Relentless Inquiry

The wind in my dream was a problem, it was blowing the door shut in my new apartment. My new apartment? I'd decided to get my own place, though I was still married to Mike. It was upstairs, or downstairs, or sideways, I can't really tell, from the apartment/house shared by my friends M & R, long since divorced. I'd always hoped to become part of their family, and for a while, I practically was, back in Mt View in the early 90's. I drifted away from them later, when it was clear that neither really valued me as a friend anymore, alas. But I'd been so preoccupied with the early Mike years that maybe they thought they were being reactive, not proactive. I don't know.

There was much more to the dream, a holiday crafts sale, a little girl who looked like R but had lots of piercings and tats, naked men I don't know (plus Mike) trying to fix a clog in M & R's bathtub that had flooded part of their house. Mike was the one who actually fixed it, and the men were all naked so they could just shower off after touching the yucky water. When Mike got into the tub to use the plunger on it, one could see that the perspective had been wrong, that instead of a lavish 2-person tub, it was really the size of a small swimming pool. I was amazed, and wondered if it had been like that all the time, and one of the men said, “oh yes, this tub is the main feature of the house!”

I somehow ended up in my new apartment, with Mike playing some kind of musical instrument in a comfy chair in my bedroom. I was closing the shutters on the windows against the howly wind, and the shutters cranked down from big fan-lacy things with patterns to small non-abstract patterns, and each pattern somehow appeared on the window shutter (closed) over the bed.

I woke up, for real, on the couch, where I'd lain down after doing an svn checkin at slightly after 9am. I woke up at 7am today even though I'd gone to bed at 2am, so I figured I'd finish something else up. The real wind was blowing in my living room. Dry, leaves from the neighbors' jasmine tree were blowing into our driveway, skittering like a giant mob of hermit crabs in some kind of horror movie. I sat briefly in the driveway hall bathroom and hoped that George Romero was nowhere nearby. What a sound! And the wind howls briefly between the homes here like it used to wrap around the corners of my second-floor farmhouse room in Maine. The wind chimes are silenced by the bean tendrils that claimed them in my absence at Burning Man. I'll free them in a few days when I take down the bean vines for the fall. I knew it was autumn last night, when it was 9pm and I thought it was later, since it had been dark for hours. I knew it was autumn also this morning, when the house was at 64 when I woke up, and I ran the heat briefly to take the chill off while Mike was in the shower.

Wow. Completely mutant dream. I miss the old days with M & R. I would have cheerfully joined their family, and always hoped I'd settle down with someone who they'd like too, and we could all get a duplex together. They didn't dislike Mike, but there wasn't the same kind of clicking with him that there would have needed to be. Matters not, as they are separate items with separate folks, and all of us changed over the past decade or so since we spent any serious time together. But what a mutant dream.