Dream Life

Dreamy garden which is not mine

This week I am preparing for having houseguests, dearly anticipated family and friends. Every night I dream of some new and fiendish combinations of guests, the most recent I remember being Lindsay Lohan and Betty White. Most of my house is unsatisfactory in these dreams. Of particular concern in my dream is my bathroom, which daytime examination reveals to be a perfectly ordinary and perfectly functioning room. In my dreams it becomes oddly configured and ill-functioning chamber of horrors, sometimes resembling in every particular the room that appears sometimes in my dreams that I call "the ugly bathroom".

Not mine but lovely

Maybe it is a function of getting older. Even in my dreams I don't devote a lot of energy to creating things from scratch when I don't need to. If a dream requires a grocery store it takes place in "the ugly grocery store" - a dream rearrangement of a grocery store in Columbus Ohio (I'm sure it is gone now) that occupied a defunct roller rink. There is a house that appears often whose odd configuration is complicated by a suite of secret rooms that are sometimes completely ignored and sometimes provide the major plot of the dream. My grandfather's back yard is a common backdrop, being long and sloped with a shed behind the garage and an empty chicken coop. Dreams of urban confusion often take place in what I take to be a university building whose floor plan I can never quite remember. In some dreams it is a college building, in others a government building or an office building. Driving around dreams most often take place in a dreamscape altered Manhattan Kansas. A seaside arrangement of roads, marshes and beaches serves as a vacation destination or quest setting. It's like Dream Tarot - a limited set of images combined in a different configuration every time. Maybe it's just that my head is so full of junk that there isn't even room for an original dream! Maybe the dream shorthand of familiar but imagined landscapes frees my mind up to busy itself with the real purpose of the dream.

Someone's dreamy garden

In a dreamy aside, in one of my recent dreams I was at work at the Major Retailer who pays me to appear. A new company policy had been created to add more satisfaction to the customer service experience. We were to offer our "guests" foot massages, even to lure people in off the street with the promise of foot massages. We were short handed on the floor because one person had walked off the job rather than rub random people's feet and another was in the process of setting up for a massage. I guess I must be ready for Labor Day weekend, when the tourists and Summer People go home and leave the Cape to the year round residents.

The garden pictured here is not mine, but I am green with envy every time I see it. I am pretty sure it is professionally maintained and occupies a lot which probably would sell for close to a million dollars. It's one of the very few possessions of the wealthy that just makes me sick to my stomach with desire.