Compassion and Madness

brrrrrrr  when a dream from long ago haunts you and finds itself too real in the present or future...

I awoke on a certain morning (several months ago) from a dream that began in compassion and ended in madness. It was a chilling dream filled with bizarre elements that will take me a LONG time to decipher.

I should begin by saying that I dream vividly on a regular basis. I dream in color (always) with a few b & w vignettes popping up from time to time (as in last night’s/early morning’s dream). My dreams are epic in nature most of the time, with wide-sweeping dramas or landscapes. They often involve walking in a city or town and being in different buildings that I have never seen or visited.  Sometimes I wonder if my “regular life” is the dream and the “dream” is my real life. (I think that is where a bit of the madness might come in).

My dream opens (I think) in a bedroom where there are several high beds with pretty quilts or comforters on them. I hurry to make my bed because I am going somehwere and need to get ready. The next thing I know, the dream switches to b & w in a park of some kind where there are large numbers of homelss people sleeping on open ground and under trees. There are no homeless children other than where a few mothers are breastfeeding their babies (babies not visible but I know they are there). It is like a scene from a dystopian film. I walk past the people, sobbing for all that I see. I feel (physically) their sorrow. At the edge of the field or park, I see women dressed in robes (not burqas, but ragged on the edges and long-skirted).They are dancing slowly and crying and I feel extreme sadness and fear coming from them. I step up over a curb and onto a street where the scene changes to vivid color. I am told by a youngish woman I meet not to look back. I feel like Lot’s Wife but do not look back. My heart is sad. I am afraid.

I am dressed in a colorful dress with a full skirt. I look at the flowers on the dress and wonder why there were no flowers in the park I have just left. A young woman who greets me says we should walk and we do, weaving in and out of streets an past buildings with brightly colored doors. I am greeted at an open door by a well-dressed (not gaudy) woman who takes me into a room, multi-colored and angular. I sit in a green chair and she takes my wallet from me. (I had no purse, just my wallet). I complain that I need that because without my ID and credit caard I will not be able to get home. she tells me I will never go home.  I awaken drenched with sweat and crying. In every scene/group of children, my own children (and in one case younger versions of two of my grandchildren) were part of the scene. I was at this point trying to climb out of something that at first seem like a basement with sharp broken windows. That basement faded into a pit with very slippery sides. Every time I get almost to the top I fall back/slide back. I see down on myself too. I know that I had to help the mothers find their children before the children faded like cheshire cats, leaving only their mouths.

The madness that ensued in the dream involved children who were wailing and looking for their mothers, unable to be held or comforted.

What do I learn from this? That somehow (with only a strange bit prescience) I knew mothers and children were going to face some kind of drastic action. It would be too easy to say that my dream predicted what has been going on with immigrant families. I do not give myself credit for that kind of psychic ability. But still, I think the dream was/is all about women’s precarious place in the too-white, too-unfeeling world. We have come a long way, baby really was about being declared equal…targets… we are now not even tokens of being honored and “protected” by man or society. In light of recent events, neither are our children. "Women and children first" is ancient history and not applicable. Cue the Titanic of the Future: "Men to the lifeboats! Women and children go down with the  ship."