Dream workshop, with Elizabeth Herron 11/7

I am visiting my grandmother’s neighbor Erica Smollow. In the dream she is also Nurse Ray Perrencini whom I met in Cuzco. She’s not living in her big house, a place I housecleaned as a teenager, but in the small cabin with three beds and three children about a year old. One is hers and the others are accidents of fate. A friend’s, or daughters? The dream does not elucidate. 

The place is messy. Erica is in bed, she is exhausted. She is a woman alone. Her husband left her. The beds are covered with gold bedspreads. The clutter in her room is like my aunt Jane’s bedroom clutter when she lived in SF, clippings, stockings, piles of mail. 

Erica‘s bed faces the west window. Her head is at the other end by the front door. The twin bed is parallel, against the wall. The passageway between the beds leads to the back door. Against the opposite wall is the third twin bed, oxymoronic, I know. There was grit on the floor, so with a piece of material I began to sweep up. 

An old man was supposed to do this, he was paid to help her, but he stood smoking in the back doorway while I worked. Blankets were scattered on the floor. It took forever to pick up before I could even sweep. The babies were about a year old. What was Erica doing with all these young children? One was a dark-haired boy. 

At one point  I patted Erica‘s dark hair, and said I never knew you were a mommy three times over. How worn and pale she looked as if she were dying of something. (what I did not know is that she had MS, it would take 30 years to discover this). I sweep the wooden floor as best I can. Nothing can alleviate the desolateness of this one-room house, how has she come to this, this brilliant journalist of international repute?

Reverse the image: I am lying in bed exhausted from raising three small children alone. One as my own, the others were gifts. I couldn’t let them go, let them be a abandoned. A woman I think I know comes to visit. I see her silhouetted by the front door that barely clears the beds. I sleep with my head nearest to the front door because I like to look into the filminess of the desert, it’s like looking through milk glass. The windows at the foot of my bed offers the same featureless view but I like to look out onto the real thing not hindered by by the constraints of glass. Everything is so far removed as it is. I don’t need to get farther away. Besides, I can see the mountains from the front door. They face southwest. 

And I can see my visitor is taken aback by the condition by which we live. I can’t help that. Raising three kids on next to nothing wasn’t easy. My husband gone, dead, for all I care. Pablo helps when he can, he’s close to 100 and he can’t do much—in exchange for food and a place to sleep. That’s all that this place offers, a place to sleep. Everything else is on the floor. The spreads, the blankets. 

She comes in dressed in jeans looking of the world, a busier place than this. I can see the horror in her eyes but I am long past explaining, long past making excuses. Sometimes, all I can do is to crawl back into bed after work, still dressed in my slip and fall into a dreamless sleep. At least dreams are a refuge. 

Pablo really shouldn’t smoke so much. Ashes all over the place. The woman makes herself useful and begins to sweep the other present grit with a towel. There is a broom somewhere, Pablo had it last. He spends more time standing in the back doorway gazing off into the northwest. One day he’ll shuffle off in that direction. Sometimes I wish he would just go and get out of here. Then where would I be? A pretty kettle of fish. 

In late afternoon I love to watch the mottled blue shadows fall from the cottonwoods and jingle and dance on the wall. Especially in early spring and late summer when the sun begins to drop low in the sky again. Of course, if we lived in the southern hemisphere, seasons and directional information would be reversed. I am using my northern latitude sensibilities, from the northeast, that is New Jersey. 

This could very well be in Peru. The great desert. And no se. It would explain the presence of Pablo or is he Pepe? Living like this in one room and being better off than most. 

Reversal number two: old man’s point of you. Soon, I’ll be leaving this place that poor gringo with all those babies to raise. How will she survive? Trust in God Almighty, I need to go. Soon I won’t be able to buy more tobacco. The wind always seems to blow in with secrets and it’s no use. The desert wants to move into the house so I open all the doors and the windows to let it in,mand that young gringa visiting the Señora think she is doing something helpful by sweeping it all back out again with a towel! Useless. Doesn’t she know it’s a useless task? 

The young think they can change everything. Some things just don’t want to change. Take this house, did my father ask the desert if it wanted a house to be built here first? No, he had to be modern and build it anyway, and look at what happened to him. Sand fills the spaces between his teeth. I cannot leave her, for who will watch over her? Who will keep back the desert when I’m gone? Sometimes the path I must take becomes clear in the afternoon light. It glimmers like a snail trail. Soon, I think soon.

Elements: two women, an old man, three babies in the room. The boy, dressed in green, watches us from his bed. The two girls play quietly on the floor. One has curly brown gold hair and blue eyes like her real daughter Brianna. Blankets, unmade beds, greedy for full of human life and lacking ornamentation or richness. It’s such a bare-bones existence and a lack of hope. The grim future. Trapped by domestic poverty. 

How did the girls stumble into this place? How does a woman arrive at this condition? And the old man with his ragged clothes and serape what’s his story? What isn’t there: escape, release away out. What’s missing support.

There are lots of other dream images and again the group of people the core group seems to go from dream to dream. There are people I care about and I am comfortable with. These are not the strangers of cities. 

We are frosting two pathetic loaves of chocolate cake. Someone splattered icing on everything. By scraping the tray I am able to rescue enough icing to frost the cakes. Why, for a birthday? Or is it just a festive occasion?

I pull an old dress on from out of a suitcase. Somebody is moving and it’s so cold. The dress still fits. My friend Stephanie gives me a dirty look because it looks funny over my sweater and pants. I begin to take my sweater off but change my mind. The design in the dress is straight out of  Escher, or maybe it’s a Native American design. This is important, and I don’t know why. Tribal? My pants morphed from corduroy to canvas the same kind as the shorts that John wears. I used to carry kid journals in my pockets. The designs, though different patterns, match perfectly. 

I have four vibrators. OK then. I’m hiding them. I’m using one under my dress and no one can tell. It feels so good I take it all the way in until there’s nothing left and I come and come and go. We are all hiking through an abandoned area of the city, chunks of cement stacked up like Inca stairs. Stephanie and I are competitive which is weird because in real life, we never were. I am out in front. I move with economy of motion to keep ahead and she’s so close on my heels ever almost there, once my best friend, who moved away got married, she who has been in limbo for years.

Note bene: I don’t know how much I actually got out of the dream workshop, but it was interesting to begin to look at one’s dreams as fiction and as a source of metaphor, versus the analysis, which was strangely liberating. I missed one workshop and Elizabeth was quite adamant about not letting me make it up. Not even homework. And I came away rather disillusioned by it all. And disillusioned by her. And yet on the other hand, I get that she is a therapist and needs to draw the lines. But I expected a little more leeway than I got. In this way I realized she was not my friend, after all. I came away feeling like a second class citizen.