I'm a classic Volkswagen hippie bus--near mint condition.

My big brother Wayan is a whimsically customized Mustang (figures; he loves horses).

Both of us are collector's items. Definitely for niche markets--but fabulous finds for those who know their old cars.

Our parents decide to sell us. They ask $25 each...

...since, after all, we're old junkheaps good only for scrap.

LATER THAT DAY

My siblings and I get together. My sister Althea ignores me utterly and only talks with Wayan. Puts him down subtly--his art’s just ideas and little sketches--nothing's finished to her standards. His music? “Well, you haven’t signed a contract yet.” In the moment, I felt relieved she'd turned from criticizing me nonstop--her usual tactic--to just patronizing our brother. For her, that's mellowing.

But afterward, I still felt drained and queasy. Being ignored isn't much better than being squashed.

Now the dream looks kind of predictive. I dreamed our parents devalued Wayan and me. But they infected Althea too; she still pushes off the insecurity they gave her by putting Wayan down and writing me off entirely.

37 YEARS LATER: WAYAN

In late 2019, I was transcribing dream-journals from 1993, and came on a summary of Miriel's dream, undated. I thought she'd told it to me that day, and posted it in the World Dream Bank, dated May 1993.

But in 2022, my transcription project was all the way back to June 1985... and I stumbled on the original account of the dream, in its true context. Now if our parents had visited or called Miriel the day before the dream... But that wasn't its context. Instead, the family putdowns were twelve hours in the future; and from our sister Althea, not our parents. Not directly. As siblings close in age, we got a lot of hand-me-down clothing. And, it seems, hand-me-down devaluation.

My recollection in the '93 journal closely matched the original in the '85 manuscript. Proof that even eight years later, her dream meant a lot to me--as a summary or distillation of our family heritage. Of worthlessness.

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