The Stray Lamb
Wednesday, November 26, 2024
I have two lives. One is in the awakening world, and the other is when I dream. I rarely remember my dreams when I wake up, but I’m often sad when awakened from a dream. I don’t have screaming nightmares, but more of dreams of great sadness. I wonder if I got that from my mom. I had only slept in the same room with my mom once when I was in Paris, and she woke up in the early morning crying. It woke me up, but I didn’t say anything. I pretended to be asleep. But it made me cry in bed, secretly, because I hated to see or hear my mom being so sad. She stayed up and smoked a cigarette by an open window, looking out at the Paris landscape.
Since then, I have had dreams that don’t make me cry, but the sadness lasts for that entire day, and I hate it. Especially when I can’t remember why I feel sad. Last night, I had a dream, and I remember only one bit of it. In 2022, I lost both my mom and her brother, better known to me as my Uncle. I have had so many dreams about Mom, and her appearance is vital to the dream. Most of my dreams are to be with the public in a work situation such as a record or bookstore. I worked at both throughout my adult life and since I left that occupation, my dreams have remained in that environment. Mostly, I try my best to do the job, and I work with all my old workmates. The strange thing is that I have forgotten them, but I have vivid images of them in my dreams, which are based on real people. But what intrigues me is that I also have these detailed dreams of customers, which are very exact. Although I’m pretty sure I made these characters up, I have their image in detail: clothing, behavior, all of it. I remember an old customer in my dream, but he was not. I made him up as a figure that I think I remembered, but in reality, he didn’t exist. Still, here he is, in front of me.
I was behind the counter at work and called my Uncle on the phone. He had a husband, but another male voice answered, and he started gossiping with me, but I didn’t know him. I asked to speak to my Uncle, and he said sure. I waited for him to get to the phone, but he never did. And that is when I woke up in a deplorable state of mind.
It felt like the world had shifted into an ugly place for a few moments. As I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling as if it were a movie screen, every disappointment I had experienced was projected. As you can imagine, it was a big-budget film. Usually, by late morning, I can shake off the sadness, but it lurks like lint on a dark shirt; it never really goes away.
I can fake it through daylight and awakened hours, but my dreams expose a world that I keep under wraps or a landscape of shifting realities. Often, I’m in a work situation, which is always retail, and for me, a theatrical place because a shop is very much a theater piece. If you work in retail and deal with customers or your manager, you are very much exposed to the public. When I go to work either at a record or bookstore, I think of myself as a performer. Also, when I’m writing, I feel like I’m performing. So, I have this projection of myself regularly, and when I dream, it’s a performance going out of my control. At times, I’m naked at work and hoping no one notices this fact, or I tend to go to bed nude, which is placed right in the middle of a busy store. My nudity is not given another thought by the people in the dream around me, but I’m thinking, How did I get myself into this situation?
One of my favorite American authors is Thorne Smith (1892-1934), whose work is humorous and very much part of the Depression era. I haven’t read his books in a long time, but I have a memory of them dealing with nudity in public places. They are not voyeuristic but more of a situation that can cause embarrassment or shame. Smith’s attitude is very much into open sexuality as an expression of an American facing hypocrisy in their surroundings. I wonder if the traces of my dreams come from Smith’s novels. His work also deals with the supernatural, such as misbehaving ghosts (Topper and Topper Takes a Trip) and sexual witches, The Passionate Witch. His books are hilarious, but my dreams, to the core, depress me. The duality of humor and misery go together, or a blind date where they sit in a restaurant but do not say much to each other.
Writing is about conveying thoughts or entertainment to a readership (audience), but it is also a conversation I’m having with myself. And I have to presume a dream is a private conversation between me, the awakened one, and the other with closed eyes, dealing with a narration that the awakened has no control over. Although at times I can’t define it, emotionally, my dreams articulate my feelings. It’s a strange occurrence to be aware of and turn my head away from such thoughts.