dreams

Sailloft

Several business problems.  First, two of my employees (who are actually each married to other partners) were going together and broke up, so neither of them is showing up for work. 

Then I am thinking of expanding back into this large space behind where we have been working.  It's on the second or third floor, and has a concrete floor, but it is cavernous with hugely high ceilings.  I am thinking of constructing a wood deck above the concrete for a sailmaking floor.  But I notice that someone has moved in some table saws and other wood working machinery.   

Some men in blue coveralls with their first names embroidered on the breast are working on them.  I ask them what's going on.  We're making the signs, they say.  I suddenly realize that, although we've been working on this floor, our lease is really for the ground floor.  The man who I have thought of as our landlord turns out not to be.  They're serious, he says, you'll have to move.  I am distraught... this is a disaster.

pizza window

I was waiting to order a pizza at a take out window.  An attractive young woman was behind the window and there were crowds of people placing orders and picking up pizzas.  I waited patiently for my turn.  As the crowd thinned out, the woman behind the window continued to ignore me.  I assumed she was still busy and would get to me when she was ready.  Finally I was alone standing right at the window, but she still didn't wait on me and I didn't assert myself, but I was getting angrier and angrier at being ignored.  Finally, I erupted. She just looked at me with a slightly amused expression as if to say, 'look at this idiot in front of me.'

Bones

I had to hide some old decayed bones, that were evidence of some past crime.  I was not a party to the crime, but I knew I had to participate in the cover-up.  I buried them in the sandy soil of the floor of a barn.  The barn doors (there were two or three overhead type) faced up hill and it was clear that a lot of water flowed into and through the barn when it rained hard.  There were channels - stream beds - in the floor.  I avoided burying the bones in one of these, but later worried that I might have buried them too close to one of these streams and that they might be exposed during a heavy rain. 

A small group of mostly women came into the barn.  They started doing yoga or some kind of new age movement discipline that involved lying on the floor.  One woman was on a spot right where I had buried the bones.  She complained that the floor was lumpy there.  I hadn't had time to bury the bones very deeply and I was afraid she would uncover some if she tried smoothing the floor so I went and offered to lie on the spot so she would have a soft surface...

Rage

Two people can help me by either carrying or putting in each of my hands 8 coins, some of which are quarters and some older larger coins with holes in them.  But both let me down.  One deliberately shows me he has contaminated his lot of coins with small screws and a screw driver. [ I think he is Peter C, a boy I knew very slightly in prep school whose father was a fixture on the staff of the New Yorker and who died not long after graduation.  I hadn't thought of him in years, but saw his name yesterday on a list of deceased classmates.] 

Anyway, I was very angry at both of these people.  I yelled at them and asked how they could do this on my daughter's wedding day. Apparently, what they did had spoilt the occasion.  I woke at this point, very hot from wearing a flannel night shirt, which I rarely do...

The Bomb Dream

The worst dream I ever had was my bomb dream.  I'm not sure whether I had this dream just once or many times, but it was so vivid that I remember it clearly, although the dream dates from about the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

I was standing on a perfectly flat plain near the sea shore.  There was nothing at all on the plain except widely spaced small groups of people which I took to be families.  No trees or houses, no bushes, not a blade of grass.  Literally no place to hide.  Overhead was a perfectly clear blue sky.  Every one was looking up.  Directly overhead almost invisibly high in the sky a little silver airplane was slowly circling.  I knew that this plane contained 'the bomb', that it was going to fall, that it was just a matter of when.

This dream wasn't heart-stoppingly terrifying in the way dreams of being chased by some kind of monster or falling off a cliff can be.  It was overwhelmingly fatalistic, perhaps that first realization of the inevitability of death.

Van Missing

I only remember the last part of a long involved dream.  I had been helping with the music for some event.  I was leaving.  I had a banjo slung over my back and was carrying another guitar.  I had left all the amplifiers and other stuff because I had to climb a long steel ladder on some kind of bulkhead to get away.  When I got to the top I started looking for my van, a full sized bright red one, but I realized I didn't know where it was.  It had been used by some transport people to help bring things to the event.  I reached the parking lot.  Lots of big trucks were pulling away, but I couldn't see the van.  I berated one of the dispatchers, but got no help.  I realized I would have to walk through miles of parking lots looking for the van - and I didn't know whether I would find it and whether the keys would be with it if I did...
[I don't own (or play) a banjo or a red van, although my company did have such a van many years ago...]

The Big C

I dreamed I had been diagnosed with cancer of some non-specific type.  I had no symptoms.  I was in a large hospital or treatment center.  I went to check in on the 23rd floor, room 2302, which was where someone I knew who had been treated here before me [my father?] had gone, but I was told that my place was in room numbers -8803 and -6702 which I took to be deep underground.  I was worried that perhaps this meant I wasn't going to get the best treatment.

Later I had a scatological dream, in which let me simply say I embarrassed myself in front of a couple of strangers, but awoke to avoid the full force of the embarrassment...   

Coffee

Bill L and another man introduced me to the best coffee I ever tasted.  It had cream and sugar in it, which is not the way I normally drink coffee, but the taste was wonderful - deep and rich.  He was emphasizing the importance of 'current' in making it, by which I took him to mean the quality of the water used to make it - that it must come from a deep, swift flowing stream. 

The other guy was putting zippers in pillow upholstery.  I was quite interested in the details - he was using a piping-like bead on either side of the zipper.

[Bill L is someone I hadn't thought of for many years but he was mentioned to me a couple of days ago by my realtor.]

Falling Man and Vermont Trip

Last night I had two dreams I remember I woke after the first, then fell asleep again and had the second.  First dream:

This was a dream of level and heights, lot of up and down.  In the most vivid part, we were on top of a mesa-like mountain.  A serious middle-aged man was explaining something to us, I think it had to do with crime, and perhaps murder, but as he was explaining he leaned farther and farther over the edge of the mesa until he toppled off.  I was alarmed at this and even more alarmed when my point of view went with him over the edge, as though I was falling with him. 

The fall was several hundred feet, and I was sure he would be killed at the bottom.   The mesa was covered in grassy turf and flared out at the bottom, so that when he hit he got up without any apparent damage.   

A small group of young, but not very attractive, hippies came and surrounded him.  They were saying, "dude, he did it", in awestruck tones.  Somehow, I knew that they had been studying in a vague, hippie way how to jump off the mesa and survive the way this man had.  They had hoped to be the first.

In the second dream, ML and I decide on the spur of the moment to drive to Vermont.  I ask ML if she has told her family she's coming, but she hasn't.  I am in the passenger seat. 

Suddenly I notice we are passing this very familiar compound, several red painted windowless barn like structures, down the hill on the shore of a lake.   I ask ML to stop.  I know the place is familiar but I can't remember why. 

We see there is a snack bar and decide to go in for something to eat.  We sit at a big table with some other people waiting to order.  Finally, ML gets up to find someone to place or order with. 

The manager, a smallish man with greasy black hair tells us there are no available tables up here and we must go down stairs to wait for our food.  I notice he is wearing a very unusual silver cap on the end of his nose - plain silver on top and with a mesh of little silver chains over his nostrils. 

We head downstairs.  ML is carrying a plate on condiments - pickle and tomato slices - and drops some of them.  She makes a joke of it.  We wait at the table downstairs with the same group of people. 

ML and I go out a back door and go out on a river or estuary in a small clunky old fiberglass day sailer.  ML is standing up steering, but not paying attention and we collide with a small outboard driven by a young teenager - it's our fault.  Some small wooden piece has broken off the bow of his boat.  I want to give his people my contact information, so we can make good on the damage, but searching my wallet I can't find a business card, and I can't even find something to write my name and phone number on clearly.  Each time I try, the pen doesn't work or the paper disintegrates or what's already on it makes my note illegible. 

BS the realtor is distracting me by telling me we will be OK building in over the top of this stone lined slipway as long as we have all the corners on the the stone and build right  up to the inner shore.

Mistakes evaporate

Last night's dream was in the category of miraculously avoiding the consequences of my mistakes.  As ususal, I only remember events near the end of the dream.

I was driving a borrowed Mercedes sedan back to a hotel or apartment in a strange city.  The car was a metallic greyish gold - pretty non-descript, but not mine.  For some reason I as I was waiting to make a left turn, I decided to abandon the car in the middle of the street.  After walking away, I realized that I shouldn't do that, but when I returned, the car was gone.   I decided I would go back and pretend nothing was wrong, then later 'discover' the car was missing from where I'd claim to have parked it on the street. 

But the missing car somehow morphed into a missing model sailboat hull, which morphed from being missing to having an indentation in one side of the hull.  The indentation, which was still somehow, in my mind, caused by my stupid mistake, turned out to be the absence of a stainless steel plate, which turned out to be still in the hull mold.   The appearance of the plate was quite detailed and there was more detail about how we would go about fixing it and reshaping it when it was back in the hull.

The theme of the dream seemed to be me making foolish mistakes about which I felt very guilty, but which actually never had the bad consequences I feared.  Other people always took them not as my mistakes but as challenges to fix.