1 Aug 2025
Dream
This was weird. The last part of the dream was a long call with my sister Ruby, where I went through a video call that I’m going to have with her today at 10. Except it happened at like 7, and we were both in bed, with huge fluffy white bedding like a hotel (neither of our beds look like this). We talked about pay for the upcoming house sitting I plan to do for them. I discussed my normal rate of 60/night, and how I can do less since y’all are family, but Ru was resistant. I didn’t feel quite legitimate asking, but I said I’d been “sick for about two weeks,” and I felt like my throat was sore in the dream and I was exhausted, and I kept genuinely coughing. The coughs were “real” in the dream but timed such that they felt like I was trying to show off how pitiable I was. Her husband Jackson had a long grey measuring tool, like a meter stick, that could be filled with matching measuring tape of several different units. The one they had in there was worn out, which I told them, and I tried to help them replace it before Jackson took it and used it to do something on the ceiling. Something happened up there and I leapt to help myself but I felt physically not great, and also knew Jackson would take over so I was effectively pretending to be more onboard than I was.
When I was talking to Ruby, among the “Dead Sea scroll” of things that were hard in my life, I said it had been SUPER hard to leave home. Sort of hard for me to leave home (as I was traveling a ton recently), but REALLY hard for Marsh to leave home. Marsh is the main character of my novel, a 300-year-old Black woman who survived enslavement and set up a life in eastern Colorado. The dream then transitioned to Marsh (who was somehow me), being driven away from a beautiful colonial home in a hot, dry, sunny landscape. The home was near a few other buildings (Marsh’s home in the actual novel is not extravagant nor is it close to anything, it’s an isolated and dilapidated little white house but she’s been there for about a century and a third). As the distance grew, Marsh grew more emotionally intense and upset. She ended up yelling or moaning so loud that the drivers of the car, which were two unknown white people with children, stopped at a school. The landscape was still super dry and sunny, and while the drivers went inside presumably to find their kids, I stayed in the passenger seat, still as myself combined with Marsh. A bunch of children hovered outside to gaze at me, and a few waved. I smiled and waved back, and considered doing something funny like silly faces or hand gestures but couldn’t decide on anything. A red headed white man with stubble and rough, sunburned skin opened one of the back doors, and he was holding his toddler son. He was looking for something, and I was going to alert him he had the wrong car but he realized it himself and shut the door.
In an earlier part of the dream I saw Loden, who is the resident Buddhist monk at the retreat center I just started working for. I know Loden from having done a retreat with him myself a few years ago—I had an intense experience there that many people witnessed and I’m a little afraid to meet him again, just out of my own embarrassment. He would of course be compassionate about it and likely not even mention it. Anyway, in the dream he said I could be a nun, I had the temperament. My immediate hesitation was shaving my hair, and I imagined my appearance bald, and considered too that it might be interesting to free myself from one of my features I’m most attached to. Overall this was a mixed emotions dream and it closely examined my own behavior, a mix of selfishness and genuine needs. I will be compassionate with myself today.
