March 12, 2010 @ 9:24 pm
The Dreams You Don’t Remember

my life has been impacted by a dream I don’t remember.
This is real: I was at my neice’s house. My sister—my neice’s aunt—was MIA the bulk of the evening I arrived. Another neice went to find and wake her and she then appeared. She breezed into the room and handed out hugs as if they’d been freshly baked, but said nothing to anyone. As a bee, she went from person to person, hugging them. I looked at her—she looked out of place, not herself. She looked like a troll—this sounds like a cap but its true. Her hair stood erect, carved. Her face bright and highlighting her freckles. She swam through us and vanished returning to sleep the rest of the day. I didn’t know she had pancreatic cancer. I wouldn’t see her alive again.
I remained at my neices house and she invited me to spend the night in her daughter’s bedroom. That night her daughter was attending a girls sleepover at the house next door.
In my younger neices’ bedroom, the walls were stapled and taped with images of boys, rappers in leather jackets, R&B singers standing in windstorms. They were all curly hair and mahogany skin and muscles and lips. She’d posted a letter on her wall from someone she knew in jail. His words were positive. More positive than mine, though I rarely said anything. Her pillows were tiny white pills. I laid down on my stomach, hugged a pillow, and slept.
I woke startled—just like in the movies. I lifted my head and saw it was nearing 1:30 the next afternoon. I leapt out of bed. I had never, not since I’d been a child in bed sick and on drugs, Ever slept that long. The night before nothing out of the usual happened. I hadn’t smoked much. I drank nothing. But I was taken aback in an unexplainable way. Something happened and I couldn’t explain what.
That next day was dark in my memory as if there were a lingering eclipse or an especially dark cloud shading everything. I don’t remember anything else: Except feeling uncomfortable like my clothes were suddenly two sizes too small. And I never came back to that house, I never returned to that city, and I never actively played family again.
Something rattled me deep.
My stepfather was the first to die within, maybe a month. Maybe longer, maybe not as long.
My sister, who passed out the hugs, was next.
I often think about that sinkhole in my memory. What did I see? Would it have frightened me to have held it and remembered? I think about that darkness instead of what I see clearly. The darkness whispered something that changed what I saw in the light.
That’s the purpose of dreaming, I presume.
****

In my dreams there are many houses.
After my grandfather died, I dreamed I visited his place in heaven.
His bed had a four tall posts and was positioned on a beach, between two huge basalt stones rising from the shallow of the shoreline. The hallways leading towards it were of glass and gold
***
The houses in my dreams are huge, busy with archetecture. Arteries of hallways. Multiple rooms as if it were a modern castle. Glass doors leading into generous bedrooms. The most recent house’s backyard was rolling green hills and a concrete path like a web connecting three neighbors. I distinctly remember my father with me in this house, his hands shyly in his pockets the whole time. I don’t recall if it was his place or he was just visiting like me. I was visiting and had to catch a bus to someplace else. I looked upon the backyard longingly and a little blond girl scooting on a small bike.
Every house has multiple stories.
Sometimes there are parties in gathering rooms in my dreams. I rarely recognize those in attendance (or they are all relatives) and I remain in the perifery overlooking the environment with the patience of a plant.
***
One dream ended in a huge field that didn’t grow anything. There was a single white house here and I sat on a motorcycle at the base of the steps while my best friend stood on the porch explaining how to ride. He stood with his arms folded, watching me and talking about how clutches work. He was supportive and parental and insistant I could do it without him. I never went inside the house, but started the cycle and sped over the ragged clods of tan earth and laughed.
***
There were a family ducks. I was last in line, towering above the animals who all focused on the lead duck as they went to a similar barren field as above. They obediently lined up and jumped down through a hole in the ground. Even the tiny bright yellow chick which went last. I stood over the hole they disappeared into; it was narrow and dark and deep. I reached my arm in up to the shoulder and felt nothing. I sat on my knees and gazed in, my heart thumping at my chest. I was too afraid to follow.
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