Trapped in amber: a very weird dream

(From my journal, August 10/19)

I had the weirdest dream about Sternthal (ed. note: a doctor I went to for years, who used to dismiss, demean and bully me). I don’t usually remember dreams, but this one was so strange. I was fiddling around with an amber necklace with huge stones in it, golf-ball-sized, and very ornate. I was taking it apart for the purposes of re-stringing it in different designs, and huge rocklike beads were suddenly loose in a sort of rock pile, along with a lot of smaller ones. But then I found myself standing in some sort of mysterious lineup of people. 

When I got to the front, I could see that Sternthal was sitting there by himself on an elevated chair, not saying anything. I didn’t know what the other people were doing there, but when it got to be my turn I presented him with an exact duplicate of the original necklace, only it was much smaller for some reason. He took it and I don’t think said anything, but just stared at me with big creepy unblinking eyes. Didn’t say thank you or acknowledge me or the gift, as if it went without saying, it was only his due, and it was about time I delivered on it. Even that I should be grateful for the rare and (of course) undeserved chance of being able to do this. Then I moved on, and that was the end of it.

I DO have a lot of amber jewelry, because years ago I went through an amber phase (amber was wildly popular then), and I DO often dismember jewelry, particularly necklaces, to make doll jewelry. It hasn’t been worn in years and years and is just sitting there. But the Sternthal thing is weird. Lining up seems like people paying some sort of weird homage, or presenting him with something, but I couldn’t tell. Except for staring at me with huge dark creepy unblinking eyes out of The Fly, he didn’t even acknowledge me or what I gave him. 

He was obviously the most important person in the room, and all the others were just whack jobs or nut bars or whatever-it-is you call chronic mental patients nowadays. They're just people who go around shooting up shopping malls and schools for no reason. (Their huge gun collections have nothing to do with it.) They were paying obeisance, because that was what they were supposed to do – in fact, it went without saying, you just “did that”. It was not a choice on anyone’s part, but neither was it something they did not want. They simply had no will, and “did that” because they “did that”. They had been erased.

I couldn’t see the others really, never saw any faces but just identical bodies, though I was aware they were there and moving. I thought of futuristic movies like 1984 and Metropolis, but that comparison may have come after I woke up. People trudging mindlessly forward in a line. He looked like a cult leader that you had to go up to and pay homage to, and in fact you were supposed to think (if you thought at all) that you were very fortunate to be able to do so. It was a bit like coming up to the front at a fundamentalist church to be "saved". I also thought of Scientology for some reason. Strange. 

I just had the thought that it’s interesting I gave him jewelry, which seems personal because in the past I had worn it many times, but I gave him a DUPLICATE of the original necklace which was much smaller and would be worth less. Big amber beads were “a thing” then, ugly as they seem now. So while I gave him the necklace, I still had it, and a more valuable version of it to boot. 

If you want to dig deeper, well, the amber necklace (which looked like something out of The Flintstones, though some of the beads were much smaller) has connotations of being “trapped in amber” and thus frozen in time. The faceless people lining up with no will is pretty obvious, and extremely creepy. But I did not have totally negative feelings, and felt sort of – what? Again, the feeling I should feel privileged to be able to be in this lineup and present him with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Giving him a duplicate without the larger stones was weird. I used to prize amber jewelry, but have lost interest in it and never wear it, or any other jewelry, especially not rings since my hands became such a ruin. But it used to interest me a lot, and I spent a small fortune on it. It was worth something to me. (Was I handing him a version of myself that I no longer wanted or needed? Now there's a thought.)

What it means isn't exactly clear, but it seems loaded with symbolism. Though I no longer see that destructive doctor, I felt trapped in the relationship for over twelve years, and in fact was told by multiple sources that he was the best in the business, I was extremely lucky to be able to see him, he had a waiting list a mile long, and there was no other option for me anyway because of the nature of my illness. I should be grateful to have all that understanding from someone so competent. I can't erase my history, which I long to erase so very often, but just try to go forward without an amber noose around my neck.

Monday Morning Insight. I just remembered something so appropriate, it's almost funny. My subconscious having me on? My relatively-new family doctor, who is the only doctor I have ever had with whom I feel listened to, is named Amber. Amber Jarvie. It's just too strange to NOT be true.

Alice in Horrorland - revisited

I was going to play the lead in a stage play about Alice in Wonderland.

I don’t think I was me in this dream. I was much younger than my present age, and in fact, much younger than I have ever been. I was some sort of innocent, almost a waif. I was running around with long blonde hair flying behind me. Other people from the play were kind of milling around in various settings, mostly in a high school (I think this was an amateur performance), but I had no idea who they were, even though we had apparently been rehearsing this play together for months.

Though I remembered the rehearsals and I seemed to remember knowing the play very well, I suddenly realized I had no idea how the play started, what the first couple of pages of dialogue were. It was simply blank. Since I was playing the lead, I had to know. I knew I was in it somehow and wondered if it was kind of like the scene where the White Rabbit (always late) rushes past her before she falls into the rabbit hole. Or did she step through the mirror?

There was a director of the play somewhere but I couldn’t find him. No one seemed to know where he was, but I could picture him, what he was like. None of the other players seemed to recognize or acknowledge me and brushed off all my anxious questions. At one point I (who at this point looked like a little girl living in the 1960s) went on a sort of strange computer that reminded me of the Wizard of Oz's contraption behind the curtain, and tried to find out something about the play on the internet. I thought I could download the script so I could at least read it onstage and not be a total fool. I pictured myself just improvising my lines but realized it would throw the other actors completely off and infuriate them and bring the play to a grinding halt.

I saw a sort of glass plate with lettering embossed on it and wondered if I could make one with my name on it, if it would somehow help. The glass was sort of amber-colored and it was plate-sized but irregular, like a blob of sealing wax. I think it had some sort of emblem or crest on it. As I became more bewildered and frantic about what was going on, I suddenly realized I had no idea of the content of this play. I could not remember a single line in it, though I still remembered rehearsing for months. I started running around desperately asking people if they had a copy of the script. All of them shrugged and went on talking to whoever they were talking to. (All these people were young adults, maybe 20s or early 30s, much older than me.) They acted as if I had no connection to the play whatsoever and should just go away.

Then I found a plastic bag and it had some sort of report written on it, printed on it. It said something along the lines of: when she first arrived here, she looked very unkempt and dishevelled. Now she has improved her appearance greatly and is obviously much more attractive. I realized I was reading a psychiatric report and that it was about me.

  

I kept trying to figure out who the director was. He had an unusual voice and it seemed English. I kept thinking of the movie/book 1984 and George Orwell. Though I never saw him, I kept thinking I heard his voice. I thought that if I asked HIM if he had a copy of the script, I could at least get the first page. I knew he didn’t have one however, because nobody did. Then I decided he must be that guy on Mad Men, the Englishman they called Moneypenny, Lane Pryce. Lane Pryce committed suicide by hanging himself in his office during the last season. He tried to commit suicide with carbon monoxide in a new Jaguar his wife had just given him (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce had just landed the prestigious Jaguar acoount), but it wouldn’t start, one of the drawbacks to effectively marketing it. 

Just now I realize I only saw this Lane Pryce actor in one other thing, the movie about Sylvia Plath with Gwyneth Paltrow. It was a very poorly-done thing and Paltrow was pallid and uninteresting as Plath, but in one scene, this Moneypenny was talking to her about suicide and how he had tried it once, “but you’ve got to keep going!”. This seemed ironic in light of the Lane Pryce character’s suicide.

But maybe it wasn’t Moneypenny at all: it seemed more like Oliver Sacks, the bizarre genius who studies people with mental disorders like so many insects impaled on pins.

The whole dream was a vague nightmare of pointlessly bustling around, realizing that the play was about to begin, that I was playing the lead, and that I had absolutely no idea of what was in the script. I was trying to scrape together some sort of knowledge of Alice in Wonderland and kept coming up with a rabbit. At one point all the cast members were supposed to produce a picture of what their spouses looked like, and I tried to find a picture of a rabbit, just the face, a brown one. 

It wasn’t until I woke up and grogged out of bed that I made another connection, with the Marina Bychkova Enchanted Dolls. My current favourite is a doll named Alice, who represents Bychkova’s “reimagining” of Alice in Wonderland. The doll has enormous blue eyes brimming with tears, elaborate costumes and long blonde hair. She both enchants and scares me because along with abandonment and terror, I see anger in her eyes, even a hint of rage.

Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Alice does not have comrades or companions, just a series of encounters with grotesque figures like the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat whose smile hangs disembodied in the air. She fell into this twilight nightmare down a hole, or, in another story, was sucked into a reverse world behind the mirror. In neither case did she choose the journey.

And then, the final realization.  My mother's name is Alice. 

It's also my middle name.

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Revolution 9: I have a dream today

Dreams vaporize like snow sublimating on a sidewalk. More and more I remember mine, and see a thread in them. Maybe it has always been there. I always seem to be a hopeless outsider or have no idea what is going on, though I am supposed to be playing a crucial role in the scenario (i. e. the Wildwood Flower bride, and the Alice in Wonderland actress). Last night my dreams were bleak, and I hope did not predict anything except my own melancholy and chronic sense of doom.

It was as if I was watching one of those dystopia films, in which everything slowly but surely comes unstuck. "All is changed, changed utterly," to paraphrase Yeats (I'm too lazy to look up the exact quote). "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

This had several parts. Which came first? My husband was with me during a big part of this, which is unusual because I am usually alone. We were watching a stage play which almost seemed like a Gilbert and Sullivan comedy without the music. This was in an ornate old theatre like the Orpheum in Vancouver. One of the actors seemed particularly good and I intended to yell "Bravo!" when he took his bows. 

At this point I was sitting in the front row and Bill wasn't with me. Then I was about 1/3 or 1/2-way back in the audience, and there was a sense almost of an earthquake about to happen, though nothing was shaking. Without any words we received the knowledge that the ceiling was about to cave in and we had to get out of the theatre immediately or be crushed. 

I looked up and wondered if the ceiling was bulging and it played into my lifelong fear that heavy chandeliers in restaurants and theatres would fall on me. People began to leave, but in a fairly orderly, methodical way. I could not find my shoes and was upset. Bill said something along the lines of, you'll need them, which seemed ominous. I realized we had to leave only a few minutes before the end of the play and I would not be able to yell "Bravo!".

Then we were wandering aimlessly through a sort of wasteland, completely lost. Bill doesn't get lost easily, or panic about it, but I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that everything was about to end. At one point we were climbing up a tall tower like something in a power station, then we had to climb down again and Bill's legs hurt. I was sort of holding on to him through this. 

There were these vasts fields of dead grass and nothingness. A woman on a horse went by (and now I think of that futuristic TV show Revolution, where the power goes off all over the world and there are no cars). Then at some point I said something like, "Wait, my high school graduation is tomorrow, how will I get there?" "It will be called off. You'll have to phone the school about it." "But everyone will be calling in at once. The lines will be jammed." As we had this conversation, we were walking by the high school and it looked deserted. It resembled my school from Grade 5 (Queen Elizabeth II) where I had to be bussed all the way across town to attend the (quote-unquote) "smart kids' class".

In another part of this strange scene, I was watching TV and suddenly the program changed. It became totally nonsensical and obnoxious,almost like scrambled-up children's programming, and it was obvious that this wasn't part of the show. I realized (how?) that a woman had hacked into TV signals all over the entire world and disabled them all. I don't even know how I knew this. I just now think of the Emergency Broadcasting System and "this is only a test" announcements of my childhood, when I was totally freaked out and felt like it was the end of the world (which, with the Cuban Missile Crisis, it nearly was). 

I think I have already lost chunks of this and would have forgotten it all by now had I not scribbled down a few details. The last part I can remember now is that I was listening to a radio broadcast, and it was about my friend Glen Allen, a journalist who committed suicide in 2005. He worked in radio and it was a sort of reminiscence about his life. I began to get very interested in it and thought, "Now they'll talk about his association with Peter Gzowski." But then it cut off. No explanation, it just ended. The radio had no signal at all - it simply went dead.