Waking From A Dream
The pain came on so strong this morning that it wove its way into the dream that was playing in my head before dawn. In the illusion, a former co-worker and dear friend, Christy, was driving me to work and we were piling food for an office pot luck and art work (for whatever reason it made sense in the moment of my dream-mentality) into the hatch back of her car. As I got into the passenger seat the pain stabbed hard in my abdomen and I turned to her to say “I don’t think, I can make it in this morning. I seem to be in a lot of abdominal pain. Can you please drive me back home?”
Christy turned the car around (the streets where not recognizable as my current neighborhood, yet there was no sense of newness in the dream so we must have been headed in the right direction.) Christy stopped at the bottom of a long hill, there was some man in the middle of the street, he had white hair and rather old looking tattered clothes, but I don’t recall talking to him. Instead another stabbing pain shot through my core and I doubled over a bit as Christy handed me a large framed poster from the back of the car.
“Why did you park down here? It’s such a long walk up this hill for me to get home?”
“The deviled eggs would tip from the steep angle of the road, so I had to stop here.” she answers.
“Oh.” Apparently it made a modicum of dream-sense to me, though I still felt put-out as I carried the art work up the street on my back.
As I turned the corner, I paused as another tummy cramp took my breath away. When I looked up, there was a blue flowering tree to my left. I pointed to Christy who was up in front of me a ways. “Look, there’s a bluebird in the blue tree.”, I said with delight. She nodded seemingly nonplused by my distraction.
Just then a small blue tinted raccoon crawled up on to a tree limb next to the bird. “…and a blue raccoon!” I added, still trying to get Christy to stop and notice. But she was already at my front door. Even without words spoken, I could see on her face that she was sad that I wasn’t going to make it into the office with her.
I could hear our little laser printer spitting out paper from inside the open door. Then a blinding light came through my eyelids as the pain gripped hard again around my navel. As my groggy eyes forced their way open, the blue light from my faux stained glass bedroom window illumed the room. I could hear the laser printer churning out more pages and the not-so-quiet scuttle of my kids getting ready to leave for work/camp.
The dream all but faded away … Until a wince of pain once again caught me in mid-breath. I hobbled over to the loo and prayed softly for my body to create the endomorphs to counter the spasms.
Sipping on peppermint tea and drinking a couple of ounces of aloe vera papaya juice that my son brought to me before getting in the car with his sisters, I listened as the Prius softly backed out of the driveway and headed down the hill into town.
No, I wouldn’t be making it in to the office today, that was an old dream that still leaves me a bit blue.
