staying in a guest house

                    I was not quite awake at 5 a.m., but found myself on the phone with the postmaster of a nearby town. She asked why I was calling and I told her I couldn’t quite remember; could she? We thought about it for a while and slowly pieced together that I had a key that one of her drivers needed, and he needed to sign a form to take it from me. I went over there. I asked the postmaster if she always opened the post office at 5 a.m., and she said she got here at 3. I said ‘oh, I see, you process the mail and then a clerk comes and mans the window after opening hours.’

           I felt a crack in my thumbnail, and then I realized that I had bit it the night before in a fit of anger. The crack didn’t hurt, but it ran from the end of the nail right across, to the nail bed, nearly splitting it in half. I kept putting the thumb in my mouth to … I don’t know… somehow I thought it would help it to heal or protect it. Eventually I felt the nail come off in my mouth, and I had a hard time spitting out the pieces, which I kept carefully in my other hand. I thought the tissue under the nail would be painful, but it wasn’t. It was only a little tingly. As I used it more, and it brushed against things, it felt sort of okay.

           I was staying in a house that was sort of a guest house. The people who lived there just let lots of needy people stay with them. I woke up in a room and the clock said 6:30, so I thought I had overslept. I got up and found that I had a bra on but no underwear. I went to the dresser to get dressed and people came in the room, wheeling a patient on a gurney. I was standing in a corner. Then Mike B. came in and he looked right at me, so I said ‘can’t you wait for a minute? Just give me a few minutes here!’ and he left, but Skip M. came in and just sat on a bed, facing away, looking at the patient, so I let him stay. I couldn’t find underwear or socks, and after looking for quite a while I finally found a really old, ratty pair. I finished getting dressed and left.

          In the kitchen there was one girl at the table, making sandwiches. The hosts left plates of cold cuts and bread so that the guests could find something to eat. I looked in the fridge and it was full of cartons of fancy juices or soy milk or something, and then there were half-finished glasses of milk. I thought these were not for us. I looked around the kitchen for drinking glasses and couldn’t find any. There were some men sitting around and finally one asked what I was looking for. I then saw what looked like a glass so I pointed to it and said that’. In the cupboard was a bunch of pottery pitchers with prices on them, and so I realized that it wasn’t a drinking glass. There were others, but they looked like good china so I didn’t want to use them. I went to the counter and looked at some of the left over food there. It all looked cold, clammy and unidentifiable. The woman came to put something away and said something about how it would be silly to have breakfast at night. I said ‘what?” and she said it was 6 o’clock at night, not in the morning.  She said I’d been in the hot tub in the afternoon, then went down for a nap. Smug. I thought about that, but I couldn’t quite remember if she was right.

          I sat down to eat or something and one of the guys started to get up, saying he had to get to work. There were clocks all around, all saying different things. I knew I had to be to work at 7:30. I asked the man if that clock was right and he said no. I pointed to his watch and asked what the time was and he said six o’clock. I looked outside to see if the light was fading or getting brighter. The guy got up and, in an effort to be nice he said I could come help him. Then he said that the girl had only been joking.

          I went downstairs to where there was a reception room. Sue M. was there with someone else. We chit-chatted about things, noting that she couldn’t leave knick-knacks on the counter because people stole them. She had some coffee and muffins on the counter, and I eagerly asked if I could have some since I hadn’t eaten. She very graciously and kindly found a plate and piled it with all sorts of good food and urged me to take it upstairs to eat, but I said ‘I’d rather stay here with you.’

          I went back to the room, and was joined by someone on the walk. She asked me which was my room, and I told her, and she said ‘oh, you’ve taken the whole hall?’ and I knew what she meant since my room was down a sort of private hall, but someone else had rented the whole thing and sublet to me. But my room was a very nice one. When we got there I saw that my door was open.  We slowed down and sort of peered around to see if there was a burglar around, but no one was there. My room had become a sort of shop, with lots of antique Bhutanese textiles in it. I looked around for my wallet and other valuables, but before I could complete my search the joking girl came in. She was wearing a cheap cotton and wool version of my textiles and was thrilled to see more of the same. She apologized for trying to fool me about the time and then admired my textiles and talked about how she had made the one she was wearing in her weaving class. Bits and pieces of the cloth were falling off it all over, littering the floor with yarn. I looked at hers, and it was coarse and not very well made, at least compared to the ones in my shop. I was showing someone how the discontinuous supplemental weft was used to achieve the patterns, and the joking girl started to explain it, too, wanting to be the one who knew.

          I woke up with Bonnie Raitt’s song that goes “I guess my love’s got no business, no business calling your name.” It took me a while to remember the lyrics, and part of the riff was definitely from a different Raitt song, but the strong, deep, funky, bouncy beat was strong in my head.

 

There’s a theme of separation and integration. It’s a guest house, so we were all there, and the hosts were caring for us, but we weren’t one group or one family. The joking girl was mean and then came to join me. The men around the kitchen were all separate, and then stepped in to help me. Sue M., who normally doesn’t like me very much at all, was all kindness. My room was part of the hall, but not of it, since the rest of the hall was someone else’s. The joking girl’s cloth was woven, but was falling apart. That Skip was being kind by turning his back on me. My thumbnail falling apart.

 

I’m not getting the nourishment I need. I’m looking, looking, looking. Eventually the things that seem difficult get resolved. I hope it is prescient.

free falling

          I was in a courtyard outside a building. There was a tall wall separating it from a parking lot. The cement wall had a series of railings on it’s top. I was walking along this wall, stepping carefully between the rails and balancing carefully. Suddenly I was joined by a lot of students. I asked the woman I was with where they all came from, but got no answer. Everyone was moving back and forth across the top of the wall aimlessly. I decided it was too crowded and maneuvered myself to the side of the wall bordering the courtyard. The soil sloped steeply up to the wall, and I planned to carefully angle my way down the slope, but the point I was at had very loose, friable soil which would avalanche if I tried it, so I grabbed at the wall, saying to someone that I’d wait until I got to firmer ground. The chunk of wall I had grabbed broke away, and I found myself falling, looking down about twenty feet to rocky ground.

          There were people below as well, and a man in a red shirt stepped forward to catch me. My fall was preternaturally slow, and I was still holding that chunk of wall. I came to a soft landing onto a small patch of grass, with the help of the man in red. On top of the wall I had seen a purple wool scarf. I went into the building and saw my friend who was wearing that scarf. Inside there was a conference or party going on. I walked through the dining room, and saw Neva, a three year old, dancing and jumping around. She knocked over a glass of wine and the entire floor was covered in broken glass. I grabbed Neva and held her to my chest while she kept wriggling. I was on one knee because I had glass in the bottom of that foot. I used my other foot to carefully scoot us across the floor and give Neva to her mother. I went to look for a broom, but got sidetracked.

          There was something about my friend and I getting muddy hands and feet and getting our clothes wet and subsequently freezing. We tumbled into a room, smearing the walls with muddy handprints and lay down. I fell asleep, and then woke up in my bed in this reality. I looked around and then went back to sleep, which had me waking up in the dream again. My father and step mother were at the door of the room with the muddy walls. I had trouble ‘waking up’. Dad handed me a wet cloth which he said I had brought in with me. I thanked him, and said it seems I had just lay down for a nap. I was still groggy, and had trouble getting my long hair out of my eyes. I got up.

          Then I woke up to a sharp sound of a door shutting. I wasn’t sure where I was, and if I should be alarmed by the noise. I guessed that I was in the school building or whatever it was. A man sat softly on my bed and put his hand on my shoulder, whispering “are you awake?” and “you need to wake up”. I turned my head and saw that he was ghostly. I tried to push his hand away, but still didn’t have control over my muscles. I knew he was shaking my shoulder as he continued to tell me to wake up, but I felt no movement. I kept trying to move until I finally woke up and swung my arm through the air. I realized I was in bed at home, and concluded that the sound was definitely not something I should have heard as no one should be here but me. I heard my dog snorting softly on the floor. As I drifted off again I heard some more sharp sounds, but I was sure that they were part of a dream, so they didn’t bother me.

 

Falling in dreams is usually interpreted as feeling out of control. Here I’m only a little out of control. Last night I woke up repeatedly, and I think the cloths that keep appearing in the dream are just crossover awareness of my bedclothes. The broken glass segment is probably about danger; a dangerous state of being, being out of control, being injured. So is the segment about the wall. Danger, caution, and care needed. I use the word ‘carefully’ over and over. 

feeding the horse

          I was walking in a wooded area. I went through a gate and there was a horse tethered nearby. It seemed to be very high-strung, and came toward me. I had to cross the area which the horse could reach, but I decided to walk around, staying out of her range. As I was doing this two women came along the road on which I had come and asked who I was going to see. They were a little accusing in their tone and I was a little defensive or evasive when I said brightly: everyone. I saw a yellow breasted bird alight on the fence post. As I looked at it the crest of the bird turned a bright red. The two women came closer and I said to them that I thought it best to stay out of the range of the horse.

          The women joined me and the horse was anxiously trying to reach us. It had to clamber over boulders and around trees. As we watched, a group of men approached from the opposite direction. They seemed to be ranchers. One was a man I had seen in a picture earlier. Scott had shown me an old picture of a man and asked me if I recognized him. He had white hair and dark rimmed glasses. I couldn’t see him well. I dropped the picture and looked through some others, but the first one was the clearest. I picked it up and looked carefully but I didn’t recognize him. Now here he was.

          Something happened with the gates, and the horse got out, chasing after one of the women. She swiftly went back into the corral (the tether was now a corral) and the horse followed. She adroitly climbed through the bars of the corral, while someone closed the gate. The ranchers said we should feed the horse some special feed. There was an oil, a white substance like yogurt, and we were to add a few horse feed pellets to that. I went into the corral and prepared the feed. I asked one of the women to go get the pellets, and she came back with green gummy candy instead of pellets. It was a special treat that the horse would like, so I added them and gave it to the horse.

          At the place we were going to, workmen were installing a septic tank for me. They had dug the hole for it and trenches for the pipes, which were slowly filling up with water. A sink hole developed beneath a road and I could see there was water just below the surface of the road. I could see through the water to the foundation of the house. The water had filled the hole for the septic tank almost to the top, and it was flowing out the outlet hole, but not very fast. I was worried that the tank would float. I was going to bring it up to the workmen, but somehow I couldn’t.

 

I dream about horses or antelopes pretty regularly. I’ve always thought that they represent the part of my psyche which responds to threats with flight. Here, that part of me is so frantic it has to be contained, and no one can come close until the end when I and some of the other alters have compassion for her. While writing the dream out I kept wanting to refer to the horse as ‘her’, but kept not doing it. I guess I felt that there was no reason to believe it was a filly.

 

The old man from the picture might be another alter with whom I’m not it touch. He seems very capable, so I’d like him to come forward! Scott is someone who is a “fixer”; capable and ready to help me. He figured more in the part about the septic tank, but I can only remember little bits and pieces. Water is often interpreted as a symbol for emotion, and the state of the water indicative of your emotional state. Here, the water is clear enough to see through, but my thinking mind sees that it could be problematic.