Dream

I've always been a vivid dreamer, and I've journaled many dreams, especially if they felt "significant." I think dream interpretation books are only partially helpful because we all possess a personal vocabulary inside ourselves. So the symbols used and the emotions we experience come from who were are and the meanings we connect to objects/events/people.

I found this dream in a larger document from 2007 and I include it here because I believe that many premonitions come in dreams. I also think we connect with others in ways we can't imagine, even while asleep.

I dreamt that all these beautiful antique pieces of furniture and objects, things that had been handed down through the family—even pieces I remembered from my childhood—were being removed from their long-term storage and put all over the yard and street in front of my house. It was gray and starting to rain. I was upset because they were going to be ruined and there was no place to store them in my house, which was already full.

I wandered through them, touching and remembering. A woman from across the street was picking up lovely throw pillows from a beautiful mahogany king size bed. I told her she could have them. I was sorry there was no room in my guest room, for it was such a beautiful bed. The storage man said some part of the contract had been violated and so the things were being thrown out.

People wandered through them, as if it were a garage sale, but no one violated anything or took anything. They just looked. Then, on a turn, the storage man said that now that all the pieces had been trotted out and put in my yard, he could take them all back again under a new contract. I could negotiate new terms. And my terms were to put them all in the moving van and arrange for them to be sold on consignment. I had no room for them. But at least they would be sheltered from the bad weather until they were sold.

Two years after I had this dream, I was laid off from my job at American Girl. I had to sell my house, store all my furniture—which includes antique pieces and hand-me-downs from family and friends—and move in with family in California. I lived there for a year, looking for work. In the end, I landed a long-term freelance job which allowed me to move back to Wisconsin and take my things back out of storage "under a new contract." They'd been sheltered from the bad weather of being laid off and homeless (eternal gratitude to my family) until I was able to "negotiate new terms" in my life.

Emotionally, I feel the loss of my king size bed, which I haven't been able to sleep in since I sold my house. The new place I rent only has room for the king bed in the basement guest room—which I don't use, myself. I sleep on the former guest bed upstairs.