Feelings and Dreams
My subconscious is very efficient. It sorts through feelings, puts them neatly into files to make them accessible, and sometimes does not bother to let me know what's going on in my mind.I have spent hours, maybe even years, sitting on a cushion, my legs crossed, simply watching the sky in my head, giving names to the clouds. Once in a while I actually achieve a state where I meditate.
During meditation, the rocks that my subconscious has used to hold down memory and thought begin to crumble. Not evenly, there is no smooth reveal like drawing back a curtain on the knowledge that I hold. And certainly not quickly. In fact I have serious doubts that this state of undoing confines itself to one rock at a time.
This makes me an odd creature, swinging from wise to foolish to downright stupid , almost always full of words clamouring to be given air and light so they too can have their being.
At times I am just syllables strung together, figures of speech that sing, drag, resonate with meaning, a drone on the wind, the screech across a blackboard. Once in a while I become a sentence or a paragraph for a moment.
Or just one word, that holds a world of meaning, that echoes in my head but cannot be spoken, cannot be shaped with tongue and teeth and buccal cavity. Then I have to dream.
I have recurring dreams of bathrooms. They range from large to small. Sometimes locker rooms that go on forever, institutional with wire, industrial tile and creaking wooden doors.
Sometimes sumptuous apartments with towels hanging rich and creamy from heated rails, a paradise of cleanliness and elimination or night may drag me to some stinking pit that seethes with life that I do not want to see.
In one strange variation, I reach the bathroom in my hotel by random elevators that have six doors that open all at once, rush through space sideways or diagonally, rarely up or down.
I have been keeping secrets from myself again. Numbness once confined to two fingers and two toes has spread and added moments of exquisitely intense pain to my life as nerves do what they do.
The change of sensation now involves almost my whole left side. Leg and foot. Hand and arm. Precisely half of my face - blinking with an eye that has diminished sensation is intrusive, almost noisy.
Still, I have not felt too worried. The feelings drifting to the surface of my mind were interest, curiosity spiced with frustration as I learned that buttoning a shirt can be a nightmare of concentration, zipper tags you cannot feel are very hard to pull while cups of tea spiral lazily from nerveless fingers creating sharp wet patterns on the floor.
A moment of wisdom surfaced and I made an appointment to see a neurologist. There are two on the island and I will see the one who offered the earliest appointment and hope he knows his business.
I may have finally unearthed the reason for these dreams, a rock has crumbled just enough to let me see the shadow of a truth. Two nights ago I dreamed a bathroom I have never seen. Not clean, not dirty. Strange blend of old and new. It echoed with the words of diagnosis. All the possibilities I face, may have to deal with. Future moments that I never look at as I move across the hours of my days.
The bathroom, whether palace or slum, offers us a place to empty out the things we do not need and clean the temple that we live in. We can, if so inclined, inspect our discards, shape, colour, texture of our leavings all carry messages of function or malfunction so at last I know the bathroom dreams are meant to let me see the very guts of me, to see what I am hiding from, what my subconscious has decided to protect me from.
As I stood, in my dream, and heard the words that might be the ones to describe this subtle creeping numbness becoming part of me I heard the echoes of a feeling woven in with all the words. And it was fear.
Comments (1)
For YEARS my dream has always been of a man chansing me while I am flying. Me flying high as a young girl and slowly getting older. And as my fear of this man grows, I come closer and closer to the ground, where he can almost touch me with his finger tips.
The sheer terror of it is unbelievable.
I once told my sister I wanted to know WHO that man was is my dreams. What had happened all those years ago that that dream would haunt me for 30 years.
She turned to me and said...."wrong question."
"What are you running from?"
And I never had the dream again.