dream fragment

I'm talking with Niri, an old friend from high school. She mentions she's at this hotel in this strange city because Adam is presenting a paper at a conference here. She says she met him a number of years ago and now she wants to have a baby on her own and is hoping that he will be the father this weekend. I feel very jealous. I ask, "Can we share him?" She evaluates this, and asks how long it's been since I've seen him. I don't want to tell her it's 20 years, lest she quote a smaller number and claim priority. I realize I want to have his baby too - to my surprise. I hadn't thought I'd want a baby. But I now realize how perfect the combination of his and my DNA would be.

I'm in an apartment suite with Adam. I know I have to leave for my first day at high school, so I try to find my clipboard and a bathroom. I can only find an exposed toilet in my bedroom, and as he's coming to poke his head in, joking about how the room is in a different city and the weather is so nice at my end of the suite, he points out another bathroom behind a closed door. I go in and notice it's all stocked up with paper supplies and there's a whole cupboard of fresh bread - this turns out to be a laundry room.

I go to the school and find a table outside. The woman there says, "You're late!" I look and notice my slip is the only one left. I do the paperwork and get my list of classes. As usual in these dreams, the first class is history (that's always the class I've missed all year and suddenly have an exam in). I go to class and I'm yelled at for being late. I leave the class and decide to skip it to buy all my books and go chill in the cafeteria.

In this segment of the dream, I've just managed to pry a bat off my shoulderblade. (Note: I have chronic pain in my shoulderblade and last night, for the first time, I tried an Icy Hot patch on the area. It seemed to be making my bed cold and wet whenever I woke up during the night, so I was worried about it.) I've also seen a mini-bat, a sort of cross between a black bat and a dragonfly, slip under the door to try to get to me. Then I feel sharp pains in my left shoulder. (Note: The Icy Hot Patch is on my right.) It feels like something is biting me. When I turn around, I see that there is a snake looking up at me from the floor. She's a pale-orangey kind of colour, the colour of a cake baked with orange zest. (Note: I'd baked madeleines the other day and part of the recipe called for orange zest, and I'd been unsure whether that meant all of the orange peel or just the inner flesh under the peel, so that had worried me.) The snake is looking intently at me as if she's on a mission. I try to shoo her away. I try to run away. She keeps getting to me and rhythmically striking at me - in the same spot. She finally says to me, "Look, I'm trying to help you. I need to give you the scars for the electrolysis." I think about it for a moment, but I don't know what she means. I'm not even planning to get electrolysis done. So I continue to run away. She always catches up with me. When I get out of the house - which looks a lot like my grandmother's house from when I was a kid - I'm finally rid of her. I go around to the back to get into the kitchen, which I do from an upper window. The people in the cast of my film are there, cooking on the stove, and Aunt Janet from the Road to Avonlea series is there baking. Aunt Janet starts to scream bloody murder when she sees me come in. The ceiling corners above me are dirty and covered with strands of cobwebs.

I haven't posted here in some time because of concerns about my being in the entertainment industry, where you're in danger of becoming well-enough known that any of your Internet postings are summarily outed. I was advised to stay off the Internet as NavyBlueFlower. I'm back on now, inspired by the immortal words of Dr. Emmett L. Brown: "Well, I figured, what the hell?"

Background to the following dream segment: I'm a lifelong sufferer of OCD. It's been diagnosed, but never directly treated. I am approaching 50. My therapist believes I'm an early-arrival Indigo Child.

Sounds about right to me.

The dream segment: I wake up in a house in England. I don't know the area. It's the home of a friend of my sister's, probably in Wimbledon or thereabouts. I have no idea really where I am - I've just been shuttled over there. I wake up and it's just before sunrise - and I feel a malevolent, sickly-evil presence in this room! I can't see it - I can feel it as if it were an invisible oil slick creeping and hovering through the air about me - an oil slick made of thought. Terrified, I try to turn on a light - but the lights aren't working. I jump out of bed and tear through the house - none of the lights are working. It's pitch dark. I run out of the house and down the street - the sun's beginning to come up and the pre-dawn twilight is softening the world. Birds are chirping shyly. The presence stays in the house.

The next thing I recall is being in the house next to the presence. It's about to enter me, but I muster all my thoughts and point them at the thing, and it balks. It rolls away. Victory.

Trouble is, it enters into the head of my 93-year-old grandmother. (She was 93 when she passed away in 2003. She'd be 101, had she lived 'til today.) I can't prevent it from doing her harm.

I know this dream has to do with my OCD. My OCD has to do with fear of loss of control, fear that things will hurt me and I can't do anything about it (except come up with childish "magical" rituals to prevent it), and "butterfly effect" anxiety that everything I do must be very specific or it may cause harm. This ties directly into fear that if I push evil away from me, it has to go somewhere, and it might harm someone I love. Which is directly related to the Christ-complex I had as a little child, that I'd be a good person if I took on as much evil as I could just to take it away from the world and save everybody else the pain. That, my toddler self felt sure, was a sure way to earn my ticket to heaven!

This dream may have sprung from my recent re-examination of that old belief - and my tentative wonderings that I may not be responsible for others' happiness, and that I may DESERVE good things to come my way in this earthly life and they WON'T bar my way to heaven. Obviously there'd be a lot of fear associated with a change like that in one's thinking.

Or... was there really a presence?....

I'm in an open-air theatre play and I know there are bullies in the audience from when I went to public school. I have to be dressed as an antebellum Southern belle and skip in, climbing up a hill near a pier, and then somehow blithely run down the rickety steps onto the pier where a handsome gentleman is waiting, without getting my shoes caught in the boards. We haven't had a dress rehearsal (think of this as the classic Exam Nightmare for actors). It's the Fringe, and the whole cast keeps saying that as one might say, "Meh - it's only a rental car." I have: the dress, my hat, my hair to keep done up, an umbrella, and a Bo-Peep cane to keep track of while skipping down those stairs!

The audience is filling up with rampantly patriotic Americans and I'm not even confident I know all the words to their national anthem! I'm in the dressing room trying to get my hat and hair on straight, let alone prepare for the scene, when a bell rings and someone cues me to just go. I do, grasping my hat, umbrella and cane, and I discover I have to jump over a bunch of nets to get to the performance space. A bunch of animated Disney characters pop up in my path, so I improvise: "Oh, hello, little piggy! Isn't it a fine day?" and such, in a comically exaggerated Southern drawl.

I come to a net attached to a rope at the end of which is the American flag. I try to cross it, and get my shoe caught in it. The audience is getting restless and I have to go now! I rip the shoe out. A tough-looking female Homeland Security officer follows me and gives me a hard time: But this is broken, ma'am, we can't fix it, it's the flag, ma'am, someone's going to have to pay for that, etc., as long as I don't move out of her sight.

I have to go. I just run. I get to the pier, and there's my leading man, but the lights are blinding me and I can't see him to playfully poke him with my cane and then act all nonchalant as the opening gag. The music for "My Old Kentucky Home" is playing and I'm supposed to sing along. I don't know the second line, so it comes out, "...and the caissons go rolling along." Then it turns into that song about the flag, not America the Beautiful but the other one that they sang very frequently after 9/11, the one the heavy lady is famous for - Kate Somebody. I don't know it!

I wake up trying to remember it. It's been 25 minutes with this iPad beside my pillow and I still can't.

I know one trigger is that I saw the musical "The Parade" the other day - the one about Leo Frank. I thought I might play Lucille in the future. My coloring often gets me cast as Jewish, Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern women.

I'm at a revival meeting in a school auditorium, only it's a circular stadium. A man is preaching. I become aware that my attendance at high school classes consists of going to one room, reading a chapter in a textbook, and then going to another room and doing the same. (A frequent theme in my dreams.) The revival preacher is saying things with which I don't agree. A protest group enters through a door in the upper section of the quadrant to my left, and I can see them waving signs and chanting. I don't remember what they were chanting, but I know I agreed with them and started clapping. People in the auditorium don't like me because I clearly am on the side of the protesters. I'm supposed to be clapping and cheering at the preacher and being silent when the protestors enter. But that's not the way I honestly feel.

I speak out during the meeting and ask why they think it would be wrong to grow a new kidney for me from my own stem cells, especially after I've given one of mine to an ailing relative. They don't have an answer other than to tell me it's sinful and selfish for me to want one. Then when they're done ridiculing me to make an example of me, they start with a beautiful ballad-style song, sung by a lovely young-church-lady soprano with shorter, conservatively coiffed hair, about how important it is to be selfless and giving and to show the Lord's mercy, especially toward anyone who was different.

I get up and leave at that point, done with the hypocrisy. I go into the hall and realize I don't have my shoes. I see myself in a mirror as a beautiful older woman, but without shoes. I start to slide along the hallway and I suddenly have some kind of skate on. Then the floor becomes a kind of video game and there are images of electronic bricks getting in the way of my skates and trying to trip me up. Circumventing these bricks increases your score. I start skating expertly around the school - as if the hallways, which form a square, are a track - and one of the people watching says they'd love to see the blooper reel of when I started.

At this point the revival people, who are now ancient Roman rulers, come out and start a show. One of the exhibits is a man who has had a uterus implanted. He's four feet tall and they call him "Little Man". I open my big mouth and dare to ask why they'd told me a kidney implantation was impossible with me when they'd managed to implant an organ into this man that clearly didn't belong there. Then the uterus-man starts to skate too, as well as all the other spliced people, and they take over the track. I have to circumvent them while I'm skating.

I thought this was worth noting. I had a dream about Colm last night. We were, at one point, in the midst of the physical act. It was very vivid; I physically felt every sensation. And that was strange, because in real life, the sexual act is usually physically extremely painful to me. Here there was no pain, only love and an indescribable, beautiful connection. The one I felt with him when I was with him in Mexico. He is one of only two people with whom I have felt that kind of connection.

It's nice to be able to see what the big deal about the penetration phase of sexual intercourse is all about, even if it's only a dream. It's also nice to have a break from my nightmares. I suppose my mind needed the respite. I am also at the onset of menopause, and have likely had that in the back of my mind as well.

I get a birthday card in the mail from Colm (who in real life didn't wish me a Happy Birthday on Facebook). I open it & it's addressed to someone else, a "Michelle", & it's a Happy 16th birthday message. He has also written her a lengthy note about how he used to babysit her & how much she's grown. He's put her full name & phone number at the bottom. Turns out to be the same phone number of a party I'm supposed to be at. Then I'm at work & I get into a conversation with my supervisor (a friend as well) that Colm quite obviously expects me to call this Michelle & tell her I have the card & ask if she has the card Colm was to have sent me, if there is one. In that way, I will have reinitiated contact. (In real life I've made it a New Year's resolution not to do so and to wait until he initiates things this time.) I remark that it's not going to work, no matter how tempting it is to find out whether Colm did in fact send me a card. My supervisor remarks that this is what very attractive Leo men do - manipulate things so that it is the ladies who are pursuing them. A fear grips me that perhaps if this is the case with Colm, he doesn't have a clue how to pursue a woman he likes. Moreover, if he's scared to, he might never initiate anything. Then I get distracted by a surly server's refusal to give me a lunch I had ordered one hour ago (before this intense conversation had begun) wherein I yell at the server and go to McDonald's. They have a quarter-pounder all ready for me.

I've been asked to audition for a teacher. Somehow this audition is a huge life-changing deal. She has already decided to reject me - that's clear - and the audition is merely a formality. The trouble is that my music isn't played by someone born into a wealthy enough family for her.

I start. She immediately covers the keys so I can't see what I'm doing. Fine, I accept that as a teaching technique with some students, but it's a little weird at an audition. She then starts demonstrating arpeggios, Hanon moves, elaborate sostenuto progressions, the works. I'm out of practice and intimidated. I'm not about to show her the music I've written - she's a hostile force.

This is right after I've been introduced to two unattractive gentlemen and asked to choose between them. "Neither" was not an accepted option, so I am now on the blacklist with this piano woman.

Finally, I've had enough. I start playing Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" - and not perfectly, either, but just because I like playing the song.

She stops the audition and asks me to talk to an adjudicator on my way out.

Before this, I'm on my way to the audition room and I'm walking through a huge house, very clean and spacious. I see lions and antelopes and other huge beasts materializing before my eyes - some of them being ice sculptures, yet alive. At one point I say there are lions, but my sister says, "Lions? There are no lions," and gives me a significant look as if to say, "Don't tell this lion he's a lion!" I pick up on that and say, "Of course there are no lions, because there are no predators. Lions eat people." Then I catch a hurt expression in the lion's face, and I hastily add, "Except the good lions, of course."

Real-life parallels: I've been helping my 20-month-old nephew play the piano. He keeps trying to close the keyboard cover. I showed him how to sweep the keys with his palms and he's fascinated with trying to do that. My sister has repeatedly been correcting things I say in front of the child and ways I deal with the child - in a nice, toddler-friendly voice, of course.

In the part of this dream that I remember, I'm leaving work at a psychiatric ward (which was a former waking-life workplace for way too many miserable years) and I'm driving a Model T type early automobile, in the style of the era when they used to be actually called automobiles, or horseless carriages. Aidan is a patient in the hospital and I stumble across his records; he is from a very wealthy family who is keeping it quiet, and he is under the name Adam MacNeill.

(Triggers from waking life: I've been watching a lot of Road to Avonlea lately as a way of dealing with the stress of being home for Christmas with a real-life 21st-century family. There are a lot of those early cars in that show. Also, I'd noticed that there was a minor character named MacNeill, never seen, but named as the legal owner of Green Gables. I'd recognized that as one of the series' many sly nods to the author's estate: Lucy Maud Montgomery's grandmother, who was her legal guardian and who was by most accounts very strict and harsh with the young Maud, had been named Lucy Woolner MacNeill. I had had a conversation with my mother about my father's early-onset Alzheimer's and the fact that he is starting from an IQ well above normal, so his memory loss is not as easily noticed; I'd commented that in the patients I'd assessed, we had to start with a rough idea of their baseline IQ, and usually the professors or economists or others of that social class who were somehow in the public mental health care system (and very few were, as their families usually made private arrangements) were harder to flag as having memory difficulties needing attention, because their scores on the Wechsler Memory Test were usually at or above normal.)

I'm well aware that I have no business even being aware that Aidan is in need of care (although I kind of know that anyway), let alone that he's an inpatient. There is some kind of paperwork that needs to be completed and left on the supervising psychologist's desk before I drive off in my ahooga-mobile. This paperwork will mean I'll be fired when the supervisor gets around to reading it, but I leave in the car before he finishes his coffee. It's the end of the day anyway on a Friday and it's time I was driving off. (In the real-life job, there was a stretch where every Friday contained some kind of reason to worry all weekend about losing my job.) When I do drive off, I'm stopped at a turnstile on the way out and asked for change. I initially don't have it and will be unable to escape the hospital, but eventually I do find it and get out of there.

Cut to a wealthy neighbourhood. My mother, a young girl in her 20s, is there with her toddler. I am there with a camera to take photos, but she has quarrelled with the family in one of the houses there and wants to get the photos taken as furtively as possible in the nearby park on the swings. My job is to carry the camera.

(Real-life parallel: My 20-month-old nephew is here and, for his time with Grandma, who is ill, it is often my job (and my pleasure, so no problem there) to follow and fetch soothers and the like and to open the baby gate. In other words, I'm there to perform all the low-profile support tasks so Grandma can have her joyful time with her grandson. I figure I can always get my time.)

One of the families across the street in that wealthy neighbourhood is the MacNeill family. It is a huge house, tan-coloured, with quaint rustic white trim hanging down from its roof, like Rose Cottage in the Avonlea series.

Oh, I know too darn well that I need to make myself scarce when anywhere around the MacNeills!!