Eating Rats

We have three packages of meat, and we open eat the first one--it looks like a rat but it tastes okay and we eat it anyway.  One is small and I tell Keith, poking at it, that I don't want to eat it because it looks like a mouse with the fur still on.  The third package looks like a rat and still has its fur, but worst yet, it is still breathing.  It is a very large Norway rat, except it also has some thick, soft--very soft, dense fur on it's tail.  I pick it up and it come to.  It jumps down and runs into the living room.  I think it is hungry and grab a cheery tomato, which it begins to ravenously eat.  I pick it and the tomato up and put them back on the table.  I am wondering frantically what kind of container we can put the rat in until we decide what to do with it.  Meanwhile, I suggest that the rat might like to eat the dead mouse.  Keith starts throwing the mouse at the rat, not to hit it, but to make it available, but the rat is running around the table and Keith keeps missing. Keith seems to be a bit afraid of the rat,  I wasn't at first and picked it up several times, but it is a very large rat and I start being afraid of it.  I wonder if it was a wild rat.  It looks like one!

12-22-07  No dreamwork right now, too much to do.

Dreaming about painting

I keep dreaming about painting.  I dreamed extensively about it last night and was very excited about my dream ideas when I woke up, but immediately forgot them--wahn.  The night before last, I dreamed I was painting a water scene.  There was a twisting bay or inlet with five rowboats arranged in the foreground in a slightly haphazard but pleasing way.  Each boat had a man in it fishing--some were standing and some sitting,  The boats were all white, but each had a different colored stripe  just under the bow.  The trees in the background were bright with autumn colors.  (But in the dream, the colors of the boat stripes didn't really color coordinate with the scenery--one stripe was a sort of industrial pink and another a sort of industrial grey-blue.)

Fallen

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 (911!)

Last night I dreamed:

We had a stained glass flower on the windowsill in the study. It was yellow, maybe a poppy but probably an evening primrose—primarily the blossom, little edges of the leaves. It has fallen down behind the desk and I am explaining to Biker Buddy that it was irretrievable, but hoping he can somehow rescue it.

I also dreamed that:

Biker Buddy had sex with another woman and is telling me about it as calmly, casually and enthusiastically as he talks about beer and other women’s breasts. I amwondering, in the dream, why I wasn’t planning on divorcing him immediately. In real life, I would! (And I know that in the dream!)


I woke up upset and scared.


and wrote this poem:

Fallen

Behind the massive, immovable desk, a stained
glass evening primrose falls, shining yellow, small
sun, falls from the windowsill and disappears.
Irretrievable, I say, hoping I am wrong and you
will somehow rescue it.

But you won’t listen,
telling me instead, with the same enthusiasm
you have for beer and other women’s breasts,
that you have betrayed me with another woman.
When a primrose falls, it shatters.




Mary Stebbins Taitt
For Biker Buddy, from a dream!
070911 (911!), 1st

Nested in a flower

The Extra Genital

Keith is naked and in a wheel chair. Steve and Sarah are there and upset and I finally see that there is a protrusion, a growth, in the center of his lower belly above his genitalia. I think at first it is his genitalia, before I look closely. A round ball of flesh with pointy protrusions tops a smooth column of flesh like a simple medieval mace (or a slightly overgrown fancy penis, thicker, rounder and pointier at the tip, but shorter than a normal penis). We are rushing Keith to the hospital, although it seems to me that this growth must have been there a long time, in spite of the fact I've never seen it before. It seems so smooth and perfect and well-developed and healthy. We reassure Keith as we rush him toward the hospital, and I am at once worried and calm because for some reason it doesn't seem like that big a deal (although when I wake up I feel a little upset).

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Dream about Peter and the DeVries

I had a long, strange complcaited dream about you this morning, just before I woke.  It was a very fluid ever-changing dream, but unfortunately, I now remember only small parts of it.

I dream that my family and I go to a restaurant where we'd never been before and are unlikely to go again, in some strange, faraway, out of the way place.  They are having a special or something and we decide to stop.  We get inside and lo and behold, who should we see but the entire DeVries family standing in line at the buffet.  The line is long and stretches past a parge stone fireplace and you are all looking intently at something on the mantle.  I shush my family and sneak over and place one hand on your shoulder (Peter) and one hand on Jonatha's shoulder (David is between you in line, Charlie behind Jonathan, your parents in front of you).  You turn around to look at me and I laugh delightedly that we are all here in the same place together by some freak accident of fate.  In this part of the dream, we are maybe me 12 or so?, you (Peter) a few years younger.

More stuff happens, I forget, exactly what, but at one point, I am am looking at you and you are standing alone in a blue shirt and khaki pants and look as if you are about 7 years old (younger than earlier).  I feel a great fondness for you/attraction to you and feel strange about it, because you are so young.

I take my food and sit down at a table in a very large room where there is no one else.  I am the first one into the room and choose a large table and am imagining that you and everyone will come sit with me, but the scene cuts to a few minutes later and you and David and Charlie and Jonathan are sitting with Bob and Tom at a table by another large stone fireplace, all the way acorss the room.  As far away as you can get from me.  I am deeply hurt and offended.  It's a boys only table and there is no room at the table for me.

Then I am sitting with my friend Pam who is older than me in "real life" now.  We are both "old ladies" but you are still a child (maybe about 12?).  You are still at the boys table, far across the room, more people have filled the space between us.  You are a boy, you are far away, and you are young and I am so old.  There is this great gap between us that is too far to bridge.  I wake up feeling sad, somewhat bereft.

The Ejection Seat

Sara and Erwin are helping Keith and me chaperone a group of teenagers in a foreign country. Sara and Keith go to make some arrangements and are going to meet us back at the piazza, but the teens have a little rebellion and want to go back to the hotel after only a few minutes at the amusement park. Erwin and I agree to take them back but I am upset because I can't get a hold of Sara and Keith to let them know. Then we get lost on the way back to the hotel. I am riding in Erwin's car, which was sort of like his current car, but a convertible with the top down. Erwin pushes a button that activates an ejection seat and sends me catapulting through the air across a wall and into a mansion-like home on a hill. He takes off with the teens to go play. I am shaking hands with people and introducing myself in an embarassed way. None of the well-dressed people at the house seem surprised to see me. They are having a party, there are many guests and I am assumed ot be one of them. It is a huge mansion, though and so many hands to shake. I can't find my way out and had no idea how to get back to Keith and Sara to warn them not to go back to the piazza to meet us.

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Don't Read This Poem (An Invitation)

 

My daughter calls from the other room; she's found a family dead.

All dead, all but one small baby hidden among the bedding.  A family

is dead in my room too, leaving another orphaned baby.

 

Don't read this poem.  My teachers told me, don't say that.

Don't mention you're writing a poem.  As if the reader,

dear reader, won't notice.  And don't say anything weird.

 

Over the top, they would say.  There are rules in poetry.

I always seem to break them.  Perhaps I also shouldn't mention

that I am writing this on red

 

paper.  Blood red.  What I picked from the scrap bin, coincidence

or synchronicity.  By the time you see this, though, the red

will have turned to white the way a face loses its color in death.

 

Two families dead, two orphaned babies.  But they aren't people.

We're in the animal-care rooms in the museum's basement.

The babies are mice, one tan, one maroon, both just starting

 

on the first hint of hair, eyes sealed shut.  Orphaned.

Of course, they will die without their mothers; we all know that.

They're not weaned.  But I am, so why the fuss? 

 

Okay, I'm an orphan.  But, I'm also a mother.  I put the babies

in my blouse to nurse from my own breasts.  Could you just not

read this?  I know you'll disapprove, but that's what I did.

 

It's sort of circular, really, since I'm the orphan now.

But I'm sixty, my parents both dead at eighty-three.  No infant, I.

In the dream, the babies grow to the size and shape of ferrets

 

and move inside my silk blouse like snakes, undulating, sinuous.

In my black velvet skirt and blood-red jacket, I hide myself

from everyone so these babies can nurse and live.

 

I am the orphan baby.  I am the snake maiden, I am the mother,

I am the grandmother.  I am as tiny as a newborn mouse

and I am the crone slipping into the grave. 

 

But you knew all that already, and knew the dual nature

of my Geminian twins, the yin and yang of me.  Even,

perhaps, the strange depths to which I'd sink to survive this grief.

 

But did you remember that you had a breast and milk

you could offer an orphan?  If you've gotten this far,

you could hold me.

 

 

Mary Stebbins Taitt

070206c, 1^st Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Here is the original dream:

Nursing Orphans and Outside Approval, Dream Sunday, February 04, 2007

 

Sara and I are in animal care and discover that in two cages of mice in two separate rooms, the mother mouse and all the babies but one (each) are dead.  She discovers one in one room and I discover the other in the other room.  The babies are very small.  They've just begun growing hair.  One is yellowish tan and the other sort of maroon-colored.  I take them into my blouse to nurse them at my own breasts so that they won't die.

 

The scene cuts to a huge science fair.  I am the head judge or some other very important person.  I am wearing a wine-colored velvet jacket, a long black velvet skirt and a wine & black silk blouse.  The baby mice have grown to the size and shape of young ferrets and are living inside my blouse, not weaned yet.  They move sinuously, bulging the blouse oddly.  I worry about offending people with the snake-like babies nursing inside my beautiful clothes.  I worry about it so much that I find a private place to sit, assist the babies in their nursing, and worry about what I should do.

 

 

This is the second dream in two nights that involve nurturing young of other species.

 

The dream poem I wrote yesterday was made of dreams from two different night—the monkey dream and rose petal dream were originally two separate dreams.

 

I don't see much potential in this dream for a poem.  If the monkey dream was weird, this one is weirder and more "unacceptable."