Detritus

Last night I slept deeply enough to dream, but woke enough times to remember them.

 

In my first dream, I was married to the bad news guy who I described in that lengthy and emotional post last July.  Ben and I were heading into a buffet line at a restaurant where you had to pay for your chosen items with tokens.  I wanted to go to a different area of the line than he did, but he was holding all of the tokens, and when I asked if I could please have my share so we could split up, he threw my tokens at me and called me a series of not nice names while all of the other restaurant patrons tried not to stare.  *I dream about him on rare occasions, and in my dreams things always happen exactly the way they would have in real life, and I feel exactly the same sort of weary despair that I used to feel when we were dating.  It’s strange, that familiarity that keeps you in those bad relationships – it’s like coming home, only to a crumbling and damp and gray home that nobody would ever want to live in.  My dream self occasionally slips back into it, and suddenly all the progress I’ve made over five years of maturing and living is stripped from me, and I’m back to the doormat I used to be, caught in his controlling world, helpless to leave.*

 

Anyway, last night after dream-Ben had his temper tantrum because I didn’t want to eat the same dinner as him, I sighed and headed to the prime rib and started to pile up my plate.  I noticed that there were t.v. screens all through this restaurant, even over the buffet lines, and on the t.v. screen was . . . me.  Someone had taken video of me snoozing on a bed, and I was not pregnant and quite fabulously dressed in a very short skirt in this video, and as I tossed and turned the skirt was shifting up, and I was exposed in front of all of those people.  And I knew that Ben had taken this video while I napped, and he had sold it to this restaurant, and he had taken me here on purpose so my humiliation would be complete.  I slammed down my tray of prime rib (very vividly detailed prime rib, man I can almost taste it now), punched out the tv screen nearest me, and demanded all copies of the video.  Then, without waiting to get it, I whirled around and marched out of the restaurant.  Ben trailed behind me, begging forgiveness, but I ignored him and sped off in our car, not caring at all whether he could find a ride home or not, and I knew in my heart that I’d left him for good.  *I feel great relief when I wake up from these dreams and remember that those days are long over.  The proverbial weight on my chest is lifted, leaving only the literal weight of a strapping baby boy, son of a good man, my husband, who leaves me flowers around the house on random occasions as a surprise, and rubs my back for me even when I’m not pregnant, and has never assaulted me with anything except the top of our wedding cake on our first anniversary, and even though that was a truly VICIOUS attack and I’m still finding chocolate frosting in my Kleenex, I think I can forgive him.*

 

In my second dream, the writer of a cycling blog that I read was performing circus tricks on the David Letterman show, and kind of making a fool of himself.  I was in the audience, trying to signal to him to tone it down, that he was taking it too far and people weren’t enjoying it.  He couldn’t hear or see me, and continued until David kicked him offstage with one of those long hooks from the vaudville days.

 

So.  It would seem all the detritus of my daily life is congealing at night into dreams of humiliation.  Entrapment.  Liberation.  Veddy veddy interrresting, says the OTT Freudian accent in my head.

 

The one major conclusion I can draw from last night’s dream sequence is this:

 

It is 9:40 in the morning and I am totally craving me some rare prime rib.  MMMMMMMmmmmmmm.  Outback Steakhouse this weekend, anyone?