TheDreamstersUnion

Friday 10.26.2012

Chris and I have recently purchased a second house, a vacation home on the bay of a lake. We have invited my family over for the first time. It’s a grey, overcast day. My sister takes off in a small speedboat with my nephew as we all watch. (When I wake from the dream, I’m not sure if it is my sister Jo or Jamie, or both of them. Or which nephew, though I think it is Jeremy. But in the dream I know who is in the boat.)

We see the boat cross a channel into the larger lake. Soon a fog descends, and two huge ocean-sized cargo ships sail past us. I panic as I realize that this lake we are living on is actually an inland sea, or perhaps an ocean. I’m afraid that the boat my sister(s) are driving will be capsized by the huge wakes of the giant ships, or be hit by them in the thick fog. Everyone assures me that the small boat has lights and that my sister(s) know how to navigate in the fog and dangerous waters.

So I go inside the house, which is full of guests. I look around, almost a guest myself since the house is so new to me. (Yet when I wake up, the house and its location are vaguely familiar.) People are in the kitchen; we prepare food and eat together.

Then I head to bed in the upper floor. The bedroom is like an attic, large and open with a vaulted ceiling. I lay down next to Chris in a double bed that has a fabric canopy with a triangular peak. The bed is located under the vault of the roof. So it feels like the bed is inside a double pyramid.

I fall asleep and awaken to a lucid dream of a male voice. The voice is loud and stern, the voice of a Master Teacher. He instructs me to curl my body into the tight ball we use as a warm-up exercise in Tai Chi, holding my knees tightly to my chest. This opens the spine and activates the light-body. As my spine opens, I feel the Teacher grab me from behind, under my armpits, and lift me. We rocket into space at the speed of light, or faster.

I don’t have any memory of our journey. I do remember returning to an empty bed. Chris is sleeping in another bed. I wake him and we investigate a hidden wing of the house. We can see into the wing via a small peephole in the attic wall. There is no furniture, no doorway, and the floors are bare concrete. Chris is the only one who has been inside; no one else in the house is aware of its existence.

Day notes:

Everyone is waiting for Sandy, the Perfect Storm, to make landfall along the eastern seaboard.

08.28.2012

I dream that groups of workers are summoned to meeting areas at the bottom of a gentle slope. There are two meeting chambers, both underground caverns. We are required to wait until called. The people called to one chamber will be told they are losing their jobs, being fired. People in the second room get to keep their jobs.

As I sit waiting near a large boulder, an awareness grows that I will be allowed to continue working.

When finally summoned, this is indeed the outcome. I’m given a small pistol to hide in the cuff of my trousers, a protection from the anger of the people losing their jobs. This seems preposterous to me, I protest. But as I leave the cavern, an enraged man with long, thin legs kicks me in the ass.

Day notes:

I found out yesterday (10.11.2012) that a young man who used to fix my computer at work was fired last week. He is very tall and slender.

The sad, recent events at Accent in Minneapolis (September 27) come to mind. Six workers were shot. The gunman, who had just been fired, turned the gun on himself, bringing the death count to seven.

They have been implementing new workplace lock-down procedures at my jobsite. Now I realize it may be partially a preventive measure in anticipation of a series of layoffs (going on now and probably into the new year).

A gun has firing chambers.

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.