Dreams

I’ve had two noteworthy dreams in the last week. I’d like to share them with you.

In the first dream, I’m sitting around a dinner table with my mom, my maternal grandma (who is dead, but sitting at the table, alive and in dementia, in the dream,) and two of my friends, Sebastian and Anya. Grandma is nodding in and out of sleep, not very aware of what is happening around her (this is pretty much how she was in the last year of her life. One of the salient images of Grandma that I retain is of her passed out asleep, with her head down on the table, at a family Passover seder.)

Sebastian and Anya are talking a blue streak about their upcoming lip-synch gig at the local tranny club, a Hall and Oates number. (This is not very far from reality, either, but Sebastian and Anya would probably pick something a little more appealing than Hall and Oates.) Then, Anya starts tying up my mom in elaborate rope bondage--not in a sexual way, just for fun. My mom gets the biggest kick out of it. Grandma is still acting doped up. Then I wake.

• • •

The second dream also involves family, and also involves a family member nodding in and out of consciousness, but this time it’s me. I’m on my death bed, though there is no explanation in the dream as to why I’m dying. I'm not old, I'm my actual age. My mom and both my sisters are gathered around me, and we’re all talking quietly. Everyone is very sad, except me. I’ve made peace with it. I’m wearing a bracelet made from a doubled-over freshwater pearl necklace which, in the dream, belongs to my mother (she doesn’t have a piece of jewelry like this in real life, I don’t think.) I say to my sister, J., that she should take the bracelet, that it’s more her style than mine. Everyone insists that I keep it, but I protest, because I know I don’t need it anymore.

I’m keeping up with the conversation but also rambling on about other things as I’m fading into death. People around me are telling me how proud they are of me, of my activism. I say that I’m not a real activist, that I’ve known lots of great activists, but I’ve done so little. And I start naming real people I’ve known in my life whose activism I admire. All these names I’m listing as clearly as can be, mostly people I knew who worked in the peace community in Santa Cruz--Nuclear Freeze organizers and ploughshares activists. (Ploughshares actions are inspired by the book of Isaiah in the bible, in which god instructs the Israelites to settle their conflicts:

And he (god) shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.*

Ploughshares actions are when people of conscience break into facilities storing weapons, most often nuclear warheads, and damage the weapons so that they cannot be used. For a wonderful introduction to ploughshares actions, see the Plowshares Movement Chronology Homepage, and click on the Introduction.)

At length, I begin to totally lose consciousness, like I’m slowly and surely falling asleep, melting into my pillow. As I fade away, I force myself to wake up. In the dream, I was unafraid, but my conscious mind, obviously, was not ready to find out what would happen on the other side of that threshold, not just yet, anyway. I don’t know if it’s true, that you can never die in a dream. This dream was the closest I’ve ever come.

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*Wouldn’t it be nice if the right-wingers remembered this passage of the bible instead of carrying on about the passage that condemns men lying with men and the passage giving man dominion over women and animals?

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