Mommy Issues

I just found this dream diary entry from 9.16.2012:

I’ve been reading Alison Bechdel’s Are You my Mother? and thinking a lot about going into therapy to deal with mother, sexuality and other life issues, and have started the process of finding a therapist for psychoanalysis.

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I just woke up from a dream in which I was visiting a woman at her home. It was this sweet woman in her upper 50’s/my mother’s age, kind of played by C---- R----, a woman I met in NY when I took her groceries out to her car b/c she was visiting her pregnant daughter but who lived in JP, where I was about to move, and gave me really nice dog-sitting jobs when I first moved to Boston, and who, she and her husband, but she was the main person, was really nice to me, offering her bikes, her car, etc. should I want to use them while house & dog-sitting!

So in the dream I would be at her house and, a couple of different times, she would give me these gifts that were incredibly (and to my mind almost ridiculously) sentimental, to the point where I didn’t even say thank you immediately because I wasn’t sure she was really giving me these things because how could they possibly be for me? But she was giving me these things, I finally confirmed, so I said, “These are amazing (this time around it was a string of handmade, hand-painted, miniature turtles) and we stood up and hugged. I was explicitly thinking, “This seems mommy-issuey,” and I hugged her over the arms (I initiated the hug in this form), with her arms un the under position, even though I also explicitly thought I would have liked to be under or at least half and half, that it was weird for me to be hugging this older, gift-giving woman this way. She should've been the top-hugger.

So now, back at home, I realized I had left my gifts there. “How ungrateful! Oh no! I cannot hurt her feelings! I have to go get them now!” I thought, "But where does she live?”

I racked my brain for info. on how I’d gotten there, but it seemed I had no memory of the journey. I learned that she lived in a valley in a little enclave of a mountain.

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This I “remembered” while having the experience of flying over sections of town to get to her house. Also while flying, I saw two teenage girls walk up stairs to cross under a covered bridge. They hurried across right before the light changed, so that their two teenage male pursuers who’d just appeared were a bit delayed in their pursuit.

I panned in my aerial view over the city, and violence was breaking out everywhere. By violence I mean insanely brutal and ferocious murders. These murderers were wolfish in personality and movement, tearing their victims apart, blood everywhere. I went through a large house and passed an evil-looking man who would position people in my way a bit, and I knew he was killing them, but I would float by, just trying to get to my destination.

When I got to my older woman friend’s house, she wasn’t there, just her husband and a male neighbor, with whom I was shy and awkward and to whom I barely spoke. I played briefly with a dog to avoid the awkwardness of not interacting with the humans, as you do. 

So I left their house, and I was back to panning the city, starting, somehow, from the covered bridge and the two girls again. This time their pursuers were wilder, and there were no lights to slow them down, and they got the girls, which commenced the heightened violence of this second aerial panning. This time the murders were even more torturous and horrible. I saw that there were cruel experiments being carries out on some victims. Many were made to aid in others’ and/or their own horrific deaths. I wondered how the wolf-people had gotten these victims to lie still or even cooperate with some of the more involved and experimental murders. I imagined there must have been some leader who was ordering the wolfish people to constantly up the horror level.

This time when I made it to the big house, my sister, Cami, was suddenly with me. She was flabbergasted that I didn’t know how to get to the gift-giving older woman’s house. Now, as we floated through this house, the evil man was killing people in front of us left and right: bloody, awful killings that I didn’t look at, just passing him to get away to my room. When we got there, Cami was beside herself in hysterics. “How could we possibly go to sleep?!” She yelled at me. “This is awful! Did you see that man?”

“Yes, he’s been doing that. I just ignore him,” I said.

“But it was so horrible! Did you see what he’d done to the guy’s neck? There was this huge-"

“Yes,” I cut her off. “I try very purposefully not to look at it or think about it. How else could we sleep here at night?”

And then I woke up.