Dream 4 April 2011

In my dream I woke up and staggered into the hallway.  There in the dim light of early morning I could see that unbeknown to us, someone had come during the night and taken out whole sheets of leadlight from the front door.  All the stained glass that lined the inside and outside panels of the front door and overhead had been taken out and smashed.
I could see out onto the street through the exposed panels.

       ‘The insurance will cover it,’ my husband said, nonplussed.  But I knew we would never be able to replace this leadlight.  An artist had crafted it for us.

As calm as my husband seemed, I was desperate.  I rang the police in a panic.  It was seven am and I began work in an hour.

The police officer on the other end of the telephone line was sympathetic as I tried to report the damage.

Small children whizzed around my knees, two of my own children and their cousin, all around eight to ten years of age.  They played rough games.  Each had a spatula, which they used to dig into the garden and bushes.
           ‘Be careful, ‘I said, between sentences, to the policeman.

My youngest daughter, about three years old,  toddled up to me.  She was naked and draped in a towel following her bath.  The police officer overheard her voice and began to ask questions about my children.  I explained that we had been living in the neighbourhood for years and although we had young children, my husband and I were old.  I offered to go to the police station myself to make the report but then realised I did not want to leave the house unattended, not with an open front door.

I looked again at the shards of glass on the veranda and the strips of wood that had once held the leadlight in place, and were now shattered across the garden.  I feared the culprit might have been someone I knew, an eighteen-year-old woman with whom I had worked some time ago.  I knew she had been angry with me.  Whoever it was, this person had caused thousands of dollars in damage.


*


Dream 6 4 11

The surgeon was to operate on my hand.  I had stayed in hospital and there I met a friend G whom the surgeon was also treating.  He was a gynaecological surgeon and at one time during my stay I overheard him in conversation with a colleague.
           ‘I cannot bear to penetrate the women,’ he said and proceeded to tell his colleague of the trouble he went to in his attempts to reassure his female patients that he conducts his practice purely out of necessity.

I challenged him on this and he raised his eyebrows in dispute.  He seemed uncomfortable that I had overheard him and later when he came to see me to check on the wound he had made on my hand he was alarmed.  It would not stop bleeding.

Then I realised the surgeon himself was ill.

He lay down on the couch fading by the minute and my friend G who had also been ill began to administer to him.

Earlier I had overheard G’s husband express grave concerns for her health and now here she was nursing the surgeon.  I felt jealous.  I wanted to do this job, but the best I could do was assist as her second in command.