Dreams

Last week, I had a dream in which I lived in my parents’ house and had my old bedroom and the house looked much like it did in real life. My bed was made and had rows and rows of stuffed toy animals at the head of the bed, as though I were a kid.

I had at least two windows, and I noticed floating through the bright blue sky outside… a log. It was a few feet long and almost a foot wide, and it was gliding through the sky during a heavy wind. It was surreal the way it floated, like stuff going by during the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz (the film). As I watched, it passed the first window and went around, really close to the house, and it came through a window directly over my bed and landed on the bed. This was odd, because the head of the bed was against what in real life was an internal wall facing the hallway and hall closet.

I left the room (the door was in the same place) and went down the hallway and into the living room, where my parents were… and there may have been a little more, but that’s all I remember.

 

This morning, I woke from a vivid dream in which I was shopping at an antique store.

I was mesmerized by many antique dolls, mostly tiny porcelain antique dolls, 19^th and maybe early 20^th century. I especially remember one that was about two inches tall, jointed at hips and shoulders, and wearing a pale blue dress. I was picking out dolls I was thinking I’d probably buy and lined them up on a glass shelf… or on the floor in front of the glass display case and behind something larger, like a teddy bear or rocking horse.

There was a dollhouse, and I also found myself arranging dolls and miniatures inside the dollhouse. On an upper floor, I placed two little girl dolls that each held a violin and bow. I set them on little chairs and noticed that beyond them were a couple of adult dolls, perhaps larger than the scale of the dollhouse, sitting at … desks maybe. I found that it was awkward moving miniatures around with my fingers, and I managed to accidentally knock something down, maybe one of the violins. I thought that maybe I should arrange dollhouse miniatures with tweezers.

I’m not even sure if this was the same dream.

I was in a corner of the antique store where there were utility shelves and I was surrounded by old clothes. I got a fairly large, square box full of antique and more or less traditional Russian clothing.

At another point, I was in a smallish room and came across a bunch of Tibetan Buddhist traditional garb, including a red brocade robe, a robe that was predominantly yellow brocade but also included some other materials (but had sleeves, unlike a Tibetan panel coat), and there was one other traditional Tibetan robe—I forget the details of that one. I stood and slipped on the yellow brocade robe and was thinking I’d like to get all this Tibetan clothing and use the Folkwear pattern for the Tibetan chupa to make a burgundy chupa like those worn by monastics. I liked the idea of dressing like a Tibetan Buddhist nun and meditating in my meditation room… even though I wasn’t planning on becoming a nun.

While I was wearing the yellow brocade robe, a Tibetan man who worked at the store (possibly the owner) noticed and recommended hanging it up carefully, far apart from other garments. I thought about that, decided I’d better not put it in my bedroom closet, since it contains lots of clothing. I stood and turned a bit to look at the back of the garment and was dismayed to observe that some of the panels of this jacket/robe were made of fur—it looked like real off-white animal fur. But I was already so set on getting it, anyway, and I wasn’t up to changing my mind.

Cloister Monkey

I dreamed that I lived in a ranch house in which I had a doll collection so extensive that I had dolls in just about every room. I was showing this collection to someone female… who at some point I realized was Evil Aunt Ethel.

There was a small shelf covered with small dolls in one room, maybe a bathroom. The earlier rooms aren’t as clear in my head now.

Many of the dolls were similar to those I saw in the Cinema Manuel exhibit in the basement of the Hult Center. New-looking porcelain dolls covered several shelves (in the exhibit)—the dolls that were set up so that they could move and seemingly watch you.

Anyway, the dolls in the dream weren’t moving… but neither were they anywhere near as interesting as my real doll collection, never mind that there were more of them. (None looked antique, and there weren’t any Japanese dolls or anything Asian or foreign-looking.)

There was a dining room with a utility shelf or row of utility shelves, on which one large section was covered with a row of porcelain dolls with doll stands. The dolls were all about the same size.

On a wooden shelf, I had rows of dolls, some porcelain (including two very different black girl dolls in a row—and one was a couple inches shorter than the other, one wore red plaid—but they were both porcelain). This bookcase also had a few ceramic figurines, including at least one frog; and I pointed these out and said, “My mother made these.”

That’s when my guest turned into Evil Aunt Ethel. She said (condescending, sing-songy), “You could make ceramics like those, too.”

I felt nervous when she said that. It was like when I mentioned that I didn’t know how to upholster furniture and two aunts ganged up on me, smugly gloating because of this one thing I didn’t know how to do, and they said I could learn how. That was one of those countless occasions when aunts were eager to ignore things I’m good at and blow out of proportion something I’m not good at, trying to make me feel like shit for not being perfect or for not being their weird notion of perfect.

I think that’s when the dream ended.

 

It’s not surprising that I’d have a dream involving my aunts’ delight in this continual inclination to focus on the negative and come up with bizarre excuses to criticize me in attempts to make me feel like shit and hate myself—that was a very common experience around aunts. And it didn’t feel good.

You could say it was part of their gaslighting. Since I wasn’t an expert on every single craft and domestic skill, I was a piece of shit to ridicule. It didn’t matter that unlike them, I can write, draw, paint, sculpt, etc. But of course, nothing I was good at mattered—only what I was bad at or allegedly bad at (“You’re not as good at history as your brother”) or what I didn’t know how to do.

You can expect that sort of behavior if you associate with narcissists and narcissistic sociopaths.

 

I had another dream in which I was thinking about the above dream and described myself as a “wandering cloister monkey” or a “self-possessed cloister monkey.”