Travelling in Dreamscapes

The author and R, Wellington, NZ.

Recurrent dreams take me back into a childhood home, to Wellington, New Zealand, through rooms I roamed between the ages of ten to fourteen. The sleep tracker tells me how restlessly I sleep; the purple REM bars tower over deep sleep, sometimes five in number, the log of rapid pulse and breath ranging in width and frequency, charting the frenzied territory of dreamscapes.

I awake midsentence, still speaking to people. Then realize that these are people I can only communicate with in dreams.

I send R a message. She is a remote facebook friend now, to be remembered on birthdays and perhaps the New Year, although we were inseparable once. She still lives in the house next door, the house that shares a wide garden and outdoor shed with my childhood home, the dusty shed a wooden building into which we dragged a discarded old mattress so we could spend nights there. We would creep out of back doors or swing out of large bay windows, treading lightly on stairs lit by the moon.

R is surprised to hear from me. She thinks I heard her mother passed away some months ago. 

I had no idea. Her mother, just a few hours ago, had rolled out spicy lentil papads flavored with cumin seeds and asafoedita, to be dried in the sun. She instructed me on how the edges must lie round and flat on the white muslin -- like this, exactly! – and then refashioned mine with the rebellious, curling edges. She sat in the middle of Gujarati women whose fingers were chopping or kneading, others had thin wooden rolling pins –belans-- in hand. This group laughed often and called each other Behen --Sister –even though they were, like me, unrelated by blood.

These dreams have recurred over days, until they felt more real than waking up in a cold Chicago condo, the sky as bleak as the news, an inbox filled with disappearing opportunities.

The dreams take me into a specific house, and the rooms and corridors within. They do not take me to the street corner where I smoked my first cigarette with friends, gasping as the acrid taste burned my throat. The dreams do not take me through the winding hills of my paper route around Newtown, chased by a dog as I ran shrieking for shelter. They do not take me to the Gandhi center of the weekly Bharatanatyam dance lessons, past the park where boys would lie in wait, pelting stones and shouting racial slurs.

These dreams take me straight into a home where the smells of cooking waft over the heads of the loud and busy women, a place as warm as the food.

I express my condolences to R. Then, hesitantly, I tell her about my dreams. R is curious, and not at all disbelieving. She feels her mother’s presence everywhere. 

R asks about my mother, who now lives a continent away from me. 

-- Do you talk to your mother often? I remember how you would have these awful fights then not speak to each other for days.

I am blindsided. My childhood memories are erased by adult filial piety. There was an expiry date on resentment when I became a parent; I clearly saw the process of childrearing as a series of omissions and confusion, and any success as serendipity.

R’s words splinter my history. I resolve to call my mother. While I still can. 

Nothing lies deeper. 
In dank soil, wait buried seeds
of what had once bloomed.