Jaci Dawn

I had two dreams last night. One was an intense story between good and evil, with a heroine who tempted evil until it got so close she could smell the brimstone. I awakened from that dream, and felt the girl’s mind as she gained the wisdom that she did not wish to flirt any longer with that danger. And just as quickly, the danger dissipated and faded, unwilling to stay in my mind if I would not engage it. A warning from my subconscious, perhaps, or my subconscious rising to take back ground I’d ceded to evil.

I mention that only because in real life, I am struggling with some angry emotions. There’s an ugly side to my heart that I don’t want to look at, but in waking I am reminded just how ugly it can be. It is the dross rising to the surface of the refiner’s fire, needing to be scraped off so I can be a more pure – and joyful – person. I always find the process painful.

But that dream, because it did not linger, was not the visitation. When I drifted back to sleep, I hoped only that I would not reenter that world.

I did not expect to see my mother.

I do not dream of my mother very often. She was my best friend in my early adult years, the person I called with all the details of my life. Once a week we spoke on the telephone.  After I had children, we did not speak so often, but even my husband knew “that ring” when my mother called – and my mother knew when it was me calling her. The dreams I had of her after her death were dreams of someone I never knew in real life: she was angry, angry about everything and angry at me. I tried not to dream of her, because I didn’t understand the anger that was suddenly pitched in my direction.

It was not until my father died two years ago (and today is the anniversary of his birthday: he would have been 85 today) that the dreams where my mother appeared changed. She has not been angry since my father died.

But those are the dreams of the past. Last night’s dream (or this morning’s, as REM sleep often catches me just before the alarm sounds) took place in a big rambling house. I’d never been in this house before (in a dream or otherwise – often my dreams return to the same settings). It was my parent’s new house and I was visiting, home from college, I think. I was an adult, and adult-sized. I walked from the darkened living room area into the light kitchen.

It was an Alice-in-Wonderland over-sized kitchen. Even though I was an adult, I was dwarfed by the appliances, the counter-tops, my mother on a step-stool – even the step-stool seemed over-large. I was looking up at my mom from the eyes of a five-year old girl where she seemed larger-than-life.

In reality, my mom was smaller than me as an adult. She was 5’2″ in her prime, but slowly shrank. At one point, she had a 20″ waist and she still wore a girdle. This was the age she was in my dream: early thirties, her hair tinted a soft auburn, wearing capri pants. She was reaching up to the cabinets to put dishes away.

My mother was never tall enough for tall cupboards and so we never had them in the houses we lived in but what she had a step stool (I am the same way and I stand 5’4″). But these cupboards were much too tall for a reasonable kitchen, and yet she was there. putting things away in them.

I asked her if I could help do something. This was normal between us. I looked around and said I’d clean out the sink. But when I reached into the kitchen sink, I found the faucet had been broken off, and it was not dirty dishes in there, but my work clothes. My sister had taken them from me when I’d changed and promised she would “take care of them.” Now they were in a sink, splatter with tomato sauce. White pants and tomato sauce.

I was not angry. My sister stood in the kitchen now, a wee bit of a girl no more than ten years old. My sister is always ten in my dreams and my visions of her. But in real life, when she was ten, she was rapidly approaching my height. In real life, she surpassed me in height: she was 5’7″ or 5’9″ when she stopped growing, a rail-thin woman with a hunched back and a misguided sense of fashion. But in the dream, her age ten self was as short – a reverse of the Alice kitchen – as my mother was large.

My mother = larger than life, my sister = a mite of a thing.

I explained to my sister that white pants would stain with tomato sauce and they needed to be placed in cold water immediately to forestall the stains. My mother looked down and said, “Deni, show your sister where the washing machine is so she can wash her clothes.”

Because it was a home I was unfamiliar with, my sister had to show me where things were. As we walked through the kitchen to the other door (this kitchen was a hallway, much like one we had in our first home in Ely), my sister told me that “Mom and Dad have a new washer and dryer.”

I knew this (I’d been writing my folks) but it was nice to hear it from my sister. She continued that in order to work the washer right, “We have to fill the toilet with extra water.”

The toilet seemed to be in a manufactured home pre-1970’s, except it had a shut-off valve. Deni turned the valve and filled the tank and bowl with clean (for a toilet) water – I mean to the brim, filled – before turning the valve back. “Now we can use the washer.”

I thought it was quite odd.

The washer and dryer were huge and in-ground. Red enamel. The washer was made up of three different tanks – the one you put clothes in and the one you took clothes out of and one in between, right to left. And they, like the dream kitchen, vacillated between underground and too large as Deni showed me how to work them.

The room was at first like a shed: dirt floor, cob-webby shelves above the appliances. Then it slowly changed into the opening of a very large horse barn, like the kind you find at a county fair with rows upon rows of box stalls and wide aisles. I was not concerned about the room, only knew that it was there and changing. And that my mother walked past us, behind us, dressed in her jodhpurs and headed to the stalls to work out her horse.

My mother hated horses. Horses were an obsession I shared with my sister, and even my brother. But my mother categorically hated horses. Horses and domestic birds, like parrots. Creatures I love. She loved dogs.

Once my clothes were in the washer, I needed laundry soap, but there was none. I was looking for Tide™ (my parents never used any other brand of detergent because my father was allergic to everything else. So they said). Deni pointed out that there was a box of powder detergent that belonged to our “foster-sister” and I could use it. I hated to, because I knew Cyndi needed every dime she could save and the detergent was for washing diapers (apparently Cyndi put cloth diapers on her little girl, Tomi).

I don’t know why Cyndi and Tomi came into the dream at all. Deni was 17 when Tomi was born, not 10. And I doubt seriously that Cyndi did the Whole Earth Mama thing. That was me. I used cloth. I breast-fed on demand. I let my children wean on their own timing (one at 13 months and the other at a ghastly 8 months. That second child hauled a bottle !! around until he was four).

I climbed up on a step stool and retrieved the soap, dumped a measure of it in the washer (now oversize) and attempted to replace it. In doing so, I knocked over a cat food dish with kibble in it and some of the kibble spilled down into the washer before the top could be shut. Oh well, I said as I righted everything.

Deni seemed amused.

And then the dream was over.

Cyndi and Tomi are living. They never appeared in the dream, they were only mentioned. My dad was only mentioned. My sister and I rarely got along as well as we did in the dream. I’d have read her a riot act for spilling tomato sauce on my good white pants (if I had owned any). She idolized me; I tortured her. We loved each other fiercely.

My brother was away. We knew he existed but he was not part of the dream any more than my father was.

It was just us: Deni, Mom, Me. A vivid dream, the kind that doesn’t fade, even 12 hours later.

There are lessons in there, I just have to puzzle them out.