Dreaming

The organization for this section of my writing is very difficult. There are a lot of layers, and they aren't even neatly stacked, but all knotted and twisted together. The insights have been good. Even just thinking about what to write this week I have made some connections that I hadn't before. There are just going to be a lot of detours along the way, and in some ways that makes it easier.

I have sort of an instinct about what to read when. One of the directions I have been led in recently is about dreams. I will probably write more about that later, but one reason it interested me is that I used to have more productive dreams, where I would get a lot of story ideas from them and insights about where I was in my life.

I had been in a rut lately, awake and asleep. All the dreams I could remember were about trying to get someplace and encountering obstacles, or having tasks to do that keep expanding. It's not that those dreams were not saying anything valid about my life - they totally were - but I was wanting more, both awake and asleep. I thought the reading might help me get unstuck, and there have been two dreams recently that have been kind of pertinent. I want to write about one.

I have written about finding one great friend in grade school and then a good group of friends in junior high. Things changed a lot in high school, and my friends changed too. Some of that was different activities and interests, but part of that was also just lunch schedules. It changed a little every year, but for a while I was eating with one old friend, one new friend, and a couple of people that I didn't love.

I still hadn't gotten into "frenemy" territory, because no one was doing any manipulation or power plays (or they went over my head if they were), but I didn't connect to the others as well. One of these was Michelle.

A memory that comes back to me periodically is that we were talking about marriage and how old we wanted to be when we got married and things like that. I thought I would be the first married because I was always all about that and the whole chastity thing. I said I thought I would be first, and Michelle contradicted me in a very knowing way.

She was correct - the people that I know of have all been married and I have not - but the smug way that she said it kind of bothered me, like she knew something I didn't. I would sometimes think that I should have asked why, and I had thought that recently.

Well, the night of the 6th, I dreamt of Michelle. We were riding a bus (public transit, not school bus) and we recognized each other so we were talking, but she had headphones on and she kept mishearing me. Everything she heard was insults. I didn't pick up on it right away until she repeated something, but then I was horrified and trying to correct her, only she kept the headphones on so it was not going well.

I went past my stop to try and fix it, quite a bit out of the way. I was trying to transfer to the MAX line to go home, and we ended up crossing the river into Sellwood. Finally she said, I guess as an explanation for why the communication was so difficult, "I am an unhappy and judgmental person." Then we hit the end of the line, and she was the relief driver so she left the conversation to go drive the bus. It occurred to me that I should have asked about that other incident, but she was already gone.

There are many things that I could see in this dream, and probably some things I am missing. I don't think I was insulting to her back then, but I do know that there are people I deal with now who take me wrong, and I think it is fair to believe that they are not hearing me right. It doesn't mean that I couldn't do things better, but there may be some points that it's not worth making.

That's just something I thought of now. What struck me then was that I do let other people's needs take priority over my own, sometimes pointlessly so. If she was that motivated to understand me, she would have taken off the headphones.

When I do this, I let other people set the course. Okay, I don't drive. That often puts me on the bus, I do run into people that way, and I am fine with that, but here she literally became the driver, and I was not.

I am working now with issues of communication, but also with issues of prioritizing my own needs. I know it has not been my strong point, but that was a highly visual representation of how far I can end up off course if I don't put my foot down.

The other thing that was nice was that it answered the question for me. I know that I have my insights now into how I got from there to here, including never having been married, but there was this thought that if I asked then maybe I would have learned something valuable. Now it clearly feels like a "no", she did not have any valuable insight for me. She didn't really know me or care about me, so she was not going to give me wise counsel.

The blogging right now is more about my past, and the things in my dream were really more about my future, for getting where I want to be (and for the present, for some of the things I am dealing with), but it all connects. As a person who was part of that time period that I am going back to, she was a good representative for the dream, but she also reminds me of what won't work going forward.

It works for me.