My dreams have been absent from waking memory for more than a month, a fact which is highly unusual. I can recall only one other time in my life where this occured. It was eight years ago exactly, and that was because the man I was dating at the time, commonly known as The Devil, was stealing them. He was also causing me to bleed each time we had sex, regardless of the force or tenderness we engaged in the act with. Upon being told that I felt he was stealing my dreams and that I was bleeding each time we had sex, my dreams returned and the bleeding stopped. There are other reasons he was known to us as The Devil, and those reasons, while important, hold little bearing here. Just understand, that it is not easily my dreams should slip away from me in the daylight hours.
Knowing this, though, sheds little light on why it should have been occuring the past month. My stressors have all but disappeared. Money, love, life are finding a pleasant equilibrium. My lover, Andy, is not stealing my dreams, we in fact rarely sleep in the same place together. No, this time it is a mystery.
What there has been to recall is little. There's the brief snippet of Michael J. Fox shambling toward me with heavily cataracted eyes, an image unsettling enough to have me wake with the certainty that I'd dreamt his death into being, and there's the dream last week I recall swipes of, a Grey Gardens-like duo of women who were my "aunts", and pails of ranch dressing being flung at a large crowd of people who wished them harm, one member of this masse being my friend Hilary Davis, whom I recognised from behind by her red hair, just seconds after the dressing hit her. There's also the brochure which featured a Korean restaurant called Babi, which served pizza with a Sriracha cream sauce and artfully cut, cold, raw vegetables placed aesthetically over the surface of the Sriracha slathered crust. But none of these dream snippets add up to a whole, nor have they provided me any insight to deeper brain goo.
In other words, these dreams are not like my dreams. They are inferiour imitations of what I know to be my dreams and praise the lord, it would appear that the real dreaming is back as of two nights ago.
I dreamed of a huge old pale yellow house, which sat on a hill that slipped gently into a cliff which overlooked a large lake. It was surrounded by thick woods of elm and oak, with a private drive not easily seen from the main road. The house was run down, as if it had not been tended to in a decade or more, but its build was solid, and its foundation crafted from natural stone. I had found out that this house was an heirloom, passed down for generations, but kept secret; the previous owner had cared little for it and spent no time there. Thus, my time had come to make it my own, lest the house fall further into disrepair. I stood on a higher hill which overlooked this house and took photos with my cell phone. I'd been unprepared for this gift and the elation had made me weepy, heady with possibility. I sent these photos to Andy with the understanding that he was to keep it secret. He was welcome to live with me here, of course, but it had to be tended to before that was possible.
What is curious, then, is the course the dream took after this. Being as religiously romantic as I am, I find myself wont to believe that this house is real, and that it is a place I have been, in a life long past. I've had dreams like what this dream turned into before, where people I've never knowingly met have names and rich lives of their own, and understanding of the dream landscape, technically foreign territory, is as known to me as my own life.
I arrived at the house in the early afternoon hours as people bustled about tending to tables and wreaths and streamers. Signs of festivity, of celebration. I wore a cotton dress, in the style common to women in the mid 1950's. This was not the house of the first portion of the dream, but that same house, decades earlier. In pristine condition. Full of people, of life, of love. These woods were somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, and the inhabitants were lifelong, old money Southerners. Happy, genteel folks. And I was one of them. But, in pondering this in the waking, it was not a me that I know, but yet a me no less familiar than the me that is now. My hair dusted my shoulders, a dark blonde which shone with shades of red. I wore a small white veil upon my head. My dress was perfectly tailored to my shape. I kept looking down, to my stomach, touching it gently. I was pregnant, and it was my wedding day.
I dashed upstairs, to the servants' quarters, where I spoke with my dear friend, our black head servant, Albert. He was the only one who knew that I was pregnant, but it was not something we spoke of, or indicated. In the dream, I just knew it to be true. He sat at a small table in a nook just off a children's playroom, eating a simple sandwich. His eyes shone with happiness and pride that I was back home, and that the reason for my return was my wedding. I knew that there was much to prepare for, and bid him adieu.
This is where the dream ends. I find it curious that despite Andy being prominently on my mind in the first portion of the dream, he is absent from the second portion, and that I've no impression of who my groom and father of my child was to be at all, other than the understanding that he was the right choice.
Last night's dream is less worthy of detail, so I shall summarise:
Connor, an ex quite possibly least likely to ever interest me again, wound up interesting me again, and things were vaguely rekindled. I moved to Madrid, and he followed me there. It was shortly after this that I became suspicious when I noted him frequently talking to large groups of people. I realised he was proselytising them to be in his army for Satan, and when he couldn't convince them on the simple merit of his words, he would resort to casting a glamour upon them. This fact raised my hackles and caused latent messianic powers within me to come to the fore and thus an epic battle of good versus evil began.
The end.
I'm sure I won. Connor's a putz.
4 years ago
