Tag: Dreams

The weather is a dictator

Morning. Against the warble of magpies and the call of the currajongs another day emerges, still cool but there’s heat ahead. You can feel it in the way the sap sighs in the trees. The ground dusty and dry through long days of heat. 

The last time I was in a plane, above the weather

At one point in my dreams that skip away as fast as running water down a plug hole, I stand at an ancient laundry trough shoving dirty clothes into a primitive washing machine desperate to reduce the pile beside me.

My wealthy friend leans against the tub nearby, and I sense her contempt for my pitiable ways. Washerwoman and nothing more.  Elsewhere in my dream I was the wealthy one who offered to lend money to a friend with whom I worked. She told me she could not manage a bill that had come in unexpectedly. She had no one to help other than her father who was past it.

In my dream I selected a woman who lives around the corner. Why her? She of the bottled red hair that sits on her head like a red beret. We talk dogs whenever we walk past one another. Her warmth and friendliness towards all who pass, the more remarkable for her dog who seems subdued.

Angus, who has taken the place of another dog who died years ago and whom the woman in my dream preferred. 

Dreams of money and mess and people. Alongside the red caterpillars of dermatitis that crawl up my arms as though they are flowers in bloom.

I do not know what gets into me these days. Fear of Covid. Fear of failure. Fear of death. The muddy cold of winter days or the searing heat of summer.

The weather is a dictator. It decides on how you might feel from one moment to the next. And it is capricious.

Paul’s friend, Roman, had thin reddish hair and his right eye was milky white from disuse. He hung about on the edges, a man of limited confidence but friendly enough towards me, while enthralled with Paul. His off sider at the races. He went with us once on a picnic along with a group of my friends, who were polite towards him and Paul’s other racing cronies, but the two groups never gelled. 

We went one day to Anakie. In search of deer. Paul was experimenting with hunting the only wildlife you could hunt in the bushland of Victoria, deer gone feral. I disliked the idea of a bloodied corpse once the bullet had been dispensed but tagged along with Roman for the companionship and chance to be close to Paul for a day. 

Who was I then? A twenty-year-old child-woman with no mind of her own. No plans to speak of, other than to finish her university degree if luck would have it and to spend the rest of her life in his company. 

Babies one day maybe, but short of accidentally falling pregnant which had not happened, this young woman knew very little about herself other than that she dislikes raw onion.

She still does.

What we do not see

In the moments of waking up, when I slipped between dreaming and wakefulness, I opened my eyes into a rush of shame, or its equivalent.

In this dream, my husband on the bed beside me looked into my face.  Blood pulsed through my veins, with a sudden acceleration of heartbeat. I crawled into a foetal ball characteristic of one who wants to escape, then jammed my eyes shut again. 

 ‘Bessel Van der Kolk reckons this happens when we’re caught off guard,’ my husband said in the dream, as if he was an expert in such things. In waking life he has not read Bessel Van der Kolk, but I gave these words to him in my dream where he went onto say, ‘When a traumatised person finds themselves unexpectedly in the spotlight, they go into a shock reaction of panic and withdrawal.’ 

In between the agitation in my bones and trying to self soothe I found comfort in these words, as if a theoretical understanding of what had just happened could bring me back to the world of the living.

And all of this in less than two minutes.

Dreams are like this. They can stretch time or condense it. They can leave you with a sense you’ve been gone for hours, or with a sense that the entire night has passed in a heartbeat.

I prefer the latter, the entire night gone fast. It suggests I must have slept well and all night long, which these days is rare. I prefer the longer journey. The stretching of time that offers more opportunity for travel and exploration.

The point is not what we see but what we do not see. 

In my younger days I travelled in the slip stream of others. I imagined anything I did or said was only good if it could be reinforced by another’s approval. I would not send out a single letter to another person without my husband vetting every word, and even as I disliked the way he changed my words into a formal and legalistic structure, I hid behind his words, as if his edits guaranteed correctness, whereas my clumsy efforts could only get me into trouble.

The irony is that his excess efforts and legal language, which were okay in the world of his career as a lawyer, were not so helpful in the world of psychotherapy.

Not that it brought me down too far. 

When did I slide out of that slip stream and take my place in my own space without hovering behind another?

The body keeps the score. I sensed it in my dreams this morning in the tensing of my tendons and the racing of my heart. But now my mind is awash with clutter. I cannot get beyond the torment of a soul lost in life’s irritations. And a wish to get back into a story. Any story. The story of shame that got me to this point. 

The story of the day I first felt shame, bent over my father’s knee as he belted my backside because I had stolen lollies from the shop. I was a child of five or six. A child who knew the difference between right and wrong, a child who, even so, could not resist the allure of the shop that ran parallel to my bedroom in a place called Sunspot where we lived for one full year while my parents ventured into a business that began and failed in another heartbeat. 

My mother tended the shop alongside the care of her eight children, most of whom were away at school by day while my father travelled the hour plus into the city for his day job as an accountant.

They were migrants trying to make good, the two families, my parents and my auntie Barbara and uncle Gerard back from Indonesia and before then the Belgian Congo those once-colonial outposts of the Dutch.

My uncle had managed rubber plantations in both places where he met and married his 18-year-old bride, my aunt who must then have been in her mid-twenties with three small children in her care.

She and my mother surrounded by children tried to run a shop that few visited. By then, the late 1950s, the tourist trade to the outskirts of country Victoria and places like Healesville had dried up. My uncle took care of the residential cottages on top of a nearby hill where again few, if any, visitors came. They made no money and the business failed.

During this time two little girls stole into the milk bar while the family were at Mass on a Sunday morning and filled their pockets with lollies. When they heard the crunch of car tyre on the gravel outside the girls threw the leftovers they had not managed to eat out the window where one of the brothers later found them. He dobbed his sisters in. 

The shame of my father’s anger in front of my brothers and sisters, and of our eviction to the bedroom for hours until our mother released us at dinner time, stays with me.

A precursor to any other wrongs I have committed, a residue of what happens when those in charge decide to redden your backside and crush you with the indignity of the subhuman.

It’s not what we see, it’s what we don’t see. The rage that percolates below the surface of shame that causes us to hide. The rage that surfaces again and again whenever anyone is humiliated. And all for the sake of a few stolen lollies.