Wednesday, August 24, 2005

dream

Last night I had a horrible dream and now I don’t want to sleep. I was driving in my beautiful red Jetta and I realized I was late for something. I was driving fast to this toll booth so I could cross the bridge on the other side. When I got to the toll booth the person behind the glass window told me I was going too fast and instead of letting me pay, she gave me an eighty dollar ticket. (I have no idea why I know how much the ticket was?)

I got angry and I felt a little arrogant like I could get out of it and asked to see the manger. When did they start having mangers at ticket booths? Anyway they led me down this hall into this room, a man was sitting behind a desk with thick glasses on, I didn’t like him at all and they locked me in the room.

He asked me if I was going fast and I said yes. He then told me to stick out my hands and very quickly he cut my wrists with a big cleaver so that the top of my hands were hanging as if there were on a hinge. He wrapped them in a rag, told me to keep them tied. I walked to my car. I had to untie the bandages to drive home or I was trapped.

The weird thing is, then I do that dream traveling thing and I am in a house. In the beginning part of the dream I am me, Teresa. The way I am now and in the second part of the dream when I walked into the house I am not, I am male. (Please don’t get sexual dream interpt with me) I am male and there’s a woman in the house with long blondish hair washing dishes and I can hear the kids in the other room. I walk to her. I sit at the table. I hold up my hands. I say “now I can do nothing. I can do nothing.” And my hands just hangs there. I wake up crying.

Now I don’t want to sleep.
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8 comments:

Emily Lloyd said...

I am sorry you had this horrible dream. All I can offer is a Shhhh and a link: do you see them? Strong, beautiful, capable. There is much you can and will do, T. I know it.

8:45 PM
early hours of sky said...

hmmmmn, can I have normal colors ones.

4:56 AM
Emily Lloyd said...

I know you didn't just say "normal." But yes. Strong soap is available upon request.

7:25 AM
LKD said...

Well, the dream fascinates and disturbs me plenty. And to add your typo, your twice written Freudian slip of the fingers, "manger" instead of "manager" overwhelms me. Because manger on the surface level is denotes, specifically, the place of christ's birth, but to look beyond the obvious and dig deeper, a manger literally is where cows and sheep EAT, manger being derived from the french word mangier which means to eat.

So, let me add this up. You're late for a very important date--which is, I think connected to your sense that you must achieve some amount of success as a writer by or before the time you reach age 40 (you mention that Yale younger poetry series quite often), there is a toll involved, which means, blatantly, that a price must be paid, there is an authority figure who you demand to see who then proceeds to rob you of your power which could be an editor or some other person in your life who you perceive as having authority over you, there is the actually cutting off, nearly, of the hands which indicates, to me, at least, that you feel a significant sacrifice must be made in order for you to achieve the kind of success you want/need/strive for, there is that nagging typo "manger" which means, I think that this writing business is as important to you as life itself, that it feeds you, that you gain much sustenance from it, and at the end there is that provocative switch of sexes which suggests that not only, deep down, do you maybe think that you have to a "man" (not literally....but maybe so) in order to get what you want out of your life, but also, that you need a woman in your life who will be the "wife" the person who stays at home and does the dishes and takes care of the kids (I just mistyped "world" instead of kids, ha) while you're out there in the world being the man, being a famous, successful writer.

So there. (grin)

I love love love dreams. You know this. At work, I have several coworkers/friends who seek me out to tell me their dreams, to unravel their nightly journeys so that I can prod them, push them to look at the blatant and not so blatant symbols, to ask them: So, what do you think this means?

As an example, the guy that sits in the cubicle in front of mine always has violent dreams that usually involve floods, guns, explosions, really distressing stuff, and I try, gently, to get him to recognize that this is his brain's way of telling him that he has some unexpressed anger, and maybe fear too. Here's what he dreamed the other night: He was on a school bus and George Bush was the driver. George was driving into buildings while my coworker desperately tried to escape this bus but found that he couldn't. He had another dream in which he was at work and it was the end of the day, time to go home but there were no doors. He walked around and around the building but couldn't get out.

Dreams are powerful. You know this. Don't be afraid to sleep. Embrace this dream, T. It's telling you something. YOU are telling you something.

I told you what I think it means. Tell me, T; what do YOU think your dream means?

8:23 AM
Blair said...

If I may, I think this is your version of saying the world is going too fast, like your daughter said to you a few months back I believe.

I would see this as a reminder to step back, slow down, not stress that grant you are writting too much.

But that is just me.

And I would not have been able to get back to sleep either.

9:17 AM
Lyle Daggett said...

The previous comments (especially the wonderful insightful comment by Laurel) echoed much of what came to my mind when I read your telling of your dream.

Overall the dream feels, to me -- based on reading your telling of it -- to be about a transformation underway, maybe at a fairly deep level, maybe a painful or at least a difficult one. The obvious transformation (whether or not a literal one in waking life) from a woman into a man; also you mentioned in passing that the toll booth was for crossing a bridge to the other side, which also suggests transformation to me.

Dreams involving tranformation, shape changing, half-and-half conditions (the bridge; your hands were not quite completely cut off, they were still left hanging, partly attached), seem to have something to do with the realm of what some cultures in the ancient and modern world have called the goddess (or the Goddess). I'm not pushing a religious or spiritual outlook, but I've found it useful sometimes as a metaphor.

In ancient myths, journeys to the underworld (they led you down a hall and locked you in a room) are often frightening and dangerous, though they hold the potential for bringing back something of great value and beauty and potential. In your narrative as you wrote it, it was immediately after the man at the desk cut your hands (almost) off, that you traveled to the house and were transformed into a man, or into whatever "male" characteristics seem significant to you.

The dream may be, in part, an attempt to heal. Every figure in a dream represents, in some way, some part of the psyche of the dreamer. (Looked at from far outside the dream, not having felt any of the awfulness of it firsthand, one of the things that occurred to me is that cutting and then wrapping in bandages is something doctors or healers sometimes do. Though in no way am I insisting that this was what was happening in your dream. Just something that went through my mind.)

The dream may be suggesting that some part of yourself is struggling toward deeply felt change, toward healing wounds.

I'm not necessarily asking you to answer this, but just putting the question -- in the dream, could you see or did you have any awareness of what was on the other side of the bridge that you were hurrying to get to?

6:48 PM
Lorna Dee Cervantes said...

Wow, Laurel! Good question, Lyle.

4:15 PM
early hours of sky said...

No I know in the dream what I was trying to get too and honestly in the dream that didn’t feel as strong as the fact that I believe I could get out of the ticket. I felt confident in myself and then it seemed I paid a greater price.

And there was no sense of healing being cut. I have had dream where I was inside an animal and have been cut open (that felt healing) but this definitely felt destructive.

Thank you all for your input. Luckily I haven’t had the dream since and both the hands still seem to be attached. Here’s hoping to no toll booths tonight.

10:21 PM

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