I don’t
usually even remember dreams, but once in a while I have a doozie – not really
a nightmare (I don’t remember those either), but one that is so bizarre it
defies any explanation. It means what it means, I guess. As Bob Dylan put it in
Gates of Eden:
"At dawn my lover comes to me And tells me of her dreams With no attempt to shovel the glimpse Into the ditch of what each one means."
But this
one - . Anyway, Bill and I were in New York (I think – at least, some teeming
urban centre that I wasn’t familiar with, at all. Here we were in Gotham. The Big Apple. This Is The City.)
We were standing at a sort of crossroads, a busy corner, although I had no idea
where we actually were and even less idea of the names of the streets, what hotel we
were staying in, etc. THEN – suddenly – I was sitting in a wagon. It was a
wagon FULL of Amish people. Just chock-a-block. Not one of those smart
carriages – this was a fairly primitive wagon, kind of like a covered wagon
only un-covered. I didn’t quite know how I had gotten there, although I vaguely
remembered climbing aboard. No kidnapping or coercion was involved.
But I was
sitting next to this woman (she was on my right, maybe 30ish, very Amish in costume and demeanour, the
kind of woman who already has a dozen kids) who kept talking and talking. It
was Amish talk, but as usual I can’t remember much content. Pro-Amish, of
course, though since I was not handcuffed, I didn’t think I was required to join
the cult.
BUT. And
this was the hard part. Though I had climbed aboard somewhere in the teeming
downtown, I had no point of reference. I had no phone. Where was my husband? I
wanted out (or “off”), but didn’t see a way. I could have, I guess, said (and I
think I tried), “Stop and let me off”, but the Amish woman told me “no, we’re
going up to the Lake
country”. I envisioned being away to hell and gone in some isolated rural
community living completely off the grid. It was a helpless feeling. I was cut
off. I was part of this. . . group. Religion? I finally said, “Can you take me
back to where I got on and just drop me off?” They looked at me in bafflement.
Like most
of my dreams, it didn’t “end” but just sort of petered out. Of course, my mind wants
to put puzzle pieces together, so I wondered if this whole thing was an allegory
for the church I attended for fifteen years. THAT ended badly too, though I had
been disaffected and unhappy for the last three or four. I stayed too long, and
began to feel a creeping sense of “we-think” – in other words, if you start
thinking OUTSIDE that box, you are no
longer welcome. This coincided with a horrible meltdown in leadership
that I won’t even go into. But still I didn’t leave!
Eventually,
as I regained my mental health and saw the light, my relationship with the
church also petered out and I no longer wanted to attend. I was tired of the
whole thing. I now see mainstream church attendance as something out of the
last century. Big drafty 100-year-old buildings being used for two hours a week, doctrine
and cant that is always vigorously denied, hidden agendas that create constant
guilt and a sense of inadequacy, an INSISTENCE that everyone is welcome and
people can interpret God any way they want . . . but if you go too far, the minister will summon you to his office for a friendly chat.
The
pandemic has virtually wiped out "liberal" church congregations except in a very limited
capacity. Some have gone to “hybrid worship”, which sounds to me like something
out of Soylent Green or some other cinematic dystopia. I am not sorry, for
so-called liberal churches are an anachronism. We didn’t really help anyone. If
someone in need came to us, they were given a bus ticket and a token for the
food bank, all the way across town. And that’s it. People grumbled about having
to pay for those tokens and wondered why people didn’t just get a job.
Oh, but one time we tried. Having dutifully brought our canned food donations to the church, someone made the mistake of getting up at the front and saying, "We also need can openers." To a person, the congregation roared with laughter. Someone needs CAN OPENERS?
The Amish
thing, well, I’ve never had too many feelings about the Amish either way,
except to say that we often hear about alarming genetic diseases that have not
even been heard of before. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Anabaptists and Amish
have been profoundly inbred for centuries, but as young people leave in droves to
live more normal lives, the gene pool is getting smaller and smaller. Marry
your first cousin? Maybe you have no other choice. So you end up with a sort of
horrifying Habsburg situation, with children stillborn, hopelessly deformed, or dying of untreatable
medical conditions.
The only
churches which are flourishing now are Pentecostals, led by evangelicals who prey
on the weakest and most needy. Shameless grifters, the sort that preach at us
from our TVs, buy private jets with the congregation’s monetary “seeds”, and
eventually get into sex scandals. I’m so tired of it all. We have two gigantic
churches in our area, very recently built, which I
have heard are full every Sunday. Pentecostals. The UnitedChurch is foundering on the verge of
collapse, and is even thinking of converting some of those huge drafty
buildings into low-income housing (an idea that horrifies almost everyone!). I don’t care what is happening to my former
church now because it outlived its usefulness thirty years ago.
Now I’m
thinking: if that cart was pulled by horses, why didn’t I see them or at least
smell them? Was it an oxcart, perhaps? DID I ever get off? The dream tapered
off before I could answer any of those questions. But I would not willingly
climb aboard any sort of wagon now, Amish wagon, bandwagon, wagon train with no
end. Stop the horses – I want to get off.
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.
(I don't usually post journal entries here, but this one was so strange that I wanted to, for reasons unknown. These are among the less-bizarre dreams that I have, though they're kind of shocking. The strangest was when I was going to a train station to meet myself.)
Had really horrible dreams all night, turbulent. Don’t know why this happens sometimes. Sometimes they involve my sister. This time they were completely bizarre. I only remember one vividly. I was upstairs in a house or apartment (not a familiar one) and heard loud, maniacal laughter, just cackling in a way that sounded unhinged. I went downstairs and saw my sister watching TV, and an opera singer was performing, a young woman lying down. She had a lovely voice.
My sister was very loudly, raucously mocking her with this laughter. It was so completely over the top. I told her, “Listen, this woman has a beautiful voice.” The mocking was obviously my sister's way to obscure and deny her complete inability to risk anything (as a singer) by disdaining and showing contempt for everyone else's efforts, a chronic pattern with her. When I confronted her she seemed to back down, or at least I thought she did. In another scene we were physically fighting, as we often do in my dreams (but never in life). Sometimes I even wish I could kill her.
I had a whole lot more dreams – oh! I was making something for my daughter Shannon out of a huge cardboard box and polyester stuffing, and I was going to make (probably knit) a sort of grey skin for it – an elephant, but then it turned into a whale. I was partly done making it, but needed another bag of stuffing (or ten!), then left it in my old church – sort of, it didn’t look like my old church, but a person I knew was there, or someone sort of like her. I thought my work in progress would be safe there.
Then when I came back, they had thrown the box out and then pretended to be sorry. They said they didn't recognize it and thought it was garbage. I was angry and devastated that they had just thrown it away and sure that they had done it deliberately. I know there were other dreams, one about a restaurant serving sandwiches that at first seemed good but later turned out to be horrible and slimy, but it was sort of disgusting. Bill was involved with this one, but as with most dreams it has melted into vapour and disappeared. I doubt if these things mean very much except to represent feelings about a person or an institution. I remember trying to fashion some sort of tail for the whale.
Normally I don’t remember dreams, and that’s fine with me.
I
had a very strange dream about Harold Lloyd. I was listening to some gospel music, or rather watching it performed live, and it was the anthem Jerusalem (a. k. a. The Holy City) being done in a very over-the-top way.
Later I was trying to find a recording of it because it reminded me of church, as if it was being sung by my former church choir, though nobody looked the same. At one point I was sticking a pencil in a vast machine-looking box to unlock it. In some way the music was supposed to come out of it, but the pencil kept breaking off, so I didn't get to hear it again. Then
I had a chance to meet Harold Lloyd. He looked like a slim, good-looking but otherwise unremarkable middle-aged businessman, from the era of his talkies in the mid-1930s (I was thinking The Milky Way where he plays a milkman boxer),
and he started firing questions at me: ten standard questions handwritten on a
piece of paper “just to get to know each other”. This was his usual method with
people. I took the piece of paper and crumpled it up and threw it away and
said, “Let’s just talk to each other instead.” He looked uncomfortable, but
seemed to come out of it and we talked. I don’t remember anything we said after that,
but he soon left, and as he went out the door I yelled after him, “Would you
like me to send you my novel?” He breezily said, “Oh, n-” (the “o” disappearing
as he vanished around the corner and was gone). No interest at all. Oh no, don’t send
it to me. No one even wants to READ it to find out what they think. "I already know I don't like it." Like a little kid with new food.
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The story: while setting up a more stylish-looking link to my Amazon page, I realized to my horror that the price of The Glass Character had been lowered from the list price of $19.95 to $4.73. That's right: $4.73, when it is a paper book that has been out for only five months. Kindle format goes for $7.96, and a used copy may be had for $16.21.
The correspondence above represents my fourth attempt to get through to Amazon for an explanation. At one point I was on the phone, and if I hadn't been so furious it would have been funny: the lady trying to direct me to the right department had the most buoyant Southern accent I've ever heard, and kept calling me "sweetie" and "hon". Over and over again, Amazon tells me they don't know why they are selling my new novel for $4.73 instead of $19.95. They keep repeating that I should contact my publisher for updated information on the list price and to convey that updated information to them: WTF? Updated? The list price is the same now as it has always been. I have absolutely no desire to change it. My publisher has absolutely no desire to change it. It will not be changed for ANY reason! But Amazon's implication is that they've only lowered their price because the LIST PRICE has gone down. Or at very least, because I don't know anything about how prices work and have somehow got it wrong, that the list price is really only two dollars or something. It's simple, silly!
I'm trying to see all this in a favorable light. On the bad side, the book now looks almost worthless, a cheap piece of pulp fiction that they are obviously trying to get rid of at church-rummage-sale prices. It has only been out for five months, and obviously it is already obsolete. On the good side, I just found out I get the same royalties on each copy, no matter what price it sells for. Or at least, that's what Amazon told me. I am embarrassed, chagrinned, and full of pain and grief over this. I will never publish again. It's not my publisher's fault, as they are the only house in Canada who would take a chance on me. And they are doing what they can against the juggernaut. But I am tired of being casually mauled this way. I am sick of the hustling, the posturing, the rah-rah and other things I feel I should be doing. I am sick of the sense I am never doing enough, or never doing it right, the discomfort, the squirming shame for something I can't even articulate. I am tired of being told I should thank reviewers who have eviscerated me. Kiss the whip! And to do this whether I really mean it or not. And I am REALLY tired of those who take a wrench and a saw and try to "fix" the problem, rather than listening to me and trying to help me figure out what is really going on, and how I can be authentic in the middle of an insane game.
This whole industry has turned so poisonous that I can no longer be part of it. I stand behind The Glass Character because I still think it kicks ass, no matter who tells me what about it. I loved writing it, and so far the writing of it has been practically the only reward (that, and seeing my grandkids watch Harold Lloyd climb the building at the launch). But after this, no more. Four copies for the price of one just hurts me, and it has nothing to do with greed or how much I will "make" or how much I will be "known" or ANYTHING like that. I swear, I have not been able to get across to a single person why this bothers me so much. I'm trying to yell under a bell jar again. I've been publishing short fiction on my blog for several years now, and it has been gratifying, though a "real book" somehow always seems to carry more - what, cachet? I don't know. It lifts you out of the realm of hobbyist. But If I feel another novel coming on, I will go and lie down for a while, and if it's really bad I'll take a little vacation. Like my very good friend Matt Paust, who keeps me laughing at all this insanity no matter what, I will blog my next novel, chapter by chapter. If someone reads it, great. If no one does, I don't much care because I have no control over that anyway, and I will save myself an enormous amount of stress.
My readership here is extremely uneven, mostly rather sparse, but with one post garnering nearly 100,000 views, and several others over 10,000. (Why? Hell if I know. This thing is anything but hip and high-tech, because I despise those things. The day it turns slick, I will either unplug my computer for good or finally jump out of my psychiatrist's 17th-floor window.) Being a published author was my dream, and after a ridiculous amount of work and grief and tears and perseverence, it actually came true three times. But by the time the third one came out, everyone who could hold a pencil was a published author, whether they could cobble together a coherent sentence or not. As Moxy Fruvous put it, "Everyone's a novelist, and everyone can sing/But no one talks when the TV's on." What they're asking for is product, the more uniform the better. I just don't see the advantage in contributing something that has already been contributed over, and over, and over again, and shoved in people's faces the same way. But I hear it in my ear all the time: well, that's what you gotta do now, sweetheart. A writer has to hustle. A former post is recreating itself, growing back like a chopped-off limb. It was such a howl of grief and rage, so nerve-baringly honest, that I knew I had to delete it. But it's back again because, by God, I was not put here on this earth to dissemble. I am an oddball, I do not belong, and so be it. Do not try to convince me otherwise because it will make me insane. This is all about dignity, and identity, and dreams. It's all about those in power casually poking holes in those dreams, and slapping down hope. I've asked a few other writers about this situation and have had four or five different variations on "well, what can you do?" Our powerlessness appalls me.
$4.73, folks. Or you could get a used copy - that's always a better bargain, isn't it? It will only set you back $16.21. The Kindle, if you can afford it, is $7.96. They must want you to buy the paper version - or do they just want to unload it? Fire sale prices, obviously. I don't know what to think. Dear sir or madam, please buy four or five of these books for the price of one. I don't care what you do with them after that. I just don't want them to be pulped like the other two. Anything but that.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .
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.
In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means." Not at dawn, but when I first get up, I find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams. Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.
I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.
At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.
At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.
There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.
At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.
It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.
That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can. Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!"
The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially inThe City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?
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