Dream, 1/13/89 (Friday the thirteenth), Council, Idaho
By Frances
Slept till after noon again, still don’t know what’s wrong with me. Stayed up till 2, but even so, who needs ten hours of sleep? To dream? I certainly have been dreaming.
Just woke up from this dream. Timothy and I are in the same house I have dreamt about several times during the past years. It is the old house on Bay Farm Island, but altered, the house I lived in with my mother, Tootles, Gramma, and Gene just before I got married the first time. But the dream house has several added-on rooms and it’s in much worse repair than the real one. This time it’s cluttered with junk. I like it very much. The dream opens with me and all my kids. I have just left their father, Big Bill, and we’re trying to find some place to live. The house appears and we start to move. Big Bill is there, in and out of the dream, asking to help. I want him gone. I want him OUT OF THERE!
The neighbor kids come over. I tell them to leave because it isn’t lunch time yet. Sue, about ten, cries, “But I never get to treat them to anything and they always treat me.” I say, “I know, but we don’t have anything. Bring them back after noon and I’ll try to find something.” It’s sad. Sue is embarrassed. Too true, too true.
Switch. The kids are grown. Timothy and I, Jennifer, John Finney, and Dan McGriff (that really is a dream!) are in the house with all the rooms. We are supposed to move to the big house way out in the boonies somewhere, where we can’t get to town. The house keeps switching back and forth between when the kids were little and when they were grown. But now there we are.
Switch. I am alone in the back of the many-roomed house. I discover a room full of my old things: my best books, my best records, and a whole bunch of a funny kind of cassette tapes, about and inch and a half square, with really good music on them. I take them to show Timothy. “What kind of tape player would use this kind of tape?” He says, “I never saw anything like this before.” He proceeds to try for a scientific explanation.
Switch. Timothy and I are in a car that you have to stop with your feet, a pedal car. We are going onto a run-away ramp somewhere in Santa Cruz. It is very dark and rainy. We go up the ramp and get our feet all muddy from stopping, but we stop. We get out. There are people around. People lined up on gurneys. Someone says, “We need help here, we need an ambulance.” He looks like an EMT or something like that; he goes around taking pulses. Now the gurneys are lined up next to the run-away ramp. Weird. The woman who is supposed to be sick gets up and walks. Her friend says, “She’s all right.”
Switch. Back to the house with many rooms. Jennifer likes it. Dan likes it. John likes it but says, “It would cost too much to fix this thing up. You’d be better off with something else.” I say, “But I love this house. Look here.” I take him on a tour. The house is normal in the front, a normal house built in the nineteen-thirties, three bedrooms and a bath, nothing special. But when you walk through the kitchen to the back, there is a room built on, then in back of it is another, with a loft above, painted red, looking like part of a barn. Beyond the second room is another room with a toilet, and straight back from that are two rooms side by side. The one on the right is a galley kitchen with one of those metal kitchen units, then a toilet. The one on the left is the room with all my stuff. I start taking things off the high shelf, reclaiming my things. I know we could not live here, we have no money. And the down payment would surely be $2,000 dollars. Who would lend us $2,000? And how would we make the payments? Oh well. It was exciting finding all my precious stuff. I had entirely forgotten about it, only vaguely remembered ever seeing it. I don’t remember what I did with it, I guess I woke up.