Who Needs a Shrink?

If it weren’t for your subconscious, you wouldn't have a CLUE about what your real issues are.  I dreamed that I woke one morning to find our house filled with many different families. I began tearing around to make sure we had enough provisions for all these strangers and only noticed after what seemed like days that I hadn’t seen the cats. “WHERE ARE THE CATS?” I cried in this dream, dashing about yet more frantically - until I found them at last in our dank unfinished basement, as skinnied-out with neglect a pair of empty gloves. Then, two nights later, I had a dream that was no dream at all but an actual memory, of something my hail and vital mother said halfway through a party we threw for her 80th birthday. At the celebration's start, just before the guests began arriving, she heard some of us squabbling about who was supposed to have laid the fire. “That was always the trouble in our family,” she sighed sadly about a time 60 years in the past: “No one was ever in charge.” Then, an hour later, still sitting there by the fire, she closed her eyes and died, her small plate of dessert pastries falling from her lap.Unearthing that memory sure explains why I’ve held myself responsible for the very wheeling of the stars ever since that fateful day. SOMEONE’S got to be in charge!...And more messages from my subconscious came just last night, when I dreamed I was trying to run a meeting of volunteers in my community but somehow could not speak commandingly enough to hold their attention.I started out in the classroom and so I know: this is every teacher’s worst fear.  In this dream that was more of a nightmare, one of the whisperers actually turned her chair around so that her back was to me. In this dream that was more of a nightmare I say again, I went over to her and in a pathetic begging tone said, “Don’t you care about the mission of this organization?” "Not since YOU took over as president!” she sneered.  Then, “When is this going to be over? somebody groaned. “Yeah,” whined someone else. “I want to watch the game!”I threw out the most intransigent talkers, something that in real life you can't actually DO in an all-volunteer organization, and finally gave up and gavel things to a close.On her way out, the sneering one shot me a sidelong look. "Nothing personal," she smirked. "It hurt, what you said before," I began, again with that pathetic wheedling tone, but "Hey!" she barked back. “It is what it is! Plus, you know you've really let yourself go lately."So there it is: a trifecta of Bulletins From My Subconscious, which would appear to be suggesting the things I am evidently worried about, which are:

• A. That I'm a poor caregiver and have done little to keep the home fires burning; 
• B. That I really am letting myself go. (Didn’t I just the other day wear a pair of pants I’ve had since the 1970s?)
• C. that I’m less than stellar at running the actual meeting I do actually have to run in my waking life.

I worry about these things, evidently, but maybe I shouldn't, overmuch. God didn't make me a manager anyway. He made me a teacher I’m pretty sure, and maybe I'm a teacher still, on the inside, because really I just want to affirm everybody and make it a good class. And clothes from the 70s are cool!  And as for the cats, well the cats died some time ago. Maybe they're sitting in Heaven right now, together with my mom, all three this very minute enjoying a nice little plate of pastries.

All Souls Day

I had a dream last night in which I had just died. I was dashing around - flying actually, over scenes like the one above, recently visited - and so didn’t realize I was dead until I swooped back over my body sitting in my same clothes from that morning, seat belt still on, so to speak.

I didn't look dead - just kind of deflated is all, like our little cat looked in the gutter after that car killed her, and all I could think was "So wait that anxious get-it-done, get-it-done girl wasn't even ME?"?

It wasn’t a sad dream though really, not like the one I had about my mother a couple of months after she died. In that one we were at the cemetery, the whole noisy family. I was scooping dirt from the grave to take home with me and my cousin Carolyn was saying "What are you going to do with THAT?” My husband was shivering in his best suit and Cousin George was just wading over to him: “Ever hear of an OVERCOAT?" he wryly remarked, only all that really happened. The dream was that my mother was there with us.

“Gosh isn't it cold!” she said. “I can’t wait to get back to the house! Do you have somebody there making the coffee and setting out the food?”

“Oh Mom I’m sorry but you... you can’t come. You have to go lie down there,” I said in the dream, pointing to the box, pointing to the open hole, and woke feeling about as desolate as ever I have felt in this life.

The other day I saw my former neighbor in a book store. Her husband was the heart of our town before he died in his sleep in a few summers back. He used to cut his grass in the pitch dark if the sun dared go down, using his headlights so he could see. He'd rive through the downtown in his pickup, yelling jokey hellos to people every 30 feet. He crashed a Halloween party we gave once; appeared in a gorilla suit, joined the dancing briefly, made apelike gestures and, even grabbed a sandwich before leaving without ever opening his mouth to say who he was.

Seeing his widow I suddenly realized something. “You know what I just remembered Joanna? I dreamed about Dave last night!”

“Oh! You did really?” she said with a face of inexpressible longing. “I haven’t dreamed of him in so long! How is he?”

The longer I live the more I think that last remark reveals the larger truth: when we leave here we don’t go lie down in a box. We take off our seatbelts and fly.