Dreams

Some dreams I’ve had lately (I promise to keep this high level so it’s not brutally boring):

First – I dream a lot about the house I lived in during middle and early high school. I barely remember the California house we moved to before my junior year of high school, but our house in Virginia Beach that we were in for my middle school years is burned into my brain for all time. I remember even that a girl my age named Missy Cheliras lived in the house behind us. (I once looked her up – learned she had gone to seminary, but died young. Cancer. She was so kind.) I dream about the house twice a week – the video in the link shows it almost exactly how it was when I was there. So eighties – my lord, that wet bar. The yard was huge – I used to shoot actual arrows from one side of the yard to the other – my dad was really into us learning archery. The arrows never even came close to going over the fence, a testament to both the width of the yard and the weakness of my pull on the bow.

Often in the dream, my parents have moved back into it and I am trying to help them update the ground floor rooms. Or I have moved my family in, and we are painting kitchen cabinets or rearranging the front parlor room (where the piano was, back when I did live in the house). Sometimes I do go upstairs, where the bedrooms were – I wander through them. Sometimes they look as they really used to – other times it becomes this giant fantastic Escher maze of rooms and wings.

Second – I’ve started dreaming about babies, motherhood, birth, fertility. Last night I dreamed that I was the “senior wife” of a multi-wife commune, and my husband’s youngest wife was in labor with their baby. I was there to help, like a doula. She needed my help, she was struggling, I thought of her as my own daughter. I helped her. I was not jealous, just thrilled to have a baby in the house, even though it wasn’t mine.

My third category of dream which I have had for years is that I am trying to climb something that is too steep and high, or pack up bags where things keep spilling and not fitting, or gather and rescue hordes of children who will not do as I say and I keep having to dash out into danger to find a wayward toddler.

These dreams seem particularly middle aged, don’t they? I am getting older. Longing for the simper childhood time when I was the age that my children are now, living in a cozy house, all nine of us (my parents, my dad’s parents, me and my four siblings). Worrying about losing my fertility, approaching mortality. Worrying I can’t keep all these plates spinning, there’s too much to do.