Lemony Snicket
Last night I dreamed that I asked my dad and brother if we could take a bus to my grandmother's house (my dad's mother). My dad agreed, and David (brother) came too. When we got there, we all separated. I went out back behind the house by myself. There was a small pool with stones around it and a view towards a hill. On the hill there were three houses. They were all like run-down mansions, quaint and beautiful. There were people living in all of them. It was so peaceful and nice behind the house, and I thought about how I wished that the house could have been kept in the family and that I could have owned it. It became my maternal grandmother's house then, and I thought about how my mother and I could have lived in it together. I worried for a moment about what would happen to the view if any of the three houses that the back patio looked out on were abandoned. Then David was with me, and he was moving lounge chairs into a sunny spot for us by the pool. Then I was in the basement of my paternal grandmother's house. I had a bag full of old toys that I had collected during a previous visit. I was going to add to it. I was looking at little items that would go in a dollhouse. I was examining each one very carefully and choosing only a few. I wanted to wait to choose until I had looked over everything. Everything in my grandmother's house was for sale. But because I was family, and I was only looking at tiny items, I could have them for free. Upstairs there was a big, old dollhouse stored on a high shelf in a living room. I thought about how I might want to buy that house. Then the dollhouse disappeared. My father then became very moody all of a sudden and said that we had stayed way too long and had to leave that instant. I said that I just wanted a few minutes to put the little dollhouse items into my bag. He said that we didn't have time for that and must leave now. He was very agitated. He also said that the toys were not mine to take. I was upset by it all and put a few toys into my bag and left. I felt like I was shoplifting the toys now. My brother quietly went along with everything but kept a distance from my dad and from me. He hadn't brought anything and wasn't taking anything. I felt overwhelmed by my father's sense of importance, and I also felt questioning of whether I was a bad person.
3 Comments:
I called this post Lemony Snicket because it reminded of the style in the movie: everything old and beautiful.
I may be dreaming about grandmothers because of a friend's grief over the loss of her grandmother. It makes me melancholy and reflective about loss and my own maternal grandmother's death. Her house was bought by neighbors and demolished. It was a beautiful old house.
Often relationships with supervisors at work imitate parent/child relationships. I had an interaction with my female boss, M, on Friday that may have reminded me of conflicts with my father. M is stressed about our upcooming audit and has a tendency to attempt to pick insane fights with me and others as a way of releasing her anxiety. This method of coping reminds me a lot of my dad. As if it were terribly important, M came to me on Friday and said, "I noticed you have more blue teddy bears than the other therapists here. That's not fair. They are prettier than the red ones." She's a new manager and doesn't know that we get teddy bears donated every year and that this year we got red ones, and another year we got blue ones (etc, etc). Because all the staff is new except for me, I am from the era of the blue teddy bear. I give them out as gifts to the kids. Anyway, I decided not to go into this explanation but instead keep it simple since we weren't really talking about teddy bears....I smiled and said, "M, why don't you tell the other therapists that they can go in my office and take blue bears. I don't even need to be there when they do." She jotted that down on her notepad and certainly couldn't argue with that. Of course, no one cares about my blue teddy bears!
My brother travels, removes himself, as a way of coping with stress, and I collect, put things around me, as a way of coping: weight, toys, books, dolls, stuffed animals.
A beautiful dream and beautiful comments. Maybe partly about wanting a child?
Dad weighs in on the cautionary and agitated negative side, Dave stays removed.
Papa died 25 years ago March 15! B
What a complicated dream - I couldn't even begin to pick it apart and was thus anxious to hear your interpretation.
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