Marching to the beat of a different mandolin

This dream was SO WEIRD. I mean they all are, but this one felt like an actual story...maybe even a good and interesting and believable one? But maybe that will unravel as I type it out. Here goes:

It took place in a fictional location that was near my parents' house. There was like a shopping center that I needed to frequent for some reason or other, and an old folks' home next to it. Over the course of several days, I made friends with this old guy at the shopping center, who lived in the home nearby. Thanksgiving was coming up, and I invited him to join my family. He declined at first, but I insisted, and then wrote down the information so he could get there. I hadn't told him my name at all yet, but I wrote it down for him with the address and phone number. I remember he had a weird reaction when he saw my name, but whatever.

Thanksgiving rolls around, and I go get my friend from the home. He's acting really uncomfortable, but I figure it's just because he's about to meet 30 of my crazy relatives. I plop him down in the den watching football with a bunch of the guys (Virginia Tech was up 14 to nothing after their first two possessions), and I run out with my mom to take care of some errands. She has to run in somewhere really fast, so I stay in the car to wait for her. While I'm in there, I find this book, and I pick it up and start to read, only to find it's about ME. Kind of.

I learn that my parents had a daughter in 1959 (three years before they actually met, but whatever, dream timeline). She looked just like me except that she had lighter hair, and they named her Margaret, just as my mom had always planned for her daughter. There were actually pictures of her all over our house, but I had always believed they were of me. Meg #1 had a terminal illness, and was in the hospital all the time. One day a pro baseball player was doing his charity thing and making the rounds. My mom and Meg #1 really bonded with this guy, Jim Grant. Turns out Jim Grant is the name of the old guy Meg #2 had brought to Thanksgiving...

Anyway, Mom takes for-fucking-ever on her errand, so I'm able to read really far into the story. Jim really cares for our family and offers to marry Meg #1 (who is like 3 years old, btw) so that we don't have to worry about money anymore. I'm not sure why he can't just GIVE us the money, and it's absolutely NOT a pedophilic situation -- in the dream it's just what he has to do to get Meg #1 the top notch care and help the family. It's all very much on the up and up.

But the media catches wind of this marriage between a celebrity baseball player and a toddler, and makes it a THING. And Hillary Clinton ends up prosecuting Jim for *crimes.* He's found guilty and his career is ruined and he has anger issues and drug problems and sort of exits the story at that point. Meg #1 eventually dies, and the family is very sad. There are photographs of the family mourning, and I realize that all of my cousins and aunts and uncles have been privy to this secret my (Meg #2) whole life, keeping it from me that Meg #1 ever existed. All those photos that I thought were my baby pictures are actually her. I examine them more closely now and see the obvious differences -- things I always previously assumed I'd just grown out of. Mom gets back to the car at this point in the story and I start grilling her. She tells the story of hospitals and tragedy, and explains why she was so uncomfortable with me bringing Jim to our Thanksgiving.

I go back and talk to Jim, and explain that I've just learned the whole story, and he explains that when he saw me, he saw her in me, and he felt this weird combination of love and resentment, because he cared very much for Meg #1 and our family, but that's what ruined his career/life when he was young and popular and wealthy. He had lost touch with my family and never knew when Meg #1 died, and so he was shocked when he learned that my name was Meg Massie and of course I looked the same, but I was too young, and Meg #1 had a terminal illness in the 60's, so...?

The dream sort of fizzled out here, at the point where everyone is putting all the pieces together. But I remember in my conversation with my mom about the legal case that followed the marriage (or plans to marry, I guess), with Hillary Clinton prosecuting, that it all made sense to me then why my parents hate her so much. But I understood why she'd be opposed to a grown man marrying a 3-year-old, and I still loved her and was going to vote for her. Apparently the timeline in my dream was such that election day would come after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, the end...

I have a lot of dreams about McKenzie. The themes have shifted some over the months. At first, they were all about him abandoning me in different ways. Lately they've been more about us getting back together...sort of...only he pulls back when it starts to feel real. So I guess still abandonment-ish, but less mean than the first go-round.

Last night I dreamt that McKenzie presented me with our wedding rings again...asked me to be his wife again. And I was thrilled and I said yes.

And then I got to thinking about it and nearly went crazy with grief. (All in my dream, still.) I wanted to be with Toby. I wanted to talk to Emily about it, but all she wanted to do was go sledding. (Would it be a dream without some element of wtf?) But what it boiled down to was that I was going to end up telling McKenzie no, I can't be your wife again, I'm with Toby now.

Other relationships have never before factored into my dreams about McKenzie. They always take place in an imaginary space in time where we aren't yet divorced, but aren't together anymore. Last night was the first time my dream took place in the present (minus the snow on the ground). And I was decidedly in Camp Toby. The dream was stressful as hell, but I woke up and felt awesome. I'm with who I want to be with. There are no obstacles. I've got this.

I still miss McKenzie to pieces, and in a perfect world, we never would have divorced. Maybe in a perfect world, he and I could be happily polyamorous and Toby could be in that picture, too. But I don't know if there are enough hours in the day for me to share all I would want to share with the both of them.

Anyway. I want Toby. I'm with Toby. I'm really, really happy about that.

I've probably mentioned the recurring dreams I have about McKenzie -- not the exact same dream every night, but the situation is the same. We're together, kind of, but he's pulling away, or running away, or straight up deserting me. And it's devastating. It doesn't take a phsychologist to work out what these dreams mean. They suck and I hate them.

Then last night, I had a different one. McKenzie wasn't the protagonist -- Toby was. And he wasn't intentionally pulling away from me -- we just got separated in a crowd and the dream was about stressfully trying to reunite. Whenever I'm dreaming of a problem that could be easily fixed with cell phones (texting, calling, even dialing 911), in the dream, my fingers just don't work with the phone at all. I can never push the right buttons and it's just wasted effort. So that's what was going on in this dream. I was separated from Toby, and wanted to find him again, but couldn't because my hands wouldn't work.

It wasn't a good dream, but I feel good about the fact that it was about Toby this time. I still very much experience the feelings that haunt my McKenzie dreams, but maybe just maybe this is a twisted sign of some healing? Maybe?

I had a dream that I was hosting a house concert at a vacation rental house, and Pearl Jam came to play. When I met Eddie Vedder, the handshake was kind of awkward so he asked for a redo and then just picked me up and made out with me as a means of saying hello. And then LeBron James came and sat next to me in the audience for the show.

Revelers ended up getting out of hand and setting the house on fire, and I was in all kinds of trouble with the owners, but LeBron was gonna have his people call their people and handle the situation. It's good to have friends in high places.

I haven't been getting enough sleep this week, and the sleep I got last night was anything but restful. You see, I had the most unsettling dream I can remember having in my life. It was all kinds of uncomfortable, but also really funny, so I'll share.

I was staying at a resort with my whole family, and I was responsible for getting the girls to sleep at night. For a combination of reasons, the three of them bounced off the walls well into the next morning, and it was sun-up by the time I actually got to sleep. But it didn't last long, because nature's call woke me up. I groggily got out of bed and went to the nearest bathroom. I sat down and began the business of loaf-pinching when I realized I wasn't in a bathroom. I was in a den, and I was sitting not on a toilet but on a step stool. However, I was already past the point of no return. I decided the best course of action was to finish what I'd started and clean up after. But when it came time to clean up, I had nothing to use, since I wasn't actually in a bathroom. This is where the dream -- remember, this is a dream, not an account of something that actually happened -- took a turn toward even more uncomfortable territory.

I had to dispose of this...situation. I couldn't find a trash can anywhere. I was wearing pajama pants but no top, but I was panicking because people in the house were starting to wake up and I was about to get busted holding a pile of my own turds. So I ran outside looking for a place to dispose of my unsavory loot. I kept seeing things that looked like trash cans, but I would walk closer and they'd just be statues or some other non-trash can thing. The resort units basically took up all the space, so there were no bushes or woods where I could discretely get rid of my problem...so I just kept walking, topless, holding a paper bag of my own poo (I don't know where I got the bag, but at least I wasn't just carrying a pile of shit barehanded), through a resort village, looking for a trash can. People were coming outside and seeing me, and I tried to play it off as normal, but no one was buying it. The resort seemed to be populated exclusively by frat boys who were all very interested in why I was topless. I scurried through the area as quickly as I could, and eventually made my way to the pool area. Again, I had a mirage of a trash can, so I hustled down onto the deserted pool deck to make my deposit and then run back to my room and pretend like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Only, it wasn't a trash can. Foiled again! Frustrated and at the end of my rope, I just tossed the shit into the sparkling pool and split, running like hell, holding my bare chest, and hoping no one would run forensic tests on the pool poo and trace it back to me and send me to prison for life. I was sure that every person who saw me knew exactly what I'd been up to. What other explanation is there for a topless woman running around a resort in PJ bottoms at dawn? God, it was so obvious, it was written all over my face...how could anyone NOT figure it out?

I was mortified, but did my best to hold my head high and act natural while I made my way back behind the closed doors of my own room.

/scene.

So. That was the most uncomfortable I've been in a long time. There are a lot of unanswered questions in this dream, obviously -- how can a grown human person get 3/4 of the way through a deuce before she realizes she's not actually on a toilet? Why was there no way of disposing said deuce in the toilet after the fact? Mysteries of the universe. Suffice it to say, I've rarely been more relieved to have my alarm snap me out of dreamland, even though I got at best 5 hours of sleep last night and could really use another 5 or more before I feel like a person again...but all I have to do is get through this day, then I have a massage after work and can happily crash when I get home in the early evening. Just a handful of hours from now...

WT, Rachel, Frankie, and Bess are at my parents' house for the week. I'll see them all on Sunday when I return from Falcon Ridge, but I'm jealous that they're there now and I'm not. Bess was playing with Mom's phone and accidentally called me this morning. We "talked" for a bit. She actually does talk, and I can kind of understand some of it. She said "bye Meg!" when we were done. I'm not sure she really knows who Meg is, but she's definitely to the point where she's old enough to start remembering people outside her nuclear family -- I think Lucy was about a year and a half old when she started connecting names and faces to the extended family. Frankie was somewhere around that point, too. But I haven't actually been with Bess since December, so for now she probably just knows she was talking to Meg because my mom said so. She accidentally dials me all the time from WT's phone, too, though. Maybe she can read and operate a smart phone and all she wants is to talk to her aunt.

I had a dream last night that I was hanging out with all three girls, and we were just snuggled up together in bed, and I was bawling uncontrollably because I love them so much. They would say or do sweet things and I would just weep more and more. I am a sentimental crier, so it's not too far-fetched that this could happen, but it was a little extreme. But that's how I feel about these girls. I love them so much I cry happy tears in my sleep just because I'm so thrilled to be their aunt. I love this job.

I had a very vivid dream last night that Marma was the daytime caretaker for my nieces.  I would come home from work each day and she'd be playing with them, and then I would take over so she could rest.  My brother and Rachel weren't *out* of the picture, they just weren't really in this dream.  It made sense in my sleep.

Of course, Marma died in 1998, and my first niece was born in 2004, so she never has met them.  But the pictures in my dream of them all playing together are pseudo-memories worth cherishing.  Marma loved her grandchildren and great-grandchildren so much, and I know she would take great pride in these three girls.  I don't know what I believe regarding souls and afterlife, but I do believe that in a very real and more-than-symbolic way that Marma is a part of me and our family still.  I want to believe I'll have real interactions with her again one day.  I want to believe that she will know the grandchildren that came after she passed.  It was a very sweet dream.

I had a dream last night that I was participating in a unicycle basketball contest -- just shooting baskets while unicycling.  The best line from the dream was definitely:  "Considering the ball and the unicycle and the basket were all invisible, I'd say I did pretty well."