TheDreamstersUnion

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.

Saturday morning 08.04.12

I am standing near the foot of a gentle, grassy slope, facing west. A quiet country road hugs the edge of the hill, meandering north and south—no traffic on this road at all.

The horizon is full of huge, cottony clouds that sail through an intensely blue sky. Cerulean blue. I’m looking up at the clouds with my son Cullan, who is slightly behind me on my right side. I feel safe.

We see a flotilla of star-like lights that twinkle and move slowly across the heavens, passing underneath the clouds. It’s a haphazard formation, less organized than a flock of birds, but a formation nonetheless.

We don’t speak. We are remembering when we saw this same lightshow over the fields of Hamel, at four in the morning during the Leonid meteor shower. Maybe ten years ago.

We turn to meet each other’s eyes. This time we are sure that what we are seeing is a large fleet of spaceships, floating playfully in the bright sky. Winking at us.

We are mesmerized, awestruck. Ecstatic that we can now be certain of our vision.

Today I saw Dr. Liu for my acupuncture treatment. She took my pulse, after which she never says much. So I ask how it is. She says it is getting better but that I have been very depleted. Depleted in the kidney meridian, which is causing my bone, vision, memory and breathing problems. “Kidneys rule the bones” is what they say in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I have always thought she was treating me for the exhaustion that followed my husband’s  hospitalization last year. Today she says my level of depletion happens at birth and she asks if I was a preemie. This level also happens with children who have suffered starvation. She says she was born during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when 20 million Chinese people died. She was lucky, her parents were university professors, but even so she had no hair on her head until she was three years old. It was the wish of her parents that she study acupuncture so she could heal herself.

Tears start flowing down my cheeks. I am crying for China and for Dr. Liu and for my childhood full of respiratory illness. I remember now about the stroke I had at birth; I must tell her this fact.

Later I recall this mysterious dream from three years ago, before meeting Dr. Liu:

Kidney Dream 04.24.09

I had the strangest dream last night. I awoke in a kind of bed made of old wooden planks (like an old farm wagon), filled with snow. I was being operated on to replace a kidney. The snow was somehow numbing me to the pain; there was no anesthesia. Then I turned over and a transplant was performed on the other side of my body. I was fully awake.

At the time of the dream I made this comment: “Kidneys filter toxins from the blood and build red blood cells, I suppose it is a purification dream.” I also uncovered this information:

“Kidney function in the body is described as Yin Water in Zang Fu theory. This can be seen as the Yin of the Yin, and should be noted as the time in nature when things are congealed, condensed and covered. A great symbol for this is the seed buried beneath the snow. It holds the memories of all the plants that have produced it through the ages, and in this memory lies the pilot light of its species. The Yin within Water is the time of rest during which this seed sits and waits. It is the will of the seed, the fidelity it has to its origins that is really stored inside.

“Zang Fu theory connects the Kidney to the storing of the Zhi spirit, which is often translated as ‘memory’ or ‘will’ or ‘fidelity.’ We can see this connection in the seed, the winter and the ocean. The Kidney is also connected with the reproductive function of the human being, and this is easy to see with the seed metaphor. Through the controlling of the water metabolism, the Kidney also plays a role in separating the clear from the turbid, which is a major function taking place during the winter time.”