Dreaming

As I was perusing Maira Kalman's remarkable "Paris" series in the NY Times this morning (Times Select, sorry), one of her drawings* suddenly brought last night's dream out of hiding, or at least a couple fragments of it. I so rarely remember my dreams that when I do, I get kind of excited about telling others about them, even though I know most people (like my husband) at best will feign interest. Feel free to skip the rest of this post.

Fragment 1: I was searching the hallways of the Humanities building at the university from which I'm taking a leave of absence, except that it wasn't the usual building, but something more like the underground shopping network in Montreal: crowded, colorful, and foreign. I was an outsider in my own building, in other words, and my discomfort was compounded by my utter inability to find a certain colleague's office, and more decidedly by my having decided to wear what I can only call platform boots, kind of like the ones Frankenstein wears. I had to work hard to keep my balance because they were both really high and really narrow. (I never wear heels, ever. And I've never bought a pair of boots that really fit well, including the pair I just bought last week, which, for the record, are flat heeled.) People were smirking at me, but I didn't really care what they thought. I just wanted to find my colleague. (I don't think I ever did.)

Fragment 2: We (my husband, daughter and I) were staying in a hotel in the village where we now live after some kind of village function. We thought it would be a treat to spend a night in a hotel, even though we lived 5 minutes away. But it ended up being a disaster, because the children in the adjoining room kept coming into our room, throughout the night, demanding attention. There were maybe three different ways into our room from theirs, and I'd block one entrance only to have them wriggle through another one. It was awful.

I'm not a big dream analyst, but these two scenes, together, seem to say something about my ambivalent feelings about both options that face our family as we decide whether to stay here permanently or return to the West coast. Do I fear that if I return to my university job I'll feel out of place and off balance? Do I fear that if I stay here . . . I'll continue to feel just like a visitor? like I'm giving up a career to be surrounded by needy children? I honestly don't know what was going on in that second scene.

*The drawing, in case you haven't figured it out, was the one of the woman "who could barely walk in her impossible shoes."