centre of the universe - the dreaming

Because now that it's officially Saturday, last night is actually Friday night, and I really mean Thursday night.

Anyway, you know how I have really vivid dreams? And you know how I often remember my dreams? And you know how sometimes when I tell you about my dreams, you don't know if they're real stories or not?

Last night (and remember, I mean THURSDAY night) I dreamt, in vivid detail, about...okay, wait. I don't want to rush into this. You might not be ready for this. It's not about the way I feel about you; it's about commitment. If we rush it, we might wreck a good thing. And that's what we have now; a good thing.

Have I told you about The Sandwich yet? I haven't? Well, this is a good time to talk about The Sandwich. I, um, invented The Sandwich. It is the best Sandwich ever invented since the beginning of man. For all you evolutionists out there, that can be translated as: it is the best Sandwich ever invented since the beginning of mammals. This is how it happened (and i'm pretty sure this story itself will somehow be enshrined on a brass plaque above a holographic image of The Sandwich. You wouldn't want The Sandwich sitting on a plinth for decades on end, because it might get a little manky.

Anyhow, enough about manky plinths.

The Sandwich is made thus:
Tuna
Yoghurt or Sour Cream + a smidge of Mayonnaise
Red onion
Pickles
Curry
Two pieces of Rye or Pumpernickel bread (or one piece of Rye or Pumpernickel, folded in half)
Cream cheese (optional)

I'll leave it up to you how you put all those things together; that is the secret of The Sandwich.

I should warn you, though. The Sandwich has Powers. Your life could easily become consumed by thoughts of The Sandwich. When you are without The Sandwich, you may think of nothing but The Sandwich. It will take over your every waking moment.

...so on Thursday night, I dreamt *all night*, and in vivid detail about PAINTING MY NAILS. All. Gorram. Night.

Labels: dreams, The Sandwich

Sometimes, dreams are dreams. Usually they mean something. Often, they mean something quite powerful - if not about the Universe Around You, then certainly about the Universe Within You.

You know by now that my dreams are always extremely vivid, and are very often incredibly brilliant. Just like me*. Last night, I dreamt I was sitting on the Blue Couch, in my "nest" (the corner of the couch I always sit in, because it is so close to all the stuff I've deposited around it, owing to the fact that I always sit there. Even the chit'luns know that when someone says "Mama's nest", it means that corner of the couch). I was watching a movie, and His Nibs was sitting beside me. So far, this dream is pretty vapid.

Beside me, on the table beside my nest was a little glass jar. It wasn't much larger than a mustard jar, but at times, if you looked at it in exactly the right way, it would be as large as a pickle jar. Inside was some murky-looking water, and a large, odd-looking eye. Oh! And tentacles! Many, many tentacles!

Partway through the movie, I turned to His Nibs, and I said: "Did you know that octopus can fit into spaces much smaller than their actual body *ought* to be able to fit into?"

"Well of course," said His Nibs. "Many animals can."

"It's owing to the fact that they are invertebrates; they have no skeletal structure," I replied.

"I know what 'invertebrate' means," His Nibs pointed out.

"Unlike cnidaria (probably where Roald Dahl got the name for the vermicious knids from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator), which mostly rely on the pressure of the surrounding water to retain their structural integrity (particularly those whose external membrane is really only a cell or two thick), cephalopods have an intensely rigorous muscular structure, which allows them to retain their shape outside of the water. Of course, they are marine animals, and they can't live outside a marine environment."

His Nibs stared at me, then shook his head and went back to watching the movie. Yes, I speak parenthetically even in my dreams.

"I have a cephalopod in this jar, you know," I told him.

"I'm not eating squid," he said.

"No, no! Yuk. BLEAH!" I exclaimed, because we all know that eating squid is rather a lot like chewing on old shoe leather, or the ears of comatose pigs. "No, this one's ALIVE!!!" I said 'ALIVE!!!' in my very best Mad Scientist voice.

You probably know by now that the only thing odd about this scene so far is that His Nibs was sitting beside me on the couch. This is how I knew it was a dream, in fact.

I held out the little jar and showed him that the creature inside was moving. His Nibs rolled his eyes and pursed his lips and went back (again) to watching his movie. But *I* opened the jar. At first, a little tentacle (and from here on in, I will say 'arm', as that is appropriately what it was; I just wanted you to have the mental image of the terribly cute little appendage, with its little suckers, wiggling about in the air) emerged from under the lid. It lolloped about in the air for a moment, but was soon followed by another, and another, and another, until there were six arms, all with the nicest mushroom-coloured suckers on them, gyrating in the air and testing out the outside surface of the jar. (NB - the other two arms were supporting the critter from the bottom. Like little cephalo-legs)

I allowed the suckers to touch my fingers, my arms, my face. Their touch was gentle, and foreign. The creature inside the jar emerged, much, much larger than the jar it had been confined to, and pulled itself down the length of my body to perch on the floor. The 'plop, plop, SLUUUURK, plop' of its arms learning the surface of the floor was oddly reassuring.

The octopus, for that's what it was, amused itself at my feet, wrapping its arms around my arms, gently touching my face, and trying not to get its arms in the way of the television. It picked things up and then put them down, sometimes in the same place, sometimes in different places. Then, it wrapped one arm strongly around my leg and held on. We wrestled for a moment; *I* was grinning, but I couldn't see its beak, so I couldn't tell you if it was.

After a time, I said, "Okay, buddy. Time to get back in the jar," and it crawled back up the length of my body and sklurked itself back into the little jar, pulling the lid over its head as it went (see video, below).

Now, sometimes dream symbols need to be interpreted. One of the interpretations for seeing an octopus in your dream is as follows:

octopus Busy-ness, multitasking, going in many directions at once, approaching a problem from many different angles. Dreaming of this animal can represent:

* Having too much of one of these qualities, or that you could benefit by being less this way
* Not having enough of one of these qualities, or that you could benefit by being more like this
* Someone or something in your real life with whom you associate one of these qualities (an event, situation, threat, etc.)

For more clues, pay attention to what the animal was doing or any particular characteristic that stood out. - from mydreamvisions.com

I didn't need to interpret this dream, though. I know what it means. And I think he does too, my octopus friend.

NOW I totally want an octopus for a pet. But I should probably stick to dumb things like cats and puppies. Something smart enough to use tools and leg-wrestle would probably be a Bad Idea. Although the thought of an octopus splorping on to someone's head from above, having crawled up the wall and onto the light fixture, is the best image I've had in my head all morning.



--
*
This is me, using the Sarcasm Hand: /* The "You're supposed to find this funny" hand is this one: *\, and the "I'm being funny by being sarcastic" hand sign is thus: *\/*. Sometimes, these hand signs are used in rapid succession or in conjunction. If they're waving about, it means you're to catch on Right Quick that a funny is being made, or that sarcasm is involved. This is represented in print comme ça: ((*\ or /*)) or, of course, ((*\/*)). Which also looks like the sign for "big boobs with a tiny bikini and/or pasties". But rest assured, it is not. It is the sign for "HEY, YOU DOOB! I'M MAKING A DRASTICALLY FUNNY WITTICISM OVER HERE THAT INVOLVES SARCASM!"

Labels: dreams

Is that it looks absolutely nothing like it looked when The Captain and I were there earlier. For instance, there is no third floor with dormer windows. There is no Spare Oom off my grandmother's bedroom. The house is, though, Full Of Crap; so much so that one cannot maneuver onself around except in narrow pathways. Would that it were like that erstwhile house in my dream, though. What a glorious adventure it would be to have a house with secret rooms!

I could do without the spiders, though. Especially the ones that stole my glasses.

What do dreams of dust and spiders mean?

Labels: dreams, The Captain

*Terribly* good in fact. I have been SO good, that I believe I ought to receive a grain-burning stove. And a million dollars' worth of renovations to my home. And a current pool. And time - time to traipse up to Hometown North and pick up my dining table, buffet, vanity, and bureau drawers. Time when it isn't a million below so that the wood won't crack. Time to actually *clean* the house rather than hide the mess. (Although, on the character sheet of "cenobyte", mess-hiding is one of the higher-ranking skills in which I have points. I shall post that character sheet some day for you.)

I would like someone to cook for my family, not because I don't like to cook, but because if someone else does it for me, I'll eat the vegetables. I eat salad if it's done by someone else. I love salad!

I would also like some dust repellant. bleah.

Then, if there's enough wishes left to go around, and in that vein of time/home renovations, I would like someone to help me redo my kitchen. And by 'redo', I mean paint. And where can one find tin ceilings these days?

Oh, and the obligatory love and respect for all the peoples of the world, a lot of hand-holding and humming indistinct tunes in the semi-darkness of a bonfire.

On a completely unrelated note, I was at a wedding last night. I couldn't tell you who the couple were, but there were an awful lot of people at the wedding that I knew, which is always nice. It was held in Saskatoon at the Bessborough hotel, where, in the ballroom, they have these enormous water canons that shoot water fifty feet into the air and can be programmed to match the music in the room. There are lights sunk into the floor as well, surrounding the water canons, which make a glorious show during the reception.

A fellow I went to school with was there - he's now a policeman, and we talked about all kinds of things. And when we retired to our respective rooms, we discovered our rooms were adjoining, by a single door in the back of the closet, which locked on each side. I won't mention what sorts of things this door led to, because that would involve my not having woken up.

Labels: Christmas, dreams, Wishes

NyQuil sends dreams to me of
l'histoire: my first love
broke my heart. He has it still.

Well, not the WHOLE thing.

Just that little flittery bit that I probably wasn't using anyway.

True story.

That is all.

Labels: dreams, sicky mcsickerton

So. Only one of these scenarios really happened in the really really world.

You might not know this, but I spent the weekend at a monastery while His Nibs and the kids stayed at home. And do you know what happened there? A whole lot of sex. Serioulsy. Couldn't get away from it. A staggering amount of sex. What's the collective noun for an awful lot of copulation? There was a nuzzle of sex. (Wait; can you *have* a collective noune for a verb? It does seem rather counter-intuitive, doesn't it? Maybe it's a collective adjective then.) There was nuzzling and caressing and humping and fucking every time I turned around. I am *totally* not complaining. At a MONASTERY (and yes, the Benedictines are Roman Catholic).

Now, in the dream I had last night (yes, that first part actually happened), Neuba and her J and their gorgeous baby, and Darth Xander and *his* J and *their* gorgeous baby, and a bunch of people who haven't any gorgeous babies at all were all staying in a hotel of sorts. It seemed to me that Neuba and her J were living in this apartment/condo complex, because they had a bathtub in the main room. It was a large clawfoot tub with coloured water and jets. And Yours Truly was about 5 months pregnant. (**sigh**) I mean, lots of other things happened, but that was the real salient point. Oh, and my mum showed up. She and I and my grandmother had a *really* long conversation last night (thank you, mugwort tea!), but I wasn't expecting to see mum again tonight. She was disdainful of all the crap I'd brought to the hotel/apartment (with good right). She also told me to lose some weight (she's been telling me that since I was eleven, and she's right).

So a big hey to Neuba and her J and their wee wiggler, and to Darth Xander and his J and their wee wobbler. You guys seem to be doing great!

Also, babies and toddlers from now on shall be called 'wigglers and wobblers', and in the store I own that has toys, handmade clothes, and other kidstuff, that's how their section shall be labelled. Make it so.

Labels: babies, dreams, smart folks

The radio is blaring, sounds of car engines in the street trickle with early morning winter light into the bedroom. The children are stumbling bleary-eyed to the bathroom and back to get dressed. Sleepy choruses of "Happy Morning!" chime through the rooms.

His Nibs raises himself up on an elbow and says, "Good morning, love."

And gets punched in the chest.

"THAT," cenobyte growls, "is for making out in a bus with your friend's wife."

Poor His Nibs rubs his chest, his face a geography of confusion. Then cenobyte pokes him in the ribs.

"And THAT," cenobyte continues, "is for **not inviting me**. Jerk."

"Wh...but...wh...co...um..." His Nibs stammers.

"Yeah, whatever, bucko. Don't try making excuses NOW. It's too bloody late. Also: I love you."

It is at this point cenobyte usually storms out of the room because she realises how ridiculous it is for her to be *this mad* at someone for something they did *in a dream*. Sometimes, the vivid and remembery dreams are Just No Good. Thankfully, by now, His Nibs is starting to get used to it. Starting.

Labels: dreams, His Nibs

You know where that day's name comes from, don't you? That's right! Two days of beautiful weather before everything goes to hell in a handbasket again!

So here's the deal. I've always wanted to live close to water. In my dream world, I'd live *on* the water, in a grand yacht or houseboat with a slide off the back and a hot tub on deck. However, this is not my dream world, so I live in a house that is firmly moored to the earth, near some water. Sometimes, I am fortunate enough to stay with people who have houses within spitting distance of the water.

I don't honestly remember what lake it was we were staying at, but we'd been there an awfully long time; long enough that our friends came to visit us there. The Smarty Pantses and the Neos, and the Arnisadors. But the Arnisadors didn't stay; they just came out for a visit. Late in the night, after many fermented malt beverages had been consumed, Smarty Pants decided to jump in the lake. Neo did as well. There were several young ladies out swimming in the lake at the time, and so this decision made perfect sense.

Yours truly also leapt in, although Yours Truly was wearing underclothes; the boys leapt in fully dressed. It turned out this lake was extremely shallow (6 feet at the deepest) and alkaline. I watched the gents flop around out in the water, and then joined them. They teased each other about not being able to get out of the water in front of their wives, if they kept swimming with the naked young ladies, and I grinned and swam off to the west. The water was warm - it had been heated by the sun all day, and with such a shallow lake, free of algae due to the alkalinity, it was pleasant to swim in. The bottom was caked hard with mineral deposits and felt strange on my feet.

Neo and Smarty Pants splashed around, practising the martial art they do, but with the added resistance of the water. Then I noticed a current in the lake. A very, very strong current in the lake. It was pulling us all to the east, as if the lake became a narrow channel to the east that tumbled over a cliff...then I noticed The Captain was swimming with us. I grabbed him and gave him hell. First, because he was out of bed, but also because he was swimming in a lake that developed a hell of a current that he would not be able to swim against. I grabbed his arm and dragged him back to shore, noting Neo and Smarty Pants were far, far out to the middle of the lake. I handed The Captain over to His Nibs, and swam hard, letting the current help, to reach the guys.

"Do you realise how far out you are?" I asked. They grinned and turned to look.

Smarty Pants looked a little concerned, but not as concerned as Neo looked. They both swore a little and started back. I suggested they try an angle to the shore rather than directly into the current, and apparently all ended well as the next thing I remember is being in an antique store four houses away from my Nama's house in the thick of the hot, dry southern part of the province. A store that had never actually existed. And the owner seemed to think I'd be providing him with sexual favours.

I woke up with a feeling of disgust and rage, so decided to go back to sleep for a while and dream about that houseboat I mentioned earlier.

Labels: dreams

The autumn here is one of those mutable, changeable things. It's rather like your grade 2 (or any grade, really) teacher who was nice but who had a hair trigger and a handful of chalk.  There's nothing like taking a hunk of chalk in the head when all you're trying to do is find out what's going on at recess. Maybe this is why I'm not the sort of person who is good at planning things (always been more of a spur-of-the-moment person) because Mrs. B could hit a fly off the ceiling fan at thirty paces with a piece of chalk, and she wielded that power like a superhero whose mother has just been taken for ransom by people with one-syllable names which are usually used as nouns. Maybe I was conditioned against making concrete plans because every time I tried to discuss recess plans (what game we'd be playing, whose marbles were most vaunted, whether the girly girls would lower themselves to playing Red Rover, or whether they'd stick with hopskotch on the uneven sidewalk) I got dinged in the side of the head.

Anyway, that's totally what autumn is like. Sometimes, it's bearable. Sometimes, it's very pretty. Sometimes, it even smells really good. But more often than not, it's just kind of there, winging chalk at you from across the room and trying to get you to do long division.

So I decided that I should probably go to the God-forsaken damnable shopping mall. It's one thing to send the kids to school with last year's usable school supplies; it's another thing entirely to claim that the shoes they wore last year for gym must have shrunk in the sun. Stupid feet. I don't remember if I first saw the gorgeous, sexy, and wicked-smart Ms. A at the God-forsaken damnable shopping mall, or if I managed to literally run in to her.

You see, I don't like crowds of people. I especially don't like crowds of people I don't know. God-forsaken damnable shopping malls are particularly awful. So are their first-cousins, effing big-box hell stores. So after I'd been at the God-forsaken damnable shopping mall, I really had to unwind, so I decided I'd take a long, relaxing walk in the park at Depot Division. (That's the RCMP training barracks.) I think I must have met Ms. A at the mall, because I remember apologising to her for having to leave so soon, and she asked what my plans were, and I told her "to go for a long, long walk in the park at Depot Division", and she said, "I've never been there!", and I said, "you should come!"

So Ms. A and I wound up on winding trails that reminded me of the Kinsmen Park in Prince Albert, or that city's graveyard on the hill; the trees were tall and deciduous, shedding their golden and yellow leaves on the pathways. Groundskeepers came by with mulching machines and blustry machines that cleared the leaves from the paths, because the baby Mounties need the paths clear for their joggery. Which gave me an idea. I started running. I haven't run (unless something was chasing me) since sometime in grade nine when I realised how painful it had become, since the advent of ten pound breasts. But it felt great, and I had someone to talk to!

Later, as Ms. A and I sat on a small hill beside the path, laughing and talking about all manner of things, we leaned our heads together conspiratorially and began kissing each other. The leaves were surprisingly warm to lie down on, and the baby Mounties were surprisingly not interested in a) kicking us out of their park for trespassing, nor b) staring at us making out.

Much more happened later, after we'd left the park. But I'm not the sort to dream and kiss and do stuff and tell.

Labels: dreams, fall, Sex dreams about Brad Wall

In general, I do not like yelling at people. I can be very good at it, and sometimes when I'm terribly upset and my hair is wild and spit is flying out of my mouth and my voice is cracking, well, those times, I feel like I should be weilding a broom or throwing a cat or speaking junkulese. Note: no actual cats have been thrown in the discussion of this topic.

There were an awful lot of people at my house who witnessed this. We had, throughout the summer, quite a few afternoons and evenings where we'd host our friends and our friends' families. This was fun, and sometimes stressful, but usually, it was pretty cool. This particular night, my friend Coyote said something or did something that made me Quite Upset. I haven't a clue what it was, but I got Very, Very Angry with him. I yelled at him and told him to leave. He thought I wasn't serious, of course, which made me Even More Angry.

Eventually, after much, much yelling and my insistence that he Just Leave, he realised (along with most of the other guests) that I was really Quite Upset, and he quietly took his things and left.

So this morning, I had to write him a note to apologise for what I said to him, and the way in which it was said to him, in my dream. Because none of this really happened in the really-and-truly. It was just a dream.

Labels: dreams

That September is going to be a crazy, bizarre month with lots of crazy, bizarre things happening. His Nibs and I were in Mexico, and we were staying at the same resort-on-the-sea. This time, though, the second time we'd been for a vacation, there were other folks there who went with us. We'd talked about that after we got back, about how we thought it would be quite a lot of fun to head to Mexico with a few other folks. There were good things and not so good things.

F'rinstance, when you travel with a group, there's always the concern that you have to stay with the group. At least, that's the concern that His Nibs had. We spent most of our time just hanging out at the condos or on the beach, which was fine...going for dinner and drinks...doing a few touristy things...but there's this pressure, you see, that if you want to lie on a beach and read, you'll be somehow being rude to the folks you've been travelling with.

Things like GenCon are great because there's so much to do, no matter what your buddies are doing. But...well...okay, that's a bad example, because there are always lots of things to do when you're Away. The trick is, you have to be willing to go off and do something on your own. Yours Truly is pretty used to doing things on her own, and so it's not such a big deal to split from the group and sleep on the beach all day. I don't think I insulted anyone, but it's difficult to know.

So anyway, I kind of decided to split from the group and hang out on the beach all day (have I mentioned how much I love beaches?), and then go for a walk in town. But when I went for a walk in town, I was suddenly reminded of the UofS campus. Mostly because that's where I was. It seems I'd decided to take a few classes, and the UofS handily had become some kind of centralised location with transporter or portal that Very Few People knew about (like, His Nibs and I and two of the four people we were with. Maybe it's only UofS alumni who can use the portal.

But, as often happens, the campus was wonky. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. In fact, it was really more like the University of Manitoba, which is a gorgeous campus. I was toodling around in the religious studies department, and found a Strange Thing - some windows built into a hill that looked in on a hall in the building. Cool, actually. I wondered if those were some of the tunnels.

Around the back (or front?) of the building, I remembered a dream I'd had where I'd spoken to someone who'd worked on the landscaping. He'd told me that there were religious symbols on every brick in the walk, religious imagery in every tree and shrub planted, and even the design of the path was in fact part of a mandala that could only be seen from the third-floor landing. I took note of the bricks; I was trying to figure out what symbols were on which bricks and what religious tradition they originated from. Then I heard shouting.

Glancing up, I saw a huge grey dog loping toward the Administration building. Someone screamed. I jogged up the steps and realised it wasn't a dog at all. it was a wolf. I ran across the lawn, to the landing in front of the building. Women were screaming as the wolf tore around the campus and sniffed and growled and bared its teeth. I stood on the concrete landing, watching. The wolf approached. A girl who used to date a good friend of mine told me to stay calm, that the animal protection people were coming. But the wolf wasn't aggressive, just determined.

I touched its shoulder. It turned around, licked my hand, whined, then put its paw in my hand. It looked at me with green and yellow eyes. Then, as strangely as it had come, it loped off again toward the field house.

I looked around, saw frightened and astonished faces. Suddenly, I was on the patio of the pub, and Neuba was there, and I knelt down beside her and sobbed, because I knew what the wolf had said to me. He'd come to tell me that His Nibs was dead. My phone rang, but I wouldn't answer it. I knelt there on the patio, and let Neuba hold me, because even had I wanted to, I could not do anything else.

Didn't much like this dream, to be honest. Nothing like waking up sobbing to set the tone for a day.

Labels: Bad Mojo, dreams, His Nibs

I was driving these crazy mountain roads, the kind that are little more than one lane, with switchbacks and hairpin turns, and heavy tree cover and sometimes you wonder if there isn't just going to be a landslide. We'd gone to some kind of mountainous terrain to research the rugged Western Canadian Mountain's propensity for vicious attacks on unsuspecting tourists - just a few weeks ago, a hapless hiker had been dashed to smithereens when one of the wild Mountains shook him from his foothold on a small hiking path.

SMITHEREENS.

It wasn't that long ago that an entire portion of one of the great Western Canadian Mountains attacked an entire village of unsuspecting people. It just up and fell over right on top of them. No warning (except from the Aboriginal Elders, who called that particular range : the mountains that move), just whup! up in the middle of the night and jumped all over a hapless village. Go ahead and pooh-pooh. The evidence is STILL THERE.

Anyway, we'd been attempting to research these vicious Mountains. On our way back, it appeared that wherever we stopped to camp, there were people there we knew. On one such stop, my friend David was there. Strangely, a number of our friends were there as it appears we'd contacted them all ahead of time to let them know we'd be camping and throwing a camping party. The strange thing about this was that we didn't know until after someone explained it to us that we'd done that.

I figured it out, though. It's very simple when you think about it. We'd *already* camped at that site, on that day. Sometime in the future, I, or His Nibs, had travelled back into the past to alert all our friends that we would be there on that day, at that time. Of course, future us could not talk to past us, because of the horrible things that does to the space-time continuum (evidence: Star Trek, Superman, Back to the Future I, II, and III, and this version of Hamlet I read in a comic shop once). So the party itself was a surprise. Which was nice, and unexpected!

Anyway, David approached me and said, "I have a gift for you in the car!"
And I said, "A gift!?"
And he said, "In the car!"
"In the car!?"
"A gift!" he exclaimed. This conversation went on for rather longer than it probably ought to have, but it was terribly entertaining. Eventually, David went to his car and returned with a little piece of PVC tubing with some shoots growing out of it. I stared at it. I stared at David. I stared at the PVC tubing with some shoots growing out of it. I stared at David. I repeated these two things a few times more. Then I said
"David?"
And he said, "Yes?"
And I said, "Did you just give me weed?"
"Yes!" he exclaimed.
"Hydroponically growing weed?"
"Yes!"
"Little baby dope plants, growing in PVC tubing?"
"Yes! I've decided that I'd rather have fresh herbs all year, and so I've set up this hydroponic greenhouse in my basement."
"David?" I asked, "Are you seriously growing a basement full of weed?"
And he said, "No! That's just for you! Most of what's in my basement is basil, oregano, rosemary...I have some lovely tomatoes, though. You should come and see. Oh, and the chives are DELICIOUS..."

David went on talking about his hydroponics grow op while I stared at the little marijuana plants he'd just handed me. My ears quit listening, and I shook my head, but then terrible, wonderful Ideas came to me as I watched my baby reefer reaching for the sun.

Labels: dreams

Sometimes I dream of swimming, and this is freedom. This is pure freedom.

The experts tell me this is indicative of being immersed in your own emotions, and that people going through therapy often dream of swimming.

I was at a cottage I'd been at before, in my dreams; it was a conglomeration of Sarah's grandmother's cabin, and the dream version of a house I used to live in in Saskatoon. But in this dream, the lakefront was more like our cabin at Candle Lake - there were overgrown rose bushes and tall, tall poplars and pines. And the lake came up along the path and wound around behind it, and there were no rocks in the water, but the reeds....the reeds were tall. They stood up out of the water high enough that you could only see the shoulders and head of someone standing in the shallows.

I ran toward the lake, diving into the water when it was just past my knees; I dove through the reeds and the weeds and extremely disgusting stuff on top of the water - really it was almost a marsh. But there was someone out in the water I wanted to see...someone I wanted to talk to. Swimming was difficult - the weeds pulled at my arms and wound around my legs. They tried to slow my pace, to hold me back. At first, I shrugged off their clutches and sliced through them, diving, even, through the tenebrous water.

But I couldn't reach the people I was trying to see - I couldn't break through the weeds into the open water. I ended up trudging back through reedy mud, onto a dilapidated dock that partially submerged when you put weight on it. The dock flared out to a small spring-fed pool at the side of the cabin, and there, I would often see deer 'round the edges, drinking from the pure, cold pool. This day, a fawn had tumbled in, and was thrashing wildly trying to get its spindly legs back on shore. Its eyes were wild, and it bleated in terror.

I dove into that pool, pushed the fawn out onto the bank, and pulled myself out on to the sinky dock. But I couldn't swim. The only thing left for me was the too-hot cabin and a collection of card games.

Labels: boat swimming, dreams, lake

A while after my mother died, I had this dream. It was unlike all of the other dreams I had about my mother, with the exception of one I had before she died. Before she even knew she was sick and dying. Before the *doctors* knew, rather. I've told you about that dream before.

Anyway, this other dream. It was several months after Mum died. I dreamt in real time, which is odd. We were all together, possibly at Christmas or thereabouts, and who should be waiting for us as we all arrived but Mum. Imagine our surprise. Particularly because I was with her when she "deceased" (my Da insists on verbing the noun, which weirds language*, **). I snipped some hair from her cold, waxy body as she lay in the cheap purple coffin at the funeral home (it's pretty stupid to pay five thousand dollars for a coffin that's only going to get torched, and apparently, they don't *do* coffin rentals. I asked.)

But there she was, sitting in her chair at her house, smoking a cigarette and doing a crossword. Her legs were tucked up under her at an angle, the way she always sat. I approached her slowly. I thought I was perhaps seeing...well...experiencing a Visitation.
"Mum?" I asked. I watched smoke curl up from her cigarette and around her head. She scratched something down on her puzzle.
"Hi, kidlet," she said, not glancing up.
"Um. Really?"
She looked at me this time, took a drag and blew smoke toward the side of the room.
"What?"
"Uh. I ...um... are you aware... I mean... did you know that... well...uh...you're supposed to be dead."
She started to laugh. "Oh, that. Well, I got better."
"Right. I've seen that Monty Python scene."
Dad walked in through the back door. I could see him, and I could see Mum, but they couldn't see each other. "Who are you talking to?" he asked.
"Mum," I replied simply.
He looked quizzically at me, then grunted and closed the door behind him.
"No, really, Dad. Turns out she got better."
"That's not funny."
"I'm not trying to be funny."
"Your Dad's here?" Mum asked.
Dad turned white. He stared at me. I nodded. Mum rose from her chair. She walked toward me. I stood where I was. I could hear her footsteps on the wood floor. "What the hell is the matter with you two?" she asked.
Dad turned wobbly.
"Mum?" I asked, my voice shaky, my eyes blurred with tears. She closed the distance between us. I reached out for her. She smiled and hugged me. I could smell the smoke in her hair, and the kind of shampoo she used. I felt her rub a circle on my back.
"I'm not going anywhere."
"But you DID. I SAW YOU," I sobbed.
"They just thought that. Goddamned doctors. By the way, thanks for the haircut. It was TERRIBLE." She laughed. I heard her laugh. I felt her laughing in my arms.
My father stood there, his jaw hanging open, tears running down his face. I heard my aunt in the guest room. "Mum's home!" I hollered.
The door to the guest room opened. My aunt shuffled out, looking like a non-morning person waking up in the morning. She stopped abruptly in the hall.
"Jesus Christ!" she whispered.
"No," I smiled. "That's Easter. This is just Mum."
Eventually, the story came out - sometime between the time she 'died' in the hospital and the time Dad cremated her, she'd been whisked away by some Brilliant Doctor, who managed to cure her, somehow. It involved massive surgery and some rather unorthodox treatment. The 'body' in the coffin had actually been a wax dummy; the doctor didn't want the family to have false hope, so he'd arranged it all. Mum was back. We asked her if maybe this wouldn't be a good time to quit smoking, since she'd got a second chance at living.

She glowered at us, and mumbled something about how she'd already thought of that.

I woke from that dream Very Confused. Extremely Confused. In fact, I called my mother that day. She ...wasn't home.

Now and then, I have these kinds of dreams about Mum. They are different from the dreams where she is with me, but clearly history has not been rewritten. They are different from the dreams where I get to talk to my Nama and my Gramps again. Strangely, my other grandfather hasn't come to see me yet. I suspect he just doesn't have much more to say...In these kinds of dreams, she holds my children and they know her and laugh with her; she visits me and tells me what a terrible housekeeper I am. We fight.

Anyway, last night, I had that kind of dream. But it was subtly different - Mum was there, and alive, but at a distance. She didn't come in to the same room we were in. She didn't talk to us. She didn't laugh. But she was watching. Intently.

I didn't much like that.

*With thanks to Calvin.
** I mean, really. It would be much more accurate to say "my wife *ceased* two years ago", or "ever since my wife ceased", or, simply, "my wife ceased."

Labels: dreams, Mum

I don't know if you've met my friend Melba. As in toast. If you have, you'll know why this is funny.

She came to pick me up and we were going to...a spa, I think. Possibly some kind of hot springs resort. The spa was nestled in the mountains, and the snow had been falling, heavy and wet, for two days. The wind, blowing across the highway, froze the wet surface to glare ice, and Melba was driving way too fast. I kept asking her to slow down, but she'd say "it's okay; I drive this road every day!"

I kept saying "I understand that, and it'd really make me feel a lot more comfortable if you'd just kinda" [flinch] [flinch] "slow the eff down."

I saw the spa off to our right, in a valley that nestled between two peaks of the same mountain. "Oh!" She cried, giggling. "I missed the turn!"

I feared she'd haul the car to starboard, there on the narrow mountain highway, with a 200m drop off one side and a sheer cliff face on the other, with oncoming traffic just as insistent as she was that there was no better time or place to be going fast. I said, "uh..."

But contrary to what I *thought* she was going to do, she kept on the straightaway. "This is going to be pretty fun," she said, glancing through the driving snow to some point in the distance I couldn't make out.

"Yeah, if we ever get there. Alive."

She laughed. "You're so *silly*!"

"Yeah."

Then, ahead of us, the highway split in two lanes. In the middle, a cavernous opening. A sign above it claimed it was a 'breakaway lane'. The cavern was full of black, icy water.

If you've driven the Coquihalla or the Crowsnest Pass, you'll know that the 'breakaway lanes' are usually uphill lanes next to the road on a downhill slope that end in deep gravel. The purpose for these lanes are to provide an emergency exit if a vehicle (usually a logging truck) get going too fast or if the brakes fail...the theory is that you drive into the breakaway lanes and your vehicle, if it doesn't slow down by going uphill, it will slow down quite drastically when you hit either the pit of deep gravel at the end or the ramp of deep gravel at the end.

So this was not what one would expect to see, were one to see a breakaway lane. They are, for reasons you can well imagine, *never* in the centre of a divided highway. They are also never caves filled with water. Owing to the fact that when a fast thing hits wet stuff, the fast thing tends to a) lose traction immediately; and b) break apart (the surface tension of haitch-two-oh being what it is). Melba appeared to be heading directly for the 'breakaway lane', which to me looked an awful lot like an open mine entrance full of rancid stagnant putrescence.

"What the hell?" I hollered.

"Just watch!" She screamed back.

We hit the opening going far too fast, and I saw it sloped quickly downward. A Bad Sign. The car plunged into the water, and didn't break apart, which surprised me. It did begin to sink, which also surprised me. I undid my seat belt and clambered back over the seat and began rolling down the window.

"What are you doing?" Melba asked me, water filling the footwells of the car.

"Uh," I said, making sure I had enough of the window rolled down to get out when the water filled the rest of the cabin. I didn't even want to think about how cold that water was. In fact, I didn't need to think about it; it was already reaching past Melba's thighs and lapping at my toes. It wicked any body heat away faster than I would have imagined anyway, my boots and socks providing no protection at all. It was what I would imagine the Arctic Ocean would feel like, an icy squall breaking all around and lumps of ice floating by. As soon as it touched me, I immediately felt only a flash of searing pain, then numbness.

As the brackish, oily water rose up over my legs, I glanced down at Melba, who was still strapped in to her driver's seat. Unbelievably, she sat calmly in her seat. The water level was beginning to recede. The car was moving backward, up a ramp, pulled by a chain drive under the wheels. As the vehicle was returned to the highway, the water sluiced out, presumably the same way it had come in. Melba was giggling.

"That was pretty cool, hey?"

It was not cool. I didn't like it at all. Not even a little. In fact, I disliked it so much, I retrieved my sopping purse and overnight bag from the back seat, and walked across the highway and down the approach toward the spa. Once there, I phoned for someone to pick me up at the spa, in three hours, after I'd had time to 'take the waters'.

Most of all, I didn't like what that black water said to me. It wanted to pull me deep inside it; to hold me under and pull my breath from me, and fill my lungs with its own glacial ichor. It wanted me with it in its arctic depths, and its very touch had left me with a growing darkness, reaching upwards to envelop me.

Labels: dreams

I was speaking to my friend, who was acting as my doctor, but my doctor from 1994. She was discussing with me all sorts of health issues, most of which are pretty good, until she shoved my file aside and looked me square in the face.

"Your problem isn't low thyroid. Your thyroid is fine."
"But I did these tests," I say.
"It's not your thyroid."
"Then what the hell is it?"
"You're depressed."
"No I'm not," I protest, although at the edges of my vision, the darkness begins to close in on me.
"Yes, you are. The good news is that there have been many advances in ..."
"No." I rise to my feet.
"I can't just let you go. You could be a danger to yourself or to others."
"You know who's a danger? Bloody drug companies that try to convince people that the biggest problem they have is that they don't feel *happy*. We're not supposed to be *happy*. Things aren't supposed to be all skittles and beer. If you get a moment of happiness in your *entire life* after the age of twelve, you should savour that moment, because it's not supposed to last forever. That's what makes them so precious. If you're particularly lucky, you might get a whole string of happy moments."
"You see? You're proving my point..."
"No!" I shout at her, dropping my accoutrements to the ground. "That's just the thing! It's not supposed to be miserable, either! IT's supposed to just *be*. If you can manage to do the things well and make something good happen for a few people, you're doing a bloody good job of things. What's a danger to myself and others are these huge corporations trying to sell everything from sex to continence to acne remedies. And maybe those three things are all related. Sure, some folks need medication; that's what they want us to believe. Sure, some of these drugs seem to help people. But you don't get to say I'm depressed because I don't have a Pollyanna view of the way things work."
"I wasn't..." she stammered.
"You *were*. Go hock your tawdry wares with someone else. I've seen that darkness; it's covered me before. It took five years of my life. Don't think I don't know when that darkness peeks out from the corners. Those are the days you hang the laundry on the line and open the house to the sun."

Then my children climbed into bed with me. Had they not, I'd have woken angry that some quack of a pysician tried to prescribe antidepressants after having had me in her office for no more than five minutes, and hearing the words "I'm more tired than usual". As it was, I woke to kisses and snuggles and one of those moments you live your whole life to find.

Labels: darkness, dreams, rants