nuns and dreams

Hello,

My new apartment is very oblong. That’s the best way I can put it. One flank is covered entirely in windows, spanning the living room and the bedroom. The natural light is lovely, as it comes over the weathered shingles of an abandoned church. I like to imagine that a cloister of ghostly nuns watch me change every night from the empty maws of the attic space.

Recently, I’ve remembered more of my dreams than I normally do.

In one, I was a cat left in a studio apartment while my owner was on vacation, whining at the door for someone to come home. The kitchen counter loomed so big, and I was left to my own devices to wreck as much havoc as I could. Then the studio grew and I found myself trotting up and down endless stairs that seemed to meld fractals of all the other buildings I’d lived in before. But, somehow, it didn’t smell like any home I knew.

On a plane, my half-dozing mind combined a crying baby and the woman reading scripture next to me into a moment of rapture. Her rosary swung like a pendulum in my mind’s eye, and she took on all the wailing of the child.

Another dream involved what felt like snapshots of Porto, mixed with an art installation in an airshaft—a moldy box of lemons, big boots, and blue jeans in a competing rectangles of light and shadow. There was a hillside beach. A boy gave me unanswerable riddles and asked me to find him through the dunes. And I dreamed of all these blurry figures around him—people who clearly knew him but were determined to not clue me in at all. As I failed to answer each riddle, his face changed and morphed until I no longer understood or recognized it, and it nearly disgusted me.

Usually, my dreams are about losing my hair or teeth or both. They have not fallen within those categories lately, and I’m starting to suspect the nuns. I don’t think I’m a being that can stomach dreams very well—like a mouth full of salt, denying that I’m hungry. Real hunger has a taste, and I’ve gone into weeks of artificial fasting at a time, as if the nausea I feel is worth anything.

We did try to stage a break-in last Saturday. Fences were scaled, pants were torn, foreheads were bruised, and all to no avail. I have one option left before they tear the church down for an apartment building soon. I think if I punch out my screen windows and then lay a really long ladder across the alley, I could probably crawl in through the attic. And then maybe after I crawl in, I can find these nuns and ask them what they’re trying to tell me.

And yet, when I stopped for a cigarette in front of the church a few days ago, there was something nice about the notion of being haunted. Isn’t it a little comforting at times? Some memories, some people, linger on like little ghost lights in my mind.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin

“You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.” George Orr finds himself capable of reality-altering dreams. In a world racked by war and environmental catastrophe, George has to fight off a sleep psychiatrist who seeks to use George’s power for himself. I’m still in the process of reading this, but Le Guin is always a good bet. As she once wrote, “Dreams must explain themselves.”

What dreams have you remembered recently?

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie