dreams

For a while, I used to dream about our fish tank when I was stressed out. I dreamt of miniature polar bears swimming in my college fish-bowl, with our goldfish Anikin (he killed Obiwan...we felt a little guilty about the names after that). That was my first fish-as-metaphor dream.

Tiny little polar bears, dog-paddling on the surface of the water as Anikin flounced back and forth below.

Later, I dreamt that my husband and I bought two malard ducks for our fifty-gallon fish tank. Then, they started eating the fish! We (for some reason) were shocked and dismayed. Most of the dream concerned our more-or-less successful efforts to get our ducks to settle for life swimming in five-gallon buckets instead. They kept ending up back in the fish tank. We bought a second fish tank; the ducks kept winding up in the one with the fish. Maybe they were hungry.

I've had more dreams than I can count about spotting fish who I thought were dead and burried (no, we don't flush them...) swimming around between the plastic plants...or all of the fish in the tank dying.

Once, I dreamt that the fish kept getting bigger and bigger...and once that these strange oceanic crabs kept mating in the back corner of the tank, changing colors every time.

Then, my stress-dreams shifted to houses. I never dreamt about our house, though...always about strange, slightly-occupied houses...occupied by memories of former inhabitants, or the ghosts of tiny children, or odd pets.

Victor and I would move in...once to this huge, gothic house on the corner of a suburban block. The former owners had left behind all of their furniture...shelves full of black and white pictures of ancestors on safari...jewelry boxes that rattled but would not open...and Puck kept running out into the cul-de-sac, oh, I was so worried that he would be hit by a car...

After we moved in, things would become stranger and stranger...rooms where there were no rooms before, stairs that ended in closet doors...attic rooms full of furniture draped in white sheets...endless hallways.

Once, I dreamt that Victor sold our house without asking, and we moved into the blue-green house across the street from my parents...the one where the family of 12 kids used to live, where we used to go after school to watch cartoons until mom came home...it slowly grew to become this huge two-family house, again full of furniture that wasn't ours, the windows cloaked in voluminous drapes - no sunlight anywhere at all...just the hint of it shining through the heavy fabric. We shared the house with my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend. Oh, I was mad about that.

Always, there were extra rooms...unknown rooms at the tops of long, narrow stairways. Eerie rooms, abandoned by unhappy children.

tenyearolds

There is so much that is good about September.

September is a month of new backpacks, fresh notebooks, and unsharpened pencils. In September, everything smells like leaves, and all the sneakers are new.

Nobody is the "bad" kid yet. Nobody is the "smart" kid.

Everyone smiles at the teacher in the morning.

And on the first day of school, everyone's desk is clean. There are none of the papers that will soon be scrunched, unrecognizable, in the deep back corners...behind lost homework assignments and notes from the teacher that say "please sign and return."

So, let's hear it for September...even though school always starts in August in Connecticut (maybe that's why I'm never quite ready for the first day).