Dreams of sepia and stuffing

I have been meaning to play dream scribe for Melissa for a long time now. I know - that conjures up images in your mind of me sitting by candle light, late at night with a big huge feather quill and an ink bottle, stocking cap tilted haphazardly over one ear as I feverishly jot down strange and peculiar notions from the sleepy mind of my love. You've got it exactly.

One upshot of having a baby who sleeps about two hours at a go is that you never get into the deep and truly useful sleep your weary soul so badly needs. That sentence was originally intended to have a positive ending. I can't hide the truth from you - it's insane. My point is that when woken so frequently the dreams you do have are much closer to the surface of your conscious mind and therefore much easier to recall. I believe that I do dream when I sleep a full night, it's just that I was asleep and so I can't remember the dream.

Lately I dream mostly of matters related to a life in the service industry. But I did not come here today to write about my own dreams.

When she woke this morning Melissa told me that in her dream someone had sent her Pandora's Box. She did not know who the sender was. She just knew that this item was better left alone, unopened. And she could clearly see that it was made of styrofoam. Now I could be wrong about this, but I don't think Greek mythology identifies styrofoam as one of the many gifts of Zeus. Come to think of it, I have heard that it was actually Pandora's Jar, which sounds to me like it would be way easier to open than a box. A box can be locked, clad in iron straps, made of lead, and so on. A jar - that pretty much implies something fragile with a cork stuck in the top. Something that begs to be opened. But I digress.

In Melissa's dream Pandora's Box was made of styrofoam. I envision something I might use to keep my beer cold. Not something I would use to store the sorrows of mankind. And in my experience, the lids on those styrofoam boxes never stay on quite right anyway. But there you go - her dream. She went on to tell of being with her mother and her mother's boyfriend, a fictional conjuration of her sleeping mind but a man nevertheless of massive proportions, a man the size and shape of an antique French armoire. She told him not to mess with the box but, in an apparent attempt to find a cold beer, he opened it anyway.

The myth tells of sickness, fear, hatred, all things vile and nasty swarming out in a great black cloud and sweeping over the land bringing misery and old age. The myth also points out that the jar/box was in fact an accessory item that came with a wholly separate gift, a way better gift - women. Specifically, Pandora. It goes that before she showed up, it was just a bunch of Greek dudes cavorting around, presumably footloose and fancy free. I don't know about that. Anyway, this curious girl shows up, opens her bottle, and the shit hits the fan.

Instead of seeing a cloud of misery and woe, or beer on ice, Melissa was physically taken to a different place. She found herself at a gathering of some sort, perhaps a party, when suddenly the people around her took on a strange sepia hue and stopped moving normally, but rather began to gently drift around. Her description made me think of the footage I have seen from one of those ROVs exploring the remains of an old shipwreck, like the Titanic, where everything is in a decrepit stasis, suspended forever in an invisible medium, never quite still but moving only slightly by an unseen force. Imagine that you are at a party and suddenly that happens. Time to call a cab.

And that is pretty much where the dream ends. She usually gets to a point like that and then starts to talk or holler, and I put my arms around her and murmur about the good things in life.

Oddly enough, I did have a short dream after that. I know I said I wsn't going to bring up my own dreams, but this one bears mentioning. It was vague and cloudy, disjointed like most of my dreams these days. The flotsam and jetsam of a catch as catch can subconscious, trying to break through to the surface and have it's own irrational way for once.

I dreamed about one of those "Build-a-Bear" workshops, one where something went horribly awry. The bears all came to life somehow and naturally they all completely freaked out. Bears dressed as fire men and ship's captains and bakers with aprons and rolling pins were terrorizing mall shoppers. Mass hysteria. Unfinished bears sat half made, stuffing spilling out, with pained and quizzical expressions on their fuzzy faces, as if to say "Dear God, WHY?!?" It was a scene of utter chaos, one that I will not soon put down.

I will never take our child to one of those stores.

Just in case.