Before Bed

When I was a young girl, I had a green rocking chair that sat in my room. It was remnant from my nursery, I think. But when I had outgrown that chair, when I was nine or ten, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I would imagine that there were people in my room, in the corners, coming to get me and I would panic. Slowly, slowly, panic. For a lot of those years I slept in a nest of quilts on my parents' floor but when I was in my own room, I had a trick I used to calm myself down. I would imagine Mary Chapin Carpenter was sitting in my green rocking chair, with her guitar on her lap, singing me "When Halley Came to Jackson."

Now I'm a (sometimes) grownup and I happen to have a green armchair in my room. As I was lying in bed tonight, ready to sleep, I turned on "It Don't Bring You," which I consider another lullaby. I suddenly remembered all those nights Chapin kept me safe from the monsters in the corners and I set it up to play again. I know there is no one here but me, Alyssa upstairs, and Charlie down the hall. I know I am safe here and I will not panic, not tonight. But a little lullaby and a little safety never hurt anyone.

Last Week's Dream

I had a dream last week that I wanted to write about that I never got a chance to. It's pretty cloudy now, so I'll do my best to remember what I can.

In the dream, my roommates and I were moving into a new apartment. Our new place was in a very European-esque building and had lots of winding hallways between the rooms. There was some leftover furniture in the apartment and the first part of the dream was me wandering through these rooms, choosing which would be mine, moving furniture, examining our new old-world space. After a while of looking around I noticed a staircase that led up to a door. My roommates appeared and the three of us climbed the stairs and opened the door into another apartment.

This apartment was painted all yellow, with white, ornate furniture. It felt like an old grandmother's apartment and I remember feeling very much not-at-home. I didn't feel at home in the apartment downstairs either, but it was a very active feeling in the upstairs apartment. Then one of my roommates said that this was our new place, not the one downstairs, which immediately upset me. I did not want to live here, but it seemed we had no choice, we had no where else to go. We started to move our objects upstairs and I tried to change my thinking, tried to accept this new space. The yellow seemed to glare at me and I didn't even want to touch the furniture.

Then, suddenly, one of the rooms was on fire. A space heater had overheated and the yellow upstairs apartment was on fire. We called the fire department and tried our best to put out the fire ourselves. (It was very much Wife In The Attic type of room fire, not Oh Holy Fuck This Is A Real Danger fire.)  Eventually, as we were just finishing putting the fire out, my current director came into the apartment. He was overwhelmed with show paperwork and binders and was very flustered by our presence, much less the fire damage. He put down his objects and explained to us that this yellow apartment was and IS his apartment, and that we were wrong, the downstairs apartment was ours.

It was very relieving to know that we were not going to have to live in this awkward space, but the guilt I felt over the fire went up exponentially. I had, somehow, come to believe that the space heater fire was my fault. Later in the dream I learned that it was not in fact my fault, but at the time I was drowning in this guilt and shame.

A lot of the dream gets fuzzy here, but I do remember two specific moments: finding out that I had not caused the fire (and all of the relief that went with that), and looking at my director's computer. While on the computer I found a file with pictures and adjectives of women that he was interested in. They were all women I did not know, with the exception of myself. It was an old picture of me, at my old weight, with the adjectives: "fat, arrogant, ignorant."

This is the second dream I have had in which this particular person has accused me of arrogance. Arrogance is not a fault of mine, I don't think (arrogant to think so?).  I have a lot of faults and will gladly discuss most of them, but I've never felt arrogance to be one. What does this dream mean? What does this man's dream accusation of arrogance mean? What does it mean that it's happened twice? If you have thoughts, I sincerely do want to know them. I think it's interesting that I was in his file of women he is attracted to, but only listed with negative characteristics. I didn't notice what was written for the other women.