Dreams

Last year, my husband and I renovated our old Bungalow kitchen. Ripped out three walls, and all the cabinets, and replanned the flow of our home. My husband built all of our new gorgeous cabinetry. His uncle asked, "Oh, like from Ikea?" And my husband said, "No, like from wood and nails. No Allen wrenches were involved."

I love my kitchen, which is now a warm open space connecting to our dining room. It is exactly the space I imagined, even down to the farm sink we found on a popular free classified ad site for a third of the going price. My fairly tall husband built the cabinets to the ceiling, which means I am constantly standing on chairs. Even the low shelves feel tall to me. I have actually looked into permanently installing library-like ladders to run the circumference of my kitchen. It is not practical. Go figure. So, during the day, there is a pile of dishes on the counter, waiting for Sam to put in the high shelves. I sometimes stand on the stepstool, and tiptoe to get them in, and those unseen things blocking my way...I end up getting a snout hit of tupperware. But this morning, while making my juice, and looking between the glass bowls sitting in wait to the tippity top of my cabinets, I thought about those crevices. Sometimes I feel like my brain is like that, like I cannot peer into the very top of my thoughts. It reminds me of trying to remember my dreams in the morning.

Dream interpretation is sort of this passion I have. I love hearing and analyzing dreams. I once used a dream machine my friend's father invented. You literally sort of experience this sensory deprivation, and the lights on the inside of the eye covering recreate REM sleep, in its different forms, and the sounds you hear are just whooshing, like your blood coursing through your veins. It was wild. There I saw a vision of myself in the desert. Six months later I was living in Tucson. There is a lot of story in the middle of that, but suffice to say, it sort of clarified my desires for me.

Yesterday, I had an elaborate dream of putting together a room-sized jigsaw puzzle. It seems sort of obvious what this dream means, I need to figure something out in my life. The little details of a dream are what sort of obsess me. I was in a gorgeous puzzle store with floor to ceiling shelves filled with puzzles. Everything was wood, and extravagant. Some of these puzzles were blank--a thousand piece puzzle of a white field, or black field. There were no puzzles that were uncomplicated or kind. But the part of the dream that seems significant was that I kept trying to move the puzzle. I would construct an entire corner of this large puzzle, and then have to bring it over to the main puzzle, and it would fall apart in my hands. As I constructed the jigsaw, it formed a photograph of New York City on a clear, perfect Autumn day. The twin towers stood. I worked on the top of the puzzle, so I was building the skyline, but the main focus of the puzzle had not yet been constructed. There was an incredibly handsome Japanese man helping me with the puzzle. (He may be a red herring.)

This morning, I woke remembering a dream of a green river and snaking roadways, phone calls and my cousin's fangs (No, in real life, she is not a vampire.) Insurance companies and water coolers.

The funny thing about the dream obsession interest is that I own two books. One is sort of some house book from a large book chain called 10,000 Dreams Interpreted and the other is a Dream Encyclopaedia that I bought for a friend's birthday gift, and ended up keeping and replacing with a gift certificate. In the back, it has a dream dictionary. The former book is crazy. It is a dream dictionary that portends the future through your dreams, though to be fair, it says that nowhere until you look up a benign dream like "lettuce". And I quote, "To buy lettuce denotes that you will court your own downfall." Or you know, you are hungry for salad. The latter book is more of a psychological interpretation of your dreams.

Ho, ho. You can imagine the fun I have with these, right? I wish I could pretend that I use the latter book more often than the former...but I get great pleasure during my morning coffee to receive a phone call from my sister that begins not with "Hello," but with "I had a dream about crickets." Not a good dream, in case you are wondering.

So, as you can imagine, I am very open to speculation about the puzzle dream if anyone is so inclined.

:::

Very often, I write posts that I never publish. They are sort of snippets, not fully formed ideas. Or sort of goofy. Like I once write a whole blog post about ridiculous conversations I have had with Sam. But this one is a post I had in edit mode since June 13th. I don't know why I didn't publish it, maybe because it was a dream, but since we are talking about dreams, I am cutting and pasting it here.

I step off the elevator. "You are late." My mother-in-law looks at me and walks in the other direction. "Come. Everyone is here for you."

Why is everyone here for me?

And it is a party. A baby shower party, and I look down and I'm not pregnant. And I look at my table of people, Sam, Beatrice, and then there is a little girl with black hair and dark eyes...Sam calls her Sofie, and she reaches up to me and says Mama. And..."A boy? You are getting a boy? What are you naming him?"

What are we naming him? Are we adopting a boy?

I begin writing names I love. One stands out in red and I circle it. The names of our fathers.

"OOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow."

My eyes pop open. Beatrice. She is caught between the bed and the wall. No, maybe her leg is pinned in the bedrails. Or, she fell out of bed and is wandering around her room in pain. What is happening? And before I process completely, Sam has jumped out of bed and run into Beatrice's room. It begins again. "Ow. ow. ow. ow. ow. Oooooow." It is coming from the window. Is there a child wandering lost? No, wait, of course, this happens every year.
"Bea is fine," he says. I glance at the clock. 5:15a.
"A cat in heat," I say. "It must be a cat, because only two creatures make such a heartbreakingly creepy sound. Children and cats."
"But why do they have to say OW?"
"I don't know. It is fucking creepy. I just dreamed we adopted a baby."
"Really? Just now?"
"Yes."
"Cool."
"I wish I could dream about Lucy."
"Yeah, me too. I haven't had one since she died."
"Me either."

EDITED TO ADD: As some people are pointing out, maybe I did publish this one, then took it down? I have no memory of that, but didn't want to seem dishonest or weird about it. It was in draft form from June. I just have a shitty memory right now. Hope it doesn't matter that much if it was published for a moment in June, and then republished now...