Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Get a room!
Ye who ken dreams well, interpret me this:
It’s Sunday morning and the wife and I are having sex. Everything is fine and dandy, but then I notice the big picture window behind our bed is wide open and the neighbors in the apartments next door can see into the bedroom without any trouble at all. No one is looking, mind you, but they could. It’s bloody distracting.
It takes an extraordinary effort to close the drapes — hey, it’s an old house, everything is buggy here — but in the end I am victorious, and we resume our activities.
Seconds later, the contractor and two of his guys traipse through, on their way from one part of the house to another. I cover Karen up, shout, “Hey!” and they apologize and leave by way of the full-service gym which has suddenly appeared in the back part of our bedroom.
Two young women, one lifting weights, one on the treadmill, try their best to ignore us, but it’s obvious they’re embarrassed. How can you get in a good workout with two naked people huffing and puffing not ten feet away? (But I bet more people would come to the gym.) I recognize one of them. She’s the daughter of the previous owner of this house and I figure she knows the house pretty well.
“Look,” I say (not that she can do much else but), “do you suppose any of the other bedrooms would be more private than this?”
“Sure, come with me.”
Karen and I wrap ourselves in towels and follow her as she takes us on a tour of our own house. She does indeed know it better than we do, and it dawns on me yet again how little of our house we use. (This is true in real life, but mostly because we haven’t finished remodeling, probably never will finish remodeling, and the parts we don’t use are simply too uncomfortable or ugly.)
We pass one bedroom after another. Any one of them would serve our purposes, but they’re either occupied or soon to be used again, mostly by family members of the previous owner. “This is where Barbara sleeps when she’s home from college, and — oh, sorry, June, it’s okay, go back to sleep — and this one’s mine, so if you don’t mind I’d rather you didn’t screw in my bed,” and so forth. Bedroom after bedroom, and not a single one of them is open for business.
Eventually, we arrive in a huge open area, the kitchen-dining room-living room. There’s a roaring hearth that would do Charles Foster Kane proud, a big spread of food, a huge punch bowl. People are chatting, mingling, having their pastries and coffee. Some old lady is upset because we have these special matches designed to keep bugs away (like a citronella candle). One of the matches fell into the punch and ignited, kind of like the way elemental sodium ignites if it comes into contact with water. “It’s a hazard!” she complains, then throws the rest of the matches into the punch bowl to demonstrate. Now there are a dozen little flames spinning around in the punch.
But I’m struck by the living room. What an elegant space! I had forgotten how lovely the tile floor looked, how well it coordinated with our choice of furniture. Attractive, yet comfortable. An ideal place to entertain. We really ought to use this room more often, I think to myself. So not like my living room in real life, but it’s a dream, remember?
Then we’re back in our real bed, dozing, and I figure Karen must have gotten tired of looking and come back to bed, and for that matter, I could grab an extra hour of sleep, too. I look around, blink a few times, and realize I really AM back in my bed — you know, the usual “it was all a dream” thing.
Weird, huh?
D.
Huh. That IS weird.
I think it is the sort of vivid dream that lends itself to analysis, too. Of course, you realize (and I realize) that 80% of dream analysis is that staple of cold reading, the retrofit, but still.
That dream would make a good dream sequence in a movie. Lucy Lui would play Karen. You’d be played by Paul Giamatti.
The old lady who throws the matches in the punchbowl would be played by Cloris Leachman. If she’s still alive, that is.
Good news! Cloris Leachman is still alive.
Paul Giamatti. I love it. And all this time I thought I was channeling Wally Shawn. As for Lucy Liu, I’m sure Karen could live with that. Me too, since I’m sure Ms. Liu would have to have sex with me before her shoot.
It’s called method acting.
Anxiety. Always. Worry over something interrupting your passions, something always out of your control. Being a hero to your wife. Worry over your vulnerabilities? Having to yield to the expertise of someone else on something you should know all about. Or maybe about the characters you’ve been writing about and your mind has applied their issues to yourself? Interruptions to things you really want to do but something keeps holding you back (That one, dreamwise, for me is I really need a pee but in the dream every toilet is in full public view – like on a tall dais in the middle of Mall Of America – or is the most vile and filthy thing on Earth) The feeling that your home still isn’t yours as you’ve not made your own mark upon it yet, it still has remnants of the previous owner, which we know frustrates you. As for the matches in the punch…I have no clue.
Then again, like Dean says, dream interpretation is rubbish.
I have dreams where I discover hidden floors and rooms in my house too and I get all excited about this new space and how it’ll improve our home life and Yay! someplace to put the armoire finally! But life is never that easy, and we wake up and realize it’s going to take a lot more work to get that happy feeling, than just finding a secret space within it.
all of that made me wanna sleep LOL
Sorry, long comment ahead…
I had a dream a couple of nights ago about batting at two birds, one after the other, as they flew down low to attack me. One was black, the other white. I felt bad about hitting at animals, but also felt compelled to defend myself before they could complete their attacks. I figured that was a dream ripe for interpretation, but got no further – I have no idea what that dream was supposed to mean.
I’ve had dreams many, many times about wandering through houses. One interpretation of such dreams that works for me is that the house represents your spirituality: rooms that are furnished imply your faith is fixed in your mind and you don’t have a lot of questions, while wandering through a maze of a house that’s mostly empty implies you still have a lot of questions and holes to fill in. The more rooms – furnished or unfurnished – is to imply the greater importance you place on your spiritual life and its richness or depth, while fewer rooms implies a lesser importance and/or a more shallow faith. [If you accept this interpretation, my take on the punchbowl scene would be along the lines of the kinds of “signs and wonders” required for other people to believe as you do. That is, it’s both a danger but likely also necessary to show and explain things to people in order for them to believe, but sometimes that means you end up with a flaming punchbowl that’s of little use to anyone because you can’t drink what’s in it. Or, faith has little value if it must be proven absolutely – but if you can’t prove it there are those who won’t have faith.]
One thing I’ve seen people say is that there are archetypal images that help interpret dreams universally, but there are also images and symbols that mean something only to you. Thus, if it makes sense for you that wandering through a house speaks to your spirtuality then you attack the interpretation from that foundation. But if it means something else entirely to you – that is, your subconscious has consistently over the years substituted wandering through a house as a way of working through a complex problem – then you attack the interpretation from that foundation instead. Since finding the “loophole” that implies not every archetype is the same for every person, I’ve found greater success in coming to an understanding of what my dreams mean for me.
Obviously that doesn’t happen all of the time – as with my Dream of the Two Birds – but it happens enough that I don’t completely disbelieve in the value of trying to figure out what my subconscious was trying to work through and/or say to me.
The house dream. Not THAT one. Sheesh. At least you ended up in your own bed. What a methodical brain you have, Doc, even in sleep. I blame it on the mushrooms you had for dinner.