Friday, March 1, 2013

When a home changes hands in a dream


[Marz took this photo of me asleep (on our new orange couch).]

Since my mother's suicide in 2002, I have repeatedly dreamed of going back to her old apartment--the one by the lake, where she was happy for a few years, not the one she died in. 

It's always a bittersweet visit:
she's always dead in this dream (not necessarily the case in other dreams), but her apartment is a curiosity cabinet, still full of wonderful little things for picking up: objects of milk- or sapphire-colored glass, smooth river rocks, or something woven from wool picked off barb-wire fences.

Wicker baskets on the floor are full of clippings and handwritten letters, books and magazines, places to read marked with ribbons.  

Sometimes I take a few things for myself.

Last night I dreamed I was there again, and for the first time in ten years, the landlord was also there, getting the place ready for new renters. 
I was amazed, but I also wondered why it hadn't happened sooner. 

Most of my mother's things were gone.
Knowing it might be my last visit, I took a knife whose blade folded up, like a switchblade, into its blue stone handle. (Not something she ever owned.)

If a home changes hands in a dream, is it forever?


4 comments:

Laura B said...

Wow.....as someone who likes not to "analyze" dreams, but to let their information more fully inform oneself, I think the most important question is how did you FEEL in the dream, about this situation?
Sometimes the feeling is quite different from what one thinks one would feel in "real" life.
Did you feel sad? Relieved? Angry? Surprised? Happy?
And then, what the elements make ME think of: what springs to my own mind, symbol-wise...
the landlord is someone who takes charge, who makes things happen, who oversees transitions.
A knife cuts things, severs things, makes a cut. A knife, or anything, folded up, is something put away, something not needed now, something stored safely.
A blue stone- blue is the color of healing, a stone can represent crystallized truth, groundedness, something taken from a liquid state distilled down to something hard & flinty, or permanent, or a concrete something.
As for your question, do I detect a wistful yearning that you don't want it be so, that a home changes hands forever? Many people use the idea that YOU are actually everything in the dream, or that everything in the dream is different parts of you. I often think of a dream as telling my waking self something from another part of myself, that my waking self hadn't caught on to yet. Using that idea, it is only forever if YOU want it to be forever.

Fresca said...

Hey, Laura!

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Good questions/points!

A weird thing to me was, I didn't really FEEL much in the dream except some surprise that the landlord had finally rented my mother's apartment.

I do resonate with your metaphor of the knife folded up being something not needed now...

The question--Is this forever?-- truly felt like an open question to me:

Does a change in a recurring dream signify a permanent change that in that layer of my [subconscious] reality?

I think I can only wait and see...

bink said...

I will be curious to hear if you dream of the apartment again...

Or if you visit a different apartment of your mother's.

Or a childhood home.

It's all still there somehow.

Fresca said...

I'll let you know, bink!