I had this dream one time
18+!!
Last night I walked the dog. It was so hot and overcast and weird outside. It’s been like this for days, like a Juan Rulfo story. It has to rain soon, I thought to myself. Something has to give, to break.
I frowned. I halted the dog and leaned closer to her mane, to the fluff around her collar. Yep, there were two flies fucking. Stuck in her hair, two flies fucking, their bodies locked together. I flicked the two of them away with my middle finger, catapulting them into the grass. I’m sure they didn’t notice.
Later, in bed, I felt something walking across the top of my left hand. A tick! I’d never seen a tick in real life before, but this was definitely one, zoomed way out, looking a lot less horrific than the micron photos I’d seen. Just what I need, more chronic fatigue. I couldn’t seem to pinch the tiny burrowing bloodsucker to death, so I stood up and went to the bathroom and rinsed him down the sink.
Later, back in bed again, I cried out (“OW?”) as I experienced ripping abdominal pain. I thought about what I’d eaten earlier. Well, it was obviously a broccoli floret taking a sharp corner inside me—had to be. I reminded myself to drink a Diet Coke later.
This all sounds like a dream, but I wasn’t dreaming yet.
My sleep was fractured: 3:23am, 6:26am, 9:38am. I tossed around, kicking covers and flinging pillows around.
At some point I dreamt I was sitting on a little bench in a room on a train. I was sitting next to my adoptive mother, and also next to a strange man. I admired him. He was handsome and well-groomed. He had a secret smile on his face; everything was funny to him.
Then I felt something on my thigh, and I looked down, and the man was surreptitiously stroking my leg, right at the hem of my skirt.
In retrospect I was surely dreaming about this because of the adult man in the back row of the airplane: the horror and shame I’d felt as a teenager, the way I’d pressed myself against the wall of the tin can trying to escape his roving hands, feeling frantic, not wanting to embarrass him. But now I am realizing I’ve never stopped to contemplate why so many young men have reached for the same accidentally-exposed strip of skin, reaching for a stranger underneath a table? Instead of being horrified or embarrassed, I’ve just been surprised—really?—staring down at my lap in shock, no other discernible feelings besides shock.
In the dream I thought to myself, oh well, it’s only predation if you say no, so I tipped my knees toward him and grabbed his hand and moved it under my skirt. Then I crossed my legs at the ankles to keep my knees from falling open.
Now I was inspecting the space, keeping careful watch in case anyone looked in our direction. I frowned. I wasn’t feeling anything? The man’s hand had gone still. This was shaping up to be a very shitty sex dream.
I stole a glance at the strange man. He appeared to be in agony. I peeked at his lap. His top button was unbuttoned, his hand was in there, and he was really going for it. I wrinkled my nose in disgust. What had I expected would happen?
“Huhhh,” he said. Then he began panicking: “Oh, fuck! Oh, fuck!” What had he expected would happen. Now he had a mess on his hands.
Aww, it was beyond piteous. I leaned close to him. I exhaled first, so that my whisper would not make an audible hissing sound. I put my lips against his ear. “Go clean yourself up,” I whispered. Then I nodded toward the toilets.
He jumped up and raced off.
My adoptive mother jerked to attention. She stood up, furious, and walked over to face me. She stared down at me.
She demanded to know how I’d managed to scare off yet another nice young man.
I smirked at her, aware that her barometer for “nice young man” was beyond busted. In retrospect: EMDR wishes it could manifest such a profitable dream, with shame shifting from one person to another so easily.
Now my adoptive mother was yelling at me about hoarding newspaper and magazine clippings of my friends’ professional successes. I was baffled. She was shaking a stack of papers at me. I snatched them out of her hands and clutched them to my chest. I told her that these clippings were precious to me.
A man came by with a big trash bag opened wide. He asked me if I were sure about keeping my garbage.
“Yes,” I said, clutching my garbage. Not only were my clippings precious, I wished they hadn’t been snipped out at all—that they were still in their original magazines and newspapers—because the Internet, contrary to popular belief, is not forever.
The man meandered off.
I wished I’d told him, also, that these various write-ups invited follow-up questions, and maybe someday I would interview my friends about their work and their successes.
Now I was wearing my adoptive mother on my back, shouldering her. Sweating, I heaved her bulk onto a stoop and sat down on the steps next to her. I wondered how she was still alive; I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. She was almost 100 years old and still robust, still full of life, still constantly complaining on my back, an enormous baby. Sure enough, as I’d always suspected, she’d never die: absolutely unkillable. I made up my mind then and there to start releasing her, to let her go.
“This is where I leave you,” I said to her.
Something fell off the back of my desk. Ugh!! I swore out loud. Then I got down on my hands and knees to look for the small object on the floor.
You can search and search but you’ll never find it, because none of this is real. I sighed and sat back, surrendering. Thought-voice was right: I’ve been here before. None of this is real.
But disembodied thought-voice wasn’t done. You’re still lost in the park, it said.
My eyes snapped open. I laid in bed, staring at the ceiling. I thought about the age of accountability, which my adoptive mother was obsessed with. That’s the notion that there’s such thing as being too young to go to Hell when you die. Bad news: you can die at the park at 5 or 6 years old, and you still have to go through the same paces as everyone else.
I rolled over a lump of pillow and gazed at the clock. So how does this work? Is it like a Sixth Sense thing? Is this why I can’t lift things, am always dropping things? Is this why my loved ones rarely see me, why no one can ever seem to get to me? Worse, am I in the only version of the dimension where people got to watch Widow’s Bay? No, no, no, I was going to make myself nuts. I’m just as alive and embodied as anybody else. I switched on the reading lamp.
I closed my eyes again. Usually I see flashes or wiggles of light against my eyelids, but this time it was all shadows. I watched a line of silhouetted people walking left to right and dissipating—snuffed out, I guess. Then I saw smoke rings, concentric, forming and expanding and disappearing again. I watched for a while, unsure what this was. I opened my eyes.
I went out to the kitchen to grab breakfast and a Diet Coke. Fat rain drizzle was slapping the big picture windows.