I dreamnt I dwelt in marble halls…
There was a house in my dream. A Great House, full of sliding doors made of wood topped with smoked glass, closing off rooms from a central hallway. In one of the rooms were the women with whom I have worked in the past, pink roses in their hair, planning yet another tea. No one had brought me roses, and the door was closed against me. Somehow I floated high enough to see into the window to find a sea of elegant faces that I didn’t even know. My parties. My business contacts. All my hard work. And nobody saw me.
And in part, I was relieved. “Whew,” I thought. That silliness over and done with. All that ‘girly’ stuff I never really got into, but worked like a mule team so that the people who subtly pressured me into ‘pulling something together’ would be happy. *I* was never happy with these things — they were way too much work, most of which fell to me. So… why was this dream colored with bittersweet nostalgia? Why did I wake up… sad?
I think my mother was in that room, with the flowers. My mother. My sisters. And not me.
Down a flight of wide granite stairs and through a carpeted foyer was another room, with so many people inside that the sliding doors could not close. From inside I heard singers singing scales, and the sound of an orchestra running through its opening notes, and I felt a horrible envy. This weekend, the Convocation is hosting a five hundred voice mass chorus for an afternoon concert, with a three hundred person orchestra accompanying. This is one of those once in a lifetime experiences that adults remember fondly from when they were in high school, when their choral groups toured and went to festivals. Of course, in my dream, the room was too stuffed with people for me to gain any kind of entrance; I was late, I wasn’t prepared, I couldn’t find my music. And by that time, even in my dream there was a kind of fatalism to my movements. I went toward the door, and I stopped. I knew that no one would part the crowd for me, to allow me inside.
I walked away without trying.
Another part of the house had… shoes. Which sounds bizarre now that I think of it, but I have been noticing shoes here — that they are all strangely long with pointed toes that curl…up just a bit. And so it made sense in the dream, I would guess, to be finding myself in a room with shoes. I tried some on — navy blue leather flats, with flat panels of leather ruching at the top. They were long and narrow and I thought they made my leg look longer and thinner, and me, taller. I went to show them to Van, in his room in the great house. And his room was… empty. As if he’d never even been there.
And here is where I think I almost truly despaired. Van is that one-of-a-kind friend, that once-in-a-lifetime-comes-along person who is androgenously comfortable. What other straight guy friends does one have who are such snappy dressers that they know all about clothes, and aren’t afraid to discuss them? In detail? Who else would have cared about the length of my leg in my new shoes? No one. But he was gone, and his answering machine played a snarky little message to me as I stood in his room, bewildered,
“I don’t have time — if Woody’s here today, that’s all I have time for, both of us have to change our schedules for him.” The machine simply clicked off — no goodbye, and the background sound of the was of a crowded concert hall, and an orchestra tuning.
I know that dreams are representative — I don’t need Freud and his cohorts to come by and stroke their chins to tell me so — but to awaken from these images is to be reminded again that I am cut off. Like a clean, swift headman’s stroke, I am disconnected from the gangly, sprawling body that was my responsibility. I am reborn singular and bloodless, an entity not quite alive, thin blown porcelain, translucent and pure —
— and easily shattered.
Will someone tell me please: who am I now?
