House dreams

For anyone who still checks here after my long hiatus:

Yes, another few house dreams. I've neglected writing it down for quite some time...but I'm having trouble picking through some other writing tonight, and I've shamefully neglected this blog, so here it is, if not in full detail...(because I owe myself some sort of writing tonight):

It was a house in the country-side of Greece in this dream; a low, single-storied & single-roomed stone house, warm with sun on its smooth weather-worn outside, cool and clean on the inside. Hard-packed dirt floors, and windows - all but one - with no glass: windows that were cut into the inches-thick stone and on whose stone-dry sills the sun was hot. In this house, my friend Neil (from tango) & I ran a printing press (I have been reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf, and so the Hogarth Press is much on my mind, among other things; with these latest house dreams have come dreams of wars in which I am killed & wake before my body falls). We worked in silence there: a compatible, content silence as we set the type by hand with tired but happy fingers.

Until, as always, the "seizure" came - this time, the classic mob with torches & pitchforks. Oddly, people I haven't seen, haven't thought about in ages. Years. But before they came, their words came. Words they had spoken about me back then, and in the meantime, and words that they drove ahead of them now. Hateful scrawls materialized on the walls of my home, even etched themselves into the glass of our one glass window, heralding my attackers' ambush.

In the beginning, they came one by one, appearing in this corner of the room, at that window, along this path outside, until there was no avoiding any of them. And finally, along the main road, I saw the mass of the people moving, a sinuous black snake winding down the red-brown sun-glazed road, cutting through the yellow-green fields. Panicked, I ran to Neil, who stood outside the house, who did not know these people nor at first understand their ominous significance. In our silence, which we still kept, I could not explain - only threw myself against his chest, his white shirt blinding in the sun. And the crowd surrounded us - he wrapped one arm around my back, and beat them back with the other until there was nothing left but to run, to abandon our stone house & printing press. We ran to the field behind the house - he ran behind me, and with one hand, pushed on my back, pushing me faster and faster until he himself couldn't keep up, and fell behind. But in our silence, I knew this was what he intended.

Strangely (as it happens in dreams), I understood the University of IL to be only a few hours' run through this field, and I understood that if I could get to campus, or even more specifically, if I could get to the Lieberman North Star sculpture on the engineering quad (the sculpture I went to so often when my own was finally defunct), I would be safe. But it would take hours, even running; it would be dark by then. I had to call...someone - and I had a mobile (which, incidentally, in real life, I had only just got that weekend).

So I made my "911" call, still running even as I dialed his number. I first asked how he was. Fine. I asked if he was still with his father (in the dream, it was Father's Day). No, not anymore. I asked if he could come pick me up and bring me to the sculpture (not asking if he would sit with me at its base, which I needed to feel even safer...). A long silence, during which I slowed, stopped, out of breath. "I don't think that would be a good idea." Without a goodbye, I hung up and simply began running again. At which point I woke up.

And another dream, which I had before that, but only remember a fragment of (but really, the most important bit I think):

I was in what I instinctively knew to be my new kitchen in Irvine. I stood barefoot in the unlit room alone with one box, and was unpacking one by one plates of all different colors - hefty, solid, "real" - plates, and then stacking them one by one in the cupboard above me. Doing this gave me a sense of not only filling my home, but somehow, of filling myself. Not my body, but my self. Stacking these plates, slowly, evenly, one by one - I was happy. This - this - was peace, I knew.