THE MAN WHO MISTOOK...

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Dreamed 1995/9/19 by Chris Wayan

I visit my family in a city park. Flat lawns, big old pines shading picnic tables. Watch my family from a distance, because as soon as they know I'm coming, my son will flee. He's terrified of me, just because I beat him for not developing properly. If I just punish him enough, his body will get the message and grow. It's hard, but it's got to be done. He's still too young to understand that.

My daughter zooms off on a bike--leaving before I show up. She doesn't see me. She's turning out all right. In her teens now. Wearing jeans and a tank top showing her stomach. Nice tan. Pretty nice little tits too. Hot. She's growing up, not like my damn son.

Then I get worried. Aren't her tits kind of low for a teenager? Sagging already! Down around her stomach. I mean look at them!

Only I'm not looking at them. She's long gone--what I'm looking at is the concrete drinking fountain I'm leaning on! Its front is sculpted, has S-shaped curlicues that bulging out low down, like a potbelly or saggy breasts. Which I mistook for my daughter.

As I start to wake from the dream, I start to realize this and wonder at the delusion, but until I'm fully awake, I'm still QUITE unaware that leering at my daughter is not going to make her like me, or that beating my son will not convince his body to grow in ways that I approve of... or that, to me, my wife is an utter blank.

NOTES ON WAKING

Mistaking a drinking fountain for my daughter = I just read Oliver Sacks's book THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT--it was brain disease, not a psychological problem. The dream suggests my own weirdness isn't a moral flaw or a neurosis, but may be as physically based as autism, or this crazy dad's obvious illness.
The park = San Mateo's Central Park. It's the first city park I recall visiting, around age 2 or 3. So it presumably means early childhood.
I beat up my son for not developing = 1) In therapy I promised to try asking out some women, but I said "I won't beat myself up if I only call one number. That takes two hours; more, and I get sick." 2) I just read Laura Kinsale's DREAM HUNTER: dad sabotages his son, blindly pushing him to marry.
I lust after my teenage daughter = my dad lusted after his youngest daughter though he never acted on it. Did I learn to leer from him, or this just psychic spillover? I tend to have his nightmares and illnesses, even when I avoid him.

There's a side of me who I've condemned as crass, in the past. The dream says flatly I'm not--I have a deep perceptual problem, like autism. And the very best this part of my brain can do for me is to shut up and quit hitting the other parts. I can't hope for more.

But... I need to insist on that much.

LISTS AND LINKS: family dreams - dream dads - oops! - delusion and madness - violence - my real dad, Jerry - incest feelings - weird diseases - autism - healing from abuse -

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