Friday 08.24.2012 (Chris’ birthday)
My husband and I are buying a house. There is a shadow quality to my spouse and I don’t think he is Chris. Someone else. I can’t see his face, but that doesn’t concern me.
The house is medieval, built of heavy, rectangular stones and topped with a large copper dome. The back wall of the house is curved, like the church at Rolduc Abbey, Netherlands.
The house seems to exist in two places and times. It’s in the exact spot where a white storage shed stood on my grandmother’s farm in Wabasha, Minnesota. The shed was a simple clapboard structure, locked, so I seldom saw inside. Two roads of loose prairie sand ran alongside the shed, one on the east side, one on the west side.
Both buildings are visible in the dream, layered atop each other.
The sellers of the stone house are a Dutch couple, strong and handsome in the Dutch way. He is relaxed and jolly but she is quite stern. She does not want to sell. Her husband is a shade, like my husband: I can’t see his face. She is tall and blond, with sharp features.
Here I wake up and collect the dream in my mind.
Then soon fall back asleep.
When I reenter the dream, the couple has passed away, even though they are quite young, perhaps early middle age (forties).
I am in a large hall with many people, seated at rows of long wooden banquet tables. We are composing eulogies for the couple, assisting the minister. I’m enjoying word-smithing a eulogy when I realize that I don’t know the couple at all, except for the fact that I live in their house. I respectfully put my pen aside and leave the writing to those who have been close to the husband and wife.
Day notes:
Another dream about time. I keep having couple dreams, where I am female and a male is just behind me; we always touch opposite shoulders.
The stone house is from the middle ages; the Dutch couple dies at middle age. In the 40s (WWII?)
I had an experience at Tai Chi this week where I felt I could see two layers of reality at one time.
Dome: crown of the head
Urban dictionary records sexual connotations for “dome” and “double dutch.”
Nether: lying or believed to lie beneath the earth’s surface; infernal: the nether regions. Origin: Middle English nethere (cognate with German nieder), literally, further down
Rolduc Abbey sits exactly on the border of The Netherlands and Germany. The Dutch town is Kerkrade; the German town is Herzogenrath. The border is delineated by Nieuwstraat/Neustrasse (new street): the east lane is Dutch, the west lane is German. My grandmother called Dutch “low German” and German “high German” or “hoch Deutsch.” This is a dream of intersecting borders.
Copper conducts electricity. In a recent dream I push a utility cart full of homemade batteries.
Amsterdam, where Bonnie and I traveled after Kerkrade, does have a copper-domed church (house of god) called Koepelkerk, also called The Old Lutheran Round Church, now a conference center and hotel, which is a kind of residence. The back of Koepelkerk is curved because it was once part of the outer fortress wall of the medieval town.
The Netherlands is on my mind because I’ve been emailing Sem Wildenburg at our employer’s Amersfoort office nearly every day. Sem will be here for a meeting September 18. There was a Nazi concentration camp at Amersfoort during the war.
The first night Bonnie and I slept at Rolduc I was awakened in the night by the sound of many feet marching rhythmically down our hallway, shaking the double metal door locks. I wondered if they were the spirits of young priests moving in unison, or something more sinister. I later found out Napoleon’s army had invaded and thrown people from the small onion-dome at the abbey. So maybe Napoleon, maybe Hitler. A waking dream, anyway.
08.30.12: On my noontime walk along the river at Oheyawahi (Mendota) I found a plump little finch nest woven of cattail down, human hair and fine grasses. An upside-down dome home. It’s so charming and perfect that when I showed it to Chris, he gasped out loud. Just before I spied it I was enjoying the prairie restoration and thinking of the undisturbed prairie in Wabasha. A few years ago I had a Big Dream of a dome-shaped lodge along the flood plain of the Mississippi that turned out to be a muskrat house. Sheila Asato and Bonnie Mitsch helped me work that dream.
09.17.12: Chris’ sister came into town from Chicago to see the Rembrandt exhibit (Dutch, of course). She stayed at the Crowne Plaza, which has a copper roof. Because she was here I was unable to go to the Great Dakota Gathering, a remembrance of the Dakota Conflict of 1862, held in Winona. After the Conflict the Dakota were removed to reservations in South Dakota, where many died of starvation.
