Friday, June 16, 2006

Dreaming

I had a dream last night of being on my aunt's farm.

It was very clear--that vivid, clear dream you sometimes get just before you wake up. I had gone back to the farm. I knew that she had died and that her horses were all gone. I had just gone back to walk through the buildings and see what had changed.

I was walking down an aisle in the side barn, a converted chicken coop/vehicle shed which had about six stalls in an odd arrangement. The aisle was much longer than it was in real life. The stalls were to my left. Then rain began to fall just in front of every stall, as if it were coming through a two-foot-long strip in the roof. The dirt floor of the aisle stayed dry.

Then I was in a back pasture. Near a gate was a large grey, black and white pinto gelding I had never seen before. A teenage girl was trying to lead him out of the pasture, but he wouldn't budge. I didn't recognize her either.

Then the former barn manager came by, looking as she did in 1991: short, spiky hair and tough attitude. She was leading a stallion I knew, one which was her very favorite and later ended up buying from my aunt's widower. The girls were yelling at each other.

"Don't lead him in here!"

"I'm gonna!"

"But he hates him!"

"Yeah, I know! Let me get Ned in there! We'll chase yours out!"

Some screaming and circling of horses, chuffing, two young girls yelling at horses to "Quit it!" And then the gelding and handler very sedately walked past. The gelding was a really odd color, and I was trying to figure out why he looked so weird. (I realize now that he was a pinto with brown and white splotches, but that I dreamed him in black and white--he had various patches of grey-tone which looked bizarre.)

Then Ned came by. But he was wearing some strange contraption which looked as if it had been cut from breeding hobbles. (Mares sometimes wear breeding hobbles to prevent kicking at a stallion. It's two padded straps encircling the mare's hocks connected to a strap around the belly. She can stand or walk very slowly, but she can't kick backwards.)

Ned had the "breeding hobbles" attached to only one rear leg, and he had too many other straps going round and round his belly. I was just about to ask why he wore this thing, when I looked out over his back into the distance.

Beyond him was a pasture with ten or twelve horses in it. I didn't recognize them individually, but in the dream I knew they had all lived at my aunt's farm at some point. They were all wearing driving harnesses, the long reins and traces looped up into curls and buckles to keep from dragging on the ground. Wearing blinders, full bridles, and harnesses, they were nonchalantly grazing in the sun.

And then it started raining right in front of me. A straight line of rain, only about three feet long, no more than a few inches wide, sparkling and snapping upon hitting the ground. I could feel the rush of air from the rain so close to my face. And the horses were no longer there, or at least I became so focused on watching the rain that I didn't see them anymore.


******

I'm not sure that all means. I'm tempted to read quite a lot into the idea that I'm holding on to those horses, harnessing them in my memory. Except maybe for Ned--his "harness" was disturbing. (But it could also be some sort of mental confusion of him with Barbaro: injured hind leg.)

Odd too that in this dream, I'm very much aware that Joyce is truly dead. I often have dreams where I'm going back to her farm and discover that she's somehow still alive, that her death was all some odd mistake. And in this dream I was very clear that I was the age I am now, whereas the horses and the people were the way they looked fifteen years ago.

3 comments:

Suisan said...

Well, I guess this is better than an invitation to visit a blog dedicated to my other popular search term, autocunnilingus.

Of course, "Debbie's Petland" gets me a hit almost every day. (Name of a franchise of petstores in Massachusetts.)

CindyS said...

I'm just glad to know that there are others who have 'dead people' show up in their dreams. My last one was about my mother's best friend who died 11 years ago. We were going to her house for dinner and I was stunned that she was there because, well, she is dead and her husband has now met another woman who he lives with. So I ask someone and they tell me she was in a sleep like coma for all those years and came out of it one day. Talk about being freaked out! I felt horrible for her, her family and Carol, the new lady in her husband's life.

My grandmother showed up in a few dreams but they were more spooky than anything. I remember turning at one point and yelling, 'hey, you're dead!!'. I guess I had decided that someone was impersonating her. She hasn't come back in my dreams since. Bad Cindy

CindyS

Suisan said...

Yeah, my recurring one about my aunt is that I've gone to visit her and it turns out that her widower told the rest of the family that she died so that he could "have her to himself."

So she's closeted in the house, happy to see me, but upset that the rest of the family has ostrcized her. I'm standing in the room with her and her husband, feeling threatened by her husband, and I've got to figure out a way to tell her that everyone thinks she's been dead for 15 years. Although I also think she knows that everyone was tricked by her husband. And somehow she's protecting him by not leaving the house.

Very odd.

My grandfather said that he used to practice his Armenian with his father, who used to visit him once a month in his dreams. (Grandpa was also a good story-teller.)