Saturday, March 25, 2017

(10/3/04) three hundred-foot/step rose; bloom-less flowers in the land of the dead; esti skepti

(Dreams only entered in daytime paper journal. No time/place info.)

Dream 1

Don't remember the beginning, except that for some reason I was in an unkempt garden, or, rather, a wild garden, with my brother. We were putting up or pulling down something.

At some point my brother pointed up a stairway either three hundred feet or three hundred steps tall. It was blue-painted, thin metal, and it curved in a spiral. Its landing had no floor attached to it. It was a shaky stairway (I may have called it a ladder). I was afraid to go up it, and I told my brother so.

Then -- (after what?) -- I was climbing up a white-barked "tree" no larger than one inch in diameter. I called the "tree" a rose. It was covered in thorns both long (maybe three inches) and short (maybe one-eighth inch). I may have been climbing up this "rose" in order to take something off its top, which, oddly enough, was a small cone of yellowing leafs. I may have been climbing up the tree to pull or cut the tree down.

But as I continued climbing up the tree I felt the tree being cut down or rotting away from the bottom up, as if the top parts of the tree floated in the air while the lower parts were cut away, rotted and fell away, and/or disappeared altogether. But I knew the top parts, where I was, would fall, straight to the hard ground, as soon as there was no more tree left beneath them, possibly because of my weight.

I looked to my left and saw the stairway beside me. For a moment I was no longer filled with the fear of falling. Instead I was filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. I had climbed all the way up this "rose," which was just as flimsy as, if not flimsier than, the stairway, and had attained a height of three hundred feet/steps without even having noticed it.

I now felt-saw the last bit of "trunk" rot and fall away beneath me (it looked like a splintered chair leg). Instead of holding onto the "rose" top and falling with it, though, I let go and let myself alone fall to the ground. I assume the "rose" top thus stayed floating in the air.

I myself discovered (guess what...) that I could control my rate of descent. I floated down to the ground, possibly landing on a patch of grass. I looked around and was in awe of the beauty of this wild garden. My mother may have been somewhere.

Dream 2

I was in some dark place. Something may have happened before, but I don't don't remember. In this dark place, which now feels like a tent, I was convinced I had died. I walked, or, rather, crawled, through an opening into an immense, lonely field of grass. I was on a long, wide slope, at the top of which may have been a tree, on the far left side. It was a mostly clear, sunny day.

I was still convinced that I was dead, that I had come into the land of the dead. But I moved around very slowly, as I move when I become aware that I'm dreaming. I saw patches of watery-yellow leafs in the grass, like patches of reverse shadows passing over the green. I told myself, So this is what it's like in the land of the dead. I have a lot to learn here, too.

But then I remembered (!) having seen a lawn in Albuquerque with this same patterning of grass. I tried thinking back to that lawn to remember exactly how it was. Slowly my feeling of being in the land of the dead dawned into a realization that I was actually dreaming.

I calmed myself down as soon as I realized I was dreaming. But I wasn't fully aware of things, not enough to get myself out of an overall daydream-like state. I walked over to a wide, yellow patch of grass and bent down to it, almost laying down on it.

I saw that in between the yellow blades were smallish clusters of old flowers with no petals. The heads were softly greenish-grey. I though to myself, This is what causes the patches to appear yellow -- these petal-less, yellowy flower-heads.

Dream 3

I stood behind a thin barrier erected between the sidewalk and a street. It was morning, kind of cool, very sunny, although everything had a low-sun, reddish-orange tint to it. The street was kind of busy. I waited for (my bosses for my present job) RN and A to show up across the street so I could help them unload things.

I kind of looked away for a second. When I looked back across the street I saw RN and A, each already carrying three or four boxes in each hand, already walking down the sidewalk. I wondered how I could have missed them so completely.

I was now in a camper trailer in the dark. I might have been in a bed. I don't really know. All I know is there was a barrier like a kitchen counter around with RN and A walked, going past me and to the front door.

RN said, "Let's get out of here. This guy is so lazy. He'll never get to work." I couldn't figure out why he'd say that. I just wasn't even aware that RN and A had gotten here yet.

I stood up to go out the door after them. I could feel-see them outside the trailer, walking to a cargo trailer with empty boxes in their hands. They had already started working, and here I was, doing nothing. I was now standing right by the open door. The light outside kept shifting between day and night and early morning. I didn't go outside. I stood in front of an oven.

My sister was behind me, holding a baby in a long blanket. She held it against her so that it was looking over her right shoulder. She was telling me something abut my dad. My dad didn't like the Spanish language or refused to speak it or even works that kind of found their way into the Spanish language. This was something of an annoyance as my sister's baby was Spanish in some way.

My dad would often say "esti" for "this," which bugged my sister, because she said it should have been something else in Spanish, but that Dad was using a Spanish-Italian hybrid word. He also used the word "skepti," the English for which I don't remember now.

I listened to my sister's story, laughed, and would interject things like, "What? He said that?" for a little while as I kept fixed on the stove and the door, wanting to get to work. It seems like a pot of food or perhaps just a pile of food kept appearing and vanishing.

At some point I walked out the door and down the steps. It was daylight. My sister followed me to the doorway and stood in it, continuing to tell me about Dad. It was like she was going on and on in an attempt to make some complete circuit of her argument, but she couldn't find the connections, so she had to keep going.

But I had to leave to get to work. My sister was still talking as I started to walk away. But she was also not talking. But also something like a deep, phantom-like part of her spoke in a demanding voice, "Well, I'll show you what being ungrateful gets you. You're in trouble."

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