inbetween time, ain't we got fun?
In the past month:
-work
-gym
-gamelan
-crappy Monday night TV (I cannot look away, David Caruso! You suck!)
-vacation, both friend and family
-cooking, home and away
-decorating and rearranging
-buying a couch
-Zip car-ing
-movies
-finally finished Anna Karenina (!!)
-freelancing
+ + +
From as far back as I can remember up until I was about 18, my dreams were dominated by one enduring image or occurrence: in almost every dream, no matter what the situation was, my eyes would get stuck shut. I'd blink, in the dream, and just wouldn't be able to open them. I could pry them open with my fingers, in the dream, but with the next blink they'd stick again. It's the kind of imagery that *must mean something* but I don't know what it means. The kind of thing that maybe I'd look up in a big ol' dream dictionary if I was in a chain bookstore and had some time to kill.
But at about 18 or 19, this imagery stopped appearing and I haven't had recurring dream imagery up until the past two weeks. Lately, I've had several dreams in which I lose all or most of my teeth. In some, I try to return the teeth or tooth to my mouth, but it's always too large for the empty socket. The most recent was the most troubling: my teeth started chipping, cracking, crumbling, and peeling out for no reason, along with strips of my gums. In the dream I cried, screamed, felt around my mouth with my tongue afraid that I'd feel another broken tooth falling away from the socket. It was the only dream in which I knew what was happening was irreversible, that my teeth were gone for good. It's been the only dream in which I've lost more than one or two teeth total. And it's the only dream in which I've piled the tissue and teeth from my mouth together outside my mouth, on a plate for safekeeping, crying and hoping a doctor can help me. Up until the last month I'd only had a couple of tooth dreams a year, but the frequency's certainly up now.
In the last four nights, I've had two dreams with very vivid spider imagery. I haven't run into a lot of spiders since we relocated to the east coast--haven't had a lot of spider exposure since I left my folks' house for the dorms and then the city, in fact. So I'm not entirely sure where this is coming from now. Last night, the spiders were large, colourful, like the garden spiders I remember from my family's first house in the relatively less arid southeastern corner of my home state. One stretched towards me on its web as I pulled one strand of the web, trying to free my hand from the sticky. The other dream featured more, smaller spiders, teeming I don't remember where, but teeming.
My teeth are fine, great even, and I haven't seen but a few spiders in the last year. This must mean something.
Anna Karenina is one of my favorite books that I would never want to read again.
p.s. when I was a kid, I had some sort of weird thing (I think as a result of the two eye surgeries that I had) where every single morning my eyes were crusted shut. Sometimes I could open them with a little force, but usually I'd have to yell for my parent or wander blindly to his or her room so that they could put a wet washcloth over them so that I could open my eyes. It was pretty scary. I'm glad that's stopped.