Mom & Me Two Archive

...out of which I just awoke! This is the second night in a row I've awakened from extremely vivid dreams, so vivid I thought I wasn't dreaming (I usually am aware, at some level, that I'm dreaming). Yesterday morning's dream was altogether delightful, although confused, contained some very funny elements and united me with MFASRF, a very dear long time friend with whom I've been trying to get together for a visit for a couple of years, but either his or my circumstances haven't allowed this.
    This morning's dream, though, was frightening. I'm reviewing it here in order to have a record of it and because I believe it is related to some major tension I'm definitely experiencing from what's been going on in my and my mother's lives since late July and possibly some minor tension over how well I will be able to direct our lives to my mother's maximum benefit when she returns tomorrow. The elements of the dream that express the tension are subtle, so I'll explain them at the end of recording the dream which, by the way, is so vivid I'm not losing memory of any of it as the minutes tick away. It was so personally frightening that as I was making coffee this morning I thought I saw a stranger's arm reaching around me to grab me and I gasped and flailed as though I was being captured by force.
    I should, as a preamble, explain that after retiring relatively early last night, completely relaxed and satisfied with my day, I awoke at 1235 out of a dream in which I had been chewing a green, scratchy, waxy substance, similar to those scrub sponges for non-stick cook ware and was trying to remove it from my mouth. The more I removed, the more appeared in my mouth. Once I awoke I realized I was congested and had an extremely sore throat. "So, that's why I was feeling so punk yesterday afternoon," I thought. I took 3 ibuprofen, drank a large mug of Celestial Seasonings Black Cherry Berry tea, a large glass of bubble water, both of which soothed my throat, spent a half hour blowing out my congestion and re-retired, seemingly even more relaxed that earlier.
Sidebar:In case you're wondering, I don't advertise products (including, for instance, television shows and movies) because I receive kickbacks. The companies aren't even aware I'm advertising them. I do it because there have been so many times when I've read mention in personal web sites of products that sound interesting but there is so little information that I can't locate them. I provide specific locations on the web of products I mention if such a location exists so that I don't participate in the same web confusion that so irritates me.
    The dream took place in the present and featured myself and a former, decades ago very good friend of mine in the guise of Rosie O'Donnell (there's a reason this friend appeared as Rosie O'Donnell which I'll explain after recounting the dream). She and I were window shopping at Scottsdale Fashion Square in Scottsdale, Arizona. We were detained by police and transported to a woman's prison facility that, in the dream, was located where Motorola in Scottsdale has sat for years, between Hayden and North Granite Reef longitudinally and McDowell and Roosevelt latitudinally. We were detained without expressed cause and without being read our rights. Neither of us had any idea why we had been arrested and "put away". The warden of our cell block was the head nurse who evaluated my mother when she first arrived at the SNF two weeks ago today. In the dream, instead of wearing a nursing uniform, she was wearing a prison gray jump suit. She explained that we were allowed to leave the cell block to "visit" other areas of the prison complex three times a day, which visits could include meeting with any outside visitors we might have.
    While we were mulling over why we'd been arrested my parents (both, including my dead father, both of whom lived in Scottsdale in my dream) arrived for a visit. Although they'd been notified of my arrest and simultaneous assignment to a women's prison facility, they hadn't any idea why I'd been arrested. They assumed that, whatever the reason was, I must be guilty, otherwise why would I have been arrested. I expressed deep disappointment that they had no faith in me, upon which they and their dog (which suddenly appeared, a black lab/rottweiler mix) left.
    While my "Rosie" friend and I were meeting and greeting our fellow inmates and discovering that the community shower stall was permanently flooded, which didn't seem to bother any of the other inmates, someone produced two black and white pictures which explained why we'd been arrested. The first picture showed us relaxing on a raised portion of a cement canal beneath the city in which we'd been swimming and canoeing. The second picture showed us in the canoe navigating the canal. There were many, many others appearing in the picture, so many that it was hard for us to recognize ourselves. We realized that the reason we'd been picked out for attention was that we were adults, as evidenced by our choice of clothing, and most of the others were teenagers. We also expressed surprise that playing in the undercity canal was illegal, as there were no signs along the canal that indicated this and, as well, it was such a popular activity in this part of Arizona, rather like tubing the Salt River, that everyone did in the summer to cool off and relax.
    Soon after we discovered that we would be detained for a period of two to three years with 6 months off for good behavior. My "Rosie" friend decided immediately that we needed to stick together on this "travesty", lie our way out of it by denying we were there or ever had been in the canal and disputing the identity of our photographs. I informed her that I would not lie. I felt, considering that common knowledge ascribed no illegality to what we did, so much so that not only did everyone do it but the pictures showed that on the day in question recreational traffic in the canal was particularly heavy, we had a good chance of "beating" this "rap" which was definitely a "miscarriage of poorly designed and poorly applied law and justice". She decided to go her way. I decided to go mine.
    My decision included calling my parents' stockbroker (whose identity in the dream was the same as my mother's stockbroker in reality) to inform him of what had happened and solicit the name of a lawyer who could quickly and resolutely negotiate me through this legal morass. An interminably long line of individuals sitting on a bench, the end of which I could not see, waiting for their chance at a five minute phone call discouraged me from attempting to use the phones. By this time it was evening of our first day of incarceration and "lights out" was a mere hour and a half due.
    I decided to break out of the facility and walk to my parents' residence to use their phone. I used the pretext that I had one visit outside my cell block coming to me that day. It was very easy to escape, as there were no fences or walls. I simply walked across some agriculture fields (which no longer bind the Motorola facility but did many years ago) and quickly arrived at my parent's apartment complex (which was in reality a complex in which our reduced-by-daughter-marriage family lived for a short period after we returned to the States from Guam, a complex on the southwest corner of Thomas and Hayden in Scottsdale which is now condominiums, which I discovered two days ago).
    Half the complex had converted to concrete, underground slums, almost unlivable in their disrepair. I negotiated my way through these. After a few failed attempts I made my way through the maze of stairs and landings to my parents' apartment, all the way hoping that they would allow me to at least enter and use their phone to call for a lawyer. Although I was afraid that they would not allow me entrance I was also hopeful about my situation, knowing that the facts of the case as I understood them would surely get me and my "Rosie" friend released as soon as a competent lawyer was able to approach the judicial establishment on our behalf and show that the law was obscure, existed in a "reasonable and prudent" state, thus the arrest could be fought on the grounds that nobody knew that a law against recreational use of this particular canal existed and the law was disobeyed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of times a day during the summer by almost everyone living within the Valley.
    At this point I awoke.

1. The feeling that I had been trapped out of my ability to maneuver through life by people willfully attempting to keep me in ignorance has been a major concern of mine as I've been negotiating my mother's health care. In reality, yesterday and the day before I momentarily wondered if I was being lied to about the existence of a CBC that might have been taken sometime after August 12th with a hemoglobin count so low that it would cause me to question whether she was getting the proper amount of supplemental iron at the SNF.
2. The appearance of my long ago friend also figures into the feeling of being lied to and being asked to participate in lying. She is one of two sociopathic liars I've encountered in my life with whom I've become involved in close, finally disastrous relationships. The reason my relationship with this friend ended was because I discovered that she had lied to me and her entire coterie of friends and some relatives about certain serious circumstances in her life. The lies were such that they could be considered pathological and her exercise of lying could without hesitation be considered sociopathic. The circumstances about which she lied we so involving that she would go out of her way to disappear at times when she was supposedly traveling for purposes related to the lie. The lies also allowed her to solicit unusually large amounts of energy and time from all her friends/relatives and her lover to her own purposes without regard for other people's circumstances and ability to produce results for her when she needed help. She went so far as to criticize and abandon people who found themselves unable to accommodate her requests on behalf of the lie. All of us discovered the lie about her life at the same time. Most of us confronted her within a matter of days. Once confronted, she quickly procured a job in her profession (at which, I might add, she was exceptional) outside the state and once again disappeared, this time for good. The reason she appeared as Rosie O'Donnell in my dream is that, although she did not look at all like Rosie O'Donnell she sounded and acted quite a bit like her, so much so that, many years later, when I first glimpsed Rosie O'Donnell during her rise to fame I immediately thought of this long-ago close friend, in part because this friend had an addiction to talk shows and often fantasized, hilariously about having a talk show of her own, who she would interview and what she would say.
       I am positive that the reason she appeared in my dream is that I continue to experience a lot of tension about my perception that the non-alternative medical establishment engages, willfully and self-confidently, in a number of lies, illusions and misdirective strategies in order to try to keep me (not personally; certainly medicine does this with all laymen at some point) from negotiating with, through and around it on behalf of my mother's health issues. The reason this particular friend appeared as "the non-alternative medical establishment" is that she had a doctorate in her field which was not medicine but was related to medical research.
3. The reason that a "friend" of mine appeared as temptress, so to speak, toward a collusive lie about the activities for which we'd been arrested and incarcerated is because, on a daily basis, I have been and continue to be counseled by friends and sometimes relatives to lie about my mother's health circumstances in order to obtain or deny-without-ridiculous-consequences treatment prescribed for my mother or information I need to evaluate suggested medical treatments in order to make decisions on the need for and the administration of such treatments.
       The reason I don't lie isn't because I'm afraid of getting caught. It's because I'm afraid, while lying, I will inadvertently lose a valuable though tricky resource or endanger my mother's health by making it even more difficult for me to access the information I need before making medical decisions on her behalf.
4. My father appearing alive in my dream relates to my accelerated thoughts about him lately, wondering if he exists in some form and is aware of what I'm doing on behalf of my mother, whether he approves of my refusal to accept-as-law (thus, the appearance of the law in my dream) everything the non-alternative medical community wants to do to her and my insistence on striking out on my own to manage her health care, often in defiance of "medical law", which, of course, is synonymous with "doctor's orders". In reality, I most often suspect that he would be very pleased with what he would probably consider my rebel's stance. I'm never quite sure of his possible judgment though, especially when medical situations become tight and I have to make a decision that is not clear cut.
5. As for such elements as window shopping at Scottsdale Fashion Square, the "reasonable and prudent" take on the legal dilemma, the site of the prison being the Motorola complex in Scottsdale, my parents living at a complex we previously, as a family, inhabited and the necessity of me doing something illegal (escaping from prison) to accomplish a legal goal, all of these hark back to random thoughts I've had throughout the past few weeks of my mother's stay in the hospital and at the SNF, usually thoughts triggered by something happening around me as I am driving to or from visiting with her.
6. I'm not sure about the canal business, the slum area of what appeared in the dream as my parents' apartment complex (although this could be the mental up-chuck of some scenes in a movie I recently viewed, Unconditional Love), the sudden appearance of a dog at my parents' side as they were closing their visit with me at the prison, the difficultly of using the phone bank at the prison which provoked my escape, why I didn't escape with plans for not returning (in the dream I clearly intended on returning to the prison, the dream just didn't last long enough for me to return), the permanent flooding of the community shower stall at the prison, the three-excursion out of the cell block limit and the appearance of a specific nurse at the SNF as warden at the prison (especially since I have an extremely high regard for this nurse and treasure her as one of the few in the medical field who trusts the information and efforts of intense caregivers). It could be that she has seemed distant over the last week. This has set me to wondering if my rambunctiousness at the SNF has somehow offended her. As for the other elements, they may have been random picks floating up as my brain processed and filed or dumped bits of data that have been remaining on the shelf over the last few weeks. I simply can't trace them to anything in particular.

    This has taken a long time to enter, as I've been doing it while accomplishing cleaning chores throughout the house, paying attention to The Girls and calling my mother to see how she's doing. She is, by the way, doing well, as usual, looking forward to release. She told me that she had been out of the room for awhile to "attend a meeting" that "wasn't very entertaining". My guess is that she went for her group occupational therapy. I told her about finding a pair of 1 lb. weights for her so we could continue her therapy at home. She groaned comically and I laughed. I also told her about locating "the perfect toilet riser", to which she made a joke about being the only people on the block with a high-rise toilet, perhaps we should advertise and charge admission, at which I groaned, comically, and she laughed.
    I probably won't do as much cleaning as I'd planned. I am naturally inclined to find any excuse not to clean legitimate. I consider awakening a bit physically under the gorgeous weather we're having here today a good excuse to just clear paths through the house, put away obvious obstacles to my mother's movement and vacuum. Luckily, I have a co-conspirator in my mother. I got my lack of interest in cleaning and my lack of ability to recognize dirt and disorder from her. Evidentially: When she asked why I didn't sound like myself I told her I had a bit of a cold, a sore throat and congestion and was "a little tired". She encouraged me to "take it easy, if you clean too much I won't recognize the place." That's my Mom, and my dear life companion. We're a perfect match, in deed and misdeed.
    Tomorrow after her release I'll be taking her to lunch in the Valley, one of her favorite activities. She's been complaining more and more about the "boring" food at the SNF, which I consider indicative that her taste buds are continuing to recover their on-alert status after four weeks of not smoking. I thought it might be a fitting experience to give them a treat for lunch in celebration of her release.
    Despite my low energy level, my cold, my concern over new tensions we might experience when she returns and some of the dream elements, I'm excited about her release and return. Oddly, for me, a dyed-in-the-wool Solitaire, I'm uncomfortable here without her, uncomfortable as I travel knowing she won't be home when I arrive, uncomfortable not being able to monitor at will her state of life and mood. I think this is a good development, although very strange for me to experience.
    The sun is beginning its incremental journey back to the position where it floods our living and dining areas with light and heat during the winter. The Little Girl just discovered a patch of it and is settling into the light for a bath and a Sacred Nap. I've got two car-based errands to run, both related to Mom's homecoming tomorrow, then I can relax and perhaps take a Sacred Nap myself before finishing the cleaning chores I feel up to managing. Mom had better return before I morph into a confirmed nap taker.