Visions in the Dark

(There is a "trigger warning" on the content of this dream.)

It is the mid or late eighteen hundreds. I live on the edge of a crowded city in grey brick house at the end of an small street or alleyway where there is a laundry pool, beyond which is a forest. In the dream I am an only child and live with my mother and a few of her friends. We are not wealthy but have enough to live comfortably.

There are several men courting me. The first man is someone I have never met, which was set up by my mother and her friends. I am not comfortable with the arrangement, even though he is an established doctor, because I will not be able to meet him until the wedding. I know nothing of what he is like, let alone what he looks like. I have not said no to the proposal, but I have not said yes either, and I try to stall my answer as long as possible. The second man is homeless and in rags with scraggly hair and beard and unkept hair, but I talk with him by the laundry pool and he is very kind. Everyone opposes interaction with him and "polite society" all but shuns him.

The third man appears on day when I am in the forest on the otherside of the laundry pool, sitting on a tree stump, reading my tarot cards. He comes and sits on a tree stump behind me and strikes up a conversation. He is handsome though I thought he had a kind of shifty look to him. The man's manner of speaking is very well, he is suave and magnetic and I find myself beoming drawn to him. While we are sitting and talking I pull either the Six of Cups or Six of Swords from my tarot deck (I cannot remember which) and say that is the card which represents him. The man scoffs dismissively, not believing in such trivalities as tarot cards, but also not disturbed that I do.

The man asks me to marry him and I say yes. I take him home to meet my mother, who is not enthralled at first but is quickly charmed by my new fiance. There is something about him that makes me uneasy, but I figure that I can't do much better with anyone else so I ignore my nagging doubts. He is eager to move in with mother and I. He has little in the way of worly possessions and it is clear to me from the onset that he is the one to benefit from this union financially much more than I. I am overcome with the dreadful thought that he is interested in me only for my money.

A week passes and the day of the wedding comes and takes place in a clearing in the forest beyond the laundry pool. The other residents of our household vacate for the night so that my new husband and I will have the place to ourselves. Almost immediately he takes me into his room and strips off my wedding dress. I am afraid and trembling because I have no idea what is about to happen. He roughly pushes me onto the bed and climbs on top of me, not bothering to remove any of this clothes, not even his shoes. He begins having sex with me but I am uncomfortable and in pain but he ignores my protests and continues until he is completely spent. As soon as he is done he climbs off of me, pulls up his pants and demands that I return to my own room. His tone is cold and flat and he does not even look at me as I leave his room, very unlike the warm, magnetic man who initially drew me in.

I am in my room on the second floor of the house, laying on the bed and looking up at a dream catcher in the window that is made with pink beads and white feathers onto which I have apparently stuck a tarot card. I cannot identify the card but I stare at it for a while. I don't know how much time passes but my feelings of being used and violated prevent me from falling asleep. I am just drifting off to sleep when I hear a door slam downstairs. Putting on a robe and going downstairs I find all of my valuables gone. I rush to the window and see my husband climbing into a horse-drawn wagon which has all of my possessions in the back. He sees my shocked and horrified face in the window and arrogantly laughs and waves as he drives away. His mocking is the last I can bear it and I collapse to the floor admist tears and despair.

My mother and her friends return and learned what happened and we are all infuriated but can do nothing, since we do not know where my husband has gone and cannot do anything anyway, since all of my worldly possessions become the property of the man upon marriage (an actual 19th century law). To avoid utter poverty I am now forced to accept the first man my mother arranged for me, the established doctor who I have not yet met. It turns out that he is more than twice my age and has children from a previous marriage, some of whom are actually older than I. We do not tell him that I was just married and robbed of all my possessions.

The marriage date is set and while everyone else scurries around making preperations or caught up in the excitement of the coming union, I feel shamed, betrayed and depressed. I resolve to drown myself in the laundry pool so one morning I sneak out of the house just after dawn. I am surprised to discover some of my stolen possessions sitting on a wooden deck next to the laundry pool. The objects where peices of pottery and soapstone carvings, some of which I have actually made in in real life, though in the dream I merely recognized them as possessions and not peices of art that I made. One particular peice that stood out was a small White Tara carved in soapstone and placed on a tree stump in the middle of the laundry pool. There were also some roughly carved faces and my pack of tarot cards wrapped in green silk.

My mother comes up behind me as I am looking at these things and is just as perplexed as I as to why some of my things have been returned. I tell her that I believe that my con-man first husband is mocking me from afar and only returned the things that he could not sell and would thus be worthless to him. I also believe though that it is an ironic twist of fate that the things he considered worthless are the things most treasured by me because of their sentimental value. The dream ends there.