Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Dream Energy


DREAM 3-10-02

FORGETTING TO PICK UP KIDS IN YARD
CRYING INTO PALE PINK SHIRT
ORANGE PEEL

Today would have been my brother Jim's 77th birthday.

The dream: I am arranging all the piles of work, for that day's class, on a desk and elsewhere, in my room. This is not Room 21, where I teach a 4/5 split but a different room. The room is more like the 3/4 split, with windows all down the long wall across from the door. I look at my clock and see that it is 11:30. I expected it to be 9:00. I think that I must have forgotten to pick up the kids in the yard. Somehow I have spaced out for 2 1/2 hours. I leave to go see if someone is teaching my kids in a different room -- perhaps they did not want to use my room, if I was not there, for fear it would offend me. When I get back to my room, the principle is sneaking across the room to throw away the last piece of orange peel from the orange he had eaten. He is wearing a dark blue and gray plaid shirt. He sees me somehow as he is throwing the orange peel into the wastebasket. I begin to explain what happened -- that I got lost in preparing everything to teach. I see the first grade teacher in the back third of the room, behind a partition, typing on a computer. I say "Hi" and he nods hello. I have an AHA! and then blurt out my discovery to the principal, "I was so engrossed in getting ready, that time got lost, the way it does when I am doing art." I begin to get upset. The principal, who is now wearing a pale pink shirt, like the ones my ex-husband used to have made in Hong Kong, comes over to hug me. I nestle into the shirt and really cry -- he cries too and it feels wonderful.

The orange peel, the two shirts - especially the pink shirt, and the way it felt to nestle in, are the most vivid. The pastel was a spontaneous reaction to the dream. I don’t know where the tree woman came from but she might be me creating the dream.

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