I woke this morning around my usual time, which is about when dawn starts breaking these days.
I lay in bed not wanting to get up and drifted back to sleep. As often happens, I woke maybe 45 minutes later from a dream in which I realized that HouseApes 2.0 and 3.0 were still living at home at 33 and 50.
“She’ll never get a job now,” I said to Chris. “She’s unemployable.”
Presumably the mutable time that allowed them to live at home for 30-some years while I didn’t notice and Chris and I didn’t age was also the mutable time that expanded the gap in their ages from 5 to 17 years.
The thing that upset me, and that I still feel now, is the sense that we had failed them. I am quite sad as I write this, even as I know full well it was a dream and as I am marveling at the absurdity of it. Dreams are odd that way – it is no wonder that the ancients thought they had mystical power, and that some people still gift them with insight. They exist with a foot in each world, the rational and the irrational, the logical human mind and the emotion-driven animal one.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this dream was the fact that, at 33, 3.0 was still about the size he is now, while 2.0 had actually regressed to look as she did when she was perhaps 9, except with some wrinkles.
I don’t think the analysis of dreams is completely without merit. This one plays strongly to the stresses and fears that I am experiencing right now.