Dream 14 March 2011

I went to see a couple who worked together as joint therapists.  They had an odd technique.  Each worked separately or as a pair to somehow unseat their patient’s defences.  They had a way of making you feel as if you really mattered for the duration of your session time.  They prodded and probed.  They encouraged you to take up all sorts of unusual positions, for me one that involved climbing to the top of a tower, something I would never normally dare to do, but by the end of the session as the next clients were lining up to enter the space, your time was over and you would be sent off unceremoniously as if what had just gone on for the hour before was all a charade.

After this session I needed to get home.  I travelled alone but I knew that my sister and a friend who then morphed into one of my daughters travelled in parallel , but across different routes as they too made their ways home.

At one stage halfway up the side of a mountain I heard the screams of my friend/daughter and rushed to the other side to find that she had fallen into a river.  There was a chance she might drown and I had to work fast to free her from underneath the branch in the river that now pinned her down.  The dream went on but my memories of it stop here.



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Dream, 27 March 2011.

I slept late and in the morning I dreamed I was staying at a friend’s house in the country, a large sprawling country estate that had been built several years earlier and was now in a state of polite decay.  Things that were broken had been left that way.

There was a party in progress for the oldest daughter of the farmer who owned this property, but she was not there.  She had already been shipped off overseas to enjoy a post school sabbatical, though I wondered why.  She did not deserve it.  She had scarcely done any work in her final school years and had only just managed to scrape through her year twelve.  But her parents were indulgent and they could not see what else to do with this wayward daughter.  The other daughters were more amiable and hard working.  One of them was a friend with one of my daughters, which is how I found myself at this party.

At one stage one of my daughters came up to me.  She was cross because I had forgotten to do as he had asked earlier that day.  She had been away at work all day and had asked me to telephone another of her friends and invite her to the party.
 ‘I forgot,’ I said and my daughter huffed off.

It was too late to invite the girl but I rang her anyhow in the faint hope she might still come as a companion to my daughter.  No such luck.  The girl could not come but at least I had tried.

I wandered around the property, mock Roman statues everywhere, in some places missing a nose or an arm or the fingers on one hand.  They were rendered in white painted concrete and had an eerie feel rather like a plaster of Paris figure I had seen in a photo the day before of a person sitting astride a bed, all white bandages to shape the man’s body.

I sat at a table then with two women and a young priest in black clothes.  The women were having a loud conversation about the priest wondering together whether or not he was gay. I could see he was embarrassed.  They talked about him as though he was gay.
‘What does it matter?’ I said and tried to draw the priest into the conversation where at least he would not be so objectified.
‘I think everyone is gay to some extent,’ I said.

The priest smiled but did not divulge his orientation.  Secretly, I hoped he was not out rightly gay because I found myself attracted to him.  I would have no hope with him.  He was a priest and if he were gay as well, I would have no hope at all.