These dreams of me
I spent yesterday doing what I love: being around writers, readers and books. They haven’t figured out the venue or logistics, but Homegrown, a literary festival by the public library, is getting a lot of things right.
I ran into a friend who I met when I first moved to Bay Saint Louis. A writer, photographer, journalist, jewelry maker and publisher, she moved away a couple of years ago. When she saw me, her eyes lit up and she said I had a dream about you! I dreamt I had come back to Bay Saint Louis and was walking around and you had been beamed up and it left a vacuum in the community.
My first thought was beamed up where? I love dreams and analyzing them. I fell deep into my friend, Rodger Kamenetz’s dream world where he, “inspired by the focus on dreams in both Tibetan and Jewish culture,” wrote The History of Last Night’s Dream and was interviewed by Oprah on her Soul Series. Rodger gets to the heart of the dream.
My other friend who sat next to me said, I had a dream about you. Your bald head had an image of the brain drawn on it, but instead of the actual regions named, the names were more beautiful and the whole drawing was mesmerizing.
I became aware of these dreams of me before I headed to the panel with author, Lisa Genova, who spoke about her new book, Maddy, about a woman who is bipolar. Genova is the author of Still Alice and Remember, both books about the mind. Genova has delved into how the brain rewrites memory and how people with Alzheimer disease and bipolar disorder view the world and gives us their perspective.
And I wondered why my friends were dreaming of me – do they know something I don’t? And I remembered what Rodger told me – that dreams embody all facets of ourselves, something Adam says as well when I recount a dream to him. The dream of Tin lying on the bed next to me and my asking him if he wanted me to teach him to drive? Well, both are me, and I am learning to drive, and to have different modes of being, lighter, freer, less in control.
My friend who saw me beamed up perhaps saw herself, an artist and community participant, now gone from a community she was strongly tied to. My other friend is fascinated by the brain and its states of being, and perhaps she transferred her own curiousity onto the only bald head she is familiar with – mine.
I know the first thing that registered for me was fear in hearing their dreams of me, and it’s the feeling that Rodger talks about. Why fear? Perhaps it is approaching my 66th birthday and considering mortality, and learning during our Chinese New Year celebration that the Chinese Pig meets with financial, relationship and health setbacks in 2025. Chani Nicholas says 2025 is a year for tending to your secret dreams if you are born under the sign of Taurus.
I know future thinking creates anxiety, and I know dreams and fortune telling and astrology and all of the desire to know the future fall short of actually pinpointing what happens next.
I came home from this full-day seminar a little uneasy despite a beautiful day outside and an enriching day inside. I learned Tin had dislocated his shoulder playing basketball, and this also made me feel uneasy, not being with him, to being able to tend to him myself and see if he was okay.
I sat on the couch and drank a hot cup of tea and read. This soothed me.
I focused on my breathing. I did my physical therapy. I drank my hot tea. And I calmed myself to sleep.
