Dreams

They say bad things happen in threes. So last week, after a series of awful seizures, Chester (our dog) bit me. (He has a brain tumor and he's doing okay, but every month or so we go through this bout of seizures and overall, we're just waiting for the day when we have to make the fateful decision...but it's not now...as you might have surmised from his behavior of biting!)

Chester isn't an aggressive dog. He lived on the streets for the first year of his life, but then he chose to live with Ann. While you can't take things from his mouth or roll him over on his back and going to the vet requires a muzzle, he's sweet and gentle and happy. Truly.

But after a seizure, he's very disoriented. After four of them (which was our experience on Monday) he's disorientation makes him do things he's never done before. Like climb up on a four-foot bulkhead in the garden.

1 o' clock in the morning and I'm trying to get him down from the bulkhead. I know he hates to be touched after a seizure (I'm assuming his skin is on fire), but I'm more afraid that he'll fall the four feet down and fracture a bone or bang his already tumor-ridden head.

I cover his muzzle with a strong hand, grab his underbelly, and hoist. He's quick, even post-seizure, and he snaps his mouth right out of my hand and right onto my finger. We both yelp. But I get him down successfully. Except, well, I'm bleeding.

Eventually, after an hour of wandering around -- his mind clearing and my finger throbbing -- he falls asleep.

By the week's end, I still have a sore finger slowly healing over and then I break my little toe.

Two things down, one to go.

I woke this morning to a huge cold sore on my lip. Number three.

And the remnants of a dream hang over me...

I'm back in my past only it's me now back in my past. I'm with my former partner. She's controlling. I lived in a kind of subtle fear that I'd do the wrong thing. After 10 years of it, I got the courage to leave. Still, every once in awhile I have these dreams where me (the now me) is still in the past (with the past me) and SHE (the ex) is there, and I'm feeling controlled.

In this dream she's purchased a new bicycle for me. An exquisitely fancy bicycle with all sorts of features I've always wanted. Only it's her birthday not mine and I can't figure out why she'd buy me such an expensive bike on her birthday especially since she earns a meager salary and I'm the one who purchases the big items for the house. I also can't figure out why I'm there...why I'm in this life that I left years ago. I kept thinking throughout the dream, "This isn't my life anymore, is it?"

Usually when I hate the dream I'm in I can get myself out of it by blinking my dream-self eyes three times (some kind of Dorothy thing like the clicking of the ruby slippers). My eyes wouldn't blink this time. Throughout the dream, I'm oddly aware that there is someone sleeping next to me, but I'm afraid to open my eyes and see HER. I don't want to find out that the dream is real and that all the changes I've made in the past years might actually have been the dream.

I stare at the dream bicycle. I touch the shiny finish and the curious attachments (a place to hold my laptop, for instance, and the special locking system that prevents the bike from being stolen) and I hear myself say, "This isn't your life. Nice bike and all, this isn't your life. You've got to open your eyes and look at the person next to you."

So, I do. I rise out of the dream like emerging from the depths of some scuba diving experience (which I've never done in my life) and look at the person next to me.

It's Ann. Yes, god, it's Ann. I'm in Seattle. The weight at my feet is the dog. The throb in my toe is real. The soreness of my finger is still real. It's Ann. It's Seattle. It's my life now and not my life then. It's even this nasty cold sore that feels like a volcano on my lip.

I am grateful. Even for the broken toe. Even for the seizuring dog. Even for the gouged hand. Even for Mt. St. Helens on my bottom lip.

I will not sell my soul for a nice bicycle.

A therapist once told me that in your dreams you are everything. If that's the case I was the bicycle, I was the birthday, I was HER, I was the life of fear.

I think it must be the same for non-dreaming...for now. I am the broken toe, I am the biting dog, I am the ooze from my cold sore, I am the woman lying next to me.

I am three bad things, but a million more wonderful things all jumbled up, standing on a bulkhead four feet off the ground ready to be saved from myself, ready to feel relief and joy that I've moved forward from fear into something safe and secure and as REAL as a broken toe, a dying dog, and an exploding cold sore.

What a good life.

Seriously. I mean that.