Compass & Quill

The last time I dreamt about C, we were at the French Market. He and my friend K were playing drums, and there was a group of dancers/mummers dressed as mechanical breasts milling around in the background. That was maybe a month ago.

Last night I dreamt about C again, which is strange, since he’s a person who often doesn’t cross my mind for half a year or more. I always worry when I dream about him, because he’s always rather stoic and sad. It was also strange, since this dream had another very vivid reference to performance art – and again, very weird performance art. Man, my brain is a very interesting place.

Last night’s dreams, as a whole, were pretty interesting. In one dream, I realized that my elderly landlady must be going senile. I came home to find that she’d taken every piece of furniture in our house out into the front yard, and was letting people take what they wanted. The house was full of antiques and really funky mid-century mod stuff, so I was really worried for her. I started hauling stuff back inside, but since she insisted she didn’t want any of it anymore, I outfitted my own bedroom with the pieces I knew she loved the best, just in case she wanted them back. Since we’d always agreed on what things were the coolest, it was a win for me, too, but I was still heartbroken that she appeared to have lost her faculties over the course of a single morning.

In another dream, I was with a friend that reminded me a lot of my mom. I couldn’t figure out who the person was, but she did a lot of things that made me think of Mum, so maybe it was actually her. We broke into a house together and fed a cat. I don’t know why we broke into the house, but I do know that most of the dream involved getting out of the house before the owner came home, though we were trying to be sneaky and have the front door locked and climb out of a window, and we weren’t agreeing on how to do it. I don’t recall us ever getting out of the house in my dream.

The next dream was the one with C. I was at a charity event where there were all these live tableaus (real people) set up to represent specific scenes in the history of witchcraft. I don’t think that we were in this reality, because the scenes depicted Harry Potter-esque magical events – scenes of great bravery and sacrifice in war. They were very important for the viewers, like war memorials. Many people who passed were brought to tears. At first, I thought that the garden with many of the tableaus was going to be mostly abandoned all night, and the event wasn’t going to make any donations. But the garden was full of tables, and as I passed around and looked at the tableaus, the tables began to fill up with people drinking and talking. There were fairy lights overhead, and people were in sparkling ball gowns and other fancy dress outfits. It was a beautiful event.

My mom and dad were there at some point, and we all decided to sit down to have a drink and discuss some card game. I was explaining the rules, but getting irritated, because Mum kept interrupting to ask for details that didn’t matter at all in the game, wasting time dissecting the items of least importance. Then I looked up, and saw C and his brother. They were sitting at a table across from my family, and a waiter was delivering their drinks. The waiter called them “Golden Bourbons” – but it was an actual cocktail of some kind, obviously containing bourbon, but a rich, milky chestnut color, served in a tall glass with ice. C looked pleased to be there with his brother, but also presented as caged and uncomfortable, whether from the event, or interacting with the brother, or possibly from realizing that I was there. I did end up talking with him later in the dream, and it was a perfectly innocuous conversation, though I can’t remember what was said, only that it was light and pleasant enough.

After that dream, I had one last one where I was a waiter at a fast food restaurant, and I sneaked away from the party that I was catering (which, who knows, might have been the party I dreamed about before) to pursue a suspicious guy who looked a lot like Patrick Wilson. It turned out that the suspicious guy was a government agent, and perfectly nice. He found me hiding in the back seat of his car during his stakeout and the rest of the dream was a poorly-sketched-out buddy cop movie with a romantic thread (of course, lol).