Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Failure of Imagination
Last night I dreamed I drowned.
No. I dreamed I was writing a story about my drowning. But the details of it were so vivid, red in their terror, that I would have had to actually drown to know how to describe drowning so well.
After I drowned, I could see my husband walking from the beach back up to our house. He fell down in the sand a couple of times and I wondered if he was fatigued from trying to rescue me or overcome with grief.
It was then, in my dream, that I decided I couldn’t continue writing the story of my drowning because it was too sad. There would be no peaceful resolution, no messages of triumph or hope, there would just be a cut-off limb, an amputation, and I didn’t know how to write about that so I woke.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
God, I love to be able to capture the details of a dream. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does, it’s so enlightening. Does this dream mean something to you?
It seems that saying, “like a cut-off limb, an amputation,” is so very descriptive that it could become the act of writing about it…
I once dreamed that I murdered someone and every morning I woke up feeling ecstatic about the prospects of a new day, only to have the realization hit me that I’d once taken a human life–and I would fall into despondency. In the dream I woke again and again to this realization. It was horrible and I wondered if this is at all how a murderer would feel.