10.25.04

more work, more meetings, more frustrations, and more small victories. things have settled into the mid-semester rhythm that will last for a few more weeks until everyone figures out it's suddenly thanksgiving.

i had a dream the other night that left a memory of a particular kind of comfort. there was a celebration: harvest time, full of warm browns. the celebration was for jon and i, though there was no specific reason. it seemed to be a venue for all our respective people to meet each other. his parents, my parents, crowds of people we were friends with in the dream but not in reality. it was inside and outside a cavernous house, a rough-hewn, upscale version of a wassookeag house. white-washed walls and long, dark wooden tables. he played the guitar and i listened from around a corner, hiding; he saw me and kept playing.

the dream creates an effect similar to that of my image of the rain-stained wooden house out in the dexter woods. i've never seen this house: i made it up out of an abstracted idea of susie and mark's old dexter place that i was in when i was three and my idea of the safest place that could exist. at some traumatic point in my life (either junior high or freshman year of college, it's unclear) i purposefully created the idea of this house as a refuge. it still works. in the image light grey rain drips off a roof and nearby cedar branches; the wood of the house is filled with shades of grey and rusty red. it's quiet except for wet woods sounds.

the long wooden tables, white-washed walls, the sweater he was wearing, and the memory of hiding while he played create a feeling in the same family as the feeling of the rain house.

i like that. i can't think of any rarer feeling.

i call up the dream in quiet spaces during the day and it makes things real for a split second.