A Dream Story

Many of my dreams, the ones I remember, are of me trying to get somewhere, usually on some odd form of transportation, not knowing how to get there, and often with people following me who think I actually know where I’m going. In one I’m riding a horse, leading the way; in another I’m in an  English taxi; one, rolling along in a wheelchair; one on a tricycle, another on a bicycle, and in one dream I’m pedaling away in a pedicab with a group tagging along behind me.

One night, just prior to falling asleep, I asked my mother, my father, and my teacher Michael Naumer (all deceased) to come to me in my dreams. I recorded the vivid succession of images in a journal as soon as I awoke (October 22, 2002). My dreaming started with Michael (who’d been gone five months). That part was short, and the only thing I remember was asking him if there was something he wanted to tell me, or if there was anything I needed to know. I tried to listen to what he had to say, but my attention kept wandering, so I don’t know if he answered, or, I didn’t hear him if he did. The images shifted to my mother (who’d taken her life some three decades before):

I’m at the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge just past the tollbooth in the slow lane, weaving in and out of traffic, lying face down on an old wooden go-cart that looks like a kid’s snow sled with wheels, moving along quickly, making it go faster with my hands and feet. A nicely dressed attractive woman with straight shoulder-length blonde hair is walking just behind me and calls to get my attention. “What does she want?” I think. I’ve traveled a good distance, and have no time to talk; I’m trying to get someplace. I ignore her and she calls out again. I race away, lying prone on my vehicle, my face just inches from the pavement rapidly passing beneath me, and weave my way from the slow lane onto the pedestrian lane. She’s still following me.

Moon Valley School reunion, mid 1980s: Audrey, Charlie, Moona, Catherine, Barbara, my son Matt

I lose her. In the next instant I’m in front of the house next to the Sebastiani Winery (which is three blocks from where I live), scooting along behind the bushes in case she’s still nearby. When I’m sure the coast is clear, I pick up my go-cart and step carefully down the moss-covered stone steps. The next instant I’m at the  market in the plaza, which is also three blocks away. As I wend my way through the bazaar, I notice the beautiful stalls look like many I’ve visited in the town plazas in Mexico, the papayas, oranges, and onions stacked in perfect pyramids surrounded by buckets of tied stock, irises, and sunflowers: colorful and fragrant. I find myself standing in front of a corner fruit and flower stand where three friends, Moona, Audrey, and Barbara, are showing and selling their artwork from their booth. (These three women are just a few years older, about the ages of my three sisters, and were a comfort and inspiration when I first moved to Sonoma. They were involved as parents or teachers in Moon Valley School, a small alternative school run by Charlie Price where I sent my sons in the mid to late 1970s, where I became the bookkeeper, and then ran the school for a few years after they’d all moved on. Audrey, Moona, and Barbara were also single mothers who gave me courage around raising two young boys on my own.)

Audrey holds up a piece of her work. “It’s beautiful, but I don’t have time, I’m looking for this place.” She telepathically knows where I mean, and points. It’s just around the corner. Three bungalows, white, clean, and crisp—like little connected beach houses each with one small window and a screened front door—are to my left. I sense my mother is inside the first one on my right. I see the door is open through the screen. I lean my go-cart against the wall, peer in, and in the far corner I see my mother asleep. She looks to be in her mid-forties and I’m a young teenager, the ages we were the last time we saw one another.

It’s bright in there and I’m surprised she doesn’t have on her eye-mask. I’m nervous about coming in, as I’m sweaty and covered in dust from the road. The room is small and clean, crowded with a few pieces of furniture and barely any space to walk. A single white-sheeted twin bed is next to her, there is a round white table and a small white upholstered chair; everything is white, white, white. I’m quiet and tentative, not feeling very sure of myself, wanting to see and talk to hear, but waiting for her invitation. She waves me over to her bed. “Come sit next to me.” Taking off my jeans so as not to get her bed dirty, I sit with her. I notice she has tubes everywhere: an IV in her arm, a plastic one up her nose and down her throat, a catheter coming out of her. She’s ill and I realize she’s dying. While she shifts to make herself comfortable, I look around the room and see six or seven framed photos on a tall oak bookshelf near the door. I’m curious if any of them are of me. I discover they are family pictures and we look happy. We aren’t all together, but in photos by ourselves and a couple with two or three of us posing together. My mother is not in any; I’m in three. One close-up by myself—my first or second grade school picture—only I have a bonnet with a small brim. I think how sweet I was as a child, how fresh and pretty. A second picture is of Daddy and me. The third, I don’t recollect who all was in it, but there are several of us. I study them; relieved she has pictures of me. She did care about me. My attention turns to her, and I ask, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, anything you’d like me to know?” At that instant, I wake up.

The next day (in my everyday waking life) I find in my mailbox a postcard from Barbara, announcing she is giving Tarot readings. Dialing her, I say, “I just got your card and this is so weird… last night I had the most vivid dream that you were in.”

“You always want to tell people when you dream of them,” she says, “as it’s significant when we dream about one another.”

“Want to hear it?” When I finish, she tells me, “I’m part of a dream circle that meets once a month, and Connie Kaplan, who facilitates dream circles and has published a book about them, is coming up from Los Angeles to be there. Would you like to come?”

I don’t know much about dreams, but believe they can have significance, and as this one was so detailed, I wanted help to decipher what it meant. “Absolutely,” I said, “When and where?”

A week later I join Barbra and a circle of women, some of whom I’ve met, others I’ve not. When Connie arrives, she sits next to me on the couch. She checks in with everyone, tells a story, and then relates a second one of her avoiding serious injury in a four-car collision on the freeway coming up from Southern California. I’m looking at her profile, and as she says “freeway” and turns her face toward me a little, all the hairs stand up on my arms and the back of my neck.

“You’re the blonde in my dream,” I interject.

Laughing, she says, “Well, you may have been dreaming me to protect me in the accident. Thank you.” Then she tells us a story about angels walking through walls, being given messages from the other side, about her experience with the angles at the time of her father’s death—all a little far-fetched for my money. The dream circle begins, along with the passing of the talking stick from woman to woman. I find the process interesting. I’m dying to ask Connie about mine, but I’d been told before the circle began that I may not share as I’m not a member of the group.

When the evening concludes, Connie and I talk outside where I relay my dream to her. At the end, she asks me a couple of questions, then says, “Many dreams have a pun, and the most interesting part of your dream, to me, is your pun: it is where you take off your jeans.” I don’t get her point. She goes on, “In that action, you are changing the genetic patterns in your family.” She looks at me quizzically, and then says, “You’re the only one doing work in your family, and you can do that you know.”

And in that moment, something inside told me that this woman, whom I’d met in a dream, was telling me the truth.