I woke up a short while ago from a four-hour nap during which I had vivid and somewhat disturbing dreams. The first was about a living baby doll, only it wasn’t life size. It was one of those tiny, hollow plastic ones I remember from my childhood, made of plastic so cheap that it was soft and translucent, with light showing through it in pinky peach tones. Someone told me in the dream that I needed to care for the doll as though it was a real baby (which, of course, it was). To do this I put it inside a clear plastic bag, then filled the bag with tiny replicas of baby things: a basinet, a blanket, a crib. I think there were a few toys in there, too — so small they were barely visible. My job was to keep an eye on the plastic bag and fluff it every so often so it wouldn’t settle over her tiny body and suffocate her. The feeling that stays with me most strongly from the dream is the deep love I felt for her. So fierce was my love that it pierced me like a javelin through the center of my body, and I found it painful and difficult to breathe. All my tiny baby doll did was sleep, and I knew in the dream that she always, always slept and it was my job to protect her while she dreamed her tiny baby dreams.
The second dream is harder to pin down, but it seemed to be about living in a one-room apartment with my husband, my in laws and two children. In my waking life I’m married, with no in-laws in residence and two cats but no children. Somehow the six of us lived in a single room with style and grace, keeping out of each other’s way and getting along remarkably well. I felt the same deep, piercing love for all of them that I felt for the living baby doll in my first dream. Everything was sweet and lovely until one night when a large, scary man broke down our front door in the middle of the night. His intention was clearly to murder us all as we slept, but I escaped and ran to the apartment building next door to get help. It took me a long time to find someone who would open their door to help me, and while they were calling 9-1-1, the large man in my apartment took a shotgun and blew off the heads of my husband and his mother and father. What happened to my children, I don’t know. They simply seemed to disappear, to evaporate as though they had never really been. In the dream I felt my body rocked by each shotgun blast, and I wept long and silently for each of the people I had loved.
The strangest part of my dreams is that I woke up from them feeling lighter, as though something deep in me had been released and purged. Perhaps it has. And it’s only Tuesday! It will be interesting to see what I’m dreaming and feeling by the end of the week. Thanks for reading. As always, I am grateful you are there taking in my words.
~Love and Blessings,
Selene~
I decided to do a post tonight before I leave for Iowa. I’ll be attending the Summer Writing Festival there, and I hope to return with some new and wonderful poems from the workshops I’m taking. Tonight, for me, will be a night of no dreaming because I will stay awake until I get on a plane bound for Cedar Rapids. Well, actually, it’s bound for Chicago first, then on from there to Iowa. Usually the only time I don’t have dreams is when I don’t sleep. I may have interesting dreams to blog about from napping on the plane, though.
I already have a new poem or six percolating in my consciousness. One is likely to be about my experience of telling fellow Californians that I am visiting Iowa. “Really?” asked more than one person. “On purpose?” Which uproarious statement was followed by gales of laughter. Well, perhaps not gales, but certainly snickers. Which reminds me, I’m hungry and I wish I had some chocolate. Ah me, I have readdicted myself to that velvetly, heavenly brown substance and am now rekicking the habit. Sigh. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to eat chocolate with impunity. And strawberries. Ah, that brings back such fond(ue) memories (okay, okay, I’ll stop)!
I may post a few blogs while in Iowa, since the friend I am going with assures me there is Internet access on the Iowa University campus. She posits there might even be wireless available now, given its pervasivness and popularity.
It is after two am in my part of the world and I can hear a train whistle blowing out in the distant dark. How different a train sounds in the middle of the night than in the bright light of day. I love the sound both ways.
Time for me to sign off. I need to cook food to bring on the plane with me. Or at least throw a salad together. Blog at you later.
~Love and Blessings,
Selene~
P.S. — In case I didn’t make it clear, I was surprised and appalled by people snickering at me for going to Iowa “on purpose.” Of course I’m going on purpose! How else can I expect to get anywhere?
I had a very strange dream a few nights ago that I am still puzzling over. No matter how I try to view it for interpretation, I’m left stranded in a thick fog of confusion. Maybe I just need to accept that I’m really weird and sometimes I have nutty dreams! If you can offer assistance on this one, I’d be eternally grateful.
In my dream, a little dog — some sort of terrier with wiry, dark fur — was running around inside a large building, barking. The interior of the building looked kind of like a log cabin, and functioned as a bed and breakfast inn. I was one of the proprietors, and the dog was a stray I had adopted.
At one point the dog ran outside to bring something back for me; I knew in the dream that the item was important, but I didn’t actually know what it was. The dog was gone for a long time, and when he returned it was snowing outside. He ran in the front door of the cabin, barking and (somehow) carrying a large pumpkin. I was very happy to see the dog and even happier to see the pumpkin.
The dog jumped up on a table and I walked up to it with a large knife in my hand. As the dog sat passively in front of me, I lopped off its head and then its butt. There was no blood, because the dog was really a pumpkin, or had insides like one. I was appalled in the dream by the dog’s passiveness. He just offered himself up for slaughter without a struggle. I was also upset because I had cared about the dog, and didn’t understand why I would do such a terrible thing to him.
Well, that’s the dream. What do you folks out in blogland make of that one? I really am interested to know (and I thank you in advance).
~Love and Blessings,
Selene~
Recently I’ve been gathering evidence of how we’ve lost our minds as a culture. I’m doing this for a new slam poem I’m thinking about writing. I’ve learned more about a remote control device that you can have surgically implanted at the juncture of your stomach and esophagus to help you combat “morbid obesity.” The television commercial I saw talking about this device showed a woman who was a bit overweight, perhaps, but hardly obese. Her complaint about dieting went thusly: “I just couldn’t lose weight because I hated being hungry all the time.” Color me completely confused on that one. How does cinching shut the opening of your esophagus to prevent food from entering your stomach keep you from being hungry? Seems to me all it does is prevent you from eating. Of course, my real question about this device is: what the hell do you do if the batteries in your battery-powered remote run out of juice while the device is cinched shut around your esophagus and it happens to be 3 am on a Saturday and you live alone? How long is it safe to leave your esophagus like that? Come to that, what the hell do you do when the thing shorts out or stops working altogether, as electronic devices do? Does this thing have a lifetime guarantee? If so, such a guarantee is simply further evidence of unbridled nuttiness.
Next on my list is Juvederm. This is a gel-like substance that performs a function similar to bo-tox. You inject Juvederm into your face and it plumps up your skin and smooths away all that annoying evidence that you might have emotions or be affected by life in some fashion. In particular, we apparently must now do away with lines around our naso-labial folds, otherwise known as “smile lines.” Heaven forbid anyone should know you get happy once in a damn while! What are the long-term effects of having this stuff repeatedly injected into your face? I submit as further evidence that we have lost our minds as a culture the fact that the people who are likely to use this gel from hell don’t really care about its long-term effects, as long as they can lose their wrinkles instantly.
My latest evidence that we’ve gone insane was provided by Aunt B. over at her blog, Tiny Cat Pants. Here’s the link to her post about labia- and vaginoplasty. http://tinycatpants.wordpress.com/2007/05/29/frank-cooter-talk/. Apparently a surgical procedure that was originally invented to help women avoid medical problems after having several children (such as incontinence from overstretching of the vaginal muscles) has now been incorporated into the repetoire of plastic surgeons to aid in “beautifying” women’s vaginas (!).
I am absolutely agog and aghast about this one. To me, this is even more invasive than having a device surgically implanted in my body to cinch shut my esophagus by remote control! Madison Avenue, stay the hell out of my pants. The way my vagina looks is simply the way it looks, and it’s my business and the business of people with whom I choose to be sexually intimate. I cannot possibly come up with clearer evidence of national insanity that the fact that we may now get our breasts enlarged, our tummys tucked, our faces lifted (or gelled or bo-toxed), our fat sucked out of our bodies, and our vaginas made to look more “uniform,” which an increasing number of people believe means “more beautiful.”
I’d ask what’s going to be next, but in all honesty, I’m not sure I want to know! Having said that, however, I do plan to gather more evidence and keep you posted. Bye for now.
~Love and Blessings,
Selene~
