Irony of dreaming

sometimes I think I should return to the intention of writing the dreams.  They are vivid and more active than my awake life. My awake life is full of distraction and longings and frustrations and disappointments and stress with a little pleasure thrown in with hanging out with friends or going to see a movie or finding an engaging moment on tv. My identity in my art has all but disappeared. I’m not writing, I’m not playing music. I’m too exhausted, too spent, running ragged at school in part because of trying to teach students who are eager but not always ready to learn more difficult skills. We have fabulous “extra” things going on at school and I bite off more than we can chew. I love the actual time in the classroom engaging with students and it feels like they are engaged and enjoying it and then the assessments are low performing for the majority as they revert back to old habits badly learned in middle school “to begin” and “to continue” as if these were transitions and it doesn’t matter how many times I beg them to think about what they write, they resort to these horrible habits of hollow writing.  Alliteration intended.  I even sat there yesterday and took a break and asked them to stand and stretch and write out some memory notes about forbidden words (and so forth) and then let them back into their essays for 20 minutes to clean up and edit.  And the horrible habits of hollow writing remained. (Just one of many prevailing, distressing examples currently—refraining from mentioning those who have had me for a year and are stuck on not knowing what to do with a simple appeal to them so we are all struggling to figure it out—me how to instruct and show; them how to just go for it and see what happens.)

But my dreams are amazing and active and energetic and creative and often solve mysteries and problems and there are always many people and often there are people from my past who are present and we are working or playing together as if no time had passed and the believability is unbelievable when I awaken to sadly only partial memory. Last night involved many colored pencils and swapping out ideas and colors for a project I can’t remember (the one at school is the Happy Thanksgiving banner for families receiving Elev8hope baskets—which I am part of but won’t be coloring or drawing...) And all of this was exchanged with a “best” friend in high school and college with whom we had a bit of a painful and misunderstanding-laden separation in our 20s. But no memory or trace of that was in the dream, we were simply the selves we have always been with me wanting to create and she needing to go out and be medical help for others, though she always had the cool stuff to create with.

The dream included a funky place on the beach with several stair cases and secret entrances and that old wood worn by wind and rain and yet not rotting and paint peeling patiently and rustically and at one point suddenly all we who were living and working there and in and out all the time came up to the door and it was locked! So was the second door!  We each had been given a key but these keys were hidden safely in our luggage because we also heard the scuttlebutt that people were always in and out and so much going on there was no need for a key or to lock the door but suddenly we were locked out. I remembered an entrance slightly beyond and above a second entrance and it was something like an attic entrance so I climbed those stairs that narrowed and found the little door and it was bowed just a little bit and there was barely any light, just that which trickled up with me from the landing twisted below and I could pull up the corner of the door just enough to see a little paper bag with its sides rolled down and brass keys brightly shining in a pile like the treasures of old caves that possessed their own light and shone out even from the darkest caves and smiling I took one and came down stairs and handed it to the thin and scruffy guy who was the first to discover the locked entry door; he tried it and it opened and I was a hero glimmering in his smiling eyes. We all cheered and went in and I secretly took the key back to its little hidden bag. 

Other scenes in this same dream included sitting on the beach near the pier and bones instead or along with shells were lying on the beach not fully recognizable until I realized these were not all shells. We generally see what we expect to see unless our eyes are given a chance to linger and see what is there. These were not scary bones or horrific or signs of murder more like intriguing treasures and remnants of another world and another life. Something about a map that endured the ocean and sand and weather and was something like cloth and something like plastic. I have no recollection what it was of, just that it helped explain some of the things that had washed up to shore. It would make sense if all this were metaphorically part of a parallel life or things lost along the way now unusable and unsalvageable. (Perhaps the map represents my dreams and all that sits around me represents all that I struggle with in my waking world....)  It was fascinating and again someone was there with whom we wondered back and forth in simple suggestions and what ifs and look at thats and ideas in quiet reflection and easy exchange and the waters lapping as the only rhythm that could be called the passing of time as time seemed more open than passing and it was a wonderful, casual, restful day.

I can tell in the waking that I have an egregious lack of decompressing creativity in my life right now because of the extent of my frustration and overreaction when kids are more like stones and I no longer have the strength to move them and seemingly the simplest of assignments and means to get them to understand while also enabling them to achieve better grades seem always to go awry and cause more trouble than success.  This is my waking life that is consuming me and burning me out.  I’m sure you hear easy answers and encouragements for shifting more of the dreaming into the waking and indeed I know that too but just like the students who hear it all but cannot seem to do any of it, I feel a bit like most of me is hidden away in a tiny paper bag up the abandoned and twisted stair behind a bowed but locked and unseen door.

seeing auntie bb again being with auntie bb now

i did not post this when i wrote it in june 2013...seemed too personal.  still is.  but now i am gathering stories from between death and resurrection.

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Her eyes were green—slightly darker than peridot, slightly darker than the pristine waters at Abaco...they were vibrant with life and I looked into them as if by looking and holding the gaze I would hold her in my life and in her living.  I wasn’t aware I was dreaming, I wasn’t really dreaming, but I was asleep, or rather, I was aware that this was a moment outside the time of wakeful passing.  I was aware that I had to look at her, look at her vibrant green eyes in all their clarity and reality, dimension and being; it was up to me, to my unbroken visual and visible bond in seeing her that would sustain her and sustain me and sustain all the relationship that we had known my entire life. If I looked away, she would be lost to me.  I made a mental note, too, of how the coloring of her eyelids matched that green of her eyes but not with the harshness of a teenager who might be experimenting, not with the cheap application of the shallow attempt to seduce, it was somehow a transfiguration, an appropriate compliment to her eyes, as if the color emanated from them like a prism throws light from the sun. There was a slight holding of my breath in that shadow of disbelief when gazing at someone loved and lost, having the perpetual body memory of embrace at the occasional physical meetings on holiday, that holding of breath in suspending the unmoving moment beyond time to absorb presence and recognize someone in soul while certain physicalities didn’t conform with certain memories.  In shared life she was darker in hair color, and makeup—her lids were always a subtle red earth tone.  Her eyes a fascinating gray like blue shadows over heather, the blue gray of distant appalachian mountains in mist.  Striking beauty, heads would literally turn in double take when we were out and about. Her age had always been about 25 years older and while she did not look at all like a photo of her in youth, this was her soul gazing back at me through that color of green I cannot describe and is fading, dulling, shifting in the attempt.  This “dream” did not have the timber of other dreams, it was not made of the same stuff.  It was real.  It felt like the clairvoyance I possessed when I was so young and prayed to have it pass.  Now I regret that prayer.  And now I have had this prayer answered.  She was there with me.  We shared our being, our connection, our selves beyond this material life but with the material that engages the senses.  This time she did not touch me.  When she was alive, I would dream of her and it would be the form of her I have always known and it would be her laugh and it would be our shared stories and it would be our walks along the beach and it would be her maternal embrace and it would be a visit that I always longed for and never had enough of and it would be her life without the hindrances of her commitments, and mine.  But this was only being.  This was only her face gazing back at mine, not looking like her but being her.  I want to believe...that this was an outstretched affirmation that she is ... still ... living beyond this quintessence of dust and pain and heartache and situation.  I feel her.  I long for her.  But not in the way I always had before in wishing I could figure out a way to travel to visit...but in a way that hopes beyond empirical doubts that there is more beyond this mortal coil and that we will BE in that space I glimpsed, that presence I felt, that connection I live in...

Before I Knew It

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Long journeys into night
as a child I hunkered down in the floor board
curled into the bucket where feet should go
a box of kleenex, tote umbrella, empty paper cup
pushed further under the seat like secrets
my cheek on the scratchy carpet
same color as my hamster
but if you wiggled just right it was comfortable
and warm.  The hum pulled me to sleep.

Later, half awake, cooler air revived me just enough
to feel
softer embrace in the bucket of Dad’s arms
he carried me through the dim light of home again home again
jiggity jog
he laid me to rest like a most precious treasure
in my own bed
I briefly expanded between the cooler brighter sheets
and softest feather pillow that held the shape of my head
from the night before
and off to sleep before I knew it

before I knew it
now I awake from the dream of his presence
gone before I knew it