Dream Analysis:

I woke up slowly enough to remember some of my dreams. I dream every night and they are generally like this – though if I wake up to fast and don’t try to get them down, they are lost to me. This is not a chronological progression of the dream, but rather constitutes scenes that I can recall. Angela and I have been given tickets by Lucinda to an Opera (This references that Lucinda and others give me tickets for various things all the time and Angela and I just went to that classical concert at the Sheldon). The concert is in the city – in a gated neighborhood and I’m climbing up over the fence – not wanting to get caught – I used to love to climb anything I could – the base of this fence is a gray stone wall and the top is black cast iron with the pointed spears on the top, it is unusually high. I make it over and am climbing down when Angela asks, “Why are you doing it the hard way? You can just go around the other side.” “Because this way is more fun.” “I’ll meet you around the other side.” – We arrive at the opera house together and it’s a mixed location – part Ascension Lutheran Church and part Fox Theatre. – detail lost for a bit. I am making things harder than they need to be, but that’s ok because struggle can be fun and its own reward.

I’ve gone out of the center during a work day on HAC business and find myself at a health fair where HAC students and others are doing Pranic Healing – I start to feel energy in my hands and I’m walking around like a supervisor sensing the work they are all doing on their clients – it stands out that Tom is there and student who has dropped out of the program. It’s a high school and suddenly we’re between classes – all these faculty spill out into the parking lot where we are – and it’s a bizarre. I’m standing with a hippie styled woman who has an assortment of odd items for sale – one of which is a large fish tank with two huge fish in it that barely fit. One of the fish is a blowfish, I can’t tell what the other one is. Someone wants to buy the tank. She gets seventy dollars for it – that number is important somehow and I clearly see the price tag on the underside of the tank as she’s selling it. She is then keeping the fish in a small bowl of water. The bowl is slanted so that there is a deep and a shallow end – I turn the blowfish around so that its gills are both under water and it begins to breathe deeply. Fish and fish tanks are a recurring dream element for me. – just saw big fish – fish out of water a clear symbol – getting too big for your tank – don’t suffocate– a clear read.

Angela and I try to go back for another concert, but we have no tickets. I try to call Lucinda on her cell but it’s no good. Maybe this is the first time and we don’t get in. But the doorman knows me from that mornings newspaper – this is a gala affair and the entrance to the building is like the red carpet portion of the Oscars – only smaller – so he has time to chat. Look what “insert any name here” made. The woman named, whose name I don’t recall, is the usher inside who would take our tickets and seat us, if we had tickets. She has mounted two pictures on a piece of cardboard, one of them is a picture of me having a pint of Guiness at the Dukum, but I have antlers coming out of my head – not as a man cuckold would, but as some kind of Deer king – like a stag. The other picture is the cover of the Lloyd Alexander book – not The Black Cauldron – but the first one in that series (Children’s lit) – where the rider of a horse gets the rider to rear up on his hind legs and the rider himself is wearing a human skull mask with a large rack of Buck antlers coming out of it. I read a sentence the other day from a breathing poster – your power is coming into you and I am reminded of that. The caption under the picture says, “Local Kirksville Personality and Truman alum…” it says more but I don’t read it, I’m scanning the picture to try and figure out if the article was good or bad and what I had done – the doorman is treating me like a minor celebrity so I deduce I’ve done something good – or at least funny in a positive way. I think derisively of the media, “Oh, so I’m a personality now am I?” That reminds me, when Angela and I went to the Sheldon the other night I almost physically ran into Beetle Bob as he was coming off the staircase from the balcony. Beetle Bob is a minor St. Louis Celebrity/Personality.

I’ve returned to attend the last portion of the Opera with my nephew T and my father, Angela has given her ticket to my dad. Most people have left because it was an Easter concert and the primary portion is over. We move in to sit toward the center of the theatre and we have to sit among bottles of booze – which are left over from the party that must have preceded us – or they are there for the party to come – the bottles are full and in boxes, but the box lids won’t close because the bottles are Jager – the German liquor that tastes like Vicks cough syrup. The bottle tops have antlers coming out of them. I don’t remember details of the concert, but afterwards my father has gone home and T and I are walking past this photo shoot. There are four very tall models – they are literally seven feet tall or taller, and they are almost bronze they are so tan, they all have dark hair. They are wearing Greek style costumes and one has a single breast revealed Amazon style. They are pretending to be models and are Amazon warriors – one smiles at me and I laugh – if she wanted to she could literally bite off a human head. The deer antlers and the Amazons are symbols of masculine and feminine power. It just now occurs to me that in real life I just had several of my black and white photographs framed and I’ve hung them in my living room – it felt good to be creative and to put my art up. The women at the photo shoot are a link to that sense of empowerment that comes through creativity. The antlers are a symbol of masculine power. Brushes with what fame might feel like in a negative way have come to me by being my father’s son. In every community we lived I was the pastor’s son, so more people knew me then were known to me, and strangers regularly said hi to me and made judgments about me – I have preferred to be at times more anonymous and yet even in the ville and here, I meet people here is St. Louis all the time who don’t know me in a personal way, but they do remember me. I’ve heard such odd rumors about me. Megan told me she had heard I directed Porno for the people who own that seedy movie store on highway 63. Well prodigal son of the preacher man, get thee to work as this fish tank won’t clean itself.