4/7/1999 geh Ashbrook
A girl who has no child, or at least as not yet, dreams one night that she is playing with a child in a park. The dream is extraordinarily lifelike and she is thrilled with the role of mother. In her dream eyes there the child is all the world, and with a role and purpose for her in that world.
At some point she notices how very much the child looks like her, or at least what she remembers herself to have looked like from photographs and such. In the dream she begins to feel into her child, in a psychic kind of way. She knows what the child did that day, she can see it as in a slide show or picture reel. In the dream, the child seems to be many ages, varying between five and twelve as it runs through the grass, swings up and down on the swings, spins on that thing that turns to make you fun nauseous and try to keep from falling off. And seeing through this much time, and into each day over this time, she sees that the child has done, and said, all of the things that she has in her own life.
At first she takes this as a coincidence, and a flattering one at that. She sees it as flattering that her child should choose the same path as her. And she is so filled with joy that she begins to run and play on the grassy field with her child. The stiffness leaves her arms & back & legs & mind as she jumps & swirls, circling the child. She begins to feel younger & she begins to contact some dancing energy in her offspring, some ecstatic transformative connection. The child is beautiful, and all the more beautiful because it is her.
Then she sees that behind her, is another person dancing. The person is circling her, just as she circles her child, and she sees --almost without looking-- that that person (as much taller than her as she is over her daughter) is herself as well; just as the many people behind that person, who are circling too, are. Her mind begins to expand into all of those people, flooding back over the body boundary line, rejoining herself together. And as this happens her thoughts and feelings and intuitions amplify. The thrill amplifies. And then she remembers how each day she more and more dreads looking into the mirror when she brushes her teeth. And how stuck and trapped she feels in her dry directionless daily routines. These thoughts too are amplified. Her circular dance becomes a corset whirl pool, composed of herself, from which there is no escape, & which is choking her, & tugging on her. She wakes up alone and vomits off the side of her bed. So vertiginously dizzy she can’t even sit up long.
That day after work she goes to the park near her house which is a bit like the one in the dream; a nice park by all accounts. There, across the way, a circle of children are talking quietly near a small grove of apple trees. She walks up close to them but she can not hear what they are saying. She walks closer. She sees their skin is liquidy and reflective. When they speak their words flutter silently across as ripples in the air, vaporous wind-caught trailings knit in ways she is unable to decode, which are also reflective, like a hot highway mirage mirror. She wants to know what the children are talking about, who they are, what they did that day, what they love, what they can see, but all she can see when she peers in is the reflection of herself looking right back; in a kind of mocking loop. She can not break through, or over, or in, or out.