I have always been a vivid dreamer, so was my Mom. We would trade dreams like most trade stories about vacations. Both anxious, both sensitive to many things, both empaths. You hear a feather floating to the floor and we/I feel an anvil dropping, it is maddening at times. The most frequent dreams of mine involve stairs, things to climb over, down, never up, always descending. I wake still seeing whatever I was unable to climb down, a colosseum where I cannot seem to climb down the cement stairs, so steep and as I slip slowly into some sort of sleepy abyss.
Another dream: escaping a silent and formless thing, carrying kitties as I always seem to be, saving them, they are typically skinny and sickly, also they are mine except I have no cat food, it’s like I forgot how to be a kitty owner! The unconquerable climbing of any steep thing and these kitties, I doze and meet these odd aspects of my dreams almost nightly. Sometimes I think they come from the kitties I lost many years ago, I did not want them to be outdoor kitties but that darn ex, it still may be haunting me. They had a heated/insulated house, I guess he tried, but within 6 months they had both disappeared, one by one. He said a neighbor stole them, we had to move and I never found out what happened, I was equal parts rage and regret.
Last night, no stairs, nothing to climb, I was in my old childhood home; this used to be a frequent backdrop, now as I age, less and less….much like my vivid memories of my Mother. I retreat into the basement after entering my lovely old home, I see people throughout the house, faces from high school, my past.
They peak over the furniture that I have blocking the door to my old bedroom but they keep going, I am not sure where they are going but I am content to keep organizing the old basement. Boxes, old relics from my youth, and the kitties. Things are different this time, I don’t have to cry or fret about the steep stairs I have to climb down as I save the kitties, in this dream, I consciously lay down and pet them and play with them and they are healthy this time, I pray that I have broken some sort of pattern.
They are never the same kitties either, I had so many as a child, I was always bringing home kitties. And, much like in the dreams, I was saving the kitties I rescued from something. Perhaps juxtaposing how I could not save the last kitties that I owned.
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche
I have read that dreaming of stairs means growth, other articles say that if you are unable to climb down you are suppressing thoughts, potentially regressing, my middle name may as well be regression. The kitties may represent feminity, innocence, or even sanctity, seems like a joke. I have let more of the darkness out in the last few years. Becoming rather combative, the anger bubbles, my patience for humans has suffered a tragic decline, especially when driving, the responsibility I seem to take on ‘takes the wheel’ away from me and not just in the car. “They should know better”, “there are other people in the world other than you”, the fighting, the combativeness, becoming more like my Dad and less like my sweet Mom, this monster that I aid and care for, the same monster who dreams of saving helpless animals, have I become the monster from my dreams? Fighting myself, fighting change each night all the while taking great care for something from my past? Unwilling to pull my feet out of the quicksand before an anvil drops on me? Only the devil knows I guess….
-B
