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September, 2011
7 14 299/7/11 - Title: "There's Going To Be A Party"
There has been a death, of someone who meant a lot to me and to a big oaf of a fellow who is sort of a companion and playmate of mine and the oaf's, the three of us having spent a lot of time together. (Don't recall anything from the dream about the one who died, except he too was a grown-up companion and playmate, someone who was kind of the life of the party when we would do things together, and he often had good ideas for more fun things to do. He may have been my brother Ralph or someone like him.)
Without him, the oak (oaf) and I are grieving and at a loss, not even knowing how to go about arranging for a funeral, memorial, or wake for our absent friend. The oaf tried to make a cake for the occasion, but it turned out wrong, about the size and shape of a hollowed-out muffin, except only half as big even as a muffin. He kind of is sadly fingering it, even tasting it, and I must have smelled or sampled it too - it tastes like a warm gingerbread muffin.
Besides the diminutive "cake," there are Fritos and pork-and-beans available for the "party" or memorial. I seem to be older than just a kid, yet also am much younger than my current age, of an age when normally, except for when at a loss over the death of someone close, I'd be much more into play than serious responsibilities, or than knowing how to deal properly with getting ready for a memorial to a close friend.
A woman arrives. She is a young adult (in her 20s or 30s, I think) and has an easy competence about her. She merely smiles at our silly attempts to get ready for the memorial. She is obviously up to the task and ready to take over and get things arranged as is called for.
With her in charge, I am still sad but no longer am feeling helpless to know how we shall get things ready. I know now they will be done correctly. The oaf too recognizes that she will make things right and help us give our departed friend and playmate a good memorial sendoff.
I don't know what the big oaf will say - can't even imagine him speaking on this occasion - but somehow, without our having to say anything, our simply being part of a proper service for our lost companion will be enough.
[The oaf reminds me of Luke, only less verbal and intelligent, someone who was an adult chronologically but was still into pretend games, or imaginative, fun mental "trips," often very enthusiastic in his playfulness, but he could also be terribly depressed. He was a physical grown-up, yet emotionally still a child. He had had a terrible childhood, treated badly and with great rejection. As an adult he seemed to swing a lot between depression - that he tried to relieve with play or drugs - and manic joyfulness and playfulness. He burned himself up one night, in his late 30s or early 40s, alone in a motel room where he was making some kind of petroleum-based chemicals or drugs. According to the fire dept. investigation, the fumes were ignited by a little cooking device he had on in the room.
The woman could be my mother when in her 20s or early 30s or could have been a neighbor of ours, the mother of some young companions of mine, when I was about six and we lived in Falls Church, VA.
It did not really know the neighbor mother well, but my mom was competent and usually kind of easygoing and tolerant, though at times she was argumentative with and irritated by my father. She gave me a lot of independence but also encouraged me to get along better with my dad than I usually did.
My brother Ralph - who was born in the month of September - died in Oct., 1990, of a brain tumor, his death only about a year later than Luke's. He and Luke were best friends for awhile in their college and then college drop-out years and, even though I was older, the three of us had a companionable friendship for awhile, one in which we were all kind of late adolescents, especially into all that was connected with a meditation group in which we were involved, pretending that it was the means to everything wonderful: enlightenment, happiness, a sense of purpose, feeling sure of ourselves, etc. Ralph was intelligent, creative, competitive, later also a good father, a natural leader, an excellent facilitator, very able and conscientious, musical, and had a good sense of humor. He also could be sarcastic and say hurtful things about and to others.]
9/14/11 - Title: "Rescued"
I am 20-30 years younger than in reality and have been rescued by a modern American Indian village somewhere in southwestern U.S. People here live under a blazing daytime sun in many ways as they have for thousands of years. Buildings, for instance, are adobe and open to nature (no A.C.). A young Indian woman (in her 30s, I believe) and I have become lovers.
She makes rock animals, small sculptures of/for people, based on her intuitive sense of their true selves, their spirits. I ask her if she will make one of and for me. She looks at me deeply for awhile, teases me about whether I really want to know of my animal spirit self, but I insist I do, and she smiles and agrees.
I shall be going away from here soon, back to "the world," though not long afterward I am to return. She will give me my spirit animal before I leave, a going away gift. I have not received it yet, but sense it and seem to see it as she has been working on it already, and it looks like a stylized road runner, long and then (thin).
I go on a walk in the sun for something, out away from the village. The bottoms of my bare feet are still a little tender, but I can feel everything as I walk, the smooth parts of the path, the little stones, whatever.
9/29/11 - Title: "Encounter in an Open House"
I am younger than my actual age, maybe 20 years younger, and am still working (not yet retired). I am out for a walk today, however.
I am walking briskly along a path through a semi-natural area which adjoins an upscale residential development to my left, itself very close to a quaint little town's center, also to my left, which I eventually want to reach on my hike.
(I have never been here in reality, but) The temperature and setting are pleasant in this place. I am the only one at this hour on the walking path, and I am just enjoying the natural beauty around me and the solitude. It is sunny in places though not warm, and where I am walking is mostly in shade from a large number of deciduous trees, their leaves turning to autumn colors, but most of them not having yet fallen.
Suddenly the path's natural setting merges into a large open house. The path in fact leads right up to an open doorway (without even a door) and, beyond a carpeted room and hallway, seems to continue on through another open (without a door) doorway, through which I can see a narrow street in the town's center I have been seeking. I can see no other obvious way to get there except by going right through this private home, and so I do.
It is a spacious, bright, attractively decorated place with a high ceiling and lots of windows letting in plenty of light. Nobody seems to be home as I proceed through to reach the city center's street.
However, as I am a little less than halfway through, I here (hear) sounds, like of a car parking, in an adjoining garage and realize an owner of the place at any second will be entering the home through a white door off to my right.
I don't want to appear like I'm caught sneaking through the place, so I stop near this door. A moment later, it opens and a beautiful woman, in her 40s I would guess, dressed nicely as if from work, walks in. She is momentarily surprised to see me there, but I quickly confess I was just going through her place to get to the street and am sorry, but I had not seen another way over there. I tell her I'm really not a burglar, just a walker who had lost his path, which seemed to stop at her front doorway.
I'm ready to keep talking to put her at ease or cover my embarrassment at sort of being caught going through her place, but she smiles and says she does not mind, that it is fine.
She asks me a question about something, evidently a mutual bit of common knowledge between us, like how something or someone we both know about is doing, and I realize we have met and known each other before, that indeed I ought to have recognized her face (still not placed in reality). I have a vague recollection (within the dream) now of having seen and talked with her in another upscale development, in front of another very nice house. She clearly knows who I am, while I am still struggling to remember her name and how we had met before.
She asks me about something or other. I am not sure what she means. Then she wants to know if I am part of the Unity program. I assume she is talking about a Unity Church activity or education program and ask her and she says yes, but specifically the program led by so and so, a man whom she clearly thinks is an excellent program director.
Not really knowing what she means, but wanting to pretend I do, and assuming it is like a kind of liberal university youth program I was involved in during the early 1960s, I tell her I was in a program like that through the U.T. (University of Texas) Wesley Foundation.
It is still bugging me that I cannot place just who she is, though she is talking with me as if she knows who I am. She asks me a question about either the Unity or the Wesley Foundation program and I am about to answer, but first feel I ought to confess I cannot remember her name, so I say something like "I'm afraid I don't know..." intending to say "...your name..." but I wake up when the alarm goes off, and then (still partly asleep, I suppose) am afraid she will think I meant I do not know the answer to the question she was asking about the program, when I actually, once I got her name, I was going to finish by answering her question.
[I have not met the woman in real life, but, as I am writing up the dream, realize that her face reminds me of the actress who played Dana Scully (Gillian Leigh Anderson), from "The X Files," except maybe several years older, as she might look today.
The numbers in the dream suggest dawning awareness and manifestation in reality, both "amped up." Perhaps also flexibility (60s) "amped up."
The references to unity and center seem to indicate a spiritual and unifying theme.
Of the character "Scully" in "The X Files," I found her attractive in a subdued way, as though she were deliberately trying to keep her good looks low-key, to maintain a professional pose in her role for that series. The actress herself in interviews came across as more open, spontaneous, amusing or easily amused, and genuinely attractive. She also seemed professional, obviously, skeptical to a degree just short of paranoid, and intelligent. In this dream, the woman who looked like her was more easygoing, charming, engaging, and chatty than the Dana Scully character would have been.
"Unity" and "U.T." are similar enough in sound that they might be interchangeable in the dream context. So, it may be that both the programs mentioned in the dream are about finding integration or unity.
The path which ends at an open doorway could be a spiritual path or an Alanon one, or else perhaps a life journey.
The room and hallway through the woman's open house join the path and the center of the town. There must be significance to this, but it escapes me.
The housing development as well as the city center are to the left as I am first walking along the path, so they may refer to my unconscious, intuitional, feminine energy aspects, or emotional material.
The woman is my anima, there to show by example or counter-example ways of being/feeling. This anima is bright, charming, engaging, open, easygoing, and interested in a program of unity. She also lives right on the doorstep of the (community's) center, in fact has no barrier at all between it and where she lives.
That I am, as the dream ends, only a few yards from the center myself, and it is just down a short hallway, suggests that, beyond whatever I am engaged in with this woman, I may have but a short distance in time to go to reach a place of greater wholeness. Hope this is correct.
When I wrote "beyond whatever I am engaged in with this woman," it occurred to me that, though they do not obviously look or act much alike, the woman in the dream may represent my female Alanon sponsor, with whom I am currently engaged in a difficult, complicated relationship and whom in the past (before recent instances of her more "snarly" behavior) I have viewed as attractive, engaging, bright, etc.]