September 12, 2004

• The Dream d’Jour

  We’re living on a farm, my little daughter and I.  It is
  springtime and mother rabbits and chickens are trailed by bunnies and
  chicks.  My daughter has “adopted” a litter of bunnies and they
  follow her around, trailed by the mother rabbit.  I watch her play
  with them, and let her bring a blanket out of the house to “nest” in
  with her bunny “babies” in the back of an old junk car in the yard.

  On my way into the barn for chores, I see first one, and then a group
  of some baby animal I don’t recognize until their mother comes waddling
  onto the scene.  She’s a porcupine.  The little ones have
  only rudimentary soft quills, and remind me of teenagers with spiked
  hair.  I think about taking one as a pet until I see that it is
  wearing a collar, already someone’s pet.

  Then my eccentric neighbors arrive, a family with several children
  ranging from little ones to a grown married daughter.  They are a
  creative / artistic bunch, and keep a lot of exotic animals. They’re
  the owners of the porcupine family, it turns out.  Greyfox comes
  around the corner of the barn and they ask about his health.  He
  talks about the doctor having found a new cancer, one in his brain, in
  addition to the one in his abdomen.  [As far as I know, in the
  real world, Greyfox doesn't have cancer.  I was concerned about
  this when I woke, and checked it with an oracle, which said it's
  nothing more than an expression of my fears.]  After some
  conversation, mostly discussing all the young animals around, and what
  each of us intends to enter in an upcoming fair, they leave and I go
  into the barn to do my chores.

  I find a ring on the ground on my way into the barn.  It is silver
  and turquoise, a very simple design set with a large free-form
  stone.  I assume that it belongs to one of the neighbors who just
  left.  One of their teenage sons had been wearing a silver and
  turquoise bracelet with a massive freeform stone. In the barn when I
  start to lay the ring on a workbench, I notice a jumbled pile of
  jewelry, all silver and turquoise and all with large stones which
  dominate the pieces, the silver only being there to serve as framework
  for the stones.

  My neighbors’ eldest daughter, the married one, was sitting in a
  tattered old armchair on the other side of the big open area in the
  barn.  She interrupted her cell phone conversation to tell me the
  jewelry was hers.  She’s talking to someone  who might buy
  the jewelry, negotiating a price.  When she is off the phone, she
  tells me that her husband has given her a bill for her contribution to
  the household expenses, so she has to sell her jewelry.

  Symbolism in this dream is obvious to me, much more than the recent
  dream where everyone was garbed in Goth black, with tattoos and
  pierces, all of which are just not me at all.  The motherhood and
  adoption issues in my life are known to all who know me or have read my
  memoirs.  All my adult life I’ve been looking after abandoned or
  injured animals and other people’s children to compensate for my own
  maternal default.  I’m keenly aware that since I stopped growing
  marijuana, my contribution to our household finances has been
  minuscule.  If I hadn’t saved Greyfox’s life a few times, and
  didn’t perform my supportive tasks so compulsively, he’d probably rebel
  at supporting us.

  The turquoise in the dream may have come up because I watered my
  turquoise yesterday.  That’s an essential part of my housekeeping
  chores.  I water the turquoise regularly, even if I’m too fatigued
  to dust the rest of the rock collection.  It hasn’t been dusted in
  ever so long, and I’m looking forward with pleasure to getting my work
  in the back room done so I can take the collection off the main rock
  shelf in the living room, wash them and rearrage them to make room for
  the lamp that now resides in the hallway, where its shade snags me
  occasionally as I walk by.  

  “Watering turquoise?” you may wonder.  The turquoise in jewelry
  has been oiled or impregnated with resin, or else is not turquoise at
  all but rather chrysocolla, gem silica, or dyed magnesite or
  howlite.  In its natural state, true turquoise contains
  water.  It becomes powdery and disintegrates if allowed to dry
  out.  My collection includes three chunks of natural turquoise,
  each about the size of an egg.  All day yesterday, as they lay
  singing in a bowl of water on the woodstove — they make a little
  singing hiss as the water is absorbed and air expelled — I stopped
  frequently in my back-and-forthing, to pick them up and enjoy their
  visual beauty and the energy they possess.

  Greyfox
  just phoned from the parking lot at the Net Cafe in Wasilla, where he
  told me about finding one of the lost episodes of Melody, which I’d
  used as packing material in a box of rocks I packed up last week for
  him to sell.  I hadn’t even noticed what I was packing the rocks
  in as I went through the box and sorted them, other than that it was
  used typing paper that had been packed around the rocks when they were
  first stored away years ago.  That has long been one of the
  practical uses I found for our many first drafts, before we had the
  computer’s word processing software when we were condemned to rewriting
  everything.  I still don’t know what happened to the final draft
  of the last two episodes of Mel, so his finding those early drafts is
  real serendipity.

  Now, I gotta go get to work on my housecleaning, and I hope to find
  time during breaks to read the dozens of comments LuckyStars left
  yesterday when she was catching up on my last few weeks of blogs after returning from her vacation. 
  When all the thankless and unpaid cleanup work gets done (certainly not
  today or tomorrow or….), maybe I’ll be able to do some readings
  and/or make some jewelry, and make a contribution to the financial
  needs of this household.

  The_Clowne_from_Clown asked
  yesterday if I’d written a book.  Terry, I’m writing it here (on
  Xanga) and now.  It’s all those memoir episodes you find so
  tiresomely long and time-consuming to read.  It cries out for an
  editor.  Do you think any publisher will ever want to take it?
  

  • 3:57 pm
  • 6 Comments