Entries from June 2017 ↓

I wasn’t very bonded with my father, and I haven’t grieved his death much. I was surprised at the more normal emotional reactions of my siblings and have kept silent out of respect for them and my mom. Guess it was just me.

But a year and a half later now, at a sunset singing circle overlooking the Hudson, I hear his voice, shy for once, singing the old tunes. I’d forgotten he’d liked to sing and forgotten he was self conscious about it. He sings with me, and more than once I have to stop so I don’t cry.

I found a voice memo in which I described this dream. Listening, I remember it, but I no longer feel the dream. It was a powerful dream then, and now it just seems like a story:

I dreamt of a collective unconsciousness. There were a thousand of us maybe. All of our minds, pooled together, to lay the smallest of hand on a frozen child. Together, we gently opened her mouth, maybe a quarter of an inch, and called it victory.

I think it was like reiki, we pooled the energy of the universe to try to save her.

I woke at dawn, as usual, but then went back into heavy sleep. I was a grifter, in a family of grifters. We were running a scam that involved scanning cell phone conversations from a device called an Oculus. I was carrying the Oculus in a black bag, the rest of the family all had their roles. At one point we were in a park, and then in a car — we were traveling, and stopped at a motel. All of the bags were in the hallway, by the elevator, as we sorted out our rooms. I was supposed to keep an eye on the Oculus at all times, but I must have gotten distracted, and it was missing. I went into my room — a suite, really, with a couple of rooms — and two bad guys followed me in. They were menacing, threatening, but not overtly at first. They were searching for the Oculus and I thought they already had it, but they kept asking me about it. One was youngish, a thug, overweight and shiny, and he leered at me and leaned in to kiss me. It was clearly about power, and intended as an assault. I knew I couldn’t get away, but I also couldn’t resist because they had the Oculus and I needed it back, so I tried to accept it as passively as I could under the circumstances. It was awful. He made some awful comment, I don’t remember now, and they left. I realized he had hacked my Facebook account and put up some crazy posts, and I started to delete them but realized I was late for family dinner, so I changed and went back into the hallway and met up with my (dream) mom. Somewhere in there, there was also something about a swimming pool, but I forget what now. Mom was happy to see me and I took her arm to escort her down to the dining hall. I was able to confide to her everything that happened, and she was helping me plan what to do next when I woke up.

Awake, I realized that in my dream, I was young, maybe 20s, and that it was the first time I could remember having a dream where my POV was completely invested but I was a different age. My dream mom was probably my actual current age. She was awesome. I also still felt a little like I’d been sexually assaulted.