The nightly freakout
29 March 2011 09:39 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
But now I remember the dreams. Me in a Whole Foods produce section desultorily piloting my cart. The space was all matte linoleum floors and rustic wood boxes stacked with unblemished fruit and vegetables. I was dressed down, way down, with holes in my clothes and shapeless pants. I hadn't showered. My hair was lank. And then I bumped into my exhusband. He looked sleek, well-dressed and happy. We had a pleasant conversation about his life and family. I slunk off feeling happy for him but unsettled about my place in the world.
There was a stint in an office building (a recurring dream setting), me waiting in this black modernist lobby for an elevator with all these men, some of them rumpled types that worked at my last employer, a think tank, some besuited or be-khakied and be-oxforded. Pressed and neat. But that dream didn't go beyond the lobby, or at least my memories of it have faded. Usually the dream building contains my old office. I show up, but don't have a job anymore. Or the elevator is unreliable. Or the elevator is huge, buzzing with people like a mobile cocktail party. Or the top floors are connected via a set of steep precarious escalators.
The final dream: I was alone on a beach, a dirty little stretch of coarse sand with a shack behind and a rusty container ship off in the distance. I was too close to the edge. The waves lapped at my feet, got my things wet, and then they pulled my phone into the surf only to spit it back out at me with the next set. The phone was waterlogged, maybe ruined. It squelched with wet when I shook it. How would I call home now? Why didn't we spring for the phone replacement package, just in case? Then I remembered: my assignment was to drive back from this beach, drive by myself back home, a long journey. I imagined fast highways, me rippling along, panicked behind the wheel. I couldn't do it. I barely knew how to turn the wheel. And now I couldn't call my husband for help because my phone was ruined, because I had been careless with it, unprepared, and what about the highways and then I woke up.
The dreams make sense to me, they are a part of the puzzle of my current life. I must prepare. Design the new blog, think about a job, learn how to dive how to drive again. I must take care of the present and prepare for the future, feeling the fear while not letting it take over, while my subconscious does its nightly freak out.
Image: Steps to the slide at a local park, taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. Like it for its washed-out dreamlike quality and the feeling of movement (or of choice of direction).
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