Dreaming of...

I've been dreaming of home--Nebraska-- a lot lately. A week ago, I had a dream of careening down a narrow ditch roadway with various members of my extended family in a hurry and making everyone but my dad mad. He trusted me, even when I didn't trust myself and almost lost a passenger out the door (we were in a Green VW) and then put us all in the ditch. He was totally unflapped. Then a couple of nights ago there was a dream about a friend's mom having ovarian cancer. Last night there was the weird one with my former boss. Then this afternoon, as I was waking up from a nap, all of my teeth (on the bottom) were falling out, my dad was asking what was wrong, I was in my kitchen picking up my teeth and taking care of the same friend with a sick mom.

I have no idea what all of this means, but I feel like home is trying to get at me somehow. It's obviously inside of me, even if I don't necessarily appreciate it as home.
One of my friends used to say "you can get the girl outta the farm, but you can't get the farm outta the girl." I used to cringe and remind her to never say that about me or around me and other people. But I guess she's right. Even if only in her dreams and my nightmares.

Stuck

It is so real that I see the fine layer of road grime on the parched ditch grass as I run up through it. I hear each step of my foot hit the ground, hard. But I don't feel it, don't feel the grass scraping against me or the jarring of the steps. I hear my breath coming in quick whooshing gulps, but don't feel breathless or choked when I wake.

I'm running from my old boss, except now, in the dream he is my boss, me and only me and two others are left and I think he's about the kill the old man. He's gone crazy and we've already been to court to resolve some issues, but for some reason the three of us were in the field behind the farm this morning, and he saw us, dropped what he was doing and came running after us.
My friend Kelly, from high school, takes off with me, but the old man knows he's not going to be able to run far. I want to be as far away as I can from him before E catches up to him so I don't have to hear anything. Kelly and I ran cross country together, but I don't think either of us will be quick enough to get away so that we can just maintain distance.

We went to court because he had unleashed upon a couple of co-workers, and thinking I'd be spared the fury, I setepped in to help and also got pummeled--pulled down and trampled and kicked in the kitchen, stuck against a low cupboard with no escape. That's how working for him (in the dream) felt, like we had no escape.

I don't know what our jobs were or where we were, but it looked like the land was my parent's farm, the one I grew up on. The interior of the house was not my childhood home, but I can't place it as any place. I can't even remember the other people in the dream, but it wasn't anyone I used to work with when I did work for this guy in real life. He looked pretty much the same, even wearing the blue and black poncho he's so fond of. But his temper, toward me, at any rate, was never this extreme in real life, and when I start running, when I finally get off of the windrowed field dirt and onto more solid, gravelly ground, I start to wake up. This is why I'm aware of my sensory overload and yet not really alowing myself to feel it. I think I make myself wake up, because this is terrible. I don't want to think of him on some crazy rampage. I want to call him or text or email or something to make sure he's ok, see what he's up to.
But I don't.
We're not connected anymore in that way we once were, so for now, this was just a bad dream. But I don't like feeling unsettled and shaky and... so affected when I wake up from something, so it's probably going to stick with me until I do something about it. Or get out of whatever trapping situation I'm really stuck in?

Epiphany

It came to me this afternoon, as I was finishing up my day of serious, dedicated writing at the coffeeshop.

On the day that I had my stroke, maybe even at the exact moment it began, I was reading my favorite book, "Swimming to Cambodia," by Spaulding Gray. He's a great monologist and actor who appears in Roland Joffe's film the Killing Fields, which is shot in Thailand but "takes place" in Cambodia during the Vietnam war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Watch it, it's excellent.
Anyway, he's in Thailand, searching for his "perfect moment" on a Thai beach, eating mushrooms and throwing up in the sand and thinking about life and why he can't get lost in the water and why he can't get married and why the Thais have so much fun and how Marilyn Monroe died. It is, as I said, my favorite book, stream of consciousness beautiful.
So now, I'm writing my book. People ask me all the time if Thailand has anything to do with it, and until today, until my epipany, I've said no, but it apparently, somehow, has had something to do with it.
The day of my stroke was the day the tsunami fucked up the beaches in Thailand. The beach that one mr. Gray had visited and tripped and puked on in STC. The second question my dad asked me when I woke up was if I could remember talking abou t the tsunami the morning we left the house. The first question was "how are you," and the answer to it was "what?" and the answer to the second question was also, "what?"
So the next part of all of this is that Gray died while I was in the hospital. He too suffered from brain trauma, a result of a car accident in the UK. He committed suicide and was found right round the time I got out of the hospital. His book, Thailand, my stroke... it sounds silly and fucked up and all sorts of crazy to make connections in this way, I know. I do. But somehow it feels like there's something there. Closure? On that part of my life, the life I had before the stroke? The life that ended that same morning for me and thousands of others? I got to go on living, but not as I once had. Finality? Kyle and I planned this trip sometime in the first year after I got out of the hospital (I think) and now it's finally happening. Closure in that, and what the past two years have meant in a connection sustained? I set a goal of completing my book by March first not because I knew for sure that I'd be leaving for Thailand, but because March felt right. I could have said "July," or "next September," and any other month. But this is working our perfectly.
Perfect. I'm always looking for a perfect moment in my life, without knowing what that perfect moment is or what perfection might even be, although it becomes in the weirdest of ways, and not always in what others see as perfect. Of course I've been hoping for a "perfect moment" of my own, on some beach while there, but it probably won't be his beach, becuse in an interview years later he said he went back and it was commercialized and fucked up, and I have no idea what it will be like. I don't know what I'm looking for.
Maybe that's the message I was supposed to get today. I don't have to know, it doesn't have to make any sense now, but at some point it will?

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