not again!

I’m cursed! All I want­ed was an inno­cent lit­tle nap! And I did­n’t even get under the cov­ers this time. I lay like a medieval saint on the liv­ing room sofa, broad day­light, hands fold­ed on my chest. And then I had the scari­est dream, all the more scary because it was so life­like! This time I was tak­ing a nap, in my dream, on the liv­ing room sofa, when I began to feel a sen­sa­tion of heat on the side of my head. I reached up, and a whole sec­tion of my hair had burned off from hav­ing one of the ceil­ing light fix­tures descend on me. (Yet anoth­er rea­son to ban­ish over­head light­ing, as if the unflat­ter­ing light weren’t rea­son enough.)

So I lay there tak­ing the burned hair off my head, when I real­ized I was lying on wood, not the sofa. I sat up and I was on the teak din­ing room table. Then I got up ful­ly and none of the fur­ni­ture was in the right place. I remem­bered I was hav­ing lunch with Becky and looked at my watch to make sure I was­n’t late, and my watch was upside down. I leaped up and looked fran­ti­cal­ly around the room, think­ing as I did so, “I’m dream­ing, I’m dream­ing, so I’ll just walk into the kitchen and every­thing will be nor­mal.” I walked toward where the kitchen should be, pass­ing a bas­ket of laun­dry I had­n’t done (and I don’t have a bas­ket), and in the kitchen was all my liv­ing room furniture.

Then I told myself for REAL that I HAD to wake up! And I did. Any dream analy­sis I have ever done tells me noth­ing this time. I have had crazy dreams in the past, back when I owned the gallery, of hav­ing a mouth­ful of unend­ing oat­meal; no mat­ter how much I tried to get rid of it, more appeared. And even I (with a per­fect­ly good PhD but not in psy­chol­o­gy) knew that that dream was about my then-life of always hav­ing to say the per­fect thing to every­one, nev­er being able to say what I real­ly thought. Artists to pla­cate, employ­ees to soothe, clients to suck up to, land­lords to pay. But fur­ni­ture in the wrong place? Hair burn­ing? I’m stumped. So any­body who knows any­thing about this is wel­come to come forth.

Mean­while, in my lit­tle anx­i­ety-wracked house­hold, Keechie is show­ing signs of my attempts to wean her off her twice-dai­ly dos­es of Val­i­um. There is just no doubt that she is a hap­pi­er cat on the stuff. I skipped this morn­ing, real­ly try­ing to get her down to the night­ly dose the vet thinks is suf­fi­cient (of course the ram­i­fi­ca­tions are not on his duvet, they’re on mine). And just now my neigh­bors Janet and John stopped in to bor­row a few chairs for a meet­ing they’re hav­ing and… poor Keechie must have flashed back to mov­ing day, because she flat­tened her­self like a fer­ret and slith­ered as fast as she could to the safe­ty of down­stairs. I myself flashed back to Avery’s birth­day and the extreme­ly expen­sive dry clean­ing bill that ensued, and fol­lowed her down. But she had just hid­den under a chair, and now she’s back up here in my study at my feet, look­ing a bit nutty.

Ah well, the oth­er three of my feline chil­dren and my actu­al human child seem stal­wart enough. So far.