Dream #1
I rode through a suburban street at night with my mom and sister. As we passed one intersection one man walked diagonally through a corner yard to our left. We continued on. My mom drove. I sat in the passenger's seat. My sister sat in the back seat, on the driver's side.
I said, "That's why I like being out at night: nobody ever comes out."
My mom said, "I wish nobody even had to live in these houses. That way no lights would even be on."
I thought, Why would you want no lights to be on? You wouldn't be able to see the different kinds of houses.
The houses were lit brightly, as if there were lights pointed all over the houses and yards. For some reason this reminded me of Christmas.
At the end of the block the road curved left. Facing the curve was a tall, wide house. It had a wide, triangular, solid roof with a longer slope on the left than on the right. The wood of the house seemed to be as polished as in a Greene & Greene interior. The front of the building had some grid design in the wood. One vertical strip of the house-front was rough like the trunk of an enormous tree, but it was colored red and blue.
We drove into a massive tunnel or "garage" on the left side of the house. The tunnel also, like the house-front, had polished wood walls with grid designs. The tunnel turned left. At the turn was an enormous bench, maybe twenty feet tall, built into the wall, with seat and back cushions proportional to the height of the bench. (I think the only thing the bench could fit would be the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.)
We continued, as if floating along, though perhaps no longer in a car (my vision was a lot more mobile), through a room full of books. I told my mom that this was a library I knew. The room was intimate. The walls were lined with books, and there were books all over the tables.
We continued floating/driving into a much bigger room which was just as full of books. Both rooms were very nice and comfortable, but they were both simply piled and piled with books.
I lay on a couch. My mom and sister sat in two chairs behind me. They were reading. My mom had a wide but thinnish book which, I thought, was probably an interesting picture book.
I turned forward. In front of me was a big, thick, dark, rectangular, wooden table piled with books. I pulled a large, pale blue-covered book off a pile. I was slightly disappointed to find that I had chosen a picture book on the history of Central Park. I had wanted something with subject matter a little "weightier."
I looked through pictures about how (some time in the 1950s?) the park had been expanded. There was a map of the park "as it is today." The park was long, oval-shaped with uneven edges. The parts of the park that existed before the expansion were in color. The parts of the park that came into being after the expansion were in black and white.
But if this book was right, then before the expansion the park was in two sections which, given the size of the park, were quite separated. I thought, How could people have called these separate sections one park? What's more, how could they have called these sections "Central Park" if the sections were so far apart?
I then saw that the two parks had been connected by a walkway, at the midpoint of which was an oval-shaped rest area. For some reason this made things a little more sensible.
(I imagined that, before the expansion, the area between the two parks was really like vacant dirt lots,, just barren, pale, dry soil, not streets, buildings, or anything implying a city. There may even have been patches of trees out on these vacant lots.)
As I justified the name of Central Park to myself, my psychiatrist A stomped into the room from a doorway to my right and beyond my feet (i.e. beyond the direction of my feet as I lay on the couch). A shouted, "What in the hell are you doing in my place? You don't just come into people's places like this!"
I was caught off guard by A's surprise, shocked by how mean A could be. I stammered to say A's name, but I couldn't. I looked at a page in the book. There was a photo of a Hindu snake woman from Erich Neumann's The Great Mother. Below the photograph were three numbered paragraphs, each of which described a title. The first two were titled "Snake" and "Religion." The third was a word I didn't understand.
I tried again to call out A's name. But all I could think to say, as if it wanted to burst out as a revelatory speech, was, "Snake!"
A looked pale and worn-out. She wore big, smoky-lensed sunglasses which made her face look like that of a classic grey alien. At some point A stood half-straddling me, so her right leg knelt by my left side while her left leg stood, on the floor to my right, before the couch.
I muttered, "B-but w-we, we weren't saying a single word."
A said, "I don't give a damn what you were saying. You don't go into places when you aren't invited."
I said, "But I was invited. I have it in writing." I felt like this was true. But I also felt like A wouldn't care about that. She was too mad.
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