My dreams from Thursday, 2022–02–10

The possibility of flight. Goodbye party.

First dream. There’s a quiet party, of people of all ages, that’s also like being imprisoned for the night, the way you felt in prison in the daytime when you were in school. It isn’t terrible; some of it is kind of okay, but you can’t leave, nor get away from people who hate you. This is in a big one-room rectangular white-sheetrock apartment with a high ceiling. I’m who I am, at my real age, standing perfectly balanced, my feet and toes curled down around a basketball in the middle of a hard queen-size bed. A strange thirty-something businesswoman, who in the dream is my mother, is lying on her side on the foot of the bed keeping an eye on me.

I’m enjoying how well I can keep my balance. I hop up and down on the basketball a few times, and each time I spent longer in the air, until I’m hovering just below the ceiling with my legs out and slightly bent as if I were sitting on the floor. I say to the mother woman, “How is this possible?” She says nothing. Maybe it’s not happening; maybe I’m hallucinating flying. I call to some of the other people around and say, “Look at this! How is this possible?”

I get down and wander around the room, thinking that it might be a good idea to jump up in the air again, just to see if flying was dependent on the bed or some magical quality of the basketball or the position in the room, or if I can just do it any time now. I try to surreptitiously make myself light and float up. My feet stay on the floor.

I wanta just go outside and jump. There’s no way to leave.

Next dream. After a blurry kaleidoscope of familiar-seeming but unfamiliar school experiences I’m invisible in a big strange apartment. This is not the same place as the previous dream but it might be in the same building, and I’m in a party for college friends to say goodbye at the end of school and probably never see each other again. Also there’s a sliding glass door to a grass yard and a regular door by the refrigerator, to my right, that has a coat-rack and shoes on the floor, so that’s a way out too. (As well as the school stuff, here I remember the previous dream’s events and problem.)

I become visible, naked. A smart/troubled girl with a shaggy mop of stiff reddish brown hair is saying her goodbyes. She’s bored. She has a book-pack-like handbag in one hand and her sunglasses in the other. She comes around the serving island, from the living room, to say goodbye to me, looks me up and down for comic effect for the others, puts her bag and sunglasses down and hugs me. She is as tall as I am. We float up off the floor and spin slowly, like a music-box ballerina, away into a hallway that leads to the bedrooms. Everyone else expected this all along, like, when are those two going to get together, and oh, finally, of course, at the end of everything. (What’s weird here is, usually if I start to get involved with a woman in a dream, I think of Juanita and either call it off or think, /This is a dream so no harm, no foul./ In this case, Juanita never enters my mind.)

I woke up to the big truck idling in the next yard, with /Wouldn’t It Be Loverly/ from /My Fair Lady/ playing in my head, the part where, “Oh, how loverly to be abso-bloody-lutely still. I would never budge till spring crept over me windowsill.”