Dreams of stone
Dreamed I was this little girl’s ‘imaginary friend’ or something. I think I must have been a plush toy that she carried with her, but I could only come alive when her parents weren’t looking; just her parents though, because later in the dream I spoke to other people. The family was traveling to Chicago, and they let her ride behind their wagon on her bike for a short while, with me. Big mistake, of course, as she fell behind, and then we were lost. I came alive to console and help her, guiding her to just continue following the road after them. There was something about knowing we were close to Chicago when we hit wheat fields, but what we came to instead were rock caves. The road continued on inside through them, and the passage through rock was short before we saw sky again, but there were still more of these short rock tunnels to go through. The rock tunnels were full of skulls, of all kinds of different creatures, and after we got through a couple, she lost her nerve. I calmed her down, and asked if she just wanted to rest there for the night, because it was getting dark. She deliberated a little, and decided against it because she couldn’t rest so close to these spooky caves full of skulls. We only had to go through a few more rocky tunnels, and then an area that looked like a rocky desert, and then we hit the wheat fields. The wheat fields didn’t go on long, before we hit a rocky area with stone steps and some people milling around. I had been to Chicago before, and this was the entrance (wtf? I have, but Chicago doesn’t look a hell of a lot like this…), but she was tired and upset and had apparently expected they would be waiting there outside the entrance. She broke down and started crying, and I was trying to console her, but all this attracted the attention of some kind of security guard and he came over to find out what was wrong. In this situation, I think I had to stop talking and everything, and pretend to not be real. We had to cross the ‘nickel bridge’ to get in, which turned out to be a little small footpath bridge. The guard le us in for free so she could go find her parents, but that’s all the help he gave us and we were back on our own. The bridge put us inside this big place that was a museum in the upper levels, and a kind of train station at the ground floor. I knew my way around, and basically led the kid while asking people if they’d seen anyone resembling her parents, or looking for their lost kid. Then, my parents called me on my cellphone. (??!?) I told them what was going on, and asked if they could try reaching her parents, and reassured the kid that we were okay because mine could reach us, at least. I guess even imaginary friends have parents? Anyway, I talked briefly with some teenager, about what I don’t remember, and then I led the girl downstairs to the station part of things. It looked a little like parts of Grand Central, or a Greyhound terminal, but there were no trains. Lots of doors. It was only a few minutes before her parents and other family members (maybe we’d been going there to visit them?) found us, and I settled back to my silent role.
This dream kind of faded away, and there were less coherent bits of being this curmudgeon-y old father who was estranged from his family and dying of some terminal illness, then things shifted into a more coherent dream where I was one of the kids of said father. Location-wise, the whole thing seemed to take place in my parent’s yard the way it was when I was a kid, starting at the bottom of the hillside where the old path let out into the grass. I was me again, or some version of me, the same as I was for the earlier dream. I’d taken up rock carving, and people were just starting to pay me for my work. I was doing large sculptures, sometimes carved into/as a part of natural outdoor rock formations. My life up until this point had been pretty much what it is now; bouncing around from one dead-end job to another, while doing the art stuff on the side. The estranged father came to visit me, and sort of told me what was going on, that he was dying and he wanted to see his kids and stuff before he went. It was all very sweet in an awkward grouchy way, kind of like Telve. Next we were in my truck, and I was driving him to my house and awkwardly telling him about my recent career move, only we were moving up the road beside the hillside. It all felt kind of disembodied, like what was happening in the dream didn’t have much to do with the imagery of my parents yard. I offered to make a sculpture of him as a memorial, but when I told him how big my work was, he said even he wouldn’t want to see a sculpture of himself that size, and was pretty sure no one else would want to either. It made us both laugh and broke some of the tension.
Then the damn phone rang and woke me up.
This dream kind of faded away, and there were less coherent bits of being this curmudgeon-y old father who was estranged from his family and dying of some terminal illness, then things shifted into a more coherent dream where I was one of the kids of said father. Location-wise, the whole thing seemed to take place in my parent’s yard the way it was when I was a kid, starting at the bottom of the hillside where the old path let out into the grass. I was me again, or some version of me, the same as I was for the earlier dream. I’d taken up rock carving, and people were just starting to pay me for my work. I was doing large sculptures, sometimes carved into/as a part of natural outdoor rock formations. My life up until this point had been pretty much what it is now; bouncing around from one dead-end job to another, while doing the art stuff on the side. The estranged father came to visit me, and sort of told me what was going on, that he was dying and he wanted to see his kids and stuff before he went. It was all very sweet in an awkward grouchy way, kind of like Telve. Next we were in my truck, and I was driving him to my house and awkwardly telling him about my recent career move, only we were moving up the road beside the hillside. It all felt kind of disembodied, like what was happening in the dream didn’t have much to do with the imagery of my parents yard. I offered to make a sculpture of him as a memorial, but when I told him how big my work was, he said even he wouldn’t want to see a sculpture of himself that size, and was pretty sure no one else would want to either. It made us both laugh and broke some of the tension.
Then the damn phone rang and woke me up.