I’ve been working on brianna.org for the last week. I have a gallery of my SX70s up there now. Just a heads up. There is also the first wide-access link to this journal on the site, so I’ve made some previous entries friends-only.
I had a dream last night about my family again. This time, we were in New York. My eldest aunt and my cousins and even my mother were dancing and chanting in a parking lot. I was wearing an eleven-day old infant in a sling. She belonged to my aunt. I stayed out of the dancing for the baby’s sake, but was swept into a rendition of “Ding-dong the witch is dead” that involved passing around a man who was only five or six inches high. There were several other small people running around in the circle. I felt at the time that he may not like such rough treatment, but really, he was leaping and running from person to person, not really being “handled” as it were.
We were all attracting a crowd with our rowdiness and our strangely glittering gauze finery. Even I was dressed in something filmy and sparkling. We felt the hostility of the crowd to our noise and left. During this, I frequently checked the baby. Often, she looked as though she were made of confectionary and was hardly moving, so I would check her breathing by placing my hand on her chest. At one point, she was cooing and kicking, and I reflected in my dream how odd it was that I knew the sounds of a baby’s cries well enough to remember it in my dreams. That was as lucid as this dream got.
I arrived at a very seedy hotel/diner/whorehouse run by an Asian family. The family was wonderful to me and very interested in the baby. I got keys to our rooms and told them there were only seven of us coming, when truly there were about twenty. I walked down a long flight of stairs to the first room and unlocked it for my family to come in.
The dream shifted to later. It was dark. The room was filled with blankets and people sleeping on the floor. I was sleeping with the baby, and got up to make her a bottle. I found a corner that was lit by an outside streetlamp, and settled down with the baby. Unusually, my aunt was awake and already preparing her bottle. My cousins were sitting between us, and they passed the baby along to her. I fell asleep but felt watchful. The dream shifted as though I had awakened with a start, and I searched for the baby. My aunt no longer had her. My aunt had been sleeping against a railing for a flight of stairs, and I just knew the baby had fallen down the stairs without a sound. In my dream, the longest walk was finding my way out through a maze of sleeping people in the dark, to the head of the stairs where I could just make out a bundle of blankets at the bottom. I knelt on the steps and wailed. Then I woke up.