Back on Track with my Famous Dreams. LOL

May 26, 2007 21:23

I went to bed around midnight last night, which is a good three hours earlier than normal. And this morning I woke up at the usual time, feeling much better..... and having had another of my famous wild dreams. This one is such a doozy, there are so many symbolic elements even while it is a story unto itself..... I looked up a bunch of stuff in it in Mary Summer Rain's "In Your Dreams" which is the best dream dictionary on the market..... SO many things to think about I can't even begin to interpret it here. But I will tell the story! =) For your enjoyment..... =)

In my dream, I was looking for a new place to live, and had come to my wit's end. I needed to be out of the apartment I'm in now, for reasons most people will already be aware of (namely, Ed) and in the dream it had come down to me having to move out without having anywhere else to go. So I went to the old rooming house I used to live in like 20 years ago. It was, and still is, administered to by a NUN. A Sister of Mercy, to be exact. Sister Marise runs several rooming houses in this area, all for the chief purpose of allowing women to have a safe place to live while they financially get back on their feet again. I lived there for about 10 months, about 20 years ago.

Anyway I was going back to the Warde House to see if I couldn't talk Sister Marise into letting me rent a room there again. I wasn't sure if she had an opening or not, but I was going to try. My ex-boyfriend and now friend Paulie drove me over there. He dropped me off at the door (men aren't allowed in) and I went inside.

There is an outer door, an inside door, and then yet another door at the other end of the front hallway leading into the living room. I was let in by one of the other tenants, because I remember waiting in the hallway while they got Sister Marise. I don't know why, it must have been evening or early morning because she was wearing a housecoat and her hair was up in rollers. She was much older than the last time I'd seen her, but she still looked regal and in command. Very sharp old lady, anyway we sat down at the kitchen table to talk and have an informal interview. As we walked through the first floor rooms to get to the kitchen I could see that a lot of the house was under repair and renovation. The living room was gutted and the floorboards were bare and the walls were down to the studs.

Sister Marise explained that half the house was vacant at this time due to the renovation. She was not sure there were any rooms left at the $20 rate (when I was there my room cost $20 per week) but she thought she had some accomodations available at a higher rate, if I was interested. I said I was.

We took a tour through the house, downstairs and upstairs, and I could see what she meant about the renovation making the house vacant. The swimming pool behind the house had been filled in, and an extension built over it, and a whole bunch of new rooms were in the extension, and everyone was relocated to one of those rooms that had stayed. So the entire upstairs of the house was vacant. My old room was gone. Plastic hanging tarps covered that part of the house so you couldn't even really go in there. The two rooms at the top of the stairs were still there, but it wasn't exactly the best place to be right now, with the construction. And sister knew it.

We went up into the attic for some reason, just part of the tour, and Ed poked his head in (figures he would even show up to dog me in my dream! I can't get ANY privacy!) we were looking through old stuff that was stored in the attic, and he looked in, and I told him to go away and leave me alone. Sister gave us both a weird look but didn't say anything. After he left, she took me aside.

She said she had been investing in some very small cottages around town that were good for one person to be away from everything else, much more private. She said she had one available. Was I interested? I said YES! I knew Sister Marise did not take pets in the Warde House, so a separate lodging might be the solution for me and my kitties!

We left the Warde House and went out across the street and walked down a couple of blocks to the railroad flats that are nearby. It's like these big vacant pieces of land with nothing there but shit scrub bushes and culm bits and junk and old train tracks that get used only by freight cars. We walked across some older tracks and over to this spot in the middle of the culm field that I can describe only as a miner's oasis: in the middle of nowhere, suddenly some tall pine trees spring out from the culm bank near a clutch of train tracks that go by. And, nestled in between the trees, was this really old dilapidated shack.

"This is the cottage I was telling you about," Sister Marise said, and I thought she'd lost her mind. Cottage? It was a rundown shack. It was very old, but it looked like it was constructed of some old kind of plywood, not even building materials that were meant to last. She said it had been built by the railroad as a place for the workers to rest while they were repairing tracks, and was never meant to be a permanent domicile, but that at some point in the last few years, someone had renovated it and installed plumbing and a kitchen and bathroom, etc. I was wary, but we went inside.

The screen door stuck into the ground when we opened it, and I had to yank it shut behind me, a sure sign of settling. And of not being plumb. LOL Inside the front door, the main room was still furnished with these old thrift store hand-me-downs. A metal frame bed in the corner opposite the door, a lumpy throw rug in the middle of the floor, and an old armoire in another corner. She opened the armoire doors to show that it was made to hold a TV inside it. The rest of the room was fairly plain. She said to me "this is supposed to be a living room, but the woman who used to live here used it as her bedroom. She didn't get out much. And she just passed away recently, so now it's vacant. I haven't had a chance to haul her stuff away yet, but then I thought maybe someone else moving in here might need it, so I left it."

Suddenly it occurred to me. "Did she die in that bed?" Sister nodded, but said it was ok. She climbed into the bed to demonstrate that it was okay. "See, there's nothing wrong with it now." I sat down on the throw rug and it wiggled and squirmed under me. I screamed that the floor was moving under me, then I rolled off the rug and lifted it up and there was a pile of young kittens moving around under it, and a puppy, and the cat momma who could have been no more than 7 months old herself. She'd been nursing all the kittens AND the puppy out of necessity. I let them all out, and they started roaming around the shack.

Sister was surprised to see them there. "I didn't know Helen had cats....." and then I opened the door and the little cat momma went outside easily. "I bet they were outside strays that she took in, or at least the momma, and maybe she had her babies here....." I said. I wondered about the puppy, but didn't say anything. Suddenly the house was surrounded by these really BIG black and white feral cats, and the little cat momma was in danger, and I opened the screen door again and she barely got inside and I yanked the door shut (remember, it was sticking in the dirt) and the ferals were all around the house. The little momma went to lick her kittens, and Sister Marise asked if I'd like to see the rest of the cottage. I was surprised, for some reason, from the outside, it looked only big enough for this one room and maybe a bathroom. But apparently there was a lot more! There was suddenly a hallway going off to the side that I hadn't noticed before, and we walked down the hall to find a bedroom down and on the right. I walked into the bedroom, and there was a full size bed kitty corner from the doorway, but the floor in this room sloped down towards the bed really bad and I understood why "Helen" had chosen to sleep in the living room. We looked quickly into the old dilapidated kitchen and bathroom which were on the other side of the hall from the bedroom, and now Sister said I had seen the whole cottage.

But I looked, and I could see a hidden set of stairs that went down into a lower level. I stuck my head down through the railing, and I could see that, far from descending into a gross nasty basement, it went down into a lighted, dry, lovely art deco hallway with sconce lighting and posh carpeting on it. I motioned to Sister to follow me, and I went down the stairs. It was weird because the stairs were actually mounted along the wall and weren't really a staircase so much as descending along the wall on these artistic clusters of shelves or something. At any rate, we got down to the lower level, and suddenly we were in a beautiful hallway that led into a MOVIE theater!

The theater was very recently renovated but it was done to the old art deco style of an old style theater, complete with plush velvet curtains and seats and thick padded carpeting and a lighted bar along the side. It wasn't one of those modern cineplexes with multiple screens. Instead, people were coming in from the main doors, and they could go sit at the bar on the left and get drinks, or sit down in the rows of seating on the right, and watch a movie. And the man running the place was dressed up really nicely. He had a tux on. There was a bartender with the gartered sleeves of the olden days, and the man chopping tickets was similarly dressed. Sister and I were in shock. Apparently the ground was terraced really strongly and what seemed like a single level shack on the one side had this underground level that had been dug out from the other side. The shining chrome and glass doors opened out onto a fairly heavily trafficked side street. And patrons were coming to the theater left and right.

While Sister was dickering with the manager as to who OWNED the place (since she had been sold the building) I was asking the ticket chopper if I moved in upstairs, could I come downstairs and watch movies for free? And he said, everything but the blockbusters and the new movies! Like as soon as a movie had been there a week I could see it.... I told Sister Marise I was going to think about it, but I was pretty sure it was going to be a yes, and I walked out the theater doors and found myself on the street.

Sister remained behind, arguing with the manager.

Instead, I was joined by a young Vietnamese man and a teenage girl, who walked me back up the street towards the Warde House, asking me various questions about my morality. Since I was asking to move into a house owned by a nun, I had to be a good moral Christian, they said. (I went through this whole rigamarole when I lived there 20 years ago, so I knew how to answer all their questions and I did)

As we got back outside the Warde House, I woke up.
Previous post Next post
Up