Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Lucid Dreaming

I dreamt last night that I was east asian, born to parents who'd been locked into an arranged marriage. Love had never developed between them, but they fulfilled their marital obligations enough to have had myself and my sister, about seven years younger than me. Our household was one of distance - my parents slept in separate rooms and had no contact with each other outside of mealtimes. They likewise ignored both of us. And so it was that on my sister's birthday (she was about six, I was about 12), no celebration was planned. A bucket of paint however mysteriously appeared at our house. We investigated and discovered that it was magic paint - it changed colors each time you dipped into the bucket. My sister tentatively dipped her finger in and tested it against the side of our house. But I knew what a find this paint was and showed her how to splash it against the wall, do Pollack drips and dribbles and mash a paintbrush loaded with the color against any flat surface. We painted everything - the house, the landscape, the dirt. There was a structure in our front yard, like a thick flagpole stuck into a base made from stacked and mortared rocks. After we'd splattered and painted our drab world into a caucophany of pastel colors, I climbed up onto the rock base and painted onto the flagpole "Accept that love may never come." The letters came out all in white. It was a well-known secret in our small town that my mother had taken a local tradesman as a lover. Right after I finished the final word and read over what I'd written, my mother's lover came out of our house, the front door slamming shut behind him. I looked over at my sister. She was watching the man who was not our father, fresh from an afternoon tryst with our mother, stride back to his shop, unconcerned that we'd seen him.

And that was the end of the dream.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

sounds like the beginning of a borges story.