The World Dream Bank: Coffins

World Dream Bank home - add a dream - newest - art gallery - sampler - dreams by title, subject, author, date, place, names

COFFINS

Parallel dreams, 1983/11/5, by 'Beryl' and Wayan

1: WAYAN'S DREAM

Jennifer lost that bet with her best
Friend, who sighs "You're dead
And can't sign checks, so why
Not pay off our wager, Jen, by
Haunting our co-op Victorian
Amusingly?"
The deal works out quite well: the ghost
girl's a star. You've seen her show
"Jennifer Slept Here." Ho ho
Eternally.
I wake in a nonprofit. A girl like Jen
Lounges nude on the old couch. (Why, anyone
Can ogle in, so I close the Venetian blinds.)
"Couldja open the blinds?" she whines. Hung
Over? I bare the glare of eyes and sun.
She grinds "Couldja close those blinds?"
The blinds groan too. I suppress my own
Moan. Sexiest of grouches, she squirms
Unpleasably.
Wake again! I clean backstage at Psychodrama--worn
Pillows, limp swords, old monsters. Corroded throne.
Bald Tom, drape-propped. A spare Tom. Three, four!
Were he a puppetry all along? His ex-lover Beryl & I
Argue where to stash the glut of zombish Toms...
Drearily.
A truck arrives. "Delivery!" So I sign. (No more
Toms, hopefully.) Grandma's effects! Hand-
lace in damp leaf mold. Left, it'll rot for sure.
Pull and clean it dutifully. Below, howling yellow
Blanket. Deft, I peel banana weft. Hello
Grandma, dead beneath. A mobile grave!
My dad glums in, and coffinloots to save
Mute carving of a monkey that she made.
Luckily,
Serene dream-coda! Wake again, to hike
The silver woods; serendipitously meet
A lovely lynx. So calm. Delight.
Tufted ears just like the horns
Of excellent owl. Her felicitous
Sweet face, not ghouly moans
Concludes tonight's dream-
Family.
Please come and dream again...
As if evade you ever can!
Admittedly a rather ominous
Homily.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

False waking into a new dream: happens to me frequently.
Naked girl on the couch: sexy till she proved a grouch. Maybe she meant "Don't rescue; please yourself"? If so, taught indirectly.
Grandma: never carved a speak-no-evil monkey. She is dead, but not buried portably.
Cleaning Psychodrama: I did clean that theater for free tickets. But not in years. Why'd the dream dredge it up now, tardily?
Tom and Beryl: friends I met at Psychodrama. They were lovers, but broke up recently.

Later that day, Beryl visits and tells a dream, unexpectedly.

2: BERYL'S DREAM

I cleaned Prometheus Theater. As I
reached the prop room, a gypsy sol-
idified centerstage. The Spirit of Psy-
chodrama! A wisdom-figure pendant she wore:
Centaur.
Reindeer folk browse the rug. A friend urged "Go
greet them!" I tried, but the tundra-rug became
the kitchen. Vic the director stared in a coffin. No
corpse; a manhole, open. A ladder led on
Below.
A vast deep-green hall. Numinous, but no rêve-
lations; so I started back up. Bag Lady, my
constant dreamguide, warned "Careful! Don't
go up there!" Up's now an empty school. I
climbed defiantly back toward light: a
Titanic
image of Vic and his lover, kissing. At
the laddercrown I saw: "I'm the Bag
Lady now." Awkwardly I huffpuff in
to their lovescene. Vibe unwelcome,
but still, Vic unwelled me from
coffin. Pulled from
Coffin.

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Are these real dreams? Yes. I trimmed one more hazy dreamlet of mine that night about mapping dreams. Beryl's account is my wording from my notes, but her dream-report in full; I censored only a few names of theater-staff, for privacy reasons.
Vic the psychodrama director who pulls her from a coffin, was Beryl's therapist too. Licensed to save!
The parallels: the same night, Beryl and I dreamed of cleaning, breakups, ghosts, coffins and death in the backstage prop area of Prometheus Theater near Stanford. You can call this chance. I can't. Starting with this pair, my dreams of Beryl and the dreams she told me were full of images of death, mutilation, and descent to the underworld, for years before Beryl's breast cancer, double mastectomy, and early death in 1992.
So for me, this isn't "just" a pair of dreams suggesting telepathy (reason enough to present them!) but the newfound earliest outlier of a long dream-chain readying Beryl for a death none of us could save her from. Bag Lady wasn't joking around. But in 1983 Beryl didn't know, nor I; so this dream-pair slept unmarked for decades on my journal-shelf, till I stumbled on them. By chance, as we say here in Middle Earth.

LISTS AND LINKS: ghosts - TV - nudity - frustration - psychodrama & theatre in general - living dolls - breakups - big cats - more dreams of Beryl - caves & the underworld - initiation(s) - animas & dream-guides - death - climbing - rescue, even if temporary - telepathy, premonitions & ESP in general - dream-poems - Christine Downing's eerily parallel dream of Sisters' Psychodrama - John Hollander's poem on parallel dreams: The Train

World Dream Bank homepage - Art gallery - New stuff - Introductory sampler, best dreams, best art - On dreamwork - Books
Indexes: Subject - Author - Date - Names - Places - Art media/styles
Titles: A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - IJ - KL - M - NO - PQ - R - Sa-Sk - Sl-Sz - T - UV - WXYZ
Email: wdreamb@yahoo.com - Catalog of art, books, CDs - Behind the Curtain: FAQs, bio, site map - Kindred sites