Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Of Dreams, Rage and Coffee Cake

I haven’t been sleeping well the past couple of days. I feel like I’m mostly just dozing which is when I have the worst dreams. I even did that thing I swore I’d never do, where Jonathan says something mean to me in my dream and I wake up holding it against him. This morning I had a dream that was disturbing and confusing and oddly satisfying.

It featured a friend of Jonathan’s named Dane (no, Jonathan does not have a friend named Dane, nor does he have a friend who looks or behaves anything like Dane. Dane is named Dane simply because I now spend all day looking at names and I thought Dane was kinda cool). Dane was staying with us because he was down on his luck, though our house didn’t look like our house and I’m not entirely sure that we didn’t move in with Jonathan’s parents halfway through the dream.

Welcome to dream logic. Just stick with me.

Anyway, we were helping him, we were trying to take care of him, to give him a place to stay while he pulled himself together and not only did he ‘accidentally’ walk in on me in the shower, but he ate my coffee cake! I have never, not once in my life, made coffee cake, but in my dream this was a violation of trust on the deepest level. I’d apparently been saving that coffee cake or was planning on taking it to an event or something. He tried to apologize, crumbs all over his mouth, but I was furious. I walked over to where he was sitting at the table, Jonathan trying to explain that his behavior was unacceptable, and I flipped the table over.

Just grabbed it and flipped it.

Standing outside of myself, watching myself in my dream, I was shocked. Then I felt this conscious decision to just go with it, to stay mad and drive home the point. Amidst all the shocked feelings and disbelief that I was behaving like this there was a certain satisfaction. I was actually stepping up on my own behalf to someone who had made me feel vulnerable and who had been walking all over my kindness. I wasn’t just taking it anymore.

Someone at work suggested I run my dreams through a dream interpreter, but I hardly think that’s necessary in this case. I have no concept of what this means for the rest of my life, how it connects with turning the other cheek and all that. It feels like a momentous moment, even if it only happened in a dream.

Plus, now I want to make a coffee cake.


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