January 9, 2012

Lengthy, peculiar dreams last night, more informed by details of actual life than my dreams usually are. In the dream I was a blond woman, though I was concerned about it, so I must not have been a woman all my life. I kept checking in mirrors to see if I looked right, kept analyzing my actions to see if they were plausible. Many details are lost now, but I seem to have been looking for, acquiring, and decorating a house. It was our house on Foxboro in Akron, though it had a view of a rocky coastline and the sea, and the interior was quite different. Through the dream crept a recurring, sinister figure. I called him the phlebotomist in the dream. I know this because I called 911 and told the cops whenever I saw him. He was a black man dressed in black, with one of those blood-taking cords in his hand. He went from house to house stealing blood, not by force, but by convincing his victims of some untrue thing. There were apparently horrible consequences connected to surrendering your blood to this man. In the last scene I was driving down Eastwood from the east, seeing the back of our house from the road, as I have done a hundred times. I saw the phlebotomist, stopped and called the cops, then I went home to a house full of beautiful antiques, looking out at the ocean. The door was open, and I looked around for signs of robbery, realizing that I had not been robbed, but that someone had unpacked my moving boxes and set the house up for me. I was glad, because their taste was better than mine, and because I was a woman, and had a vague feeling I should not be doing my own heavy lifting.

TD’s birthday celebration at his house, Got to play Transformers with August for a while. We developed a bottomless pit, and then a bottomless water that only his steam shovel and my hand spider could get over. I tend to under-praise the casually transfiguring power of a child’s imagination, because I still have it, and it strikes me as less foreign than it does some. When the guests arrived, I realized I had no inkling of TD’s life other than that part which relates to me. It was very young-marrieds with babies, and I had no idea how I was supposed to behave. Saw Tebow in action, which I gather now is the big thing. Everyone had an imitation of Tebow praying on the field. Looked very chivalric.