Journal

Past Lives and Dream Deaths

Girl

I was temporarily convinced that I was girl in my past life. Well, not exactly temporarily. I wrote a section of my work yesterday (from the perspective of a girl) and I realised that I wouldn’t have been able to do it in such and such a way if it had been from a guy’s. I just know how to approach it better like this, I think. Which makes no logical sense, but it’s good to know what I’m okay at and what I’m not quite okay at.

The Collector

I dreamt this dream where a relative of mine died. It wasn’t frightening at all. It was just quite sad, but I think I always knew that it was just a dream, so it didn’t quite have the effect that it might have been intending to have. The most interesting thing about it was the old man that came up to the front of my flat. He stood on the grass, at some distance, and pointed to my door. And as with so much of our dreams, this immediately made sense to me. He would point and stare at whichever household he had to make his announcement to. It was just a natural law.

He came up to the door next and we opened it and we talked. He came to collect something. He was a nameless old man in a blue suit, but I called him the Collector. It was a name I’d made up. I didn’t know what it was that he collected (nope, not the body), but he collected something. And then he did his job with his perfectly straight face and we were like friends. I didn’t blame him for anything. I didn’t see him as the harbinger of some mysterious doom. No, he was just a guy doing his job.

That’s not to say that the loss of a relative was nothing sad. I was sad. I remember crying in the dream, remembering all the stuff that we’d done together, a smile, a face, a joke, and some lost epiphanies. I was really upset. I didn’t wake up in tears or anything, which led to my belief that I must have known that it was a dream, at least on some level, and that I’d wake up and it would be okay.

Reading

I’m now reading Wena Poon’s The Proper Care Of Foxes. This comes after my second reading of Gatsby. I read that a long time ago. I read it again because it’s in my course. I realised as I did that that I had clean forgotten almost everything about it. Now I have to write an essay about it.

© 2010 a modest odyssey.