Therapy
Round the age of 23, I had a dream in which my parents told me that for many years they’d suspected I was schizophrenic. For about six months, I was convinced I’d had this conversation. Then I realized that some things were wrong with the memory. For one, I can’t believe my parents would tell me something so personal, even if it was about me. (We aren’t a confessional family.) Two, the kitchen towels in the memory were all wrong.
(I confirmed this with them later.)
This was actually the second time kitchen towels helped me puzzle real from unreal. I’d had a lucid dream when I was fifteen. I was floating naked, just as I’d read would happen in an out of body experience (OBE). I floated through the railing, down the stairs, through the front room (in which a kitchen towel flapped atop the drapery rod over the atrium door), and, finally, through my closed bedroom door. I looked down at my sleeping self, then crashed into myself. I woke with a start, and my body ached. Much later, desperate to have a lucid trek again, I realized the kitchen towel thing. Total let down.
Now, maybe I need to sit down and think more about the problem of confessionalism in my life. For the past year, as Jen and I have updated this site in fits, interrupted by long silences (lets call them whole notes and say they are essential to the composition), I have dreamt increasingly of people I know and in familiar settings with very familiar plot points. This is a noted departure from 30 years of dreaming of strangers, particularly faceless ones. Facelessness has been an ongoing element in my dreams, a creepy, upsetting, thrilling element—one that common interpretation boils down to a fear of revelation, sharing of self, distrust of self, etc. In short, a possibly unfortunate need for distance. A basketcase.
Something about spilling tales on this site has led to me spilling more personal tales to friends in conversation, and, ultimately to more, well, facey dreams.
Sigh.
Yes, I like your faces, friends. I like them dearly, even though they seem to be watering down the inner fits--even with you dressed in that creepy all-white outfit, John, as if you were a painter with a bloody hatchet to hide; even though you, Jennifer, wanted me to pick you up at the Uptown Motel on a snowy backroad of northern Wisconsin. (What were you doing out there?) Dear Julia, why were you in that field when it seemed to be going nowhere good?
I dream of water, often. I dream of things I cannot see.
