Again, the dreamspace

{Caesura}

If my life were a poem I would be stuck at the mid-line pause.

Yesterday I spent the bulk of my day away from the machine & this was good. I bought one of Ian's beautiful woodcuts to hang in my office & talked to Missy about religion, politics & all things Whedonesque. I spent some time in my own company having lunch, browsing the bookstores & reading. I bought myself a post-post birthday present because nobody else did. I considered wrapping it but thought this a bit too eccentric even for me & I am too lazy anyway. I am in this place where I feel very disconnected from everything & I am struggling to reconnect or at least to make sense of whatever it is that's making me feel as though all is merely flux & fissure & my life is like water leaking through these cracks.

Last night I dreamt of a room. In this room, an orca--one of those black & white swirly whales that have been in the news recently for doing violence to humans. The orca was quite large & whale-sized at first glance. At second glance, it fit on a moderately-sized dinner plate. I sat before this plate of whale, with a knife & fork poised in the air. A disembodied voice called out: If you were a good person, you wouldn't be doing this.

I replied: I am not a good person. That's why I'm doing this.

And so I began to cut the whale into slices. The whale had transformed into a loaf of bread--an aquatic mammal as marble rye, with dark & light swirls that seemed especially fitting. I consumed the entire loaf.

Later, I was told we were all required to wear chicken-shank hats. In another dream, this might have seemed odd.

***

Thematically, the dream centers on the idea of consumption.


Whale: may suggest the dreamer's fear of being swallowed, like the biblical Jonah. (The whale reflects some of the same yonic archetypes as the hellmouth in my previous dream: life & death, rebirth. The womb.)


Bread : the staff of life, sustenance. That which nurtures or sustains us. If one wanted to drag Freud into the picture, orality.


Hat: being positioned on the dreamer's head, having to do with the intellect. According to my dream dictionary, hats also suggest vanity & self-expression (!). "The type of hat points to the personality of the dreamer." (Apparently I am a chicken.)


***

Swallow or be swallowed, chickadee.