Lion and Magic Boy

Okay then!

I am sitting here, dumbfounded: in front of me is James Lipton sitting with his pants rolled up to the knee and his feet in a swimming pool, talking about car insurance. So….why? Oh! Have I mentioned I don’t watch a lot of TV? Here are my current Netflix: Volver (which somehow I could not get into after the alcohol I consumed) and two documentaries, Wordplay (about Scrabble) and Show Business: The Road to Broadway. I guess I was into documentaries that week.

Hey! No laughing! Documentaries RUUUULE!

So! Why?

Why would I schedule, SAME DAY, a meeting with The Ex and also a meeting with She Who Cannot be Named?

Why?

Actually, they sort of both went well. The wounds hardly show. And! They both read this blog so my awkwardness talking about this is totally a secret. Shhh!

But I had announcements to make, and there is stuff to resolve. I often think that’s the whole point of life: creating stuff between people that requires resolution, and then resolving it. Or not.

So! I have taken the trash out to the curb, both literally and figuratively, and I feel I have accomplished something. Especially since I had to manifest a whole dream about taking the trash out in order to remind me when I finally crawled out of bed that I hadn’t done it last night and therefore needed to get a move on this morning before the truck came. Except in my dream it was pitch-black outside, being in the middle of the night, and I was wearing a nightgown, which I don’t actually own one of in real life. Whatever. Also a long sweater over the nightgown (it was cold outside in the dream), which I also don’t own.

So obviously, the sweater is a symbol for my unresolved conflict about wool and yarn in general, and the trash is a symbol for, well, trash, and the dark is a symbol for my hidden fear of leprechauns.

But lo and behold, the trash man cometh and I now have a whole empty reservoir to fill with all manner of unwanted items. Surely that is also symbolic.

Yesterday I was feeling a bit sad/depressed/overwhelmed/angry (I forget which, exactly), and Matthew suggested I do some energy work with an entity we’ve been working with.

Oh wow, look at that! Your eyes just rolled up inside your head when I said “energy work” and “entity”! That was so cool! Do it again, please?

Okay, let’s just get past that part, shall we? (It only gets weirder from now on anyway)

So I sort of curled up into a fetal position for some reason on the green chair in the livingroom which I hate (the chair, not the livingroom, and said chair WILL GO at some point), and closed my eyes and invited the energy in.

I started seeing something vaguely dreamlike at that point:

For some reason, it was important that I use a sword to cut off my own head. There was, rather understandably I think, some resistence to this, but I knew that in the long run it would be a good thing. Still, the resistance persisted, but after a bit I noticed I was looking down at my severed head rather dispassionately. Someone else, possibly Matthew, appeared at my side and I said, “Look, it’s my head. Huh.” He said, “I know,” and we walked across a little meadow into the edge of a nearby forest together, where we knelt down to look at something precious that was growing there, a tiny plant that bloomed with my face. It was clearly a new version of me that was growing there, and there was an incredible feeling of tenderness toward this small plant, tenderness and good wishes. Around us a number of other people appeared, dancing in the forest. Most of them were also growing from the earth, in various stages of growth and height, and they were all accepting and relatively joyful, acknowedging their place in the world.

Umm…so what does this mean? It seems rather obviously symbolic, yet, is there something more perhaps?

Okay, some questions:

1. Why a sword? A Japanese sword, for that matter (I didn’t mention that part). I can only guess that severing your own head with a sword isn’t easy.

2. What happened to my severed head afterward? And how was it that I already had a new one?

3. Do you know how weird it is to see your head growing out of a plant? And what’s the lifespan of a person-plant? Wasn’t there a movie about this? And why am I reminded of Audrey II?

I was totally going to write about something completely different today, but now I will save that one for another day since I am so damn impulsive and reading this post of Sweetney’s made me remember my dream from last night:

So I’m in my house, and it’s not my house really although I know it’s my house, you know how things can look totally different in dreams yet you know they are actually something else, or something in particular anyway? I used to have a lot of dreams based in the house I grew up in, weird pebbly beige kitchen linoleum, wild green and orange walls and all (hey! it was the 70’s! And we had brown, avocado, and yellow appliances!), but I must have grown up along the way sometime because now my dreams mostly take place in the house I live in presently, whatever house that is, except I seldom had dreams located in the haunted 200-year old farmhouse I lived in for 6 years with The Ex before escaping to Colorado. Hmm. I wonder why? Was it the hauntedness?

ANYWAY. (Will you stop distracting me?) So I’m in my house, some house, and it has pink carpet, I might add! I know this because most of the dream has me looking floorward, and this pink carpet is right. there. looking very, um, pink. It’s not a fuschia, not a pastel pink, but is leaning towards Pepto-Bismol pink, and I have seen carpet this color somewhere but cannot right now put my finger on where. Probably in some other dream.

So there’s a cat litter box there (you were wondering how cat litter figured in this dream, weren’t you?), an open box, and it’s my job to scoop out the chunks and put them in the toilet conveniently placed next to the litter box. (When did that toilet appear? Poof! Don’t you love how you can just make things appear and disappear in dreams? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that in life?). So I’m scooping, and meanwhile having a conversation with some unseen someone not in camera view, and there appears to be nothing there to scoop so I’m about to give up, when I notice that, no, there are a couple of small chunks in one area, so I scoop them up and drop them in the convenient toilet. Then suddenly there are more chunks, and more, and I’m scooping and dropping, scooping and dropping, and beginning to wonder if this isn’t going to affect the plumbing somehow, because suddenly this has become Not My House and although I’m not sure whose house it is, I know that whoever it is probably won’t want their toilet Roto Rootered because I clogged it up with clumping cat litter.

And I’m wondering about the prodigious output of these two cats (somehow I know there are two), and the clumps just keep appearing and I just keep having to scoop, because I can’t stop now and leave the job half done, you know?

So, the Sisyphus of Cat Litter. What can THAT mean?

So this week I discovered a new sleep aid.

O blessed Valium, where have you been hiding?
I only wish that the small brown bottle was everlasting
But refills are zero
Still, you are my hero
And with you, to oblivion I go

I’ve had insomnia problems for, like, 15 years. Some of them I can attribute to pregnancy (have you ever tried to sleep with an eight-pound bowling ball stuffed under your skin? That’s melting the ligaments around your pelvis and causing your entire body to swell to proportions for which it CLEARLY was not designed? yes? One question — WHY????!!), but mainly, my mind refuses to go to the “off” position and I find myself thinking about all sorts of random things, like what maybe I’ll cook for tomorrow’s dinner, and lately all sorts of legal-divorce stuff, and designing halloween costumes, and reworking endings of movies we saw lately and other incredibly useful useless crap.

So the Valium apparently disconnects this wiring and instead my face is blanketed with blackness as if some giant pillow is placed there not in suffocation but in gentle repose, allowing me a buffer between my brain and the world at large.

So waking up in a semi-drugged state is seemingly worth the six hours of blessed oblivion this affords me. Only problem is, there’s a finite supply and in general I’m not so good with the prescription medication, or even anything over-the-counter (I didn’t even own Advil until Michael moved in with his pharmacopeia of little brown bottles). It seems a little like giving up, giving in to some unknown affliction that I’d prefer not to be labeled with.

I’ve had some weird dreams with this stuff, too, though not as weird as the one I had in college when there was an influx of giant caterpillars taking over the world and the entire planet’s population was gathered on the football field and somehow I had to communicate with the caterpillars about their plans. I hated all the pressure from being chosen to do this and those caterpillars were so disgustingly…slimy.

Another prophetic dream was the one I had in, say, August of 2001. The name “Osama bin Laden” kept permeating my brain for weeks that month, and one night I dreamed I was holed up in my house with my family with bombs going off everywhere outside and I could hear voices speaking an unknown language outside and I knew they were related to the total annihilation of the planet that was apparently coming up momentarily, so I had seconds to say goodbye to my family and to accept what was coming next, which I did so and then everything was fine and quiet.

So……anti-depressants? What do you think?