Go North for Freedom, part 2

I fall in love with a man. He's not glamourous or perfect in any way, just a nerdy looking guy with a blue collar job. We decide to move up to the Yukon and set up housekeeping, so we load into an old Cutlass Supreme and point it north. it's already winter when we leave and there's snow on the road.

For a Canadian road trip it's a romantic experience; the truck stops are charmingly gritty and the parkas are toasty warm on the inside. We make out in parking lots a fair amount. By the time we pull in to our destination, a fair-sized northern town, the car is loaded with supplies and we have had a big adventure we will always remember.

Then we settle down to sensible Northern living in a modular house made out of two old shipping containers. My husband and I both work for the local transit company, him as a vehicle mechanic and me as a dispatcher. Sometimes my job involves knocking truly gigantic icicles off the doorways of the building I work in. My husband has a hobby that involves multiple vats of boiling liquids kept in a part of the garage, metallurgy maybe? It's delightfully geeky.

We still make out in the chilly garage sometimes, because we just can't help it.

I have not actually been sleeping these past few days. It's a pattern: when the hottest nights of the year arrive, sleep goes away, and I walk around for days in an altered state, feeling giddy, thinking in symbols, not language, and feeling like I'm on the brink of big changes.

All you folks who reliably sleep through the night have no idea how much time there is in a week. To pass the time, I have been plowing through a compulsively readable science fiction series (CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books - so far, 3 books in as many weeks). Now I'm walking around in two universes at the same time. When I leave my apartment, I have to remind myself of where and when I am. I confuse the names of real places with fictional ones. I feel sad to be all alone with my monumental nerdiness.

Maybe I'll try being a writer again ...

A picture of what frightens you

I am with a group of people at a workshop or something, and the facilitator asks everyone to draw a picture of what frightens us. I leave my page blank for a while while I think it over. The woman next to me draws a shark, which is usually the symbol I fall back on to show primal fear, and I think to myself, great, now I have to think up something new, because I can't draw exactly what she has drawn!

The effort of delving for a new image starts to really get to me, & I start whining, then crying, then tearing my hair out because I can't think of anything that epitomizes "fear"; I try thinking of different ways to draw sharks, but not only does that not seem creative enough, but I also literally scare myself with the images that come into my head. Pretty soon I am reduced to a two-year-old style temper tantrum, rolling on the floor while people say "Oh for fuck's sake, woman!" and the ones who were comforting me at first withdraw and leave me to straighten myself out.

In the back of my mind, I know I am pushing myself to a place where my instincts will suggest a symbol I can use that will have real meaning, even if my conscious mind doesn't yet recognize it. Finally I go one degree of separation away from the shark itself, and I draw the marine biologist; a man standing beside a Jeep on a beach under a cloudy sky. The man is no-one I know, but at least I get to finish the project in a way that feels true to me. Several people complement me on my drawing.

The time I drowned

This dream felt so much like memory that I woke up re-evaluating my beliefs on past lives.

I dreamed that I was a fifteen-year-old girl living with my father and grandmother (who were the same as my father and grandmother in this life) in a small wooden house in a forest on a river. It was a gloomy, depressing place, all drooping trees and rotting wood and sticky mud, and, then as now, my family seemed obsessed with keeping the dim, dirty past alive with dusty old pictures and books about virtuous girls who died young.

There is a rickety dock behind our house, and it's one of my household duties to wait on it every evening for my father to come home and help him tie up his boat. Sometimes I beg my family not to make me stand down on the dock at sunset, and I always do the chore sulkily, but it makes no difference; my father needs help tying up the boat, and my grandmother's too old. This duty is the most hated thing in my life, because I am afraid of the river. In the daylight it's not so bad, but as the sun goes down, things appear on the water that were not there in the light.

Every night when the shadows lengthen, a boat like my father's appears out of nowhere, just sitting on the water near the opposite bank, absolutely still regardless of wind or current, and the man in this boat simply stares at me and leers. He never moves nor makes a sound, but he is always there when the sun goes down. And some nights whispering voices can be heard, and when I look around, I see a man and woman standing on the bank near me, or worse, walking through the water towards me. I know none of these are of this world, and I know equally well that they want me. They make my skin creep like spiders in my bedclothes.

One night there is a storm blowing, and I fight long and hard with my grandmother to let me forgo my duty down at the dock. It is already eerily dark out because of the clouds. I beg and whine and threaten, but finally my grandmother shouts me down and calls me names and tells me that if my father drowns trying to dock his boat, it will be all my fault and so will the abject poverty that will follow his loss. She hands me a lantern, shoves me out the door, and slams it in my face. I walk down to the dock wailing in anger and fear.

The creepy little boat and it's leering occupant are already there when I assume my post, sitting perfectly still in the water while waves rage all around. Groaning voices are in the air, and the ghostly couple are already out in the water up to their shoulders, reaching toward me. I can't see my father's boat anywhere, and there's no way of knowing when he will arrive home. The dock pitches under me as I stand there crying in terror, and I cling to a rotten post for support. I look up to the house, but it looks so far away and closed to me, offering no safety. When I look back at the river, the ghostly couple are right there, their hands on the edge of the platform, their mouths hanging open. When the waves lift the dock, they heave at it, seeming to laugh at my fear. Tree branches whip back and forth as the wind intensifies, and finally, after a number of tries at it, the waves and the ghostly hands manage to tear the dock away and flip me into the water. I hold on to one side of the loose dock, trying to keep my limbs away from the wraiths that are in the water with me, just a few feet away. There is an iron hook on the dock that has come loose from the ring that holds it to the supporting posts, and I brace myself as well as I can against the muddy bottom and try to bring the two together again. I come tantalyzingly close a few times, but the waves are too strong. I keep losing my grip on the solid post, and losing track of which way is up and home, and which way is the rushing river. Exhaustion finally overtakes me, and I slip under the surface. The last thing I see is the dock over my head, cutting me off from the air.

A tiny yellow lizard

Im my dream I am six years old and someone has given me a tiny yellow lizard to look after. He is so small that he lives under my fingernail. It feels good to be responsible for a such a friendly little creature, and I go about my six year old business, happy and confident that everything is as it should be.

Then one day, after some time has passed, I am in the midst of frolicking in a mud puddle with some other kids when I suddenly realize that the lizard has disappeared! I frantically look around on the ground and find him, cold and half-drowned, at the edge of the mud puddle. At that moment, I feel myself fill up with an awful grief. I pick up the tiny lizard in my fingers, lay him on my palm and try to warm him, to comfort him, but he's so very tiny that my efforts only hurt him more. Finally, the lizard leaves me and drags himself to a hole in the corner of a kitchen cabinet, and that's the last I see of him for years.

Years pass; I get somewhat taller and turn into a sullen teenager. The horrible grief has not left me even for a moment, but I hide my sadness from everyone. Still, it seems I have a friend or a sister who knows my secrets, because one day she tells me she has a surprise. She takes me to the kitchen of my house and introduces me to a young man in a blue uniform, and even before I see him I know he is the very same tiny lizard all grown up. I walk into his arms, and can't keep from crying.

No honour among thieves

Sometimes in my dreams, I come face to face with the extreme moral ambiguity of my beliefs and actions. Breaking into my ex's apartment and poking around is one example (see below); here is another.

I dreamed I was part of a deep-sea exploration team, searching inside sinkholes and underwater caves for something very valuable that has been lost, and which we are going to steal. We stop our submarine over the sometimes tiny rocky openings of sinkholes and send down our remote camera to see what's there. At one hole, I am watching the monitors as the camera pans around, and I catch a glimpse of something that looks like a person.

My first thought is that someone got stuck in the sinkhole and drowned. I send the camera in for a closer look, and see that the shape is a person, a woman wearing a gold one-piece suit, and she is still alive. She's standing on a thin ledge and looks exhausted and scared. I bring the remote camera in close to her, and although she doesn't seem to be able to see, she reaches out and grabs it and I carefully use it to pull her out of the hole. Once we have her on board our little submarine, we send the camera back down to finish the search.

The woman from the hole is shaking and crying, and tells us she had been trapped in the hole for weeks and has eaten nothing all that time. She is barely sane, and doesn't yet dare to hope that she is no longer buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Meanwhile, our camera finds something else in the hole: a bunch of black nylon bags lashed together. It is our quarry! We excitedly hook it and bring it to the sub, but soon we realise our sub is too small to carry both the bags and the rescued woman at once. Being profit-minded thieves, we decide that our only choice is to put the woman back in the hole, make off with the quarry, and send someone back to collect the woman later. Of course she fights and screams and pleads and cries, but we force her out of the sub and lower her back into the dark hole. I watched her go down into the darkness; the last thing I see is her terrified face peering up at us.

Philosophy Quest

This was a fun dream to dream. I was starting university (something I have not yet done in my waking life) in a program where I'm required to take philosophy. I enroll in a class with a prof named Torquemada. Her classroom is in the dank, oppressive basement of a crumbling old building; her teaching methods consist of torturing her students, and instructing students on how to torture each other. If anyone screams "This isn't fair!" Torquemada snaps her riding crop, tightens her lips across her teeth, and says, "Fair doesn't matter. You have to take philosophy to graduate, and mine is the only philosophy there is. You can either accept that now, or keep repeating my class until you accept it." Because I am new, don't know any better and want to fit in, I believe her. I attend the class, all the while keeping my eye on the prize, course credit and the right to say I have learned "philosophy". In a few months I have really started to hate myself.

Then, one happy day, a friendly young woman strikes up a conversation with me, and when she hears I am in Torquemada's class, she shakes her head and says, "You've gotta get into a different class." She gives me a pamphlet with all the philosophy courses listed, points to one and says "This one's the best." For the first time, I know of an alternative to Torquemada, and I decide to go meet the teacher of the recommended class.

It's not so easy as going to her office and making an appointment; instead, I have to show up early one morning and join a safari of 10 or so other seekers for a trek on elephants. We all mount our elephants and head off on land a short ways, then we come to a lake. The elephants swim across with us perched on their backs, climb out on the opposite shore, and carry us off across country, through fields and forests, until we come to a huge 60's modernist building where we dismount our elephants and are greeted by a group of profs. There's a bit of mingling and conversation, and then someone says, "Okay, who's going on to meet the philosophy professor?" three or four of us put up our hands.

The profs tell us to get back up on our elephants and climb the staircase all the way to the top. We go round and round, lumbering on our elephants, and the higher we get, the older the building gets. The staircase changes from concrete and glass to carved mahogany paneling, and then finally at the top there's a chandelier and everything looks very Victorian. I go in to meet the professor and she looks Victorian too, in a comforting, grandmotherly, traditional kind of way. "Do you have your staff?" she asks. I don't. "You'll need your own staff or wand to continue," she says, and sends me off to find an appropriate stick. "Can elephants go down stairs as well as up?" I ask. "Yes," says the teacher, "but hold on tight, and yell at your elephant a bit, it helps to calm them down." So I head off back down the stairs, lurching and yelling at my elephant and wondering what to use for a staff. I think about my grandfather's handmade walking stick, the one that's shaped like a shillelagh; it's the closest thing I have to "my own staff or wand." Then, whaddaya know, I see the walking stick lying on top of a mahogany railing! So I pick it up and head back up to start my philosophy career.

And that's where the dream ends. They are seldom very literary.

The first dream I can remember

The first dream I can remember in my life was of lying on the bottom of the ocean in the mud while grasses and seaweed swayed all over me. Some nights I would find myself sinking down into the mud and freaking out when it started to leak into my mouth. Other nights my baby mind would make up strange creatures like the elusive "grass shark" to menace my sleeping self. It was scary, but only because I didn't know what was happening to me. Then, as I learned to talk and ask questions, I found out more about things that live in the ocean, and these things came into my dreams. Over time I spent more time swimming around rather than just lying on the bottom, and I encountered fish, whales, even other people, deep under the waves. One day my mom brought home a big fat novel with a picture of a submarine on the cover, and from that day on, submarines became a part of my dreams too.