The keys, by the way, are still missing

This morning I’m plagued by a dream hangover. Few things are more tedious than the recitation of someone else’s dreams: bear with me for a minute.

Two nights ago I was visited by one of my greatest-hits recurring dreams. (The others are: the dream of previously undiscovered rooms, the dream in which I witness an airplane crashing, the dream in which a car I am attempting to drive proves impossible to control, the dream in which I have sex with my mother and kill my father–wait, no. Scratch that last one.) Anyway, one feature my recurring dreams share is my conviction, while asleep, that I’m finally actually experiencing the dream I’ve had so many times. “I knew this would happen in real life someday,” I think to myself in the dream, as I watch the plane crash or kill my father on the road to Thebes. “Why, this is just like that dream I’ve been having for years!”

(An aside: There are presently FOUR blue jays battling over the suet in my feeder. Three cardinals are scolding them. So far today I have had a downy woodpecker, several fat little juncos, a nuthatch, a couple of mockingbirds, the usual chickadees and titmice, and a very bossy Carolina wren, who should not be here this time of year, I don’t think. Not quite the feast for the eyes that greeted me every morning in Honduras, but not bad for a snowy suburban back yard in February. The kitten is watching the spectacle eagerly from the windowseat, her tiny tail twitching.)

So two nights ago I dreamed about losing teeth. This is a Jungian archetype, I believe–I know other people have the same dream, and I think Jung decided it symbolized castration (oh, he just would, wouldn’t he? Another aside: one of the most pretentious people I knew in college went through a phase where he liked to talk about Jung every chance he got. “Are you familiar with the work of Carl Jung?” he’d ask whatever poor soul had drifted, unwittingly, into his orbit, except that he’d pronounce it with a soft “j”, to my friends’ and my neverending glee. “Yes, I am,” the poor soul would say, “but isn’t it pronounced…” at which point one of us would throw a bag over his head and drag him off before he could spill the beans. By senior year the jig was up, and the pretentious guy never spoke to any of us ever again….)

Anyway.  Sometimes the tooth-losing dream starts with wobbly teeth, which I first think are baby teeth (and therefore fine to wiggle and lose) but then realize, with sudden, sickening dread, are permanent, grown up teeth. Sometimes they don’t fall out, but it’s clear that they are about to, and so I spend the dream mumbling and gingerly worrying them with my tongue and fretting about their imminent loss. Sometimes I take matters in my own hands and decide to pull the offending teeth out myself. Usually they slide clear of my gums with minimal fuss, like grapefruit seeds slipping effortlessly from soft fruit. But two nights ago the tooth I yanked had a fleshy root that went on, and on, and on.  It was the size, shape, and color, exactly, of an earthworm.  And though it didn’t really hurt as I pulled, I knew I was bound to mess things up eventually. It was like biting a fingernail below the quick. You know you’re on the verge of pain and blood and soreness as you gnaw away, but what can you do but keep going?

I’m going to have to cut this root somehow or I’ll never get the damned thing out of my mouth, I thought in the dream.  And then I woke up.

Over the years it has become apparent to me that my subconscious thinks I’m an idiot. I once dreamed I was–no kidding–the madwoman locked in the attic in Jane Eyre, and I’ve had plenty of other dreams whose symbolism was so eye-rollingly obvious as to be laughable.  Apparently, my id has very little faith in my superego’s ability to decode things (come on! I wrote a dissertation! I watch foreign films! I’m friends with actual poets!) So the tooth-root-cutting dream was only moderately disturbing once I woke up (I can still feel that nasty twinge in my jaw, that phantom tug as the ugly worm-like root just kept coming), because it is, let’s face it, not the most subtle way for my subconscious to get its rather heavyhanded message across.

And then last night I dreamed a dream whose plot was far more innocuous, though its meaning (if one believes in the meaning of dreams, which I suppose I must) is just as obvious. And I can’t shake the terrible feeling it gave me.

I dreamed my ex-husband and I were laughing and chatting together in the dining room of our house–the very room I’m sitting in right now, with the sun pouring in and the kitten and the squabbling birds outside the window. I was looking for my keys, which are (in real life) misplaced, but I kept finding sentimental objects instead–love letters, pictures of the two of us when we were happy, a valentine I made for him when we lived in Paris–and trying desperately to hide them before he saw. They’ll make him sad, or possibly furious, my god, what are these things doing here?  I thought in the dream. Meanwhile my ex-husband hung around amiably, being funny and charming and sweet, and suddenly my bowels turned to ice. Wait a minute, I thought, what is HE doing here? I thought we were divorced!  Oh god, he’s back–how on earth did I allow that to happen?

My ex-husband chatted on, oblivious and happy, in the dream.  And I went on smiling, stuffing more and more sentimental artifacts under stacks of papers, willing him not to notice. I can’t ruin everything again, I simply don’t have it in me to go through the whole process of separating a second time, I thought, near tears and hiding it.  I’ve lost everything, the whole last three years. I cannot fucking believe we are back to square one.

Then I woke all shaky and sweaty, newly astonished at how damned obvious (yet how effective) my stupid subconscious is.  Score one for the id, zero for the superego, again.

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