Last night I dreamed we were in the Homeland Road house again.
The six years we lived there were probably the most unhappy years of my entire existence, which is really sad to think about, because three of my children were born there. It is ironic that the years I spent on "Homeland" were the years I felt less at home than any other time in my life.
I was so happy, so relieved, so beside myself with contentment when we finally got out of there.
And now I keep dreaming that we are going back.
Last night I dreamed that a realtor let us in and we spent the night there. In the morning, we had to run along a sidewalk next to a rough embankment to get back to this house so we could pick up socks and coffee. Shawn stayed here with the coffee, but I ran back to Homeland alone where I found that the old neighbors who used to live across the street had moved into our old house, and they were remodeling it. It was the grandma and her grandchildren. They remembered our kids and tried to be civil. Still, they were quite perturbed that we were there, as they were getting ready for company. The grandma asked me to please get my stuff out of the house as quickly as possible.
There was also a lot of stainless steel--weird 1950's style stainless steel kitchen counters that assembled and dissembled to perform different functions--and a giant steel mixer mounted to the kitchen floor. I have seen that same mixer in other dreams, in silhouette, and thought it was an animal in the kitchen until the light increased and I could see that it was a machine.
These Homeland Road house dreams are not terrifying, but I do not usually like them.
There is another recurring dream I have that I really hate. It stemmed from those dreams about being in college and not having been to class. Those particular dreams abated at one point when I dreamt that I was in a flat, ranch-style house with green carpet, chasing my toddlers around and trying to get to class. Someone came to the door to get a paper from me, and suddenly I stopped and cried out, "No! This is not real! I am not a student, I am a mother of three!" A sucking, suffocating, pulling sensation ensued and I landed in my bed, awake and shaking, but very relieved.
Since then, those dreams have morphed into a dream about being in a high school and needing to go to the bathroom. I hunt and hunt, and finally find the bathroom on a remote floor in a remote corner, but it is always unusable. There are usually many, many toilets, laid out in circular patterns, and I desperately seek for one in a stall, because it galls me to use one out in the open. There are always people in the bathroom--sometimes hoards of them, and sometimes just a few--but it is never private. The people are not nice, either. They are what one remembers from high school as "mean girls." There are also a few smokers, which is annoying and slightly threatening, but they do not produce the same sensation that one gets from the mean girls.
Eventually I will find a stall or two, but they are always full, or out of order. Sometimes I try to wait in a line. Eventually I always end up going back to the exposed toilets in circles (facing out, with a dirty ledge running behind them), because I need to go to the bathroom so very badly. People (females) are sitting on some of these toilets, but the open ones are always full of putrid feces and I gag and put my hands over my nose. I cannot bring myself to go to the bathroom on top of someone else's putrid feces, next to a stranger in an open room. I don't want to touch anything, and I cannot find soap and water.
Finally I wake up and have the privilege of going to the bathroom all by myself in my very own private bathroom, washing my hands with nice smelling soap, drying them on a clean towel and going back to bed.
I feel so weird for having written about these dreams. I haven't ever talked about the bathroom dream before. Maybe by exposing it, I can stop having it, or at least identify it concretely in my mind as a dream so the next time I have it I can wake myself up earlier. I hope so.
Coming soon... pictures of our wonderful weekend with the WHOLE FAMILY AT HOME!!!
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