Skip This One if You Don't Like Reading About Other People's Dreams
In my dream I was getting married. It wasn't clear to whom, but I had the dress ready. The dress was perfect for the person I seemed to imagine myself as in the dream--someone no longer young and with good taste. It had an antiquey, vintage feel, two pieces, not white but an off-white, deeper than ivory color, I can imagine it being called bisque, perhaps. It was flattering but not form-fitting. The top part may have had little spaghetti straps or maybe it was a jacket. The skirt was a number of layers, cut jaggedly, I mean like Flintstones-wear jaggedly, so that you could see parts of the different layers on top of each other. Some of the underneath colors were a dark gray, to contrast with the bisque. The layers flared out in a way that I liked. I was very conscious of the fact that the outfit was utterly comfortable yet, to my mind, very attractive, or that I was attractive in it. I had shoes, too--they were kind of a bronze color, leather, also antiquey looking, kind of a cross betwen ballet flats and Mary Janes, with lots of little punched out or embroidered designs around the edges. I think that I was looking at myself in the full-length mirror in what we called "the little room" in the apartment in which I grew up--different people slept there as we all got to be different ages and my older siblings left the family. Sometimes my mother slept there, too.
As I wrote above, it wasn't clear whom I was marrying. The putative groom seemed to waver between being (it's so hard to know what tense to use to describe the weird "mood" of dreams!) the guy that broke up with me a year and a half ago whom I still feel anguished over although the thinking part of me knows it wasn't working out, the guy whom I broke up with over eight years ago in a rupture that was very painful at the time but also seems now to have been for the best, and the guy whom I was with when I was 25 and who died suddenly and violently, a victim of street crime in a dangerous city. (In real life, the first guy is dating someone else and the second is married and just had a child.) There was something about a journey to go to wherever the wedding was supposed to be. The families--both mine and the groom's--seemed to know about the wedding, although it was not clear that the groom knew. There was a part where I was sitting and talking earnestly with someone, a woman professor at the place where I attended graduate school, and she was supposed to be the man's mother. Later, someone else reported to me that she had said, "I feel like Sarah is already my daughter," and that made me feel, in the dream, even more obligated to go on with the wedding.
So, yes, the wedding. Somehow I had to make a decision that I was going to go forward with getting married, without knowing if the guy was going to show up. (I guess that was me, the nondreaming self, knowing that each of these situations were really contrary to reality.) Even in the dream, though, I knew there was something wrong about each of the scenarios, that I was picking someone from my past that I didn't really know anymore. As I am writing this, I keep trying to hold on to the kind of thinking that was going on in the dream to describe it, but it kind of vaporizes in the light of day, doesn't it?--anyway, the issue in the dream seemed to be about me having some faith in whatever my decision was going to be, not worrying about whether the other person was going to do his part. So, in the dream, I tried to think about the issues involved in marrying any one of those men, or more accurately, about getting married in general. At one point I came to what seemed a moment of clarity--I thought, if I can just get this over with, this marrying thing, then it won't seem so important and I can just focus on the rest of my life. At that moment I think the picture in my mind of who I was going to marry was the guy I was with in my 20s, and the "reality" of that intruded on my attempt to think generically about marriage--I just couldn't imagine being married to him. I thought, but we haven't spent time together in so long, I don't know if there's any feeling between us anymore or if we have anything in common. (This is painful to write about. He is still and always in his 20s. I am 48.) Then I thought, again trying to reason all of this out, but if you get married, you will get to take care of someone, you would like that, it would be good for you. And at that moment I pictured the guy from eight years ago. Or maybe all of this was happening simultaneously--there is not really any time in dreams. But at any rate, I couldn't imagine being with him, either.
Then there was another part about the dress, where I was going to try it on for someone, a woman friend, who said, "Are you sure it doesn't make you look too old?"
But I still liked the dress and wasn't worried about that.
It got closer to the time when I would have to leave to travel to wherever this wedding was supposed to be, and I decided I just couldn't do it, even though I knew the families (!) would be disappointed. So instead of going to get married, I changed my clothes and got on the bus to go to this weekend singles-and-outdoor-activities place in the country that I've been to a couple of times this year, in real life. Once I got there, I saw that it was really beautiful, as always, and even though it was winter, people were swimming in the lake. Also, some people were walking on all fours (chalk that one up to a review I just read of a TV documentary about a family in some country, can't remember which, that does that, and how the local community reacts to them [mostly cruelly]). Then there was a lot of anxiety stuff about getting my badge (in real life, you don't get badges at this place!) and getting assigned to a cabin and thinking why did I come here, who am I going to room with, I want to go home. But then I got over that, and was on my way to some activity or other--volleyball, football, perhaps. True to the time of year it is, the ground was muddy. I looked down and I was still wearing the little wedding shoes and there was mud caked all around various parts of them. I had a pang of reget--I thought, now I will never wear these particular shoes to my wedding, that moment has passed. I thought about taking them off and frantically trying to clean them. I think even in the dream, I knew this part was very hokey, too heavily symbolic, but at any rate, then I thought, it's okay, you can let go of the shoes and this moment, you can buy other shoes if you ever decide to get married. I don't know if I believed myself, though, or in fact what I decided to do about the shoes, if I was really able to let go of them because then . . . I woke up! It was all a dream!
__________________________________________________________________________________
Okay, back to real life, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to share this curious mixed bag of a dream. Thank you all for listening. Consider yourself to have done your good deed for the day and go have turkey! Happy Thanksgiving to all.
As I wrote above, it wasn't clear whom I was marrying. The putative groom seemed to waver between being (it's so hard to know what tense to use to describe the weird "mood" of dreams!) the guy that broke up with me a year and a half ago whom I still feel anguished over although the thinking part of me knows it wasn't working out, the guy whom I broke up with over eight years ago in a rupture that was very painful at the time but also seems now to have been for the best, and the guy whom I was with when I was 25 and who died suddenly and violently, a victim of street crime in a dangerous city. (In real life, the first guy is dating someone else and the second is married and just had a child.) There was something about a journey to go to wherever the wedding was supposed to be. The families--both mine and the groom's--seemed to know about the wedding, although it was not clear that the groom knew. There was a part where I was sitting and talking earnestly with someone, a woman professor at the place where I attended graduate school, and she was supposed to be the man's mother. Later, someone else reported to me that she had said, "I feel like Sarah is already my daughter," and that made me feel, in the dream, even more obligated to go on with the wedding.
So, yes, the wedding. Somehow I had to make a decision that I was going to go forward with getting married, without knowing if the guy was going to show up. (I guess that was me, the nondreaming self, knowing that each of these situations were really contrary to reality.) Even in the dream, though, I knew there was something wrong about each of the scenarios, that I was picking someone from my past that I didn't really know anymore. As I am writing this, I keep trying to hold on to the kind of thinking that was going on in the dream to describe it, but it kind of vaporizes in the light of day, doesn't it?--anyway, the issue in the dream seemed to be about me having some faith in whatever my decision was going to be, not worrying about whether the other person was going to do his part. So, in the dream, I tried to think about the issues involved in marrying any one of those men, or more accurately, about getting married in general. At one point I came to what seemed a moment of clarity--I thought, if I can just get this over with, this marrying thing, then it won't seem so important and I can just focus on the rest of my life. At that moment I think the picture in my mind of who I was going to marry was the guy I was with in my 20s, and the "reality" of that intruded on my attempt to think generically about marriage--I just couldn't imagine being married to him. I thought, but we haven't spent time together in so long, I don't know if there's any feeling between us anymore or if we have anything in common. (This is painful to write about. He is still and always in his 20s. I am 48.) Then I thought, again trying to reason all of this out, but if you get married, you will get to take care of someone, you would like that, it would be good for you. And at that moment I pictured the guy from eight years ago. Or maybe all of this was happening simultaneously--there is not really any time in dreams. But at any rate, I couldn't imagine being with him, either.
Then there was another part about the dress, where I was going to try it on for someone, a woman friend, who said, "Are you sure it doesn't make you look too old?"
But I still liked the dress and wasn't worried about that.
It got closer to the time when I would have to leave to travel to wherever this wedding was supposed to be, and I decided I just couldn't do it, even though I knew the families (!) would be disappointed. So instead of going to get married, I changed my clothes and got on the bus to go to this weekend singles-and-outdoor-activities place in the country that I've been to a couple of times this year, in real life. Once I got there, I saw that it was really beautiful, as always, and even though it was winter, people were swimming in the lake. Also, some people were walking on all fours (chalk that one up to a review I just read of a TV documentary about a family in some country, can't remember which, that does that, and how the local community reacts to them [mostly cruelly]). Then there was a lot of anxiety stuff about getting my badge (in real life, you don't get badges at this place!) and getting assigned to a cabin and thinking why did I come here, who am I going to room with, I want to go home. But then I got over that, and was on my way to some activity or other--volleyball, football, perhaps. True to the time of year it is, the ground was muddy. I looked down and I was still wearing the little wedding shoes and there was mud caked all around various parts of them. I had a pang of reget--I thought, now I will never wear these particular shoes to my wedding, that moment has passed. I thought about taking them off and frantically trying to clean them. I think even in the dream, I knew this part was very hokey, too heavily symbolic, but at any rate, then I thought, it's okay, you can let go of the shoes and this moment, you can buy other shoes if you ever decide to get married. I don't know if I believed myself, though, or in fact what I decided to do about the shoes, if I was really able to let go of them because then . . . I woke up! It was all a dream!
__________________________________________________________________________________
Okay, back to real life, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to share this curious mixed bag of a dream. Thank you all for listening. Consider yourself to have done your good deed for the day and go have turkey! Happy Thanksgiving to all.
posted by Sarah Sometimes at 10:39 AM
7 Comments:
These seems like such a significant dream. The funny part is that while I was reading it, I could sort of picture the whole thing -- like, it made sense in a weird kind of way.
Okay, the word "These" in the last sentence should have been "This." I know you know that, but I cannot stop myself from editing.
jo(e): Yes, I knew what you meant! Thanks for reading and for the comment.
Your writing makes this so vivid. I can almost feel the fabric in the dress. I agree with jo(e) that it does make sense and it was interesting that you could do such a good job rationalizing things.
jo(e)'s right, both in her first comment and in the second one. It's been a long time since I've remembered a dream that seemed to be so clearly meaningful and symbolic like this one you describe is.
Oh, I love dreams. I hardly write mine down, but I know I should do it more often. Thank you so much for sharing, this is a fascinating dream! I totally know what you mean about the feelings in the dream vaporizing in the daylight. Feelings are just so deep in dreams and so hard to capture in coherent, rational day-light speech. You described it beautifully, though and made me want to write down my dreams as well.
jar, scrivener, Lilian: thanks so much for reading and for the comments....
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