nov 11, 1979
(my twin brother is on the left; i am on the right)
Archive for dream
nightmares
Two nightmares in one night. These days logic drowns. Especially in the dark. I am afraid of being alone. What saves me often: love. I grab onto his hand.
But he’s sleeping, and when I try to wake him he doesn’t understand. A father to his daughter when she comes into our room: it was just a dream go back to bed. He pushes logic but it has spikes sometimes. She cries and sleeps beside her brother instead.
I feel that fear: when I die I will be alone. Love can’t save me from that, and love can’t save me now. I will hold all children who come to my bedside afraid. For now I am a furry animal with a hurricane for a brain and a jellyfish heart.
I turn into my pillow and the night ticks on. In the first dream no one was there and I was lost and it started to snow. In the second dream a man was burning a woman and I was clubbing him in the face for hours.
I need to believe that if I wake, he wakes, and if I stutter out fear he understands and his hands comb my hair, his arms hold me unbearably tight. Then my heart would return to my chest.
What do people do without love. Virginia Woolf says that there are parts of us that no one, not even the most beloved, could ever find.
cookies
I’ve been trying to get back on Eastern time, and meanwhile Steve caught his California nephew’s flu and so either really sleeps or really doesn’t sleep, all with short lungs and a beating head. I caught a small version of it that makes lights too bright and sleep only one inch deep.
Which explains why yesterday I took a four-hour nap, and in this nap I dreamt that I was hungry. My sister declared this a pregnant dream. I was with my family — my sisters and brother — and I found a chocolate bar on the ground. I can still imagine tasting it now, it was in every way delicious. My family thought I was silly for eating a chocolate bar off of the ground, and my brother laughed as he went down to the lake and fetched me some Cheetos in a ripped-open bag. I went to eat those, too, but I woke up.
Which is when I decided that I should definitely make chocolate chip cookies. An excellent reason to wake from a nap. My logic for random baking: it was my sister’s birthday, and though I could not ship the cookies to her, I could eat the sweets in honor of her, and she could eat the photograph.
being there
I believe more and more that I cannot truly know what something will be like until I am there. I had no idea two years ago that, if faced with infertility, I would choose the route I did. I had no idea what I would feel after the surgery, if I would feel resentment or love. I thought that once I got pregnant I would check it off my list and coast through a pregnancy — I had no idea that I would feel the grave statistic so deeply: 20% of pregnancies end in early miscarriage. I had no idea how I would feel about forming a baby. I used to be excited that I would get to eat more, but now that I’m here, I am a fanatic about what I eat: every calorie is worth something to a life that is growing 100 brain cells per minute. Right now my embryo is about 5,000 times bigger than the day it formed; therefore, I shouldn’t eat white bread or drink chlorinated tap water. I had no idea I would feel so much awe over life, that it forms out of almost nothing. I look at Steve in amazement: he used to be a ball of cells, components set to make fingernails and red hair. I look at my dogs in awe: their mothers formed them by accident, without thought, and they are perfect. What are the chances that we work out so symmetrically almost every time? It is a miracle. I had no idea I would feel so invested and in awe of the process. I don’t know if I would feel this way if I had adopted, but I don’t think I would. I had a dream last night that I adopted from China and I woke up excited about our future adoption journey, but for now I am glad that this is the way I am learning what a baby is.
dream
(image from Maira Kalman’s NY Times Opinion piece, In Love with A. Lincoln)
…
Last night Steve made sad sounds in his sleep and woke to tell me about his bad dream. We were in jail and we had to push wheelbarrows up a steep hill and the wheelbarrows were filled with heavy metal things. He made it to the top but I was struggling. People at the bottom of the hill were making fun of me and Steve got mad and started throwing heavy metal things at them. Then he came down the hill to help me push my wheelbarrow up.
I had a dream that my exboyfriend and his ex-wife were still together. She is beautiful in real life, and they were pregnant with triplets. Triplets! But one was dying inside of her. You could see the babies through her stomach somehow and they were so, so beautiful. My heart broke for the one who was dying. You could see its head falling away from its body. Then I was trying to wash clothes but I could not get them white enough. And there were stray cats pissing on our bed.
Sometimes dreams are boring. Most of the time in my dreams I’m trying on shoes all night long or something else monotonous. But with the stress and the sorrow and waking up a lot with my back pain from the stupid fertility drugs — and mostly because the hormones I’ve had to take make my dreams more vivid and colorful — I’ve had the most complex and gorgeous dreams. That is one good thing. Though we both awoke this morning in sorrow. The black dog crawled into bed halfway through the night and he was twitching and shivering in his sleep on one side of me as Steve was moaning in his sleep on the other side and I was awake in between them. The night lasted so long.
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