Dream On
In the basement of my sister’s house, early in the morning, asleep for a light second round, I had a dream.
It was a puzzling enough experience that, upon waking, I just lay there, more than a little stunned. Only a few moments later did I resolve to remember as much as possible.1 Lest it float away like most of the others do, off to join its dream-fellows on high. In those Uplands of Meaning and Realisation, that combinatory corral in which nothing is bizarre and everything is connective. Think of all that even one of us dreams . . .
What if —as a feature of the aforementioned dreamy Uplands— we could share?
What if —in addition to our own dreamworlds— each of us could choose to share our dreams with, say, a half-dozen kindred spirits out there in the world . . . people whose minds, whose tireless brains we'd had the privilege to peer into2 and found some kind of complementary allure and inspiration. People whose minds are also at play, and whose dream-fragments and symbols might just craft with and careen off our own?
We dreamers could gather periodically to think it all over. Think the dreams through. Create narrations and invent possibilities together. Perfect agreement would be as rare as delight would be contagious. You'd go one way, playing to your strengths and strangenesses, and I'd go another.
We might uncover penetrating sense. We'd surely have a damn good laugh at ourselves.
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I was late for something in this particular dream, a regular yoga class I think.
To my dream-self, it seemed vital that I make it, that I practise. Even if I had to tumble into the studio a few minutes late, a total disruption to others, getting there mattered. As is the way of dreams (for some of us sad Moderns), the prospect of Lateness mattered Way More than it should’ve done.
My path couldn’t be easy of course.
My dream-self —my yoga mat and stuff in a long bag over my shoulder— couldn’t go straight there. I had to stop off on the way, at a place where I was staying part-time.
I arrived at some kind of boarding house, in the middle of what felt like Chinatown in New York City. It was dusk after rain, and all the colourful lighted signs seemed to dance off puddles in the street.
I entered —Jimmy McGill-style— through a nail salon shop-front. Then passed into a complex labyrinth of a back garden. Out there, it didn’t phase me that everyone (including me!) stayed in tiny shared cabins. I knew this place. My dream-self knew where to go. It wasn’t my home home, but I stayed there regularly.
Except that this time, people and things had changed on me. What seemed to matter was how obstacular everything suddenly became, conspiring to thwart my getting to yoga.
The first person I encountered was a young woman with strangely bubble-braided hair, colourful plastic bits cascading off all sides. I’d never met her before, and she was quite impossible to miss.
She was out front of one of the “cabins,” seated in a green-tinted bubble (made of glass or see-through plastic), atop a piece of playground equipment, consulting an iPad.
An older couple I took to be her parents were also there, but on a lower plane, and not interacting with her or anyone else. They’d helped their daughter move in, my dream-self assumed. She'd be my new neighbour.
Without looking up from her tablet, the woman in the green bubble, sensed my hurried arrival. She suddenly spoke. “I have allergies,” she said, “so you have to be careful.”
Somehow manipulating her protective bubble off the playground equipment and over to a kind of fence, beside which I was passing, she abruptly asked me for the water bottle I was carrying. The one I use for yoga.
Presumably a some risk to her hyper-allergic self, she grabbed it, unscrewing its top. Pointing at the rubber bits inside the lip and cap, and still not looking at me, she muttered in a mildly bored ‘I-knew-it’ tone “this has to go, see, there’s no double lining.”
At the sound of her pronouncement, the man I took to be her father edged closer. He didn’t look up either, and didn’t say a word, seemingly accustomed to his daughter doing all the talking. But I remember his appearance and the feeling, the ‘vibe’ he gave off, as if he were still standing next to me right now.
He was hunched over, with thick, dark-red hair, and a droopy moustache that seemed to follow downcast, mournful eyes. The young woman’s father was deeply disappointed in dream-self me and my water receptacle.
A glance over at the cartoon-demure woman I took to be his wife (and the bubble-person’s mother) only confirmed the generally morbid atmosphere surrounding this pair. She was silent too, just embodying a sense of letdown, of non-fulfillment.
Grabbing my bottle from this delightful gang, I made my way into the shared cabin where, as I remember, my dream-self expected to grab a few things and rush off to yoga.
Things had changed in here too. At least two more young women —sporting the same kind of bobbly-bubble-braids as the woman in the bubble outside— were on top bunks, all looking a their tablets. (Yes, dear reader, the cabins in my dream have bunk beds. And, yes, the dreamed “screens” that dominated us and the visiting Basilisk a few weeks ago are back. ) I seem not to have expected these new room-mates.
They’d moved in all sorts of things of their own, meticulously organised on the floor and up one of the cabin walls. They didn’t speak to me or even acknowledge my presence. But it perturbed that all my stuff had been moved, and stuffed into a bottom bunk aread. For some reason, it especially rankled my dream-mind that the bubble-braid-women had moved my rubber boot mat; two of their own (boot mats!) crowded out my own. The nerve.
Rummaging around, I struggled to find what I needed (a cotton towel, a bandanna, my pair of sports glasses? Who knows), and my dream-self, all discombobulated, just grabbed things and got out of there.
Rushing out through the garden and its labyrinth of tiny cabins (presumably right past the bubble-woman and her creepy padres) I passed into a kind of refectory or cafeteria in the main building in the front.
I hadn't noticed this room on my dream-self's way in. For some reason I took a seat, as if I was planning to eat (what about my last-minute dash to yoga?).
There was a gentle din.
Dozens of young women in the same kinds of bubble braids were seated around me, and others were queued up along the walls, holding trays and talking among themselves. For the first time I felt amidst a kind of community I didn't understand.
Everyone but me knew what was going on, everyone belonged. I was odd one out, and I was surely going to miss yoga.
By the time my dream-self hastened outside, on to the stoop in front of the boarding house, the rain had picked up again.
And the lights of Chinatown were ablaze.
/) /) /)
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I thank
for leading by example, encouraging attention to dreams, to dreams as starting lines.This idea springs from a comment made by Jill, who writes (the inimitable)
, which itself transformed into an emerging plan for some oddball writerly types to meet in a village pub Jill is not only thinking over but also joining others in trying to save. This is my kinda’ dream plan and cause. Cheers and Jill of
Ken, we gotta get these screens out of your dreams – they can't have THAT world too, can they? (He typed, on his screen, the blue light, the hunched back..)
Yeah. I don't think this dream was about getting to the yoga class, Ken. I am pretty sure it was about those bubble-braided, screen-obsessed women. Any idea what that means? This line was very clever: "Perfect agreement would be as rare as delight would be contagious. " And "I felt amidst a kind of community I didn't understand." These days, I feel like this All. The. Time. Your photo was shockingly perfect (or perfectly shocking). Those colors! Yeoow!