Dream

Dream by The Hungarian-born artist Ralph Fabri (1894-1975)

I don't usually tell many people about my dreams.  I have a vivid, rich dreamlife, full of imagery and hidden meanings.  But generally dreams make sense only to the dreamer.  And everyone else bores of the dreamer's ruminations--quickly.  Have you ever been held captive of someone telling you his or her dream? And it goes on and on?

But here I go.  I will preface the dream with one shared by Mircea Eliade in his journal, No Souvenirs: 

Last night's dream.  Two old men who are dying, alone, each in his own way.  Disappearing forever with them, without witnesses and without leaving a trace, was an admirable story (which I knew).  Terrible sadness.  Despair.  I withdrew to a room on the side, and I prayed.  I said to myself, If God does not exist, all is finished, all is absurd.

I awoke with the taste of ashes.

I love the sensory nature of this dream, especially the last impression, the taste of ashes. 

I include Eliade's dream as a crutch, as a way of saying it's okay for me to tell you my dream.  It's a way of saying, please don't be bored.  Read on.  It may not be as bad as you think!  

But I also include Eliade's dream because he says something so important about writing our stories, about getting them down.  We cannot let our "admirable" stories perish with us.

Sometimes our personal mythology merges with the universal in intriguing ways.

I told Vicky (Vicky is a perceptive woman I've recently met online--we  found each other not through this journal but as a result of a common experience we had, one I had expressed in a recent short story) about this dream a few days ago.  At the time I didn't understand its meaning.  She hinted I should look at my own journal for the answers.  (Vicky is so patient and never tells me my dreams bore her).  The dream: 

I was standing in the kitchen with my boys, who were small, around ten or under.  They are all men now, the youngest 20, almost 21. I opened the refrigerator and said, "We're going to color Easter eggs today."  They all gasped, happily, and said,"Really?"  It was the kind of joy children express when you've truly surprised them in a good way.

I said, "Yes, really!"  I opened the refrigerator and took out a huge carton of eggs.  More than two dozen, more than three dozen, perhaps.  The eggs in the top rows of the carton were whole, but in the bottom rows of the carton, they were merely shells.  The eggs had been cracked, used, and the discarded shells placed back into the carton.

The used eggs had white shells; the unused eggs had brown shells.  "Oh no!" I said to the children.  "Brown eggs!  We can't color brown eggs!"

I felt tremendously let down.  I felt I had let my children down.  That is all of the dream. 

My interpretation: 

I had recently done an entry in my journal on the cosmic egg.  In the entry I had typed out the story of Eurynome, who changed herself into a bird and laid the cosmic egg, which became the world and the sky, the egg from which came all life.  Not long after the entry, I did a presentation at the Northwest Ohio Writers Forum.  I talked about mythology, symbols, and icons.  I read the Eurynome myth in conjunction with an excerpt from my own novel in which the mother is not strong like Eurynome, but dependent on her abusive husband.  I talked to my audience about how I changed the imageof the powerful woman who dances on the waters to a weak, frightened woman who says what she needs to quietly, speaking into the drain of the sink.  (In contrast to Eurynome, who drives the male out of her presence after buising his head with her heel!)

I think doing the journal entry and then doing the public speaking, which always makes me nervous, drove the cosmic egg idea home, and triggered some memory--or memories--deep in my unconscious, and it had to come out in dream form.  I was forced to think about my own life and how the egg myth relates to my life. 

I think the white shells represented my spent years and the lost potential of those years.  I could no longer color these eggs.  I think these eggs represented not only my artistic life, but my life as a mother.  I think I was mourning all the lost opportunities in my creative life (my art), and lost opportunities with my children.  In a sense, both are my "children."  That is why I was brokenhearted when I saw the white eggs were spent. 

The remaining eggs were brown, and these represented my middle-years.  These years are not the bright canvas that the early years were.  Anyway, how do you color a brown egg?  It isn't the same in terms of brightness, of beauty.  There aren't as many possibilities with a brown egg, or so I thought.

I believe I'm meant to take from the dream that I should not give up the idea of coloring the eggs altogether.  I must find a way to color the eggs, to make my art, to do what I can for my children.  Despite the lost opportunities, there are still ways to connect with my children.  There are still ways of showing my love.  I can't magically make them happy, like I could when they were children.  Their needs, and my own needs, seem more complicated now.  It is more difficult to get the desired result now.  My art is a slightly different situation; something about the doing of it seems easier than it did when I was younger, but it also seems harder because I no longer have the innocent belief that "success" will happen simply because I am somehow "special," and it is destined to happen to me. 

Vicky told me I should also consider the Spinoza quote, which I had written in my AOL journal earlier:  "I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."  I think Vicky was right; the Spinoza quote is relevant.  The  brown eggs were only substandard because my imagination considered them so.  I had not yet found a way to envision the brown eggs as beautiful and useful in my life.