Dog dreams

Classes have begun again, and thusly, anxiety dreams.

I don't think that I am who I am because I am teaching a class on statistics and I have no fucking clue about statistics. But there I am, an instructor, no, I am not naked. I like being naked and actually when one person is nude and others are not it changes the power dynamic in favor of the person who is unclothed. No, and in fact the anxiety is actually also unrelated to my lack of mathematical knowledge (though strangely almost all anxiety/school related dreams are related to having missed the first six weeks of calculus class, or having failed to do math homework for a month and having a test the next day, being cornered in the hall by the instructor etc.) but to the fact that my dog, which I don't have, somehow managed to come to school with me and it would be BREAKING THE RULES to allow him into any kind of school building unless, of course, I were blind.

I have never had a dog but sometimes I think that I would like one. In the same way, I suppose that I would like another baby. Distant thoughts far from the reach of the long arm we like to call reality. But I do love dogs despite being a cat myself. There have been a few. I loved Blackjack, my childhood neighbor's black lab. He and I would play after school every day for years, until we finally moved away. I remember when I was 10 they would be having a backyard BBQ and I would be invited over as the entertainment, their guests would ask me questions and marvel at my (I can only imagine) precocious responses. They would ask, and it never got old, "how old are you 30?" "No, silly I'm 10." "Oh, 10 going on 30."

Asynchronous to the core. I have decided that age and time don't really exist.

I like rules though, they make sense. I suppose that in fact I would have liked statistics, and perhaps one day I will abandon literature and become a social scientist (there are urges sometimes, I resist, but I can envision myself sabotaging my own career at some future date just so I can learn to be something new and completely different). But instead, long ago, I opted out of stats and calculus (as undergraduate math requirements) and in their lieu took an introduction to computer programming. I remember exactly nothing, or rather the amount of knowledge accrued in the space of one semester when my brain was already hijacked by a baby (if people speak of pregnancy and how women become distractable and forgetful, it is totally and absolutely true.) is totally obsolete and useless to me now.

I also loved my friend Jobi's golden retriever Jake, he was the smartest damn dog that ever was. And my friend Sue and Ben's border collie, also Jake, god I loved that dog, even after my brother picked him up and he bit his mouth trapping his teeth in his braces and propitiating an emergency room visit. My parents were in the carribean, just like they are today, no that's a lie. They were in Bermuda for a week.

But the dog I loved the most was a dog whose name I never knew. When I was a small, small child, I went to a crunchy hippie school in the lovely Rose Valley woods. No one made me learn how to read, in fact I made it through kindergarten without decoding a single word, but I would write works of theater, and poems and songs, just had to have a scribe. My memories of Rose Valley are mostly wonderful, though my parents tell me I was miserable by the time they stopped taking me, allowing me at age 8 to spend my long afternoons at home alone in front of MTV. We had free rein of the woods and we would play kick the can and capture the flag, or we would dress up and act out our high fantasy. We would collect tadpoles and pick blackberries and honeysuckles, and explore our bodies (I think I mentioned this before). It was a highly permissive atmosphere, but at the same time, highly creative. I spent most of my playtime building geodesic domes with construction sets, or having stories read to me. Aesop's fables, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (I still remember the banks of the great grey green greasy Limpopo). The Princess Bride (and Iñigo's spilling entrails), "The highwayman" (Alfred Noyes) and the shortening winter nights, waiting, waiting. But in our outdoor play there was a great white dog, he was huge, with massive paws and shaggy, brilliant white fur, and he was alone. He was a herding dog of some sort, and I loved him like I loved no one, perhaps precisely because he was alone, and therefore he became my own. He was like the dog from the Japanimation cartoon that I also loved "Belle and Sebastian" (and, incidentally, I was crushed when it ended). He would come lumbering out of the forest, from a neighboring house and he would play for hours in the waning of the day; we would talk, or at least it seemed that he understood me in his patient silence, eager to accept the caresses that my 6-year-old hands would dole out endlessly.

This is the age at which I had my very first (memorable) anxiety dream. The setting was The School in Rose Valley, around the side of the preschool building, under the chestnut tree. My great white dog was nowhere to be found, and there was a line of marching baby alligators, neatly defined marching, marching in the straightest of lines up the ladder to the top of the slide, sliding, landing, walking in a semi-circle to join the tail end of the line. Why would I classify this as an anxiety dream? Well, perhaps only because of the sensation that it left in me, a blind terror that I had somehow misread the appropriate and previously agreed upon rules and for that reason, I was left on the outside looking in. Or of the horror of uniformity, of sameness, of conformity to an unattainable ideal. I had that same dream for years, and it was quietly replaced by another dream of terror, being trapped in an abandoned car, or a supply closet or my own home, guarded by sleazy men in low-riding cars, that had the intention of kidnapping me, of hurting me. How? I never dreamed that part, it wasn't the fear of the acts to be committed but rather the fear of enclosure.

I still have a hard time doing my work indoors. I need to feel like the sky is literally the limit. Perhaps that explains why in my dream I was so mortified by bringing my white dog into the confined spaces that are so neatly marked, so stained by decorum and apropriateness. I think that maybe there is a need for insurgence, a reclaiming in human humors the spaces that break us down into nothingness. There must be something liberating in the secret "mis"use of a space, just like the owning and redefining of epithets that are made to oppress and convert themselves into something beautiful, unique, intransferable.