Hi, gaugie. (And everybody.) You shouldn't have sent me that dream. I can't resist a dream. Even though I've been resisting SI very successfully. I am a thousand posts behind on DAR.
You know what this dream made me think of? How dangerous life is and how beautiful it is and how the two are sometimes (always) combined, and how you, gaugie, have been subjected to waves of many sorts, waves of feeling, I mean, of sensation, you have been swept along by them, and haven't been destroyed by them, though they are, and could have been, dangerous. And the imagery made me think of drugs, too, and the feelings, and waves of feelings, associated with them, and the complex feelings one has about them, and the reasons you yourself have felt (and have had to feel) various contradictory ways about drugs-- because they have helped you so much and yet been so alarming to you, and felt so good and necessary and like a blessing at times (when they helped the pain) and yet so dangerous at other times.
Something about your language, also, made me think you are still processing thoughts and feelings not only about the danger with which you lived over these last years, and during the period of surgery and early recuperation, and about all the drugs you have had to take; but that you are thinking, too, with excitement and amazement and exhilaration, about the life you are now entering, post surgery.
One thing I noticed is that you have used rather a lot of drug-associated language in this dream; and drugs of one sort or another have been a part of your life for a while. Hash you mention explicitly; you use "reef," (reefer comes to mind); you used the word "smack," and "pipes," the phrase "getting higher." Jamaica is, of course, the biggest drug source in the Caribbean and some Jamaicans, notably Rastafarians, use drugs in their religious rituals; and you mentioned "tubes," and "rocks," and "cooking."
You wrote, and this is so wonderful, I think,
<<< Besides being colorful to the extreme, it's breathtaking. Exhilarating, and it should be dangerous, but it's not...>>>
and you wrote,
<<<... and we notice... something is different, and the rhythmic parallel waves have turned to more chop and in the chop there, the green and white cake-frosting foam, we realize there are a hundred or so dorsal fins. >>>
and that made me think about your life being, suddenly, so different, the steady if difficult rhythms of it having turned, maybe, now that you are looking at the prospect of less pain, less disability, into "more chop." And in the new "chop," (choppiness of formerly rhythmic waves is a very good representation of suddenly life-flux), there is cake-frosting foam (sounds celebratory!) and... there are those reef sharks. With their dorsal fins. And in this part of the dream appears the knife and the cutting of the shark.
One could hardly avoid thinking of surgery when the shark was being cut apart; or of thinking how confusing, and emotionally paradoxical, in a way, serious, painful surgery always is, to the patient, because it is at the same time an assault and a very ordinary experience. One undergoes it to survive, and doctors wield those knives to earn a living; it's an routine sort of thing as well as a shocking, bloody physical attack. Of course your surgery was not only a knife attack, but was... ordinary. Like the cutting of the trapped shark by the Jamaican.
And of course if you were taking drugs for the heck of it, that would be one thing, but under other circumstances (the ordinary kind), that would be another. The knife is dangerous and yet safe and ordinary; the drugs are dangerous and yet safe and also beautiful, and ordinary.
And the break, the break, (your word) didn't wash you off the walk, I noticed, gaugie. It shook you, you said-- but didn't "wash you off the walk as you would expect." It is "amazing," gaugie. No wonder you smile hard!
(I wonder if you are anticipating an improvement in your sex life, post surgery. Perhaps I have just stepped over a line, lol!?)
That dream of yours seemed to me like an evocation of the different realities running parallel to each other in your life, and that are now in a state of resolution, or beginning resolution, which "feels good" and at the same time must be confusing-- and especially confusing, I should think, would be the knowledge that you contain about what you've been through; the memories, I mean; they could almost be called secrets; and they are so amazing to you; and also the problems still to be faced must feel great to you, I'm sure, and yet, to the world, they are evidently so... everyday. So unacknowledged.
And there were fins in your dream. Many, many fins.
(Dorsal fins. Those are the ones on the back? Well, you are back from the surgery, and back from that abyss of pain and disability, and you do seem in this dream to be looking back; but you're looking forward, too, and with exhilaration, it seems; and it's breathtaking; and it's a fascinating experience, it seems like a world that you've kind of discovered, gaugie.)
Fins The fins of the not-so-dangerous, after all, sharks. In the newly choppy water. (Choppy, but with foam like cake-frosting.)
And I think maybe that Englishman, the one you waded across a river to? The one to whom you were trying to show the sharks-- really, the fins of the sharks? The Englishman to whom you were trying to show them because "he sort of didn't believe it"? I think that was you.
It's a wonderful dream, gaugie! And beautiful.
Fins.
Amazing. |
