A Pilgrim’s Digression

I had two dreams Sunday morning. This is the second of the two, the one I had just before waking. The other I have posted under the title No Help. The setting for both dreams is the tiny, rural community where Lynn and I lived just after our marriage.

I am walking a hallway in the High School where I taught for three years. It is night and the school is empty, but I can hear a football game in progress outside on the field. Light from the big, white strobes over the stadium stream in the classroom windows, spilling into the hallway like artifical moonlight. I am searching the school for a girl I had a crush on in High School. Her name is Erica.

Though the time and place are of contemporary vintage, quite unexpectedly I find that I am my younger version of myself. I have hair and can run my fingers through it. I am slimmer, free of all back pain and general middle-age languor. My mind is still my adult mind, however. This is nearly the best of all possible things that could happen to me, and I am looking for Erica.

I also have a general sense that something is not quite right. I have to find her because someone is searching for her to kill her. I can’t quite figure out where I’ve seen all this before. In my waking life, I now think my subconscious was recreating a scene from the film Halloween II, in which Michael Myers pursues Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance through a hospital. Public schools, hospitals…both have the same antiseptic, institutional feel to them.

I find Erica hiding in one of the Social Studies classrooms. She is not really hiding, though, just standing in there as if waiting for me. I have not seen her (or thought of her) in at least fifteen years, so she looks the same as I remember her in 1990-’91. She has poofy, blonde eighties hair, and her glasses are too big to be stylish today. She is wearing a gray skirt and a pink sweater, and except for the sexy, tight pink sweater, she looks kind of frumpy, like a young, blonde Joyce Carol Oates.

Erica was quite attractive back in the day, however. I think she was class valedictorian; however, although she was smart, she was also pretty and hung out with an entirely different class of people. She never knew I existed.

Now she is standing in front of me after all these years.

I say, “We have to get out of here.”

She says, “We can’t; there is nowhere to go. If we leave here, he’ll catch us.”

“Don’t worry,” I say, relishing my role as hero in this horror pic. “I am trained in several types of small arms.”

The classroom has one of those tall, steel cabinets which teachers use for supplies. I go to the cabinet and open it to reveal a sizable arsenal, apparently kept there by the teacher for disciplinary purposes. I take a 9mm and rack the chamber; its already loaded. I take a red box of ammunition, labeled “Parabellum,” and put it in a hip pocket. I put the nine in my belt.

There is also a shotgun in the closet, a Remington double barrel 12 gauge with a light, walnut stock. It’s not exactly what I would have hoped for—only two shots before having to reload—but then, I am not exactly in a position to find another. There is a green box of twelve gauge shells in the closet as well. I take these, but they are too big for the hip pocket of my jeans, so I open the box and shove a handful of loose shells down into my front pants pockets. I crack open the shotgun and see that it is not loaded. I plug two shells into the breech and snap it closed.

“Are you ready to try for it?” I say. “If we can make it outside to the stadium, we’ll be safe with all those people around.”

She says, “No.”

And here, the dream shifts subtly. It is no longer a horror movie, or at least not the part of the horror movie where the maniac is chasing the hero and his “love interest.” Now it is the part of the movie where the teenage lovers are making out.

The guns are gone. Gone, too, is fear of the maniac, though we are still in the classroom, and it is still night, and the football game is still going on outside. Erica says, “Do you still love me?”

I say, “I didn’t love you, but I do now.” And I do. Suddenly, I remember what new love feels like, a blooming outward towards someone else, so different from married love. I am feeling that love again, what I haven’t felt in so long. New love is like walking into a garden thick with the scent of jasmine; for a moment the smell overpowers all of one’s senses. Married love is like returning home, the scent of which relaxes and helps one shrug off the cloak of worldly duty.

I am walking in the garden now. My heart is pounding, and I am feeling intensely passionate. Without much prelude, we begin to kiss while simultaneously trying to unfasten each other’s clothes, just like in the movies. When we are naked, her J.C. Oates glasses lying on the pile of her clothes, I break off and go over to the miraculous teacher supply cabinet. Where I found the guns earlier, now I find blankets and a couple pillows there. I lay them out on the classroom floor, and Erica and I lie down together. I hold her close and smell her hair. I like the smell of a woman’s hair, especially at the end of the day when the shampoo and conditioner has worn off and there is only her smell, the smell of her hair, clean and plain like sunlight.

I kiss her lips. I kiss her cheeks, her ear lobes. I kiss her eyes. I move from kissing her face down to the hollow of her neck; I kiss her throat. I move down further to her small apple breasts. I kiss in the cleft between her breasts. I kiss each pink, hard nipple. I move down further. I kiss her belly. I kiss her belly button. Then I pass over the real object of desire and move down to her left knee. I kiss behind her left knee, then I kiss the front of her knee. I plant kisses up her thigh. I kiss the valley where thigh meets hip. And then I am there.

She takes my face in her hands and plants it right where she wants it. Her blonde pubic hair is an unshorn thicket. The smell of her genitals is rich, almost milky, like the opaque exudation of a white lily in full bloom. I burrow my nose in her fur, loving that smell. Then I shift so that my mouth is in a better position and I can breathe freely through my nose. With my tongue I begin to probe for the little bud of her clitoris.

“Wait wait wait…”

That’s my SuperEgo breaking into my dream. It actually woke me up.

“Wait wait wait. You can’t do this. You’re married, middle-aged. She might be eighteen, but she might not.”

Crap. “But I was eighteen in the dream, too,” I think. I shoo away SuperEgo, briefly trying to recapture the dream, but to no avail. Then I roll over and hug my wife.

Ring, ring, ring, ring. Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my hair. (Well, scratch the part about the comb). Found my way downstairs and drank a cup. Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

Rainy day in Washington. All weekend, rain. Today, rain. I could not find an appropriate umbrella this morning, so I left the house with an umbrella my wife carried when she was a girl. It has Mickey Mouse on it. I probably looked rather silly in my classy trenchcoat, my professional-looking satchel over my shoulder, carrying an umbrella with Mickey Mouse on it. The great thing about being an adult, and married, is you really don’t give a damn anymore. The race is won; time to stop training. I’ve got nothing more to prove. I’ll carry a Mickey Mouse umbrella to work if I damn well feel like it.

On the train, on the way to work through the rain and morning darkness, I tried to remember that feeling of new love that my subconscious memory had briefly brought back to me. I could think only of the love I now feel for my family. It is a good love in itself, a secret graden of its own, where pretty, less exotic flowers grow, the daisy and the easter lily, perhaps. I like it there just as well. I’ll keep the other place for dreaming.