Pandora’s Box

I had a nightmare & a strange dream this morning. The first one I remember is about a man who was in my back yard on a sunny day, using a weedwacker. I couldn’t see this man, so I am assuming this person is a man. While doing his “routine” trimming, he turned the instrument on a man (either himself or another) and wacked the head off, committing homicide. A clean, precise act. It was evident that my life was in danger. I hid behind some dark-stained, door-sliding cabinet, which was the height of the back of a couch that faced the two sliding doors that separated the attacker in the lush greenness and my near-hyperventilating self. I crouch in the bareness of the air, peeping over the sofa for vantage point, only learning that I lost sense of the killer’s location. He’s no where in site. The grass lightly rustles in the sunny breeze. Fear holds my eyelids open. The whiteness consumes me.

I struggle to say something to someone. Was it in French? Was it Mannigan? I try a number of times, to no avail. I am pleading for help in a low, deliberate voice. I repeat the words, but the message is not getting across. My heart races. I awake, mouthing the words, by the sound of my voice, as if a starting a stalled engine. The room is twilit, either by daylight or by the street lights. I shift my body, uneasy and hot, and tell myself it was only a dream. A pang of another movement – not necessarily my own – lingers. Am I alone?


The second dream was of my extended family. We are gathered by my maternal grandfather’s assumed death bed. He is ill. One of us tries to feed him a glucose liquid of some kind. Someone else says he hasn’t eaten in days, thus the frail, gaunt appearance. He is lying down, head and torso slightly angled up. The liquid is fed to him in a syrup container, the metal kind you’d see containing gravy for a turkey or roasted pork. I take it from one of my aunts and gingerly pour, holding his jaw with my other hand. In moments, he regains consciousness and jumps out of bed like a teenager. Energetically raising his body, his drapey clothes hang off him like a hanger. I can see his skin-covered skeleton. He joyously laughs; it breaks us of our solemnity and we stand up, applaud, smiling. Tears of joy. We head out for a meal.

This leaves me bizarre. What is plaguing my black holes?

Image by Marat Zakharin Tamara Gallery.com, posted on http://www.picsearch.com/info.cgi?q=black%20hole&id=UEq20pyawpH1ZIVu97f3vFpGAIvxOF9EaLP2nu4mL20