May 07 a whiney little girl

May 07 a whiney little girl

 

I was in a big garage-like building, and there was a young couple who had just gotten married. The woman was wearing golden denim Capri pants, and had short, fluffy, white-blond hair. I was looking down on them from an upper level. The woman had a VW beetle and she wanted to paint it white because she was newly married. We took spray paint and started painting it. Everyone else was standing about seven feet away, and they were commenting on how that was the proper distance because I was standing much closer. My paint job was, however, much better than theirs, so they stopped painting, and I went round and round, painting.

 

Then a couple men came in and they were professional car painters, and they happened to have a lot of equipment with them, so they started unloading it from their station wagon – which was also white, and had tin cans tied to the bumper. They began setting up their equipment, as they were going to paint the car properly as a wedding gift to the woman.

 

I went upstairs where there was a gift shop, with a bunch of my pottery. Over the course of the dream I checked again and again, and finally, right toward the end I checked and twenty out of twenty-one pieces had been sold! I was happy about that.

 

I went to a corner of some sort where I had a drink, stashed up on a shelf. I was trying to find things to stand on to get to it, when a little blond girl who seemed to be my niece came up and said that Eric wanted to make coffee for the car-painters, and he wanted to create a sort of faux coffee shop, and to string some sort of signs or fliers across the ceiling. She needed my help. I was fine with that, and wanted to help, but the girl was insistent and whiney. I wasn’t jumping to her aid fast enough or something, and she started saying things like ‘why do you always treat me this way?’ and ‘you’re doing this to hurt me’ and things of that ilk – things my mother always says to me.

 

I became enraged and I picked her up and shook her and squeezed her and I yelled at her to shut up, to stop whining, and I mimicked her cruelly, and I must have bashed her because she was bloody and actually just a collection of parts. There was something about tying her onto my back, but then I took her parts and laid them on the floor, on some blankets. I had to struggle to pull her away from the comforter because her body juices were leaking all over it. In a few moments she became a whole person again, and I think I was a little worried about her, or worried I’d be caught? I’m not sure if that is my waking self assuming that’s what I’d feel.

 

She woke up and looked surprised, and I thought maybe she didn’t remember what had happened. She still had a bad wound on her shin, and she started unwrapping the bandage, which was soaked with blood. I told her not to, to keep pressure on it, and I would get another bandage. She was cheerful now and not accusing. I was anxious to serve her now, and to mollify her. I was aware that I didn’t know if she was faking the sweetness, and was wary of the harpie being merely disguised.

 

There was another section in which there were story-boards on the wall, depicting stories involving a sort of superhero or famous cartoon character. Eric kept pulling me over to the wall to show me the story panel by panel. As he pointed to each panel it lit up. I was very familiar with the story, and in fact I had either lived it, written it, or otherwise been involved in it, so I knew the story better than Eric, and I wanted him to let me go, but he kept insisting that I listen to him, so I did. I thought he might have some insight into the story that I didn’t, and kept waiting for some new information, but it never came.

 

My first feeling about the little girl is that she is some aspect of myself, but then she was speaking just like mother.  Its one thing to be angry at a certain aspect of myself that is needy and plangent, but another for that aspect to be so thoroughly separate from me. Or is it the aspect of myself that developed certain emotional patterns as a reaction to mother’s problems? She talks like mother and she is Eric’s daughter, which says to me that she is the interaction between myself and my family. Something. 

What’s with the newly weds? VWs are certainly associated with a certain time in my life, though I’ve never owned a bug. Am I painting over that time in my life? White is the color of spirituality.

apr 07 a needle in my chest

Apr 07 needle in my chest

First I dreamt of a plane crash. Something about getting to the crash site and there’s a woman who’s already done some investigation and the plane seems to have been struck by a defective telephone pole. It was a bizarre accident. I’m walking down a path away from the site with other people and turning a corner I sort of almost step on a little girl’s hand. She’s more shocked than hurt. She’s probably three or four, with straight blond hair and blue eyes. She looks directly at me and I sing-song to her, and blow on her hand to make it better and she is mollified. I go on and am following a young girl of seven or eight. There’s something about me touching someone and they comment on my cold hands, and I say that they’re always cold; that I had been wearing gloves to keep them warm but I was embarrassed since its warm out. There’s more; I don’t remember.

Then I dreamt that I woke up and thought about that dream. I leaned over to get my pad to write it down and found a different pad of paper by the bed, and the milk crate with my alarm clock on it was facing the wrong way. I noticed but didn’t figure out I was asleep.  The front door cracked open and the dogs started to go out, so I jumped up, put on my robe and went after them.

A maroon Subaru pulled up and the back door flew open and at first I thought it was a QRU call that I had somehow missed. The driver shouted “jump in!”. I said no, no, I’m in my robe, I have the dogs. The driver got out and the vehicle turned into a minivan. The woman was part Deb Bullington, part Takla, part __________(the massage therapist in GF). She showed me a lot of packages and said she hit the motherlode! She opened one package and showed me a craft she had made, or maybe she’d bought it and was selling it. It was a sort of white pitcher all cut up and with beads and nakali stuff attached to it.

I told her to come in for coffee. She did. Before putting on the coffee I got out my laptop so I could start writing down the dream I had “woken up” from. The computer had an antenna attached to it, and it started playing the radio, which I wanted to stop, so I picked it up and began taking off the add-on antenna, and found a camcorder also attached. I took it off and it started playing a movie or trailers or something. I looked and looked for and off switch and couldn’t find one. I looked for the battery compartment, but wound up opening the bottom of my computer. I poked all the buttons on the camcorder, which seemed cheap, and then there was a loud pop and blue powder came out of it. I tossed it down.

The woman came in and picked it up, and more powder came out. I realized I’d have to take it in for warranty repairs. She said I looked like I’d been in a battle, with all that blood. I looked down, and saw that when the button popped it must have thrown some shrapnel, as there were many ruby-like dots of blood all down my leg. I walked away and saw a
LOT of blood on the rug, so I looked and found a gash under the ball of my foot.

I went into the kitchen and saw that she was boiling pears in a pan on the stove and asked her, and she said yes, and a frozen egg. I put my foot up into the sink and started to rinse it and saw it was a huge gash. I asked her if she was good with a bandage and she said no. I took green soap that I didn’t recognize off the sill of the sink and began lathering. It hurt. The soap lather is sticky and stringy, even under water. She reaches in and tries to pick up the snotty ribbons of soap, and tries to cut some with scissors.

Somehow I’m now lying on a bed and she’s sitting next to me. Somehow a sewing needle has become lodged in my chest. It hurts. I am fussing with it or the bed moves in a way that pushes the needle a tiny little bit further in and it hurts a LOT. I realize it is right over my heart, and there isn’t much blood so I change my mind about just pulling it out and with a lot more urgency tell the woman to go get my jump kit. Then I give her more detailed instructions, and say to call 911, since its an impaled object and it may bleed even more when I take it out, so I better go in to the hospital. She goes out of the room and immediately a Scott Thompson type person comes in. He has a stethoscope and some other gear on, and is wearing a blue shirt like the old postal service carrier shirts, and it is open down to the waist. He says, ‘so, we’re taking you in, hmmn?” I ask ‘how’d you get here so fast’? and he just smiles at me, so I realize that I’m dreaming, then I wake up.

There were three or four dreams nested into each other, with me “waking up” and realizing I had been dreaming all in a row. I had woken up several times around one or two with a sense that I had woken myself up to escape whatever I was dreaming.I was hot and my throat was dry and I couldn’t get back to sleep. The last I looked at the clock it was 3:30. The first “waking up” included hearing the alarm clock and “waking up” and deciding that since I was sleeping at last, I’d sleep in an extra hour. I remember the physical sense of diving back into the rolling, shearling clouds that were sleep. I wonder about the little girls. Other dreams have featured girls that age, and I wonder if it is me at that age. Did something happen to me then, as Sonia says? Or is it just a new aspect of my personality emerging, or the new directions I’m moving in? The girl looked at me in a significant way. 

 Is the woman visitor an aspect of me? Not clear. The injuries I sustain I have to care for myself, except when I know its beyond me. A needle in the heart. [ the Indigo Girls song…”and I guess that’s how you started, like a pinprick to my heart, and at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown” But I woke up with Ozomatli’s Magnolia Soul in my ears.] Last night I sewed my red bathrobe with a  sewing needle and red thread. In my light sleep I also knew that some other QRU had been called out since I could hear it vaguely on the radio. While needles are about repairing or creating (or just that I used one last night), a puncture can be about needing to get at the “heart of the matter”.  Well, that was literal. 

The dream dictionary lists being barefoot as feeling vulnerable – and boy was I vulnerable, since I got wounded!  And the wound keeps me from moving forward. Green is the fourth (heart) chakra, love, compassion and needing to pay attention to your heart (sure do: later I get a needle in it…). So I’m trying to heal and cleanse my wounds that keep me from going forward. The cold hands are a bit of a puzzle. There are a lot of interpretations for hands, and coldness is supposed to be about being emotionally cold or cut off from your emotions. Hands are tools. Do I not have the emotional tools to get done what needs doing? 

I was embarrassed about my cold hands. A reflection of my waking emotion. Come to think of it, last night I was embarrassed in my dreams several times: about the vibrator falling on the floor, about the garbage I was carrying around in a sacred site, and …something else?  The camcorder that I can’t control, that behaves bizarrely and injures me. I feel nothing about that. Its just too odd. A machine is something that is devoid of spontaneity, enthusiasm or emotion, and its broken. The distance I’ve kept from my emotions is the machine that is no longer working? They also say a broken machine could be a part of your body that is broken. My eyes? Don’t think so.  

apr 07 I serve everyone breakfast

Apr 07 I serve everyone breakfast

 

It was a girls nite out overnight party at Pam’s house (not really her house, but based on it, and the hostess was definitely not Pam). I awoke early and went to the bathroom, which had many stalls, and the light did not work. Amy S. was there and said that the power had gone out just five minutes before. The light was dim, but I found a toilet, and could just make out that it was clean.

 

Downstairs the hostess was preparing breadfast. There was a banquet table set with many places, with complicated place-settings, linen and goblets for juice. I began helping to make coffee and muffins. The hostess sat down to start eating, so I served her juice, and I served everyone coffee. For a time I was putting the coffee in little tea pots which I had made, but it took too long, so I started serving it straight from the pot. At the far end of the table there were two men, one of which I had shared a joke or secret with, and he referred to it as I was going around serving coffee. He said something like a series of initials and looked hopefully at me, and I knew what he was referring to, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. Besides, I was busy so I just smiled and moved on.

 

On the opposite side of the table from me (the kitchen) was E. and a couple of her friends. They were very clique-ish, talking amongst themselves and giving the impression they were “popular girls”. As I served them their coffee they made exaggeratedly desperate comments about how much they needed the coffee, and where had it been so long?! I felt as though they were admonishing me, and I felt ill-used since I was just a guest, like them.

 

I went back to the kitchen to make more coffee, and someone had put the pot away in a cupboard, and I had to find it. I had to pull out all sorts of sundries, and then I couldn’t find the grinder. The coffee beans had been put away, so I had to find them, and I searched through endless bags of lentils, cornmeal, flour and such. I finally found the beans in the freezer, where there was bag after bag of … something. I made more coffee and served it, but by then most of the people had finished and left.

 

There was one place-setting that was still untouched, so I brought some juice and coffee there to serve myself. There wasn’t any food left, just muffin crumbs and what not, so I was preparing to sit down to eat that, but then I found that I wasn’t at the empty place setting, but at one next to the man I had shared a secret with. His friend had left, and I was using his dirty place setting. I felt like I was making a gaffe because now the man would have to remain while I ate out of politeness, though he surely wanted to leave.

 

I felt …what. It was so unfair that no one helped, and yet I volunteered. I felt excluded, and also some resignation or at least a recognition that that was just the way it is, fair or unfair.

 

What I take away from this is that feeling of exclusion. It angers me, but its so pervasive and maybe I’ve even bought into it so thoroughly that it feels futile to be upset by it. 

Its like the dream in which I paid more than everyone else, and no one noticed or cared except the caterer-man.

apr 07 I have a petite girlfriend

Apr 07 I have a petite girlfriend

 

I was talking to a very small, blonde woman who had just professed her love for me. I was not in love with her, but I was willing to go with her. While we talked I kissed her lightly on the lips several times, but it wasn’t at all passionate. She was of a wealthy family, and I was in their house with her, ostensibly to clean it before the family returned from vacation, but they returned early.

 

The woman wanted to reveal to her family that she was a lesbian and would be going off with me. I didn’t mind this, but I did feel a bit haggard at the thought of once again being the “scary outsider”, the different one whom people love or hate: I wanted to just be normal and unremarkable, but I was fully prepared to back this woman up.

 

We were in a room alone, and she was clutching a book. It was a classic – Georges Sand or a Bronte or something – and she had read one book in a series by this author, and her running away with me would be another book in that series. She was profoundly uncertain, and said that having read the first book, which was very passionate and difficult to read because of the strength of emotion in it, she wasn’t sure she could do the next book – us. I kissed her again and said, well, then maybe you shouldn’t. It wasn’t clear at the time if she meant reading the book or running away with me. I saw the connection, but she didn’t make it clear.

 

Some of this is my processing my “heteroflexiblity”. When I was with Jean, she was very small and very needy, though I dumped her; I didn’t back her up. I also didn’t feel passion with her even though we fooled around.  

Some of it is certainly the persona I’ve developed over the years of being exceptional, in order to bolster my self-esteem. The woman is my self-esteem, or the part of my psyche that needs to be backed up, supported and loved. She is (thankfully) perhaps not so much in need of the melodrama anymore. 

I woke up feeling very depressed and sad. It was that miasma and shrouds your view of the world, coloring everything in umber, sepia and sorrow.

apr 07 I explaın the history of Turkish

Apr 07 I explain the history of Turkish

I was in a three or four part bed, on wheels. The blankets were in disarray, and I was trying to fix them. Some others came to help. There were a number of cats on the bed, and somehow they managed to swat my vulva, and sink their claws into it. It hurt, and I was careful to pull their paws away gently. The second or third time it happened I said to the people there “those cats keep swatting my twat! I don’t mean to be crude, but that’s the case”.

Putting the beds together and adjusting the covers morphed into practicing tying a patient down onto a gurney. I was under the bed, working with a man, and we were trying to sort out the straps. There was a complex mechanism there, and neither of us were really sure how it went together. I felt that he thought he knew more than I, but he didn’t. I was right about how a key fit into a slot, and he was wrong.

Then another man came over, because the strap, which was supposed to be wound through a mechanism came all the way out, and the other man was very familiar with it, and was going to show us how to re-thread the strap. He was above us in status.  He called to yet another man, and told him to pour a thick, white liquid into a sort of hopper. I noticed that the man brought the liquid in a pottery pot that he had made himself. On the neck of the vase-like, squarish pot was runic writing. The pot was sort of chunky, but very … true. I don’t know what that means.

There was trouble pouring the liquid in, and it spilled out, and was forced out through the seams of the machine because it was being poured in too fast. I looked up and saw a bowl that had been made by the man ‘in charge’: it was a wide, low bowl with a cream glaze that broke to brown. The glaze was not smoothly applied, and the imperfection of it made it also “true”.  I felt a little  vindication or validation because some of my pottery was also imperfect, and I thought, true. I picked it up and found that the inside of it,…or it changed from a bowl to a sort of box which could be manipulated like one of those folded paper things we made in grade school, and by opening and closing the thing four ways we would predict the future.

In any case this sort of origami bowl wound up having parts of Orhan Pamuk’s book written on it. Some of it was in Turkish and some in Nepali, … I said that this is Orhan Pamuk’s book _________. I named it, and then I went on to tell the story that Pamuk told in his book, in great detail. The man said yes, he thinks the Turkish people are very close to god, and that’s why he incorporates their work into his art. He said that the people of Namibia (or Nigeria?) were also very close to god. He said something about some of the words being in Arabic; that the translation into English…something.

I thought that Turks are not particularly close to god, but I didn’t want to contradict him. I did say that Turkish is not at all related to Arabic. There are some loan words, but it belongs to a completely different family, the Altaic family of languages. I listed other Altaic languages: Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen and even Finnish. I was very specific and explicit. Then I turned back to looking at the art because I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed at his mistake.

Looking at the art I was absorbed by its (new) colors – white and pale yellow and pale green/blues, so that I realized I was flying and looking down at the clouds. I was at an altitude such that I could see individual people, but I was also way above the clouds. I knew I’d better hang on, because I could fall off this plane. I felt a little lurch of fear and dizziness, but secured myself somehow. I pushed away the fear and uncertainty because I had to.

The man in charge who was above me in status validates me, and I even find that I know more than he. He is what stands between myself and my authenticity. Then the art becomes my transport; it transports me, and I’m again afraid I will fuck up, fall off, not do it right, and I hang on by force of will. This sounds like the history of me in my family. I’m the low status one, and then through art I find my individual, powerful self, but I never feel well-supported so I have to power through the fear.  I think the white liquid has got to be semen…all those men. Its always causing trouble. And the many-sectioned bed in disarray symbolizes multi-partner sex.  There is something about the specificity in the section about Pamuk and the history of Turkish. I think maybe even in the dream I was surprised that I was so fluent and specific with my knowledge and facts. I certainly am surprised now, since dreams are rarely so pedagogical. After all, the pottery bowl became panels and then a plane. I guess what I feel is that my dreaming mind had unusual access to my waking mind. The rest of the dream was more typical: the mind that stored the information about my unusual sex play doesn’t store the plain facts, like exactly who did what. That mind finds the dream version of those facts just as valid as the waking version. To it, the facts are unimportant; only the impression that was left on my “self” or my “mindstream” is important. So that is not the mind that could spew out facts.

Time and Dreamtime

That we have three dimensions of space and one dimension of time is interesting. We might have ended up with a universe with just two dimensions of space, and one of time. This would the world of Flatland, as descried by Edwin Abbot in a book from 1880. Creatures living in Flatland could only move in left-right or up-down directions, having no height. They’d be like ants traveling across  a flat sheet of paper.

Another option is that there is more than one time dimension: time and dreamtime. If time is one-dimensional, then, like an ant trapped on a line, you can only go forward. If time is two-dimensional, you could circle around in the time-dreamtime plane and visit anywhere in time you wanted, like an ant free to roam on a sheet of paper. Normal causality would not exist in such a world.

That certainly isn’t the world we know. But what if the second dimension of time was just too small for us to notice in everyday life? To picture this, think of a soda straw. It has a two-dimensional surface; you can make a straw by cutting a strip of paper and curling it into a tube. To locate a point on the straw, one needs two coordinates: the vertical position along the length of the straw and the angular position around its circumference. Creatures living on the surface of a soda straw would really be inhabitants of a two-dimensional Flatland, but if the circumference of the straw was small enough, it would look to them like Lineland. Curl up that straw tightly enough, and it looks like a line, even though it does have a second dimension – its circumference – which is just too small to measure.

This is what String Theorists mean when they talk about the Universe having seven or eleven dimensions, only some of them are curled up and too small for us to detect. Going back to the ant on the straw, think about what it would mean if the second dimension of the straw was an extra time dimension: dreamtime.

When I dream I imagine that the second dimension of time is unfurling, and I can travel around the straw in ways I can’t when waking. And when I dream and look back at my waking self, I can perform a kind of meta-analysis of my psyche that is often stunningly perspicacious.