All right, I don’t

The dream was very odd and very structured, (comparatively speaking I mean, for a dream). It began, I think, with the Brocketts and ourselves at the house of a Filipino family. It was getting later and later, everyone had already left but the couple who owned the house, and Hayden, and I. The couple were offering us shrimp with various sauces; it was very good. But the night gets darker and darker, and we are still a long way from home, which we have to return to sometime that night. Hayden and I appear to be playing some kind of game of chicken, seeing which will leave first. I forger why the stakes were so high.

And I never got to find out. The next segment promptly arrived in the form of my grandmother’s house, which at the same time was also a palace on the water. It was under some sort of attack, or at least a hostile ship had boarded it.

The attacker was the princess, a young woman with dark curly hair and rounded, highly colored features. She wore an odd sort of clothing, like a cross between a pirate and an assassin.

In the palace, the queen, a proud and stately old woman, with grey hair and a crown, paced the floor back and forth. It was she, for some reason, that was the main target of the princess-attacker. She was her mother. The princess came up the stairs and confronted her. If only I could remember what was said in that interview! But I remember that it ended with the threat withdrawn, and the princess, humbled, withdrawing her fleet, and the queen, still old and stately, watching from her battlement.

Then the third segment arrived. We were still in our grandparents’ house, but it was no longer a palace, and set in its usual North Carolina woods. Marriage had been outlawed, and the Johnnies who wished to be married were hiding there for the purpose of having the cermony performed.

I can’t quite remember who was marrying on this particular occasion - I believe it was Cassie and Adam.* I was helping Grandmom- a great seamstress - make wedding gowns, with the result that I was acting a sort of dressmakers’ dummy. I was wearing the actual gown, while all Cassie was wearing of her costume was the little white hat which the veil attatched to.

We saw Adam coming through the woods, all dressed up in an elaborate white suit, and we all rushed out to greet him. But then I bethought myself that I had best get out of the wedding dress before anybody got confused. I wanted to be with all the wedding guests, but I didn’t dare be mistaken, in that clothing. I ran upstairs to change.

Then the fourth segment began. I was a different character, a girl, somewhat younger than I am, in my room back in the days before I moved out and my sister moved in. I was talking to a friend - I *think* it might have started out as Ivy, but it certainly didn’t stay that way.

We had become suspicious of my mother - an attractive woman with dark, curly hair - my friend had made a devastating discovery. My mother was a demon, bent on some sort of plot. Was it to destroy the world? I don’t rmember what, but it was something terrible, and it was something urgent. We had to discuss what we had to do, and we had to get away and do it quickly. My friend had started to explain, but I hushed her (although it might have been a him by this point).

"Walls have ears!" hissed I, for my mother lived directly above me, and if she were a demon, who knew that she might not be even now listening to us? Afterwards I thought about this, and as my friend was trying to figure out where we could go, I repeated to myself, "Ears have walls," which seemed to me moderately profound.

We eventually decided to leave the house, on the pretext of going to the theater. But as we were explaining this to my mother, my friend made another discovery. There was some sort of code involving the letters B, R, and A, whose solution came to 8:23. At that time, explained my friend, my mother the demon would gain her full powers and her plan be implemented. I suddenly recognised some sort of jesting refence my mother had made to it in a comment about bras, and suddenly several things aobut her behavior became to clear to me. I stared at her in horror, because she looked so much like she usually did, a normal, pretty, older woman.

**There was a strange interlude here. I lost the thread of the dream, and was running down in a department store of stories trying to find it. If you have ever been to the Home Depot (a hardware store) it was like that, except underwater. I ran, underwater, down these endless aisles, looking into each one. Stories- dreams, were playing out in each. I saw Loki and Thor in one, and Posiedon in another, then, at the very end of the row of aisles, the dream I had been in. I rushed to it.

My mother walked into the kitchen and sat down at the end of the table. (Our table is long and oval, and the end of it faces a shelf on which is a large clock)

We were still telling her about this plan to go to the theater, when suddenly my friend, (who was now definitely a boy) looked at the clock (it was six forty) and gestured to me. I understood that we were to make an attack upon her then, and I leaped forward and locked my elbow around her neck, while my friend began to strike her on the head with a radio antenna. She looked at us in puzzlement, particularly at me, and asked me what I was doing.

I suddenly realized that at a particular time which must be very close, my friend’s radio antenna would turn into a rapier, and he would be able to kill her. At the same time, just seeing my mother sitting there looking surprised and rather hurt, it suddenly struck me what a horrible thing I was doing. I left off choking her, and began to try to beat off the blows of the radio antenna. But at the point the clock turned to six forty-two, and the antenna turned to a rapier, and my friend slid it right between my fingers into my mother’s side. She turned around and looked at me - I was sobbing by this point - and she looked incredibly betrayed.

Then the dream switched back to that store beneath the sea. I was walking with my family - my real family - and we were looking at stained glass.

Mom (and this was my real mother) was pushing Sarah in a stroller. She admired a stained glass lamp which had been made of agate slices. "Ah, you should come back with me to Annapolis," I said. "They sell ones there that are far more beautifully made than this one - this one is thrown together wtihout artistic skill, and looks cheap and gaudy. But you would love the ones they make in Annapolis."

But then I remembered the dream, and I thought that I had to get back to it. I set off running in that strange dim store underwater, until I came back to the places where each aisle was a dream. I saw men working at a forge, I saw plants growing in pots, and ran past the same stories from mythology, but when I came to the end, there was nothing but an empty grotto where my dream had been.

*Footnote: That is, Tillman-Young, a freshman our year, who left.

One Comment to “All right, I don’t”

1. Beth remarked:
   

   Et tu, Katharina? Then fall, Mother!

   I suppose I should be relieved that it was only the mother variants that were the enemy and in need of slaying….Do in my dark side, I suppose!
   If you ever doubt that you are an unusual person, try to find anyone - ANYONE - who can remember and articulate dreams in a tenth of the vivid detail you can produce years after the dream.

   Carry on!

   August 22nd, 2002 at 11:00 am

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