Unicorn Stainglass Windows
Dreamed 1983/4/28 by Wayan
THAT DAY
Just saw Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange in Tootsie. Funny that she won an Academy award for Supporting Actress (for letting Hoffman's bravura drag act totally upstage her!)--but didn't win Best Actress for her searing performance in Frances. At the Academy Awards they played a clip from Tootsie: Lange describes wanting big bold roses on her bedroom walls, but her mom insisted on restrained little rosebuds. Ironic, since the Academy treated her just like that movie mom--approving her delicacy, rejecting her wild side. Reserved for guys, I guess.
THAT NIGHT
Dream 1: UNICORN STAIN-GLASS WINDOWS
I'm being shown a pair of stainglass windows--but installed so their images are superimposed! Outer and inner, each subtracts some light--they interfere with each other. Clever in theory--as the viewer shifts, eyes could move, hidden details could emerge, water could ripple--but the pair are badly planned. Unrelated images!
The outer one is mostly black--a bold image of unicorns with white bodies & teal-blue or red-orange manes & tails, against a moonlit sky. To me, they look like more than a horny version of the Three Graces--they're hot! Three elegant nudes eyeing me seductively. Maddening that they're blurred and dimmed by that inner picture!
What is the inner layer, anyway? It's spottily lit--only the unicorns and the moon let much light through--but at last I make out that it's just a pale, delicate floral pattern--transparent wallpaper!--that blurs and dulls the crisp bold image behind. Unneeded, unwanted--why'd they install this?
The room's not dark because OTHER windows are clear, let in lotsa light--though they're behind me and I can't see them and I KNOW they're all supposed to be stained glass... yet the roomlight seems daylit, unfiltered, almost like I'm outside looking in. Mysterious.
My crayon sketch, right, is my best rendering of the the unicorn layer--as well as I could see it through that tasteful, annoying floral veil.
NOTES & GUESSES
Dream 2: SCREAMING YELLOW CLOTHES
I'm wandering through a bookstore, draped in my yellow childhood security-blanket as if I were still a toddler... through it's grown big along with me, big enough to serve as a robe... Still, I wonder. Am I THAT insecure?
But I sure LOOK pretty yellow.
Dream 3: SCREAMING YELLOW CLOTHES AGAIN?!
In a place whose windows I decorated with stained glass, a woman asks my advice about a gift for my housemate Alan. I say "Get him a long dress--he likes women's clothes but he lacks any long gowns."
She finds a bright yellow one--well, yellow under, but with an open vestlike long-sleeve jacket of turquoise.
The contrast is eye-searing. I preferred the unicorn palette--equally bold, but harmonious.
NOTES & GUESSES
NEXT MORNING...
At work in the Stanford library, I was puzzling why my dreams repeated that yellow robe/dress/blanket image.
On my break, I was scribbling dream-notes on a scratch card when an Indian woman glided in... wearing a full-length, eye-searing, lemon-yellow sari.
18 MONTHS LATER...
Driving north on Highway 280, just north of Foothill College, I notice a stainglass window of unicorn(s?) in back of a house overlooking the freeway on the east side.
At freeway speeds, I only got a glimpse, so I dunno if the composition's like the dream window, but the palette seemed identical--black, cool white, red-orange, turquoise.
Quite a shock to see my dream window popping up by the road...
I took a class at Foothill a few years back, so I probably saw the unicorn window subliminally, over and over, coming home. Except I can't be sure the window had been installed yet, when I dreamed it.
So... was the dream subliminal or predictive? I'd dismiss the latter, but the OTHER dream of odd colors that night seemed to look forward to that sari as much as back to Tootsie.
In a noisy image-rich world, it's not always easy to tell.
YEARS LATER
Trees have grown, fences got replaced... hiding that unicorn window again. The window of opportunity is gone.
I should have driven back, triangulated, walked that neighborhood, knocked on doors, and asked...
...but I was too shy. Now I'll never know.
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