Category Archives: dreams

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Hurt and healing

H is for healing and hurt in the Blogging from A to Z. I mentioned dreaming of monsters in my Gift post, and this is the poem about that dream. It is hard work to heal.

Advice to Micheal

Neverland
Is such an ironic name
Can’t they hear?
Can’t they think?
The land where boys never grew up
The Lost Boys

And you
Are not molesting
Boys
You are
Searching
When I heard
About your childhood
I knew
They were wrong
They’ve missed the boat

You sang
Like an angel
And the world
Stole your childhood

Hotel rooms
With older brothers
Sex
Drugs
Alcohol
Money
Chaos
And you must have been
So frightened
Lost
Pressure to sing
As the star

Locked your core self away
To keep it safe

My childhood
Was scary too

I started my search
With a dream
Of a dark hole
From which came the sound
Of monsters
Howling

I was scared

I went to the hole
anyway
scared
of the howling

The hole was dark
And roots stuck out of the side
Like reaching fingers

I got a flashlight
And looked

It wasn’t as deep
As I thought
And the roots worked as
A ladder

I climbed down
Into the hole

I found three monsters
Howling

Baby monsters

I put them in my pack
And carried them up
Into the light

They howled

I bathed them
And diapered them
And fed them
And rocked them

They howled
They didn’t know what to do
When taken care of

I named them
Fear
Grief
Shame

At last they stopped howling
And sat
Warm
Wrapped in blankets
Ugly
Sullen
Lower lips thrust out

And I found a shrink
To talk about my dream
And to help heal the monsters
That I had rescued

We always have more
Work to do
But now I have a little girl
Inside me
Who came to greet me
When I had healed the monsters
Enough
She is beautiful

You won’t find
The Lost Boy
That you are looking for
Outside you
He is inside
He is innocent
And beautiful

You may have to face
The monsters
Of your childhood
To reach him
Yours was worse than mine
I’m sorry

You may have to face
How much people you loved
Hurt you
Even though they loved you
I’m sorry

Find help
And rescue
The Lost Boy
And joy

Good luck.

Poem written August 10, 2005. Previously published on everything2.com.

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Gift

G in the Blogging from A to Z, for gift.

Dreams are a gift. Dreams may be the unconscious speaking and attempting to bring something to consciousness. We may have a collective unconscious.

I am no expert in analyzing dreams. My minister says that we should stand in relation to dreams. That we should hold them in our consciousness and think about them. Some of the information about interpreting dreams I learned from him and from his mentor, Robert Johnson PhD.

There are four people in my fly dream. This is a good thing. Four is a number of completion, of arrival, of numinous knowledge.

The people all represent aspects of myself. My daughter/cat represents an aspect of myself. I told a friend the story of “The cat who walks by himself”, because he doesn’t read fiction. Or says he doesn’t. I have a hard time imagining not reading fiction, just as I never quite believe people who say they don’t like poetry. I think they are afraid of it.

The two males I am taking as aspects of my animus. My male energy. My male energy is healthy, which is very different from a dream that I had ten years ago. In that dream one male was a crazy cardiac surgeon who was doing a heart transplant in the middle of a garden party. The other male was the patient, whose heart was broken and needed to be replaced. In the fly dream, both males are healthy and bright. The adult male still has the capacity to not be grounded and to be disconnected from the ground, but he is willing to set the house down and explore locally, once he’s done showing off his power.

The children in my dreams were initially monsters. Baby monsters. Then my dreams had a baby girl and then a girl child. A recent dream had a two year old male, healthy. This dream is my first with a healthy teen male.

I think that this is a reassuring progression.

And still, I hold the dream present, a snapshot of my interior psyche. It may have more to tell me.

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Fly dream

F in the A to Z Challenge: Fly.

I returned to work yesterday after ten months off very sick and then convalescing. In the afternoon I came home. I ate a late lunch and fell into a deep sleep. Relief that I am back at work.

I dream: I am in a metallic boxy house. It is very modern, glass and metal. It is very spare, elegant and uncluttered. My daughter and cat are there but are one being. She keeps shape shifting from cat to daughter and back. There is a man and a teen, his son. He owns the house and built it. It is up high perched on a tower. It feels very precarious and the tower moves with the wind. The views are stunning, wilderness and mountains. The house falls and the man shows me that it is a spaceship. It hovers over the earth. He and his son are aliens. I am a bit annoyed that he deliberately scared me, but I also know that he is showing off. He is showing me his strength and power and maleness. I do find it very sexy. I want him.

I tell him that he can set the ship down in a safe place. I am suitably impressed and admiring. He does not need a spaceship or to scare me or to fly to be loved. He intimates that we can fly to explore other planets. I say “I am happy to explore this one for a while. It is ok to be grounded.” He sets the house spaceship down in the mountains.

I wake up.

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Daughters and dinosaurs

D for daughter and dinosaur. Here is a poem I wrote quite a while ago, though it is about my son rather than my daughter.

Dinosaur Dreams

The problem
With Intelligent Design
Is those old bones
Those dinosaurs

Also that of 10,000 dreams of creation
One would be right
And the followers of all the others
Consigned to hell
If so, I go gladly, clutching
Dinosaur bones to my chest
And will enjoy the diversity
Not the narrow heaven with a narrow
Small-minded deity

But is evolution right?

Well, I think it’s on the right track

But wholly done and all correct?

After all, think how often
Medicine has been wrong
Think of tobacco and vioxx
Think of Galen, over 2000 years ago
Thinking that evil humors built up in the uterus
Causing hysteria
External pelvic massage was the cure
For over 2000 years
For old maids, widows and nuns
Who had no male to cleave unto
Massage was a treatment into the early 1900s
And now we wonder about prozac too

Evolution is an evolving science

I think of when my son was four
And he watched “Jurassic Park”
Against my wishes
Because I thought it was too violent
He studied it carefully many times

One day he asked me, anxiously,
“Mom, is DNA real?”
To check that it wasn’t another of those Santa stories
I was able to reassure him
Yes, I think DNA is real
He was pleased

A few days later he announced
That when he grows up
He wants to be a plant and animal scientist
Extract DNA from amber
And grow those dinosaurs

A laudable ambition
For any four year old

If God left the dinosaur bones
Around to fool us
And they never lived
She has a nasty sense of humor
And my son and I will not forgive

I believe in evolution
And dream of dinosaurs

first published on everything2.com in 2005

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Love and self

When you love someone, do you lose your self?

I think that is the tricky bit about love. When you fall for someone else, do you fall or do you hold on to yourself? Where is that boundary?

I am in a flirtation. I am very interested in a person. I am interested in what he says and what he is interested in. I am learning quite a bit about some topics that really, have not been on my radar. I also often disagree quite strongly in the realm of politics. And I don’t really care that our politics are just about opposite ends of the spectrum.

I am interested in where we meet and where we don’t meet. Where we agree and where we very strongly disagree and privately think that the other person needs their head examined. I am not falling too far into the “really this person thinks like I do, they just won’t admit it” trap. Well, perhaps I am. Perhaps that is what love is: when we project part of our self and the ideal part of ourself on to the other person. They reflect and occupy some part of our ideal. That does not mean that they ARE our ideal or that they ARE the projection.

In this particular flirtation, he does not seem interested in much of what I am interested in. Well, particularly poetry. Occasionally this bothers me but mostly I shake it off. I am hoping that I have reached the age and level of cynicism where I do not expect the other person to like everything I like, to agree with what I say, to have the same ideals or ideas. I am watching myself and wondering how much of what I like in him is him and how much is my projection. Don’t know yet. The mind is a peculiar place. So is the heart.

But …. I am feeling much happier about holding on to myself at the same time as I fall and crush. I look at what he likes and wants but I also hold what I like and want. I am trying to give them equal weight, the needs and wants and desires of the two people present.

Hold and fall, at the same time.

The picture is of an etching by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway.

Shake it off.

Also published on everything2.com

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Choice dream

Very soon after the angel dream came back I dreamed this:

I was in a house doing something and I realized suddenly that there were a lot of people present. It was a party. I had been so engaged that I had not noticed. It was not my house.

I saw my maternal uncle. I went to hug him: “Hello Uncle Rob!” He withdrew with his fierce expression: “I am not sure I want to hug you.” I shrugged.

I saw a female maternal cousin next, across a counter. We have been on opposite sides of a family issue. I reached across the counter and hugged her. She looked sad and disapproving, but she let me hug her.

I was hungry. We were going to have dinner, but it was not ready yet. I had a chocolate bar and pulled it out. Dark chocolate. A two year old curly headed blonde boy was eyeing me and the chocolate. I smiled at him. He smiled back, cautiously. “Who does this little boy belong to?” I asked, “And may I give him some chocolate?”

A large blond curly haired man turned and smiled at me. “He’s mine and yes you can.” he said, grinning.

I said to the boy, “I am going to pick you up and then I will give you some chocolate.” I picked him up. He was still being a little careful, glancing at his father to check in. I thought that the party was going to be fun, with the little boy and his father, and I woke up.

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What would a sufi do?

I dreamed about a door all night last night.

First it was a door into a car. Over and over. I was not sure where the car was going, the driver wouldn’t listen to me, it was a race car. There weren’t any people that really had form in the dream.

The car was my friend Dave’s. A 1978 or a 1979. I don’t remember. He would care, I don’t. He has a racing harness instead of a regular seat belt in the driver’s seat. He can drive it like a race car, or close enough to fool me.

My daughter sat in the passenger seat and didn’t move when he drove. I sat in the back and went “eeeeeeee” and my right foot braked the whole time.

The last time I dreamed it there was just the door. A car door still. Lying in space, in the stars.

I woke up and thought about my say yes poems. And I thought, ok, Beloved, I don’t know where it’s going or what it will bring or who is driving but yes, I will go through that door.

And coming down the stairs I was thinking that I’ve been trying to communicate something to Dave but he doesn’t want to hear it. So I am not being a sufi. The sufis only taught the student who wanted to learn and who was ready. WWaSD? What would a sufi do? Stop butting my head against a wall.

I think that was the door.

I think of my consciousness at times as a table, and different parts of myself come to the table. There is the very small injured child, who gets healthier and healthier. She is healing. Somehow Dave has called up a sullen teenager who glares at everyone. The adult woman is annoyed and mutters “boys, toys and race cars.” The trickster sits and laughs. The doctor/psychiatrist is very interested in the whole thing and is mostly sitting back and watching.

Now perhaps a Sufi will come to the table. Or someone else. A fence is being built around my house. I envisioned a picnic table in the fence, on both sides, but it kept looking like Lucy’s psychiatric booth from Peanuts. I wanted to put up a sign: lemonade or the doctor is in, depending on my mood.

The fence is being built because someone stole our picnic table from the front yard while we were on vacation. I had bought it second hand and it was made of two by sixes. It was brutally heavy. I hope the theft weighs on them. Over 14 years we’ve also had a blue gazing ball stolen and two plastic pink flamingos. A bike was stolen from the back yard.

So now a fence. The picnic table/lemonade stand/psychiatric booth has morphed into a bench that goes through the fence, so that someone can sit on each side. And beside it in the fence is one of the little library boxes, for me to leave books and for others to trade or take them. It will have glass doors. We will have a pool on how soon they will be smashed. We are not cynical, are we?

Fences and doors. I think that I should put a sign in the yard, but perhaps I don’t need to. The new person at the table is the crone. I have gone through the door and I will think about doors all day. The crone introduces herself to the others at the table. The table gets more interesting every single day.