An old dream about something much older

When we learned about Lincoln's assassination in elementary school we were given few details. He was a good man. Everyone loved him. Well, a few people didn't love him. He did very good things and then a bad man shot and killed him. I don't remember much of the lesson but I do remember the dream I had the night they taught us about what happened to the tall president with the big hat, big beard, big voice.

I am there but not there. I am in a room, just waiting in the corner. I wasn't me but I was me at once. I was male,  and had itchy pants and heavy, highly polished black shoes on. The chair I sat in was hard, straight-backed, wooden, not upholstered at all. I was waiting. I was sad about something. 


Soon they brought him in. I wasn't waiting long. I sat and watched and no one knew who I was. They didn't see or feel my presence at all. They brought him in and had to lie him across the bed instead of the regular longways position. Everyone moved around him and worked in silence, murmuring. He didn't murmur. He breathed and then he didn't. They put coins in his eyes. 


Then I stood on cobblestone and they moved him past me on a moving bed (I didn't know the word for gurney). I cried and was in my own body again and everyone milled around me in the dark cobblestone alley, lit only by oily streetlights. They put pennies in his eyes but his face wasn't on the penny yet. 


*I had this dream after learning that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. I must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. I can still feel this dream in my bones, over twenty years after having it.*

Dreams

There was something. A dream not from this odd morning, but from Sunday morning, with its thick pastries eaten at noon and sweaty pajamas until three. My sleep that morning was epic, hurried along by two Tylenol PM's and deep, thick, muddy, and long.

I was male. I was a boy I went to high school with. I was a boy who betrayed his mother and then fell in love with a woman in her fifties, someone with cloud-silver hair and eyes bright and seductive. I fell hard for her, and then I found myself in a bathtub, again myself, again female. The mother of the boy was so chagrined by the state of things that she plunged into a bottomless silo filled with water. She carried papers under her arm and leaped off the sharp edge of the silo, squinting her eyes against the bright sunlight dancing across the water.

The end of that one, then. There was another. But it's faded already, already crept back into my subconscious.

My beautiful old friend Roman was there. All of us traipsed through the downtown-somewhere setting that I occasionally walk in dreams. We were late for something. We didn’t care. We were going to go into the new mall (the same one that’s been a setting in my dreams for ten years – the place that I’ve seen in person, and it’s up here in Alaska of all places) and try the new ice salon that’s so hot (ha, ice, hot) right now. So we do. I get my brows waxed and the others get their hair cut. There’s a real ice sculpture on the ceiling, like a rolling wave, and faux ice beneath our feet. It’s all crystal and blue ice and Sigur Ros on the speakers and we’re in heaven.

The dream book I got on the Border’s budget rack says that to dream of a salon means new ideas. New things. Change. It also states that ice means frozen emotions, but I didn’t get that at all from this dream. All I got was the beauty of the ice.

…and in these dreams I have where are you? The small one is there, he is at my side. You are absent. I amble through the amusement parks, shopping malls with sparkling caverns and tunnels beside the food court, and twenty story library museums without you. Your appearance, when it emerges, is a comfort and a balm to my subconscious. Any delves into the scattered and muddy world of “dream interpretation" have come up annoyingly short. Where are you there? On my shoulder or at my side? Or on your own adventures?

Early morning Dream Journal

My eyes are still a bit glued together with sleep, but I had to type this into a permananent spot before it slipped away, as dreams do. First, Xander told me this morning that he "spins" into his dreams, up for going into the dream, and down for going back to his bed and going back to sleep.
My dream was of course multilayered but I must remember this:

The woman could hear exceptionally well. She had been adopted as a seven year old and her adoptive parents gave her a black butterfly. She was an angry, sullen child due to what had happened to her prior to her adoption. She took the black butterfly and looked at it. She heard the heartbeat of the butterfly that her new, eager parents gave her, she heard it stop when she squeezed it too hard. The rest of that segment of the dream she was an adult, the adoption/butterfly/heartbeat bits were her memory. So essentially I was in a plot, viewing the present and memory of a fictional character.

I also must remember ice skating on that quiet pond, all by myself. It came right back to me. I thought I was awake, but then I felt the snow beneath my mittened hands and the smoothness of the ice as I brushed the snow away. And as I skated for the first time in over ten years I remembered that I was pretty good at it.

By this time of night, especially if Gary is out of town, I sit down at the computer with all intentions of spilling some beans. The beans are quickly forgotten for the likes of TMZ and Perez Hilton. I'm not too proud to admit that.

I had all intentions of beginning some tales, not even blogging, of my time as a "historical interpreter" at Carillon Park in Dayton. This was the age when all interpreters at the park were pretty much in high school & college. We were young, we were smart, and we loved Dayton. Ah, bless us, we loved Dayton.

I can't muster it tonight. It's chipper. But oh, TMZ and Perez Hilton. They're my Skittles.

Gary in Fairbanks. Drove past the spot we had our picture taken six years ago. My shirt was raised a bit. I was wearing a PINK shirt! Some horrible khaki pants! I thought I was so very special. Or did I? I think I got every last bit of clothing at Planet Exchange or the Thrift Store. I knew how to work poor. Still do.

But khaki? Oh, dear.

I recently read the book the Sweet Hereafter. I saw the film first. Oh shoot! Our copy is still in Ohio...down below. Add that to the list of things for Mom to ship!
The book is very effective. Such narrative beauty. But, really? I'm bowing to Atom Egoyan on the story, even though it wasn't his originally. What that man can bring out of a story and out of his actors is astonishing. You think about every.single.breath.

I have to put it here so I can watch without searching on youtube.

I'm practically all the way Canadian now. :)

I'll have to ask the landlord if we can paint some accent walls. Or I'll just paint on every scrap of paper we own. I bought some gold leafing today. The art store was in a dream I had a week or so after we moved here. I was SO thirsty in the dream! After picking out something in a BIG jug I bought some apple juice. In waking, I snuck upstairs @ our friends house we were staying at and drank some juice that was not mine. I tried not to wake the animals, noisy things. That's the second time or third that I've been inside one of my dreams up here. A little while before we moved I dreamt I was in a warehouse, with a built-in second floor, loft...we went into Gary's studio he works for now on Saturday before the Running of the Reindeer and there it was. Same thing. The other was the mall I've dreamt about for almost 10 years. It's the downtown mall. And yes, I have a recurring mall dream. Maybe it's all the eighties movies I watched in the eighties. Baby boomers might have Woodstock dreams, their children dream of retail.

Will I find my museum here? The one on the hill? I've searched for it always, but it hasn't revealed itself in the real world yet. Only in the gossamer bits of my dreams.

Gossamer. Ethereal. Aery. Diaphanous.

...Vaporous. Gauzy.
My mind today is dominated by shimmer. Or what evokes a floating feeling. Perhaps it's the onset of Spring, or the requisite Benadryl that goes with the onset of Spring, but my mind is full of glimmer.

Here are a few selections that properly evoke the glisten...

Snow - Uri Shulevitz (A Caldecott Honor book)...combining a Eastern European style of drawing and one little boy's unwavering stubbornness for snow, this is one I pick up for pure other-worldliness.


The Mysteries of Harris Burdick - Chris Van Allsburg...when I took creative writing in high school, this was a tool we used to spark imagination for short stories. Van Allsburg's constant use of photograph-like charcoal drawings that summon so much LIGHT--the images feel like they could light up a dark room. From Archie Smith, Boy Wonder - - "A tiny voice asked, 'Is he the one?'...


Hondo & Fabian Peter McCarty -another author/illustrator that uses light, glowing light, to create a dreamlike world of simplicity. You feel a bit as if you were squinting out into a really bright early spring afternoon...where it's still cool and crisp and the heat of summer hasn't burned off the dew yet. Plus, it's about dogs and cats being silly.


When you Were Small Sara O'Leary (illustrated by Julie Morstad) - The bitsy and timeless illustrations remind me of Corningware with the use of color and classic lines and 1950's style of clothing...like Leave it to Beaver in a McCoy pitcher.



...have a dreamy night!