Monday, June 21, 2010

Lots of bathroom dreams. Usually it involves me trying to find privacy so I can go, but there's always someone sashaying around. I had some version of this dream for months. But recently the dreams are advancing. In one dream I ran a mile deep into the woods with some other lady poets to find a private spot. We found one, all the other poets dropped trou and started going, but I merely staked out my "spot" and decided to come back when they were gone. This weekend I dreamed that I kept going into the bathrooms that I deemed not clean enough, but I did finally find an acceptable one -- it had a hamper full of blue jeans and cutlery, mostly steak knives.

What's that about? Is the hamper showing something that's already been used? Or something I'm supposed to be using? Should I be wearing the pants and carrying a dagger? Or that the past? And if so, is this a memory I should be exploring?

I'm reading these dreams to be about my writing process--trying to find a suitable (private?) place where I can release and my hesitancy to do so. Bathroom dreams aren't my favorite. While they're clearly not my most disturbing dreams (I think severed penis in my spaghetti gets that honor, Kid Rock sex dream where he ejaculated into a cup a close second), bathroom dreams are not so fun to talk about. "Omigod, I was sitting on the toilet and then I realized there was a guy standing 2 feet in front of me moping the floor and he was all 'Sup.'"

I mean, um, fascinating. Please, tell me more.

Last night I had four writing-related dreams. Three had (or made reference) to poets, the other had drunk dudes worried about saving a few measely beers and a surfer riding the wave in a corn field. There was a B&B and they were racing to it. Like there was just one room left. I haven't dreamed of corn since October 2008. In that dream there was a fire on the hill behind my father's house. I went up after the fire department put it out and found a few cornstalks. A man with me picked an ear of corn.

So what was going on in October 2008? According to my email records: suffering. It seemed like everyone, including me, was suffering. Yes, there were a few stalks spared, but most of it was scorched.

I like to believe those ears of corn are poems -- and now I have a whole beautiful field full of them now, so high and plentiful, you can ride them with your surf board.

I hope the surfer beat those drunk yahoos to the B&B and got the room.

I'm also grateful nobody peed in the cornfield.

4 comments:

  1. I tend to think of all the elements in my dreams as aspects of myself, including the objects. I like to play around with such notions.

    Here if your dreams were my dreams I'd think about me as an ear of corn, me as a severed penis, me as a bowl of spaghetti, me as a bathroom.

    Not for the facts but for the feelings. Dreams travel in disguise and only the dreamer can really land upon the meaning. It's just so idiosyncratic.

    I love to read your dreams, Rebecca - the dreams of a poet - and I suspect you're right, they are most likely about your writing process, and your poems. Thanks.

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  2. Thanks Elisabeth, I follow your dream technique to some extent, but it's a little broader, sometimes the people or the items can be things that are in my life or describing an outside situation. I never thought of myself as a severed penis in spaghetti, I'll have to meditate on that. :)

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  3. "Usually it involves me trying to find privacy so I can go" -->. Whoa, I have that dream too! Sometimes I enter a stall or a bathroom and find there's no wall on the other side.

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  4. We suffer from the same psychological complexes -- cool!

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