and it's this whole new vocabulary we have.

(loud horn blows) - [Jeremy] I've had dreams that are definitely dark sided, where you're like, something's grabbing me, it's pulling me into the dark.

And it wants something that I just intrinsically think it should not have.

And those can be terrifying.

So could dreams be a version of yourself from your optimal future helping guide you to meet them on that side of the fence?

(loud horn blows) - [Michael] So really, when you look at the brain and you look at the systems that control memory and the systems that control emotion, it looks like emotion is a really important part of how the memory system works, potentially because emotion is what tells our brain what to remember.

What is fear except for a flag for memory, like, remember this, this is important.

And memory needs that information to color it, to understand how it fits in, was this a good event or a bad event?

And it looks like one of the things that happens in dreaming is those rules break down on purpose to allow us to probe, see, process, integrate connections between things that we might not even be consciously aware of, but they help us learn.

Why?

Because clearly evolution figured out that the brains that did that figured things out better.

So maybe it allows us to make sense of a world in a way that we can't actually do when we're awake.

(bizarre synth music) - [Kitty] This time is unprecedented and there is so much anxiety and COVID is going to be in us and in our brains and in our dreams I think for years and years.

- [Nina] I'm sure people who are dealing with a lot more you know, losing their jobs and so many people are losing their homes, I bet their dreams are pretty intense and pretty bad.

- [Jeremy] If I've given myself a really rough day, if I've really beat myself up, then I encounter these kinds of chaotic, combative dreams versus if I'm kind to myself, my dreams tend to be more fun and I get to explore parts of myself and maybe discover something in the dream versus be pulled to a dark place.

I feel like, let your unconscious take you for a ride.

It never gets to do that in your day-to-day life for the most part.

It's always having to be warped into shape.

(bizarre synth music) - [Michael] I want to give comfort to people that you don't have to remember all your dreams for them to benefit you as much as they're going to.

You might be able to learn something new from them by remembering them.

And if you do, when you wake up, jot them down, write down as much as you can.

I wouldn't ascribe over-importance them.

It was a dream.

If you want to dig into it more, go right ahead.

I would not make it cause a worsening of the quality of your life.

Know that the dream is doing its job because because you're having it.

(mellow music) (alarm clock ringing) - Perhaps one of the best ways to de-stress these days is to get outside.

Fresh air, exercise and spending time with others in nature can improve our mental wellbeing.

Combine that with revitalizing a local waterway and you have Reconciliation on the River.

(mellow music) - I grew up in Armory Park around the corner, and when I was a kid, I'd come down here and just kick cans and spray paint stuff.

I never thought that there would be water or life down here 'cause when I was walking through, it was just kind of a desolate dry wash. And so when the Heritage Project started back in 2019 and effluent water was released back into the Santa Cruz, immediately, I noticed green.

Once the water reached this area down under the Cushing Street bridge, I was like, well what happens if it keeps getting greener?

(mellow music) And it did, it just kept getting greener.

It kept getting greener every day, more and more animals, I would see tracks of raccoons and tracks of javelina, more and more birds that I hadn't seen on the river before.

But then I was also noticing more and more tamarisk and buffelgrass and trash that was dumping in, and so I started making the point to come down every Sunday and just spend the morning removing waste, taking out invasives and chatting to folks that were on the river.

Over time, folks just started asking questions and asking if they could come help out.

And now we have like a rotating crew of between 15, 20 folks that just love Tucson and want to see the Santa Cruz flourish.

(indistinct chatter) - Both sides of my family have been in this region of what's politically known as the US and Northern Mexico, for generations right?

And I was born and raised here.

I was actually further up north, about First and Roger, and I would make my mom come drive me downtown 'cause I loved it.

It's like going back in time, seeing all the exposed brick and they used to have the old street car running and things.

And I remember looking down on this area and it was just filled with trash, like the water wasn't running.

And this is the most lush that I've ever seen it.

It brings me a lot of joy just seeing how revitalized it is, how green it's becoming, and being able to do this work too.

It just adds to that.

I'll sleep good tonight.

(laughs) Ooh, these are cool birds.

These are shorebirds.

So they call it killdeer.

(mellow music) (birds singing) - [Angel] You see these little fibers, fibery hairs right at the joints between the leaves and the stem.

That's how you know for sure that's problematic.

Once buffelgrass commandeers an area, it is almost impossible for native plants to squeeze their way through.

It's important to acknowledge too, that buffelgrass isn't the only invasive plant that we're threatened with down here in the Southern Arizona borderlands.

We have tamarisk, and there's also stinknet and Russian thistle, AKA tumbleweed.

We see all those plants in the river.

They drain and they cover ground and they take up habitat that could be used by native species, like nurse trees that eventually could provide habitat for more animals and more native plants.

Those things are all snuffed out by these invasive plant species.

Once that's scooped up, we can toss it in the bin.

(indistinct chatter) Then this is native seed mix.

So it's got grasses and wildflowers, mainly grasses.

By replenishing the seed bank, hopefully we're not just removing buffelgrass but we're actually stitching this a little bit more.

So it's not just a band-aid, but we're actually getting a little deeper regenerative healing taking place.

There's so much to learn when these plants come back of what it actually means to have a healthy riparian area in an urban ecosystem.

Maybe get in here and step down on all the buffel.

There's historic accounts in the early 20th century recording the Santa Cruz as just one of the most biodiverse areas they'd ever seen with these huge mesquite bosques, cottonwoods lining the river, 70 foot tall trees with rustling leaves.

That's something that I could never imagine having grown up along the river.

And so this reconciliation work is not to restore this river to what it once was because it most likely never will be.

There's now a million some odd folks in the greater Tucson area that are gonna make the water table a little upset.

(mellow music) But what we can do is we can restore connection to this canvas for life.

Big coyote, booking it across.

- [Woman] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's amazing.

- [Angel] Yeah, beautiful.

(laughter) - [Isaiah] You're building a network not only in your immediate community, but across the world.

So that's a concept for me that I call it the joy angels, right?

And it's not one size fits all, but if you're doing work kind of like this, I don't know, you just feel closer, right?

You don't feel so alone in the battle.

And you're like, I'm making a difference.

- It looks great, man.

Absolutely killing it.

Nice dismount too.

That's 10 for 10 on the style points, bro.

Reconciliation is a phrase I use because in this process of learning and removing invasive species and forming connection with each other and the river and the non-human stakeholders like the Vermilion flycatcher and the coyote that we keep seeing, we gain a deeper understanding and sense of place.

We can't ever make it perfect.

There's no such thing, I don't think, but what we can do is be down here and making new memories and new experiences on the river and removing mistakes that have happened and Polar Pop cups and Carl's Jr bags and buffelgrass and tamarisk and maybe one day this will be a place that is a little reminiscent of what it was for thousands and thousands of years.

(mellow music) - [Tom] Watch Arizona Illustrated stories on demand on our website, azpm.org/arizonaillustrated.

Catch up on past episodes, rewatch your favorites or even view some stories before they broadcast.

Nearly half of all men and a third of all women in the US will receive a cancer diagnosis at some time in their lives, often without warning.

It can be an overwhelming experience, filled with fear, anxiety, anger, and bewilderment.

There's a group here in Southern Arizona that strives to educate, inspire and encourage people both during and after cancer diagnosis and treatment: Tucson Cancer Conquerors.

(mellow music) - In 1973, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

- Stage two ovarian cancer.

- Inflammatory breast cancer.

- Appendix cancer.

- Ovarian and uterine cancer.

- Triple positive breast cancer.

- Triple negative breast cancer.

- Colon cancer.

- Blood cancer.

- I had another reoccurance, I'm currently in treatment and I'm doing great.

(people talking) - [Elizabeth] Hi guys.

Hey Kristen, are you ready to work out this morning?

Can you hear me fine?

- TCC is actually a healthy survivorship program for people going through cancer treatment to help them get through treatment but also to help them stay healthy after treatment's through.

- [Elizabeth] Make sure you grab light weights, they're on the wall.

- I have breast cancer and currently I am going through a treatment.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, and when I found out, we were getting ready for Thanksgiving, it was the day before Thanksgiving.

That's when I got the call.

It was a very sad day, to say the least.

I didn't want to accept it.

But I wanted to be strong for my family.

And I kind of wanted to go through this privately.

I didn't want really any involvement.

And my husband encouraged me to reach out to Liz for more of a positive inspirational support that he thought I needed.

- A lot of our members end up reaching out because they don't want to burden their families.

They start talking about it.

They start crying.

Their husband gets upset.

Their children get very upset and they really don't feel like there's someone that they can talk to.

So the first time that they reach out, I usually text them and then we end up talking and sometimes I can just hear that they're they're crying, and they stop.

And I just encourage them and say, "This is so normal."

Five will work.

It classifies as super light.

- [Lisa] The first time I went out with Liz and had a cup of coffee, I had a lot of questions.

So Liz being there and guiding me through what I was going to experience, it made me feel a lot more comfortable, made me feel like I wasn't doing it alone, that I had someone there to ask questions, to hold my hand, if you will, through the process.

- Studies very clearly show that having support when you're going through cancer treatment or even after your treatment is finished and you're still finding your new normal, having support improves your quality of life overall; your physical quality of life, your emotional quality of life, not just the social, what you get from the social support, but it's essential for that emotional wellbeing.

- [Liz] We started as an exercise program with just a general exercise class.

And then we added a beginning class and then someone said, well, I'd rather walk.

So we have a walking group, we have a hiking group, and someone else said I like to garden.

So we have a gardening group.

We also have book groupies.

So there are people that don't want to exercise, but they love reading.

I think the key is the personal connection.

We have a lot of members that continue to come even though they finished their treatment for several years.

Really fast, one two punches that hurt.

- I've had two breast cancers and uterine and ovarian cancers and I'm now 80 gratefully, and currently I'm in very good health.

I do try to rush up to new faces that I see.

I just want to do that because I want to share with them my joy at discovering this group.

I can exercise outdoors.

I love the outdoors and also meet other cancer survivors.

And honestly sometimes I just get this rush of physical warmth.

I really feel that this group is good medicine for my body, with the exercise, but also for my soul.

- [Instructor] You got it, go, go, go!

- We had the exercise to get fit in the park.

And that was really the first time I was introduced to everybody.

It was like, wow, there's a lot of people who's had cancer, and they're okay.

And I think I'm gonna be okay.

I was really amazed at the size of the group.

I kind of was a little shy at first about saying hello to everybody.

I kind of let my guard down.

And I was really amazed at the level of support and how friendly everybody is, and how ready to help everybody is.

- We're not all raised to feel comfortable sharing our needs and our feelings with other people.

And so it's sometimes a real challenge in my working with cancer patients, to help people realize that this is a different kind of situation you're in.

- I think you can support one another through activities.

When people come here to exercise, yeah, they come for the exercise but they come for the comradery.

So you'll have people working side by side in the garden and they'll start chatting about trouble they're having with chemo or issues with radiation, and it just makes it easier, I think, for people to talk.

- Being a part of TCC has given me a lot of emotional support.

So emotionally, I feel stronger.

I feel that I can handle mental stresses a lot better.

I feel that I can always reach out to someone and talk about my feelings.

That's been a wonderful gift to me.

- I was never really a groupie.

I didn't have time.

I was a singer and voice teacher, didn't have time to be part of many groups, but this is my group.

It really is.

And for so many of us, that's how we feel.

I'll be here forever.

(laughter) (mellow music) - Before we go, here's a sneak peek at a story we're working on.

- [Man] I was raised to never cry, to always dominate, to always be in control.

Don't show weakness.

Don't act like a girl, don't act gay.

Don't ask for help.

Don't show any emotions or weakness.

That socialization process has really clear links to higher rates of depression and suicide and gender-based and sexual violence, and even school shootings.

That issue of how we're raising boys in America today is really central.

(mellow music) - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

See you next week.

(upbeat music)