Dreamavsion

The corridor of time stretched out before us, long and gloomy and rather dusty.  Time and dust seem to go together, perhaps because time makes dust of us all.  The no bodies thing is kind of nice, my knees don't hurt, Mom and Uncle John are not old.  But the fear we all feel-that is real and now and not dusty or old either.

I call for reinforcements and Oliver the parrot, Moon and the blood pythons appear.  Because it's MY dreamavision, Mom and Uncle John are not frightened by them, they probably don't even know they are there.  Oh, now I get it it, part of the rules.  I am the consciousness, but I'm sharing their memories.  Cool beans, now we'll get to the bottom of all this, because at the end of the corridor lies...dum dum dum (Oliver intones helpfully)....the Crux of the Matter.

Holding hands with hands that don't exist, we gather our courage and walk through the creaking door.  No one has bodies, so the term walk works for those of us who waddle and who don't have legs.  Ok, we did not walk-we, our spirit selves, moved through the door, which didn't creak but opened silently.

And there sat the Horrible Crux......Mom and John's father wasn't a very nice man, he didn't have a job they understood or maybe not one at all, and they were poor and embarrassed about it.

Uncle John, Mom and the Horrible Crux vanish, leaving me only with my anger and disbelief.

"That is fucking it?  IT?  All there is?"

I work up a righteous anger, that turns suddenly into laughter.  I've been looking and brooding for months for the terrible gloom that hangs over us all, trying to understand it so I can fight it.  And I've been looking for things that would scare and bother me in THEIR past.

Even when people tell you things about their lives, we all still tend to see them through our own eyes and experiences.  I suddenly understood why my parents could not understand how lost I was when the snakes died last year.  And, I finally got it that when Mom looks at Moon, she truly sees an ugly dog-really she does.  My spirit dog wags his tail and I smile at him.  For an instant, a cur dog rises behind him like a puff of smoke-another's vision manifests-one that I reject.

"Still, I thought there'd be more."

"Not YOUR fears, only YOUR dream" Oliver intones and shoves his face into mine so that I see his beak and his beady eye surrounded by reptilian scales.

"How come no one else is talking?" I ask.

Oliver sighs and cocks his head, giving me his best patient look.  "I'm the only parrot".

So, Boogey Men are specific to each individual.  What cripples one person or molds their entire life course only does so if they let it.  But ponder this.  If Mom hadn't been embarrassed about her poor shiftless Dad, hidden in 50's domesticity and never emerged-where would I be?  Who would I be, hell what would I be?  In the middle of a different dream I suppose.

Mom asked me today "What did you DO all day?" and I answered "I worked" which is so much shorter and sweeter than "I'm not going to tell you so that you can place your own value judgements on how I spend my time."   I wonder if the Crux of the Matter ever felt the same way?

But I am only my own crux, no one else's.  If someone else wants to relegate me to the dark scary room at the end of corridor of time in THEIR dream, that's cool.  But this one is mine and I must learn to see it through my own eyes.

Wow, learning to see my own stuff through my own eyes and other people's stuff through their eyes-is that like a psychic boundary?