Wiccan Whirlpool

The last two nights were both filled with craziness, but since I didn’t write anything about the earlier dream down it’s just some vague impressons for now.  But last night involved the ghost of a dead girl, a key that wouldn’t fit an apartment door, some weird apaocolyptic book and lecture series, and an exercise facility.  Oh, my husband was in it, too.

But why oh why do I have so many dreams that involve dressing rooms of some kind?  Am I flashing back to my nightmarish existence in retail so many years ago, or am I channelling some vulnerable feeling that I don’t sense in myself duing the day?  Maybe it’s a representation of my tendency to harshly judge myself and my accomplishments, or lack thereof, because ladies, you know what dressing rooms are for.  That horrible three-way mirror, “does this make me look fat?,” trying to find a bra that your bossoms will conform with, or egad-a baithing suit!  That’s probably it.  So: if you also dream of a dressing room you’re probably feeling abused by yourself or you’re in a situation where *someone* is passing judgement over you.  I’d think it was the same for a locker room, and one of those was in my dream too.

Oddly, I don’t ever recall dreaming about being fit before, even when I was regularly exercising.  I was outside a gym at a track where I was jogging.  When my husband approached to say that my friends were going someplace else I didn’t stop jogging in place whiule talking to him.  I told him I was going to go with them to another gym and jogged off.  We went to another fitness center where some guy was handing out copies of a really poorly written book about some idea he had of the end-times.  It was filled with ridiculous ideas that supposedly linked a bunch of local news events and the like to some perviously unheard-of South American tribe’s prophesy about the End of the World.  There wasn’t much happening as far as exercise because the author was obnoxiously giving a lecture about the “truths” he had discovered on the field, and for some reason I found that I had to listen.  I got to sit on a swing though…and then my husband showed up, as did the personal trainer from my actual gym.  The each took a swing beside me and we discussed our overall fitness goals.  I clearly remember telling her that I wanted to be able to bench 240 pounds so that if my husband fell I could lift him.  She laughed.

One of my friends somehow indicated that there was an emergency and I had to come RIGHT NOW.  So I ran into the locker room and showered (some right now, eh?) and ran after her.  Actually, it was a woman I went to school with from kindergarten through graduation.  She knew how to read in kindergarten, she was a math whiz, and now I think she’s a doctor.  We were friendly, but not really buds or anything special.  Anyway, I met up with her at her apartment door, where she told me “they” couldn’t go in because another woman that lived there saw a ghost face in the kitchn window, and could I please go check it out?

It didn’t occurr to me to ask why *I* should go in when they were afraid, I just did it.  But the keys she handed me weren’t the right ones, and I told her.  “We had these made after you left” she said.  Huh.  Guess I used to live here too.  So I managed to get one of the too-small keys to work the lock–a dead bolt–and went into the darkened apartment, which was missing all but the barest of furnishings and all of its curtains and blinds.  I yelled to her to ask about the curtains, and she said they took them home over break to wash them (guess this was a college pad?).  I asked again which window, and she yelled directions to the back patio, past the kitchen, where there were glass sliding doors.  I could clearly see the clump of dead shrubbery they had mistaken for a ghost, and I told her so.  “Oh,” was the only reply.

I stepped back out onto the balcony, and in the sky I saw a group of mice climbing a ladder-like contraption, wholly suspended in mid-air.  Everywhere a mouse’s feet would touch would disappear, leaving them all scrambling and scrabbling for some kind of hold in order not to fall.  It was like they were looking for me to help, but all I could do was watch.  Something came over me and I ran away, down into the basement of the apartment building, which really was like some kind of mall.  I ran through a dressing room and into some sort of blinding white space. Once my eyes adjusted I realized that this was  huge shell of an almost empt mall.  All of the stores were either cllosed or barely used, and none carried their original merchandise.  Someone said it’s because the sale of clothing had been made illegal.  There was a food court, and lots of stores selling comic books, calendars, posters, and that kind of stuff.  It felt like a maze of light, glass, and shiny aluminum supports, and I wante dto find my way out.  Eventually I found my way to a conference room where a banquet was set out.  Now there was someone chasing me.   I was trying to hide from the man chasing me underneath chairs and behind decorations, but I knew it wasn’t going to work.  I saw a table that had a voluminous green tafeta skirt, and I found my way underneath.  For whatever reason, I heard a banquet attendant lying about where she’d seen me go.  It didn’t help.  The man walked right up to where I was and leaned down to pull back the skirting.