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| Click image for more vignettes* |
What horrified Goines – and shortly woke him up – was that he didn’t immediately put the croquette down but proceeded to try to kill the struggling creature by squeezing it as hard as he could with the fingers of both hands. It was during the squeezing that Goines awoke, and, he was thankful, stopped squeezing the creature in time – he hoped – to avoid killing it.
Awake, Goines lay there trying to amend the story to continue the narrative with a live frog emerging from the croquette, but the story fell apart, the narrative that led up to the croquette already having shriveled away into incoherence. The best Goines could do was retain a vague sense that the frog was somehow an ally of his, which made the attempt to eat it even more bizarre.
What might the dream mean? For he still believed that dreams meant something, however few the occasions on which he believed he had actually understood what a particular dream did, in fact, mean. He supposed that some dreams really were only the stomach’s protest against being overfilled – yesterday was Thanksgiving, after all. But, if overfilled, why prompt a dream about more consumption? Was the frog’s struggle the stomach’s protest? It did make a sort of sense. And yet....
The night before, Goines had received an animated Jacquie Lawson greeting card from an astrologer in Memphis; could she throw any light on this? Did astrologers do dream-interpretation? He tried to remember things his high school Latin teacher & mentor had said about astrology on the several occasions he spoke of it – always with respect and reserved judgment.
His mentor had also been a Nabokovian, had even taken the huge risk for the 1950s – and the ages of his students – of bringing a copy of Lolita into his classroom and reading some snippets....
Goines decided to shrug the dream, the nightmare, off as another wonder of life. It was great, after all, still to be alive!
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* The image is a cropped, darkened, neon-glown rendering of Henry Fuseli’s 1790-91 variation of his 1781 painting, “The Nightmare.”
| Copyright © 2020 by Moristotle |
I think a lot of dreams are just what the headshrinkers say they are, your brain arranging, making sense of and storing the information we accumulate over time, the emotions, conflicts and unsolved problems left over. But once in a while, they seem to have some real meaning, whether from our own minds (most likely) or, possibly, something exterior to us. My mother saw her father-in-law after he died, shining at the foot of her bed, and he had a message for her. They were close, and she was grieving hard. He said, "You're needed in the nursery." As in, let me go, there's work to do. Cindy saw her father after he passed at only 46. He said he was OK, he was with his mother. Are these the machinations of minds under stress, our own interpretations of what we've been taught, in school, home and church? I don't know, but if so, why would they be something that we were never really taught, like Cindy's dad glowing blue? My own experience has led me to think sometimes those messages are in fact from something outside of us. One dream I had as a young man terrifies me to this day; I am convinced that, had I done what the entity that manifested to me wanted, and just gone back to sleep, I would have woken up as an entirely different person, and not a nice one at all. More like a serial killer. The nightmares might visit, but you sure wouldn't want them to stay...
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