Or, now for something completely different. I am a little hesitant to do this as I'm afraid some expert will read it an tell me something about myself I'd just as soon not know. But, what's the point of living if you don't live dangerously.
We live on a few acres out in the country and just below the house, there used to be a little pond (stock tank to Texicans) that wasn’t much more than a big mud puddle. I had it cleaned out and expanded a couple of years ago to be deep enough for fish, had it made kidney-shaped so that is covers about an acre.
It is situated mostly in the open. I have planted a few evergreens around it but I didn’t want a lot of trees blocking the sun and filling it up with leaves in the fall.
So this morning I dreamed about my pond.
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In my dream, the pond is just full of leaves. I think my recently deceased father was there with me when we came up to the pond. I started to rake some of the leaves out and somehow the pond turned into something much smaller. It appeared to be built like an above-ground pool – still kidney-shaped. In the dream, the thought did cross my mind that my pond was bigger than this. But in typical dream-logic it made sense, more or less.
I think Dad suggested breaking the pool down to clean it rather than raking the leaves out and we proceeded to do this.
The pool was set up, not on the ground but on a platform, like a stage, with a backdrop behind it, and seats on the other side, looking down on it like a little amphitheater. The bottom row of seats was elevated off the ground at about the same level as the stage. There was a gap between the stage and the seats probably six or eight feet wide that dropped down to ground level. Possibly it was there for drainage, to let the water from the pool get off the stage without getting into the seats. You obviously weren’t meant to cross from the seats to the stage under normal circumstances because there were no steps on either side. The platforms were four feet high or maybe a little more. I know I stepped down into the gap from the stage and started to vault up to where the seats were, something I could normally do easily, but my arms and shoulders were exhausted from a workout earlier (in real life) and I gave it up.
After the pool was dissembled several family members appeared to help me put it back together. Dad was not one of them. I was a little concerned because I had disconnected some small tubes from the pool and wasn’t sure how we would connect them back up. It occurred to me that the people assisting me did not know what they were doing. We were beginning to get the bottom and sides up. We paused to talk about someone, a female – my mother (also deceased) I think – who “liked to turn on the lights out there and play [some kind] of music” so that people passing by could enjoy the scene.
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I kind of think I know what this is about, but I am open to suggestions. Jung is OK, Freud not so much. Have fun.
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1 comment:
Mushroom,
Beautiful dream. It reminded me of the pool we had growing up. My friend down the street had a nicer one, bigger, and that’s where our gang spent the most time swimming in the summers. Although my friend used to ask if we could use my pool many times, which we did when it was just the two of us. He liked the pool more than I did. But really it wasn’t a big deal either way to me. My dad used to complain about taking care of it. I don’t know why really. It wasn’t much trouble at all. I did a share of it. Every year he suggested we get rid of it and he was right of course since as we got older (me and my two brothers – I’m the youngest) we used it less and less. But the sons, especially the last one, didn’t want to see it go. When I graduated college, that summer had a few days off and decided to break it down and fill in the shallow hole left behind with some good dirt and put down some seed. It was a lot of work. But it needed to be done.
My friend I think it was who told me how she felt different when her mother passed away. Her father had passed away some years before the mother. When her last parent passed she felt like she was really the mother now although she had already teenage children of her own. I’ve heard this story before, once by a man talking about his father passing.
The stage, your father, no one else knowing what to do but you are left in charge of a job you don’t know how to do. Maybe your father felt the same way once, when his father passed. And he was in charge a long time, all the while knowing he was the only one who knew it, felt the continuous strain of that job. Or maybe I’m thinking of my father, who is in his seventies but still worries about his boys.
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