I had a very strange dream last night which I feel certain must have emerged from my innermost self, though its message is still quite foggy. All dream interpreters out there are welcome to have a go at it. In my dream, my sister was trying to orchestrate a reconciliation between my husband and myself. She locked the two of us in a room together so that we’d be forced to look at each other and talk. My husband told me that our marriage was finished and that nothing could come of my sister’s efforts. He began trying to find a way out of the room. Just then a telephone rang and I answered it. It was P.D., my very first boyfriend from high school calling (the only man/boy whom I’ve loved with true abandon, never imagining for a minute that breaking up was even possible). The line was crackly and I could hardly hear him, so I was repeating his words to ensure that I’d gotten the details right. This meant that my husband, who was busily trying to pry his way out of the room, could hear what P.D was saying. The message was something like this: his marriage was over and he needed help. He wanted me to call someone and tell that person about his predicament... except that every time he said the phone number, I couldn’t make out the numbers. He got exasperated and unreasonably angry with me and so I hung up on him.
My husband then seemed to have a change of heart. In my dream I gathered that he approved of the way in which I dismissed my first love. Suddenly, he claimed to want me back, and said that he had found a way out of the room and that I should follow in a few minutes. He seemed to need a head start on finding a place for us to consummate our renewed marriage. Then the videotape fast forwarded, as often happens in dreams, and I was suddenly sitting on the side of the street, naked but wrapped in a bed sheet. I was a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk with other homeless people. I wasn’t at all afraid because I knew my husband would come for me as soon as he found a place for us. I only regretted having no clothes on beneath the sheet, and was afraid of becoming unwrapped as I slept, making my nudity visible to anyone walking by. Fast forward again, and I was stumbling along the street, still wrapped in the bed sheet, trying to find my husband, worried that he wasn’t able to spot me on the street amongst the bedraggled lot who’d been keeping me company. Eventually I found him, just coming out of a hostel of some sort. He didn’t seem happy to see me, but invited me inside nevertheless. When I entered, I noticed that it was not a private room at all but that he had also invited other people. One was an old woman, and the others I couldn’t see but could only hear their voices. In my heart, I had a sickening feeling that he’d misled me and that he didn’t really want to restore our marriage, or else that he’d changed his mind while we were apart.
When I awoke from the dream, my chest was aching so badly, that I had to turn on to my stomach and press my chest against the mattress. It was as though tremendous sobs were trying to burst through my breast bone, and I had to force them back in by pressing against the mattress to block their exit. It was imperative for some reason that they stay locked up inside my chest, even though crying comes very easily in the light of the day.
The saddest part is that the person who always used to listen to me recount my dreams, and marvel at their imagery, their complexity and their metaphors, no longer sleeps next to me. I couldn’t ask him what it all meant. I couldn’t ask him to assure me that he’d never change his mind about wanting me.
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