Dreams and Mom

Tuesday. My sleep had been deep and black the night before, from too much partying and quite simply, too much. As my brain refracts, the subconscious returns with a vengeance. In the form of all too real and message laden dreams that crush me with questions when I awaken.

I’d gone to sleep fairly early since throughout the day I was very tired and listless. The result of going out to Crobar Monday morning for Alegria ( It was ok, I’ve heard Abel do better). Exhausted, I’m in bed by 8.

The dream starts in a familiar setting, Brooklyn College campus. It feels like a stairwell connecting to the steam tunnels. I’m being pursued and I’m not alone. I'm with Karen, a woman who’d seduced me (I let her) and whom I later, blew off (for which I’m fairly certain, I’m going to hell for.). We’re being chased while playing paintball, a sufficiently non-lethal reason to be chased but harrowing nonetheless. Up black painted corridors, down dark shadowy stairwells, many flights at a time, we’re running and dodging. We explode above ground by the Quad. There’s a marching band walking by and a graduating class is following them. Don’t trust them, somebody in there is looking for us. Oh, and watch out for the pile of chairs in the bush.

Relieved and happy, we turn on to a side street, it morphs into West 8th Street off 6th Avenue. The woman I’m running with is now my mother. I’m flabbergasted and stunned, but elated in my heart. We stop for her to fix something in her pack, as she bends to one knee to my left. At that moment, a window opens across the street. Another version of my mother is screaming at me to drive her somewhere, selfish and inconsiderate. It is then, I realize that that woman is my mother, not the one with whom I’ve been running. I call, “Mother” to the woman before me and the woman at the window berates me for calling the other woman “Mother” and wonders aloud what the hell is wrong with me. I look back to the woman on her knee and as she sheds a tear, I awaken heavy-hearted.

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