Dream Journal, animal dreams, my mother's cancer, 12/13-16/1985

I am no longer writing down the dreams, they come in a series, hard and fast— nightly, and always the animals. Someone senselessly killed all the foxes. And I found dry desiccated corpses in various stages of death strewn in the grass what a horrid waste of fox fur, I thought, and collected the dried foxes in hopes that someone would know how to skin them though they were no longer fresh. That it would be a total waste if something could be salvage from all those poor shriveled bodies.

12/13/1985


I was leaning out of my grandmother's bedroom window. It overhung a cliff taller than I remembered. A gray weathered scaffolding surrounded it. At the next story level, a ground squirrel had several small sections of corn on cactus and was hauling it into his burrow below the window.

I wanted to know what the special adaptations this creature had to have to be able to gnaw on cactus and not get thorned. I asked my mom who was combing her hair by the mirror and she gave some non-plausible explanation which meant it wasn't important. And she hauled her her half exposed body back in the window.

Below the ground squirrel, a gray and white creature, like a cross between a guinea pig and a collie, was borrowing a pale gray brick red and gray partridge hawk. I thought: a new species?

I climbed out my grandmother's window. My mother keeps dragging me back in because she thinks I'm getting excited over nothing. She said her pap smear came back positive and there was a lump—it could be scar tissue or anything or yet another confirmation she said she said.

12/14/1985


We were in an old whole hotel boardinghouse, I don't remember most of the dream, but something was troubling the pale woman with a long dark hair. And she said the halls were entirely paved in apple jade tiles—including the circular stairway.

I was sewing something. The black and silver shears with the nonsymmetrical handles were in my hands. It was a time to run. I don't remember what the reason was. My running steps resounded in the green spiral staircase as I headed down down down. Tthere was a shower at the bottom, no door. And the following footsteps got closer and closer. I held the scissors up. I couldn't remember if I was going to kill myself, or the intruder.

The intruder said (me): I followed the pale woman down the stairs knowing she meant to harm herself. I was afraid I was going to be too late and redoubled my speed. She seemed to go faster and faster down those dizzying green stairs. I had trouble getting traction. And the tiles were slippery. When I got to the lower landing, there was no door, only an open shower stall, and a pale frightened woman holding those scissors up ready to strike herself or me.

I wasn't sure which. She said:: how did you know about this? And I said earlier in the day I was looking out over the pond from the veranda and everyone was picnicking on the grass and only you were missing.

From somewhere deep, a muffled explosion shook the house. Small clouds of silk roiled from the underwater mine entrance in the reservoir. The other entrances in the basement house so I know you had to be connected with it

12/15/1985