Hatsuyume, The New Year’s Dream

(Sunday, New Year’s Day 2017) moon waxing crescent Aquarius / tarot Spider Woman (Wheel of Fortune)

The Wheel turns. Many dreams last night, but I tried hard to remember the first:

I am with a woman who in the dream I see as Jeanne P., but when I awake and sift through the images I think is really Alea’s art teacher mother, who has worked in education for many years, as did Jeanne. They are physically similar, the same height and weight, with strikingly beautiful smiles. Perfect, brilliant white teeth. I can’t remember her name. I only met her one time.

I tag along as Alea’s mom searches for daycare for her (our?) grandchild. She expresses her strong, take-charge attitude fully, as I express my more reflective and slow-moving character of supportiveness. We examine the diagram of a center that has three rooms: one for administration, one for group activities, one playroom with an interactive water sculpture that creates rolling waves by tipping up and down. The daycare is run by the Three Rivers Park District.

Intrigued by the toy river, we decide to go on a tour of the center, which is up north, on the reservation. The interactive river is less than we expect: small, and constructed from an old pool table (pool of water!). The center itself has been revamped in a simple, economic way. Gold flower-patterned ceramic tiles from the old structure are still visible around the doorways. The local Indians have done the most creative work they can within their very limited means.

We head outside to find that the native village is located on a river bank, on the west side. I look east, across to the beautiful sandstone bluffs and gasp in pleasure. My heart loves the golden yellow cliffs. I am home. It feels like a fusion of the Mississippi River at Wabasha and the St. Croix River. Alea’s mom grew up along the St. Croix. Even a faint shadow of a golden New Mexico arroyo (dry river bed) is perceptible to me. Three rivers.

The villagers are outdoors, gathered along the shore of the river. Alea’s mom spies an old steel playground-style merry-go-round. An adult and young boy are seated on the motionless platter. She asks if I have coins to activate the wheel. I say I have a pocket full of nickels, which disappoints her. She inserts quarters into the coin box but nothing happens. I peer into the box and see that the slots are designed for nickels, but people have forced half dollars and quarters into most of the slots. I pour a handful of nickels into the only available open slots and the wheel begins to spin, to the delight of the child.

The sky is without a cloud, cerulean blue, what I call a Santa Fe Sky. We continue our walk and the Indian boy comes with us to the very edge of the water. I wrap my right arm around him and we lay down together on a large granite boulder, on our bellies, gazing into the current. He is my grandson. Our grandson?

Alea’s mother and I enter the water and begin to swim upstream together. She is much more athletic than I, but I am able to easily keep up with her. We swim in the very center of the river, without danger of barges or speed boats. We swim far, to a golden, sandstone-colored bridge with arches, like the old stone arch bridge at St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis. Here we turn back. The sense of being in the water, and of dipping my arms rhythmically overhead into it, is very powerful in the dream. I hear the splash of my fingers. I smell the scent of the river. I feel the coolness of the water on my skin and in my nose. Immersion in the wet river body is deeply pleasurable.

As we head downstream, I am careful to preserve my strength. I flip onto my spune and do a backstroke for some of the journey. Face to the heavens, then belly into the water. I tell Alea’s mom that I have recently come from a life near the ocean, which I loved, but I love the river even more.

Day notes:

The end of 2016 was explosive. Chris fell in the night and has a concussion. We spent all day Friday in the ER at Methodist.

Cullan called me yesterday evening to tell me that Alea had been attacked in her home by a man she met on an online dating site. She wasn’t raped but she was physically assaulted. She refuses to tell the police or her family. She tried once to tell her mother about being repeatedly raped by her cousin (when they were young) but her mother laughed it off and said, “Oh yes, I had kissing cousins too.” So no one in her family knows the history of her childhood sexual abuse. Cullan feels terrible. Alea wants to continue to work on their relationship but he told her he does not. Even though he said to me, at the end of sharing this story, that he is unsure he has made the right decision about leaving her. I said I was also unsure he has made the right decision.

How can Alea release the shame of her past if she refuses to share it? What if this man attacks another woman?

My Tanya dream from this summer (about an intruder in Alea’s house) was resurrected in my memory by the powerful west wind that blew the door off my house. An omen. In the Tanya dream, two middle-aged women enter Alea’s house and offer her sugar: sugar-coat the experience. In the dream I am amused as well, not taking Alea’s OCD seriously. How do I act react now?

I was looking forward to being a grandmother because I know Alea very much wants to have children. She will be a good mother. This is unbelievable sadness. So undeserved.

Swimming in the three rivers of time: past, present, future. The Wheel of Time is also represented by the merry-go-round.

The golden-yellow color is prominent: sun, warmth, joy. Maybe the citrinitas of alchemy too.

A theme of living simply, within one’s means. Nickel coins activate the wheel, not silver half-dollars or quarters. From Wikipedia: Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile. Pure native nickel is found in Earth’s crust only in tiny amounts, usually in ultramafic rocks, and in the interiors of larger nickel-iron meteorites that were not exposed to oxygen when outside Earth’s atmosphere. Meteoric nickel is found in combination with iron, a reflection of the origin of those elements as major end products of supernova nucleosynthesis. An iron-nickel mixture is thought to compose Earth’s inner core.