jul 07 cranes, eagles, raccoons and caterpillar

I was traveling with an older man down a river – the Kızıl-something – that was located on the border of Poland. He was supposed to have brought two boys with him. He had told me that he was doing a ‘social experiment’ with them, but somehow it didn’t work out, so he brought me with him instead. We had been on this river before. As we floated along there were two sandhill cranes flying along next to us. They were unnaturally large: as big as a human, and flying low over the water. I could see that one of the birds had a large, long, black beak and the other had a short, clipped beak. The red on their heads was prominent. I was riveted by them, and felt that they were a little ominous; powerful, beautiful and non-threatening.

 

We were then in a meadow and a man called over to us; “hey, hurry up and get over here! There’s two eagles mating!” So we went over and in the top of a tree there were indeed two eagles, and as we approached they started to fly away, but then they became huge raccoons, and they were on the ground. They stood upright on two legs, were white all over with brown stripes on their faces, stood about five feet tall, and held hands like lovers. They moved away and someone said we should look at the nest, so we did, and there was a kit there (is that what you call raccoon babies?) which was two shades of brown with only a splotch of white. I wondered if this was one of those phenomena like magpies (?) where one species dupes another into raising its young, since the kit didn’t look like the adults.

 

As we watched the one tiny kit grew, and then another one joined it. Now they were the size of housecats, and we started talking with them. I felt that it was my role to babysit them, so I was trying to engage them in play. I found a toy caterpillar in a box and took it out. As I pulled it out of the box it grew and grew, until it was five or six times the size of the box, and it became alive. It was brown and furry, with small ears. As one petted it, it tended to curl up around, and reach back toward the petter and scrape its teeth or bite lightly. One of the kits said that was how the caterpillar expressed anxiety. It also had a thing about its right ear, which was also about anxiety.

 

Next I was on top of a mountain which was a familiar ski area, though it wasn’t Showdown. I was with a woman and a young boy – Zach. The boy was running away from us, down the snowy ski run. It was dark out. Some of the ski runs had been scraped clear of snow, and others had beautiful, fine, dry powdery snow. I chased after the boy down a snowy run, cajoling and trying to persuade him to … come back? I was aware of the tracks he was making in the snow. They were significant. He suddenly changed directions and started running back up the hill because he had gotten to a cornice and was afraid to go farther down. I grabbed him and held him in my arms and tipped over, and we slid gently down the mountain on the snow. At one point we started going a little too fast and as soon as I realized that, we swooped around through a deeper drift, without me doing anything, and slowed down.

 

We got to the bottom and there was a group of snowmobilers. We discussed something with them, and wound up in a room that had the Sunday papers strewn about. I saw them and said ‘oh, I love the comics!’ and went to look at them. It turns out I had already read them. The comics were all colored with a rusty red, and addressed issues that I thought had had too much attention paid to them already. The man from the beginning of the dream was back, and I was fixing breakfast for him/them. I made blueberry pancakes, and blueberries with yogurt. The yogurt in the bowl, as I tried to spoon it out, flaked into watery slabs and incongruously disappeared the more I tried to scrape the shards together with a spoon.

 In the past few days I’ve dreamed a lot about places and situations in which the people aren’t particularly important – I don’t really interact with them, but with the situation. Before that I had a spate of dreams in which all the characters were specific and important, and I thought of those as integration dreams. This dream harkens back to really old dream patterns, with lots of animals. These animals are all larger than life, more intensely colored, and occur in pairs. Unlike previous animals, these aren’t hybrids, though they have unusual attributes like color or size, and they morph from one thing into another. In waking life I’m experiencing a fair amount of stress – the good kind as well as the not-so-good kind. I’ve thought of animal dreams as being about core emotions in the past, and indeed in this dream its plainly stated that the caterpillar is dealing with stress.  

The boy, on the other hand, is probably an aspect of me, whom I protect, and even though we’re sliding down the mountain, somehow we are safe.

There was a lot more to the segment with the comics, which I can’t recall. Old news. Something I’m through with. The blueberries and yogurt probably just had to do with looking forward to breakfast, since that’s what I often have.

jul 07 art and museums

There was a problem in a museum with an employee who had done something wrong. Bob R was on the board of directors, which were about to meet, and I was there to present the case of a party that wasn’t present. Linda S was there to explain her story, which was at odds with what I was to present. There was tension in the room. Linda presented her version, and bob kept giving me sidelong glances as though to ask if what she was saying were true. It wasn’t but at this time I wasn’t allowed to present contrary versions or evidence.

 

Later she was telling me that the museum wouldn’t allow her to take with her copies of writing she had done on the office computer. She had written a long book, on company time, lambasting the company, and she thought since it was personal data, and not about work she should be able to. I disagreed, and then I said in light of that, I should double-check what I had on my computer.

 

Later we were at Pam’s opening for her show of paintings. She was very happy. I had a white VW van there, and as I came down some stairs I saw some boxes on top of the van. There were also dolls with suction cups on the hands. One jumped off and into my arms. I played with it. On the box was taped a note from Julie. It asked about the cigarettes that someone had brought back from a foreign country. I realized that I did owe these to her, but didn’t know where they were. I realized that I also owed someone else cigarettes, and made a mental note to go get a carton of cigarettes for them.

 

I came back to the bus and saw that one window had been broken. I was upset. Then I looked harder and saw that there was a chunk of cable, two or three inches in diameter, frayed at each end, folded in half that was sitting on the roof of the bus. One side of the cable was resting in the rain gutters, and the bent-over part was above the windshield. I was astonished. I had no idea how it got there, and it seemed to suggest some sort of violence. I thought that when ıt landed on the roof it might have broken the window, but I was sure I would have noticed it happening. It seemed sinister. It was painted white.

 

I had a bandage on my thumb which kept unraveling, and throughout the dream I was constantly trying to get the bulky bandage to stay on. As we milled around it became the beginning of a postmaster’s meeting. A dark-haired woman was mumbling about things she was dissatisfied with. She said that now they’d have to hire 15 new clerks – apparently since proper hiring had not been done earlier – and that with all the overweening attention to safety, efficiency had suffered. The moderator had heard her, and cut her off, saying ‘yes, we know you think safety is an issue’.

 

There was something about two square rocks landing in a corridor in which I and two other women were walking. They just plunked down out of nowhere and landed, conveniently, on a ledge. I noted that that made it easier to pick them up. I picked up the first one and started walking out with it; I meant to take it outside. I headed down one hall, but a woman said that it only led to her office, so I turned the other way and the other woman came with me. We found an exit door which could only be operated from inside. I went through it and she was to stay and let me back in. I took the rock up the stairs, through another one-way door. This side of the building housed the employees, and I saw shoes on the floor inside someone’s room. Outside Jack F. came toward me, being nosy about what I was carrying. Then he said ‘so how’d you get the new digs?’ I said that I had just applied for them, that’s all.

 

The bit in the museum seems to be just a rehashing of waking events involving Linda S. My side of the story was never told. There was a lot more about that museum, but I didn’t write the dream down quickly enough to get it.

The artistic background continues with Pam’s show, which is indeed opening this week. Another recent dream compared mundane, work-related tasks with art. In the surgery dream I’m muddled when trying to get work done, but find off-beat solutions to simple problems. In this one its just the setting which involve art or creativity.

White is the color of spirituality, wisdom, the first chakra. i’ve never had a white van, but I’ve had plenty of VW vans, and dreams of my vehicles often are about core issues or emotions. Cables usually bind things, and this was a very strong cable, but its frayed, and  while it felt really powerful it did nothing but sit there on the roof of the van.

The chunks of rock were squarish, and about the size and color of fresh blocks of clay, though they were much lighter. Stones often hold healing powers, and might represent the need to heal oneself, but then clay is pottery and, again, artistic expression. I take the rocks out of the narrow, confusing corridors, upstairs and into the open. If I hadn’t woken up it would be interesting to note if I went back downstairs and if the woman let me back in.

 

Perhaps bringing the clay up into the light, past all the ‘employees’ is a need to express myself artistically.

 

jul 07 I perform surgery

I was lying in bed on my right side, with my legs twisted together in an unusual way. Mother was lying on her left side, facing me. She commented on my legs, and I lifted my lower legs and waggled them around a bit to show how bendy they were. She couldn’t believe I could do that, so she started to move over to look, but I didn’t want her to see because I think the covers aren’t covering my crotch well, so I turned over.

 

I get up to go to work, and I know I have to leave by 6:20. Something happens to make me late, and I know that I’m not going to get coffee. I go by a shop that has a huge puffy, blue rocking chair in front, on which a girl is sitting. The shopkeeper is there, and explains that she can’t let the family that has been hanging around there stay overnight because it is in a bad part of town. The chair goes in at night. Across the road in a boggy field is a woman with her son and a red car. The son seems to have gotten it stuck in the bog, and now the woman is chasing him. The shopkeeper woman explains that the woman in the field is upset because of perceived injustice on the part of the government, and is down on her luck, living in the car. The woman in the field catches up with her son, and picks him up. She is wailing pitifully. To me it sounds a bit hammy, but the shopkeeper says it is exquisite agony – and understandable, given what she’s been through – as evidenced by her wrenching wail.

 

I’m still going to work, and might be late. I’m now in a car, but I’m just parked, as I’m working on a 1412 from the previous day, which doesn’t balance. I have to get it balanced before I go to work. Mother wanted me to do something else on the way to work, but I roll down the window and say to her that I’ll not be able to do it. I have only 15 minutes to get this done. I really wanted to have a cigar before work, and think briefly about lighting it up and smoking with the window open, since I can’t leave until I get the paperwork done.

 

I’m now at a really large postal facility, still working on my 1412.  I’ve run out of pre-printed forms,  and have to try to do it free-hand. I look through past 1412s for hints as to why I can’t get this done, and am distracted because previous forms were different. The procedure has changed since then. I have to remember what the numbers are, because the previous entries don’t match or seem to change each time I look at them.There are clocks stuck in the low walls that surround our carrel-like work area, and I notice that two of them are stuck at 6:05 when its really 6:25. I call to a supervisor that we need new batteries for these clocks and she says that she thinks they have to order new clocks. I pick up the red clock and put it face down on the table.

 

Now I have to clock in, and go to the other room, where people are clocking in by running a paper through something that looks like a fax machine. There isn’t a rush because it is really too late; everyone else clocked in earlier, on time. Then it turns out that another woman and I are different than the others, and have to use a different procedure. We are both not sure how to do it. I realize that I haven’t clocked in for a long time; I’ve just forgotten, and it seems to be okay since nothing bad has happened. The other woman thinks it has to be done on a certain color paper, and looks in the tray, but only finds blue paper. We are standing by the counter and then the Timekeeper, Sue Coler is behind the counter and we ask her what to do. She hands us a pad of yellow paper with two pens on chains, and two plastic-wrapped name tags.

 

She says we have to provide photos. I don’t know what to do, I’m just blank for a while. Then I realize that I don’t have a photo of myself. I think of the avatar I tried to put on wordpress, and how it didn’t come through. I think of the photo that was supposed to have been posted, and I feel it will be really difficult to get this photo. I say that I don’t have a photo of myself, and the people around me are surprised by that, kid me about it. Sue says I can use any photo, maybe one of a figure, reading. I’m brightened by that.

 

I have with me a dormant rose plant. Instead of the photo, I’m going to prune off a bud from the plant, and when I post it with the name tag, the rose will bloom. I look carefully at the stem and select a bud which isn’t too far from the end. I get my hand pruners out and begin to cut the stem at the exact spot that will maximize the success of the bud, but the stem has gotten bigger, and is too big to fit in the jaws of the pruner. I cut into the stem, and now the stem has become Sue’s foot, I can feel the pruners slide over the bone that is the ball of her foot: I’m cutting off her toe. I have to be careful. I slice through the skin, using the pruners like scissors. Time is slowing, and I’m paying exquisite attention to what I’m doing. The skin begins to bleed, and I wonder why I hadn’t anticipated that, and I think a little about how to sop it up, but it turns out to be only a little blood. I work around the circumference of the limb, which keeps getting bigger, cutting the skin, and then I take the knife-like blade of the pruners and begin to slice deeper. I can hear the sloppy, grisley, wet sounds of slurping and separation. Now it isn’t a foot or a toe, but Sue’s chin. I’m cutting off her chin in a way that means I have to cut very close to her trachea. I can see the ever-deeper chasm of grey, pulpy meat. The limb gets even bigger, and I have to crawl over her torso to get an angle on what I’m cutting. I ask the other woman for help, since its now such a big job, and I look up at her and see that she is horrified. She thinks that its opprobrious that I’m performing surgery in non-sterile conditions, and that I’m performing such a scary surgery at all.

 Well, that was gory. I think there’s an expression of my personality in that I plug away at the mundane accounting task and never quite pin it down, and don’t have a photo of myself, but given the opportunity to be creative, I “blossom”. Unfortunately for Sue, sometimes I get carried away. I rarely if ever dream about my mother. In waking life she’s a very critical, manipulative person, but here she’s completely bland. I spoke with her on the phone just the other day. I sometimes sleep in a kind of twisty position which is partially prone, and I think I was aware of my body position in my dream. Mother has always made me feel that I’m not normal. Sometimes she tries to make it seem as though my abnormality is “special”, other times its more that I’m so very different she’ll never connect with me. Time crops up again and again in this dream. I think that is just because I woke up a few times and looked at the clock. I had to get up before a certain time the next day, and each time I woke up I tried to remember what day it was, and when it was that I’d have to be up by. There is a woman with two children staying in town, who came with no money, and was camping by the creek. I think the “exquisite agony” is me trying to validate my own pain. A shopkeeper here in town had a huge blue stuffed animal, and as I passed by I commented on it to him.   

jul 07 Allie becomes my son

I was walking with my dog Allie in a residential area of a small city. She chases a kitten which leaps up onto a flower box, and Allie jumps up, catches the kitten then lets it go. I scold her because she isn’t supposed to chase cats. As we walk along she repeatedly chases cats, and I keep having to scold her, and having to call her to come to me and stop wandering. We get to Pam’s house/neighborhood, which is teeming with cats and kittens everywhere. Pam says something about the plethora of cats.

I am pruning a rose, and gathering the prickly stems when I see Allie getting into trouble again, and I grab at her, but I also get one of the kittens, and between the rose branches and the kitten’s claws I’m getting pricked all over. As the kitten gets disentangled from us, it lands a claw in my vulva and I shout and jump around trying to dislodge it. I am aware in the dream that in a previous dream I also got a cat’s claw in my vulva.

We are going home with the sticks and Allie keeps straying, and I have to call her back. She is now across a street and there is a large bus coming, so I’m afraid to call to her lest she run in front of the bus. The bus passes, obsucring my view, and then I see that Allie is now a boy of 12 or 13, wearing a tie, and delivering newspapers. I demand that he come home with me, but he just ignores me and continues on his route. I run after him to his next delivery point, and an elderly woman comes out of the gate.

Somehow the boy and the woman are sort of the same. I feel I need to drag her along with me, but she is wearing a blouse without a strong collar, so I grab her firmly by the belt and drag her along with me as though she was Allie the dog or the boy. As we walk, we talk and I say I don’t know what’s gotten into the boy and she said that they’d “all” seen it coming, because they all thought that 93 was a bit much. She is referring to another dream, in which the boy was suspected of committing some crime and as an alibi he had said he’d  – something about 93% or 93 degrees or 93 somethings – but the number 93 didn’t jibe, so “they all” thought he was guilty. The woman is willingly walking with me now, and discussing the issue in a helpful way.

In another thread, I was on a road which was impassable because of the snow. I was gathering branches. Behind me I hear something and look to see a semi coming around a corner into sight. I look around, alarmed, for a way to get out of its path, but the snowbanks are high and it would be very slow and difficult floundering through the waist-high snow. Then I think that it will be okay because there’s no way the semi will make it up the hill through all that snow. I have an image in my dreaming head of a snow-scraper/eater being beneath the semi, clearing a path slowly.

Then I’m on a snowy road, and I’m helping Santa Claus, who’s injured. I am trying to make him comfortable before I take off and get help. I have him lie down, and then realize that he’s so fat I doubt if he can breathe well that way, and I ask him if he’d like to be propped up on a snow bank, and I drag him over to one, trying to find the right position for him.

That segues into me being in a hotel with a lot of conventioneers or something. We have been stranded and one man has slept in a closet because he thought it would be easier than going to a room. He is bedraggled and says it was a mistake. I have been in a room which wasn’t mine, working on the internet. A fat man, whose room it is, comes in and I leave. He goes to sleep. Some time later I think I’ll try to sneak in while he sleeps, since I still need the internet connection in the room. I open the door and he shoots awake. I pretend that iI opened the door by mistake, and go to back out of the room, but he says that there’s no use; he’s awake now and won’t be able to sleep. I notice that he is lying on his side, with a pillow propped up against his back, presumably to facilitate his breathing.

Allie is, perhaps, my rebellious self, who began rebelling at about age 13. Her wandering is her dis-integrating from my childhood self, and from my family.  Over time that aspect of me has remained dis-integrated, even up till I was delivering mail. The older woman who is helpful is the self I’m developing in maturity which can probably help with the re-integration.

I’m non-plussed by the number 93. “They all” could be the myriad personalities of my schizophrenic self!

Gathering the sticks probably has to do with having gathered brush a lot lately in waking life. Nevertheless, its a thorny situation I’m in.

I was woken in the middle of the night by Allie barking at a real-live semi truck that had stopped for some reason just down the street and idled there for some time.

Who is Santa and the Fat Man? They have some authority, and I want to help them, and breathing is an issue. Not getting very far with that one.

jul 07 a hawk attacks a dog

It was in a close neighborhood of back yards with low fences between them. A hawk or a vulture was harassing a little white dog that might have been mine, or was in my yard. I was watching from a yard or a house a little bit away. I tell a young woman to put up these small, dart-like deflectors on the roof, which are supposed to deter the hawk somehow. She has trouble getting them to stick to the roof, and its obvious that they’re useless.

Now I’m in a yard on the opposite side of the yard with the dog, and a dark-haired man is coming toward the dog’s yard, carrying a three foot flexible hose that has metal gadgets at each end – a huge ‘truncheon’ – and he is very angry at the dog. Either its displaced anger, and he’s really angry at the hawk or its that the dog, in trying to get away from the hawk has made a lot of noise. He is coming to whack the dog, which is now standing on two legs, and is wearing red overalls and a sort of engineer’s cap [good grief. is this not weird enough?].

The guy sees me on the other side of the yard and he falters, knowing that he doesn’t want to be seen whacking the dog. I say to him that its okay to discipline the dog, but he needs to be gentle but firm. He relents. He comes to my side and we look at the fence-posts around the yard. It seems that some of them are in the wrong places: there are property line markers, and the fence posts are misplaced. We discuss this, and how to create a path while restoring the fence posts to their proper places.

He says that he will get his dad’s digger and come back and take out this and that post. I say great, but different posts should be moved, because that way the fence could go this way, and ….blah, blah, blah. I outline a simple path, but he doesn’t like it. He wants his own way. I’m earnest in wanting to work with him, not as an adversary, but I do believe that my way is better.

Next door, out in the alley is a freshly painted double-decker bus. The guy is the driver of this bus, and as he walks toward it, talking to me my mother shouts at me from a doorway, nagging me about something. I can’t hear what he is saying for her noise, and I say something to her that shuts her up. But the guy is already in his bus, driving away.

Now I’m watching him drive down the crowded highway, and I hear a voice-over that is an ad for truckers, asking them to join a certain company. The guy is trying to catch up with another double-decker bus, but as he tries to pass a red pick up pulling a boat trailer, it drifts left, and I can’t see what happened to the guy, but I see Rita W in a gold SUV come to a stop on the left verge. There has been some sort of show-down or maneuvering that I didn’t understand.

One thing I find interesting is that in the morning paper after this dream, there was an article about a man who was playing golf, and a hawk swooped down and dive-bombed him, taking a bit of scalp away. Oftentimes during the course of a day I will encounter some element of day-to-day life which is normal but not common or typical, like watching a tree fall, or hearing a certain piece of music, and I will have a moment of recognition: ‘I dreamed that last night!’ Usually the dream is not one well-remembered, and I ascribe it to just a synaptical fluke, like deja-vu, or a certain amount of suggestibility that allows us to take exquisite notice of certain moments, and then imagine that the extreme focus is actually because it matches a memory. This is the first time I’ve actually written down the dream before encountering the element in waking life. Of course, it might just be coincidence, but I’m thinking more about Dreamtime!

I think the guy is me; my tendency to get really annoyed at annoyances, and the observer-me in the dream is the part of me that keeps my outbursts in check. He drove away, where I can’t watch him anymore, or maybe out of my life for good.

I have been very frustrated in my waking life lately because a project I’ve undertaken keeps encountering setbacks and road blocks. I’ve been actively trying to not get annoyed.

The hawk is, of course, a predator, and strikes from above, where there is little protection. Is this just another manifestation of the way I feel harassed by the blockages to my project?  I don’t think so. If animals in dreams are emotions, there’s an odd dynamic between the powerful hawk and the cutesy little white dog. My hawkish emotions are not cooperating with my gentler side, and the gentler side pays the price.

My annoyed side and I try to negotiate boundaries. In a way that is unclear, the annoyance arose from improper boundaries. He refers to his dad’s digger and my mother is there pestering me – are those the sources of my inappropriate boundaries? Ya think?

Tell Rita W to stay the heck out of my dreams. I have very, very little respect for her, and interact with her as seldom as possible. She’s a malicious gossip, manipulator, liar and so full of pretense its surprising she has room for oxygen in her lungs. I don’t know where that part of the dream was going, but I’m glad I woke up.

Listen to me. A little pent-up emotion, perhaps? Hmmmmn.

Nightmares

Two types of dreams are commonly called nightmares: REM anxiety dreams and night terrors.  An REM anxiety dream is one with anxiety producing content during REM sleep.  The dream is more likely to occur during the latter part of the sleep cycle, and the dreamer has good recall of the content.  The night terror, on the other hand, occurs during the first two hours of sleep, is associated with Stage 4 sleep, and is difficult to recall.  A scream typically precedes awakening, and the subject may be disoriented for the next 10-20 minutes.

Night terrors are less dreams and more a cognitive effort to

gender differences in dreaming

In a study male and female dreamers were rated according to femininity scores on standard psychological tests for sex-role orientation.  It was found that more of the subjects with sex-role orientations contrary to their gender had more unpleasant dreams compared to those with sex-role orientations congruent with their gender.  This relation only held for dreams involving some form of aggression.  When the analysis was limited to only those subjects whose dreams included aggression, 75% of the role-gender mismatched had unpleasant dreams while 25% of the role-gender matches had unpleasant dreams.

The greater the fraternal influence on a female dreamer, the more males appear in her dreams. Last born women have fewer babies and children in their dreams than women in older birth positions. Dream researchers, in tallying pleasant and unpleasant emotions or events in dreams, find that two-thirds of all dreams are unpleasant. That’s a lot. It doesn’t jibe with my personal experience.

jul 07 working at showdown

I was at Showdown ski area with a tall woman with long, dark, coarse hair. She was very anxious to get a job there, so I had to get a job there as well. She had a daughter – who might have had a young daughter as well – who was locked into a bathroom while we worked, to keep her from escaping.

The woman went on her way, and I was left to find work for myself. I drove a vehicle up a really steep road that lead to the vehicle repair shop. I had to put the vehicle in first gear. The road was lined on the sides by dark wooden fences and buildings. There were many roads veering off in different directions, and chains across parts of the road, and it was somewhat difficult to find the way.

Then I was walking down a hallway that was filled with people sitting student-like at desks. These were the people already hired to be ski instructors.  Clarissa was there. A man with short dark hair intercepted me and said he was AJ. He was going to help me find work. I hoped it wasn’t as a ski instructor, because I don’t ski well. I followed him. He said I was really too late to get a job as a ski instructor, but he’d take me around to some other departments. I said ’so next time, I should get here earlier, right?’

We stop for coffee. AJ says he wants cream in his, but the young male servers says that he should have cremora because its safer. I say what the heck, get real cream if that’s what you want. We open the cream machine and it turns into a huge mess somehow.

I was back at the bathroom. The daughter was in a huge jacuzzi, which had no water in it. I needed to get up into it, but the side was too high. I found a torquoise-topped step stool nearby, apparantly just for this purpose. I began climbing up, and grabbed what I thought was a hand-hold, but it turned out to be some of those light-weight dumbbells people carry while they exercise.

Then I was outside, and the tall woman was back. Now she had on high-heeled sandals that were gold and translucent. She was dressed up. She said she had to leave now, since her daughter had already gone.  she wanted to go to the Subbins Ranch, where she wouldn’t work, but be a guest. She said we could go on the Harley she had outside. It turned out to be little more than a scooter, brown in color. We got on, and with me on the back it actually tipped the front wheel into the air. The woman started steering us down the mountain, along a very steep, rocky path. There were people clustered at points on the path, chatting. The woman steered around them all expertly, although they looked frightened when they saw us coming at them, and we laughed because of that. At one point she took a corner really sharply, and I realized that my elbow was skidding on the ground, acting as a brake. It didn’t hurt. I was impressed with her skill. Toward the bottom of the path there was a young woman in a lacy, transparant wedding gown.

There was something about some purple, child-sized shoes. Perhaps they were left behind by the daughter.

There was more about buying groceries in Japan. I have to show each item to the checker, and I hide an item or two under others, pretending to just not notice them, but thinking that if he’s so lazy and inept, I’ll just let them go through without paying for them. My grocery cart has a huge ham in it, some ham slices and some other sort of ham or pork. A small bag of apples costs $500, and I say I won’t buy them, but I think about mashing them up as I put them back, as a protest at how stupidly expensive they are.

As in the Hawk Attacks a Dog dream, there is an aspect of me that is responsible, achieving, driving, but also not compromising. In both dreams there is an aspect of me that is fenced in and harassed (in this case the daughter locked in the bathroom).

Steepness plays a big role here. I go up steep, confusing roads to get a job. I go down steep, obstacled path to go be a guest instead of a worker. Going upward can be metaphorical for going into the head, vs. going downward, to the emotions. Certainly the head is the practical one with a job, and the heart wears impractical high heels and drives a harley – albeit underpowered -to a social activity, past a girl in a wedding gown.

The daughter escapes her prison, and does have the consolation of purple shoes, just like the dog escapes punishment with the truncheon, and wears cutesy red overalls.

These two dreams seem to be about personality integration; the recognition that there are these disparate elements, and from time to time I follow them, or watch them drive away, though I try to work with them without being confrontational.

The Japanese grocery is all about passive aggressivness, and the sense of being denied what I want, so I try to get it sneakily. I think I might just go to the store, buy some Fuji apples and mash them. My dreaming self has analyzed my waking self, and suggested some therapy!

Jul 07 two dark men wearing black

I was going to dinner with Dad and Bonnie. On the way we stop by an apartment building to invite a dark-haired man wearing black to join us. We talk for a while and he tells us of some escapades he’d been in lately, which all involve him drinking a lot of wine. In one he has promised the building manager to clean the pool or something, and he did it wrong, or forgot to do it or something, but it was because he had been drinking. I was surprised because I knew this man and never guessed that he drank so much. I am actually pleased to hear it because it makes him seem more human.

He and another, younger man with dark hair, wearing black and carrying a grey guitar case walk with us across a commons to the restaurant. I realize that they are going to play music after dinner. Yet another young, dark man wearing black is nearby or with us, and I wonder if they are supposed to be potential boyfriends for me.

Two nights ago I had a dream that was exceptionally dark (“lots of women”), then last night everything was white (“VW has no door”), and now its all dark. Last nights’ and this nights’ were dominated by men, and the first was dominated by women. In two of the dreams there are guitars. I have no immediate feeling of what the guitars are about. I have been listening to Ozomatli lately, which is a band with a lot of young men. Maybe that’s it.

We are shown into a small room with two sofas, both with turquoise cushions. There are a few people already there, and I understand that they are the last group, just filtering out. Everyone has glasses of white wine, and as I sit down I realize that mine is missing. Iit seems like too much trouble to go looking for it. I’m not sure if this is where dinner will be served, or if this is a sort of waiting room.

 As in last night’s dream, we are a group, we are moving toward a celebration, a dinner, a gathering, but we just get to the preliminary stages.

I’m having trouble understanding how the three dreams could be so complementary. I understand that my psyche is expressing the same notion or location in different ways, but alternating between dark colors and light ones doesn’t jibe with my conceptualization of how dreams come to be. Maybe its the aliens speaking in morse code! Dark = dash, light = dot! Sheesh.

If last night’s dream with the dirty pool represents my “polluted” emotional state, then the dark wine-drinker is an aspect of me that neglected to work out my emotional problems or “clean” the pool.

Jul 07 VW has no door

I have been at a conference or gathering. I go to the parking lot and my white VW bug has no driver’s side door. As I look at it I struggle to remember if I knew this before. Did it happen while I was there or while I was gone? Did another vehicle rip it off? I can’t remember. I realize that I will have to drive a long way with no door, and that I’ll be cold. So I pull out a huge parka and start to put it on, wondering if it is legal to drive without a door. I think about the seat belt I’ll be wearing. As I struggle to put on the grey, furry parka I knock a stick off the roof of the bug. The stick is about a meter long, and has colorful strips of material and feathers attached to it. It is connected to the function I had just attended, and I know what it is.

The process of falling off the roof has released the door from where it had been stuck. It only looked as though it was missing. I’m pleased. I take off the parka and put on some white sandals which have a thong between the big toe and the next. I have trouble putting them on; now they are attached to clay bats and have sticky clay on them, and …ooops! one of the thong things has come off the sandal and is stuck in the clay. Someone comes by and I show him what the problem is. There is no solution.

Next I’m riding a bicycle down the highway, which is tan in color and several lanes wide. I’m in one of the middle lanes, and another bicycle comes along from behind me on my left, then cuts very close in front of me, as the rider veers into the far right lane. He means to tell me that I should be on the right since I”m going slower than he is. He has a large acoustic guitar with beads on it. He is playing it, and the music is like piano music.

Two young men or older boys next pass me on the left, and as they go by on foot, they both slap my ass. I’m angry and ready to teach them a lesson, so I speed up and catch up to them. As I pass I reach out and punch the older one in the face very hard and knock some teeth loose or something. Then I aim a kick for the younger one, but he dodges, and then all of a sudden we are walking together, up the steep, rocky embankment to peer around an obstacle on the roadway below. I say to them that they shouldn’t bother with an old woman like me anyway, and they say ‘but how do we find younger women?’ I tell them they should look in coffee shops, cinemas, pizza parlours and the like. I say to go to pizza parlours on Friday evenings when the girls will be there with their friends, and then they should just say hello to them. Be nice rather than trying to take.

Later I’m in a man’s house, which I know he rents, and he is asking me to help move a corpse. The dead man is lying on his back, and his back is arched in a tetanus sort of way. There is an easily understood reason why the corpse is there, and it isn’t a big deal, but it needs to be moved. We use sticks or scoops or hoes of some kind to push the man’s limbs into order, so that he’s lying straight, with his arms crossed over his chest like a proper corpse. He’s dressed in white. We use the sheets and whatnot to manipulate him onto a backboard or stretcher and we never touch him with our hands. We are ready to move when we see in the neighboring house that the same is being done for a dead woman. Its not a plague or epidemic, but we all need to do this now.

There is a long thread which I only remember a small amount of. I know many of the elements in this thread have precursors; I just can’t remember the story line. One is that we are travelling in a white van. Its a school event, or office journey – some sort of organized event rather than friends partying. We are going back to base, where we will have coffee and cookies. I’m rifling through my pack to find the white, lemon-flavored cookies, but they aren’t there. I realize that my girlfriends and I ate them at the send-off party we had before embarking on the event. I tell the driver that its okay, because there’s a convenience store just around the corner.

We go there, and, being in charge of provisions, I take one or two of the party around, pointing out various treats we could get. We look at some bags of chips, but I say that we should have sweet cookies. The store has several displays of doughnuts, bon bons, muffins, pastries and packaged cookies. We browse but never choose anything.

In that thread there were many instances of me rifling through the pack for things the group would need. At one point the driver was driving just me and my friend to a bus stop or embarkation point. He starts driving us in the wrong direction, which we only slowly realize. Then we are definitely on the way to a place called (maybe) Stanford. He says that will be the best place for us to get the next conveyance to our destination. We realize that he was tired of us being confused and undecided about which route to take, and taking us to Stanford was a way of definitively getting rid of us. We were a little abashed, a little grateful and still a little unsure if that was what we really wanted. We had to think about it.

A lot of white. White VW, white van, white sandals, corpse dressed in white. Last night it was all dark things: dark water, dark rocks, night. Last night was filled with women, and this night was filled with men. The men who slap my ass, the man with the guitar, the male driver, the corpse and the man who rents the house.

Darkness, water and women can all be symbols of the emotional world, while white, men and travelling can all be symbols of the spiritual journey. In the journeys of this dream, I’m not quite ready. I have to take care of the corpse first, to get the cookies, to plan the route and decide on the best course of action.

The colorful stick and the furry parka seem very shamanistic, as does tending to my feet. Feet of clay, indeed. The young guys are easily turned into students, their threat is inconsequential. That is certainly my brother. Glad my psyche is about done with that tired saga. Last night as well I had control of his pen with its special ink.

The VW harkens back to the early eighties, and there is some damage to me from that time, but I’ve never really known what. Nevermind, for I have the magic stick and it appears the damage wasn’t ever even there.