In Your Dreams: Attend your own funeral

And who was that prostitute?

By Moristotle

The first dream (night of August 3-4). Because my funeral was scheduled to commence in a couple of hours (around 1 p.m.), and I was on the program to perform a classical piano selection for it, we (that is, my over-the-shoulder assistant – or perhaps my manager – and I) had to decide whether I knew the music well enough to do it. We judged that I didn’t, so we decided that we would play a recording of the music and I would sit at the piano and play along with it – sort of finger-syncing.
    We had to get to the venue in time for me to retrieve the sheet music. We arrived – it didn’t seem to be a church (“thank God!”) – but I dilly-dallied the time away and, seconds away from whenI was scheduled to start, I had not yet assembled the sheet music I was to “play” from.
    I woke up.

Considerations. Well, the first point has to be that I was supposedly attending my own funeral. If it was someone else’s funeral, I failed to comprehend that, and I did have the sense as the dream went along that it was my funeral, and this didn’t seem strange to me or my assistant manager.
    The second point is that I can’t play anything on a piano, let alone classical music. And not only could I not play such music, neither could I convincingly “finger-sync” doing so.
    A perhaps obvious “meaning” of the dream might be that I have been ill-prepared to live my life, I have not known its “music” but have only gone through the motions of living, so that being alive at my own funeral isn’t strange – I have been dead the whole time anyway. And my being in no hurry to find the sheet music suggests that I have not applied myself to finding the music of living my life.
    All of which seems absurd somehow, and singularly off the mark. Perhaps nothing more is “meant” than that I have some second-thoughts about the actual music that has been my life’s soundtrack?
    Was the only constructive thing I did in the entire dream…to wake up? And is my task now simply to consider what other kinds of music I might pursue?
    One thing strikes me about my life: I work hard, and I am future-oriented in planning projects I need to get done, whether to get through a day or a week of home life or to publish whichever of Moristotle & Co.’s recurring columns have recently accrued. All of these activities are enjoyable, but....Could they be more enjoyable if I could “be present” more in the moment of doing them, and less “in the future” planning my next move?

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The second dream (night of August 5-6). I was sitting in an upholstered chair in a sort of student center (a busy, crowded, large, public sort of room, anyway), with a fair amount of my “stuff” lying in the seat on other side of me. A woman I recognized from about 40 years earlier at IBM rushed up, desperately in need of using the toilet, which my upholstered chair in the crowded public space had suddenly become (or been revealed to be, although it still looked like an ordinary upholstered chair with a fairly wide and deep seat). There was no question that, of course, I would get up and let her “use the toilet.”
    Nothing else passed between us; we didn’t say hello or anything else. I simply stood up and gathered my stuff, which mainly included several lemons and several limes. I stuffed as many as I could into my pockets and carried the rest away in my hands.
    I didn’t watch her “go to the toilet.”
    In the next scene I was reconnoitering with my team of detectives in another area of the “center” - it seems we were there investigating something, although I can’t remember whether I had a sense of this as I was sitting in the upholstered chair. One of my colleagues asked, “Who was that prostitute?”
    Without hesitation I said the name of the woman who had asked to “use the toilet” and told them what years she had worked at IBM. My colleagues were amazed that I knew her and even knew “all about her.”
    I didn’t question the term “prostitute,” although had never been a prostitute to my knowledge.
    And then I woke up.

Considerations. I don’t think I’d dreamed about the woman in many years, and I can’t remember when I ever did, although I suppose I must have. The most striking thing about this dream (even more striking than the strange “toilet chair”) is that this person showed up in it. And I suppose that the dream’s “meaning” must somehow involve her identity and be centered on the fact that the chair I was sitting in was the one that she wanted to use, not someone else’s – couldn’t all of the chairs in the large room have had the same property? (This question didn’t come up in the dream.)
    And what about those lemons & limes? Why citrus fruits? Vitamin C? The colors – bright green & yellow? Beats me.
    Or could “prostitute” be my psyche’s assessment of my dealings with the woman, and the dream’s message be that I have now evacuated all its remains?

Copyright © 2016 by Moristotle