am i dreaming?

Yesterday morning, S asked me if I'd had bad dreams the night before. I said, "No; why, was I making noises?" He laughed and said that several of his Facebook friends reported having bad dreams. I guess he was trying to see how far reaching this plague was. He had taken Nyquil, so he slept drugged and dreamless for nine hours.

Last night, I was startled by a bad dream. It was a bad dream, but I couldn't say that's what it was while it was happening. Usually, a bad dream is all about the label "bad dream." One could be being chased by an ice cream truck or a goat in a tuxedo, and that could be considered a bad dream, and somewhere in the middle of it, you know it. (I've had both of those dreams, and they were bad!)

In my dream that is just now coming back to me, I was climbing to the widow's peak of an old wooden house. There was a beautiful woman in a long white night gown standing next to me at the top. She stood up on the edge of the roof line and took a nose dive into the misty green silence before us. A moment later, I looked over the edge, and she had surely splatted on the concrete far below. It was startling. I thought, "Oh my god, she's dead." And then I woke up and thought it was a bad omen to have someone die in a dream (though I'm not superstitious that way, I myself have died in my dreams numerous times).

Then I thought back on the dreams S reported (and that I saw) on Facebook; one person had dreamt a close acquaintance died.

But I also remember passing by two empty public pools in the previous day or so and having a weird non-fantasy visualization of climbing up on the diving board and doing a dive into the emptiness. The part that stuck with me was that it might not kill a person to dive into an empty pool; it could just paralyze them, and as P1 says, that would be worse than death.

Just past the pool around which I had that thought, my eyes caught the eyes of an elderly black woman at a bus stop. I smiled, but it was too late to see if she smiled back. I like to think she did. A few days before that, I was riding my bike through that same neighborhood and caught a long glance at a black woman dressed in church-going finery. I nodded my head and said hello, and she smiled and said hello back. She was the opposite of the woman in white who dove to her death in my dream.

Maybe I'm making connections where they don't belong, but I fell in love with that black woman a little bit, even though I'm pretty sure that was the best our relationship could ever have been.

(photo credit)