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After a week of being in Spain, I’m finally starting to dream in technicolor something that happens with incredible frequency when I’m away from my day to day life. Last year, my big dream was the bridge, the storm and the end. It was an incredibly vivid one that haunted me for the rest of the year and proved to be prescient for how the year would unfold.

My dream started on Tuesday night, when I dreamed that my brother who is in prison was out and I had met him to drive him somewhere, only he had his face turned from me and he said, “They did this to me, they hurt me.” And then he turned to face me and I thought his eye was missing, but then it turns out it was shut from a bruise and his face was battered.

The next day I wrote him on the prison email and he said, he thought that the dream signified hope, because he was “out” in the dream, and that the black eye was the hurt he had caused his family by being away from them.

I took a deep breath. Then the next night I dreamed about his daughter, my niece, and that I was to take her somewhere only “they” were after her and I was trying to hide her in many places, and trying to protect her, and I kept going from one place to the other and finally getting in the car, “they” found us and opened fire, but I woke before a bullet actually hit.

Disturbing.

I tried to shake these haunting dreams. I wanted to believe that what my brother said was true – it was a good omen. But I felt like each time someone I loved deeply was in peril, needed protection, was not safe. I looked up some dream interpretations and mostly came across the general sense that when you dream that someone you love is in danger and you need to protect them that you have put up artificial boundaries around yourself and are walled off.

Well, okay, I could see that – in my studies of Buddhism I could easily see myself right now as a person who is walled off, fearful of being vulnerable and scared to let go. This is why I find myself in Cadiz, taking the healing waters of Spain, in order to get back to me.

I didn’t write my brother about the dream of his daughter for fear he didn’t need one more thing to worry about with her. But I thought about it a lot. She keeps showing up on Facebook and I keeping wanting to reassure myself that she is okay, but really, how would that be accomplished? Me: “are you okay?” Her: “sure am.” And then what?

It made me think of how complex our minds are and how we build up these set up fears that stem from early on. I was reminded of this because Tin has started to say he is scared when he goes to sleep. He said, “Someone comes in the door, and then … ” and he is unable to complete it. Sometimes he will say it is yodeling man from the Balthazar cartoons he watches with Tatjana because yodeling man yodels when he’s happy but he lives in the alps and every time he yodels there is an avalanche.

I have a memory that is imprinted on my brain from being his age – I slept on the bottom bunk of a bunkbed and I was supposed to take a nap only I didn’t want to, so my brother, David, came in to put me to sleep. He always spoke to me as an adult and he was asking if I knew the meaning of a certain word (the word I can’t remember) and he was speaking to me about the word and how to use it in a sentence, and I always remember him, smiling, young, thin and tanned speaking to me in his pleasant voice. That image is so profound now as I try to put Tin to nap and he protests.

Last night, I dreamed that I ran into my sister and her husband and they were going to dinner to have filet mignon – she said she was craving steak – and they said they were going to go again with David to eat, only in the dream names and people got twisted and they were going to have this dinner on January 8th, which is my brother Bob’s birthday, and I said well you better invite him to dinner now because he won’t be alive by January 8th. (I still can’t remember if my brother or my father was born on the 8th, one was on the 9th and I get them confused.)

Again a sibling in peril, but this time with a little more ease, sort of matter of fact.

As we are here in Cadiz forming our summer memories, remember this is the year that I lost my hair – “remember?” we will all say in anecdote later on. Remember when you lost your hair, remember when I didn’t want to take my nap, remember when your brother/father was in prison, remember when you were young and then you weren’t?

These dreams and memories need space to breathe, and the life of busy has kept them submerged in the tundra of my unconscious, maybe it’s true that dreams of protecting a loved one mean we are protecting ourself from harm, maybe walls that have formed over half a century require longer bits of time to break down.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2012 at 7:59 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.