Evacuation
Everyone is in a hurry. We must leave home quickly. We are being evacuated. There is a mudslide coming. I can hear it rumbling off in the distance, though you would think it would already be here. But this is dream time.
I am living in the place I grew up. My bedroom is an amalgamation of my bedroom there and stuff that I own today. I’m supposed to be packing just the bare essentials.
But there are so many things that are important to me in my room. I find an owl carved out of tiger eye that I know must go with me. I find the teddy bear given to my mother by her real father when she was very young, and the smaller, more worn one that belonged to her sister, Chris. These bears, more than anything else to me in my collection of animals and junk, are important to me, for their connection to the past.
Then I throw in more pieces that make me happy. Soon I have two bags full of junk that I know is not essential. This is supposed to be an evacuation.
My dad is waiting impatiently outside, in a truck. I wonder how all this stuff, in addition to everything else, will fit. But then I realize that there’s a second vehicle we will be taking. A small car. So then I feel that I can load up on more stuff.
We don’t have all day, my father says.
I’m almost ready to go, I think, but then I realize that I have forgotten to pack clothes. I’ve packed all this junk but I have no clean underwear, no shirts or jeans.
I hurriedly stuff these into bags, and hope that no one will notice that my clothes were an afterthought.
Then, after I’m finally done with that, I realize I still have to track down my cats.
My cats are really what are most important to me; everything else, including my clothes, and even the bears, don’t matter to me. But my cats don’t understand that it’s a matter of life and death, so I of course have to chase all three down.
I don’t know now, awake, why I wouldn’t have caught them first. Because I could leave without everything else if my life was in danger.
Anyway, I managed to get them, and stuff them into bags as well, telling them that it’s only for a couple of minutes, until we can get to the car. I have cat carriers for them, but I can’t get at them fast enough.
When I get oustide, lugging what must be about six bags, including three filled with heavy cats, I see the mudslide getting closer, looking like a river or lava flow of mud.
Sometimes I have no idea where my dreams have come from. Other times, I can recognize a fleeting influence becoming a full-fledged dream.
I watched about five minutes of a segment yesterday on the Weather Channel about fires and then mudslides in San Bernardino in 2002. One guy described seeing a mudslide coming down the mountain, looking like lava mud.
I’ve also been dreaming a lot about the place I grew up, probably sparked by talking about it recently.
I don’t know that I’ve been thinking about my mother recently, but her sister has come up. I talked with my dad last week to find out that my mom’s full sister is in a coma, expected to die.
I thought a lot about her the day I talked to my dad about it, and how little I knew about her. How she didn’t get along that well with my mother. How she never seemed a part of the family. How we only saw her for funerals. How she had such a rough, unfortunate life.
I have her bear, the one I called Teddy. I found out later my mom’s was called Eddie. Neither one of us had much imagination in naming them, I suppose. But we both can be excused for our youth.
Anyway, Eddie has always been in much better condition than Teddy. I inherited Eddie as an adult, but got Teddy when I was quite young. And to my credit, I was not the one responsible for Teddy’s eyeless, partly furless condition. The story goes that my mother and sister got the bears when they were quite young from their real father. But that my mom’s sister was angered that she got the smaller bear (being younger) and therefore threw it to the dog. That’s just what my mom always said. But I do know that Teddy looks like he’s been chewed by a dog.
Now I won’t be able to go to my aunt’s funeral. As cold as this sounds, I can’t afford to go back home for a funeral for a person I barely knew.
But it saddens me to think that my mother’s sister soon will be gone. Another connection to my mother’s family breaks.
It’s interesting that in your dreams, you often revert to an amalgam of childhood and adulthood imagery. You find yourself at home again, looking to your Dad for guidance in escaping the mudslide. Your bedroom is your childhood bedroom, but your “stuff” is a combiantion of childhood and adulthood.
I can remember having dreams in which I was “home” again, but it has been a long time since I’ve had one of those. I think these dreams must be peculiar to a period in our life when we are still transitioning into independent young adulthood.
I’m not sure if it’s just a phase… My dad doesn’t always figure prominently in my dreams, and neither does childhood.
I know I have separation from the place I grew up, but it’s not something I’m thinking about every day at this point.
My father figures into these dreams as an authority figure. No offense, if Dad’s reading this, but I don’t need a father or a person of authority to tell me what decisions to make any more.
That’s an interesting transition, actually. The point in your young or later young adulthood in my case, where you feel more adult and less dependent on your parental unit for advice and guidance.
“I’ve packed all this junk but I have no clean underwear.” You could always just go commando, you know
I must say, I had to laugh at the thought of you lugging your cats around in bags, though I was curious as to the sorts of bags. I was picturing canvas bags of the sort the Pied Piper would have used for all of Hamlin’s rats.
Even though I feel pretty settled and have for some time, I still have dreams of home. Often they involve conflict with my father that will never be fully resolved, I suspect, or they are about the sad state of my childhood home, about rain coming through the roof by the bucketful, that sort of thing.