I dreamt I went to Chicago to meet my mother.
In life, my mother and I parted company when I was 14 and I never saw her again. She was hard partying, hard drinking, never slept with a man she didn't hate and hated every man she met, and died of a heart attack in her early sixties living in a shabby eighties-era frame house in Mountain Home, Arkansas, up in the Ozark foothills. She was dead three days before anyone found her, surrounded by cigarette butts, old newspapers and jigsaw puzzles. (Sorry to drag all that out if you already knew it, but I thought I should set the stage for the dream.)
In the dream, she was living in Chicago, in a small, old but still elegant urban apartment building. She was attractive but not beautiful or glamorous, well-spoken, a little aloof, and looked younger than I did.
She met me at the door and let me in. There was a little tension, but not as much as you might expect between a mother and son who hadn't seen each other in forty-odd years.
She showed me around the apartment. I had Haley with me, and she escaped and went barreling off down the street (second escaping pet dream this week!) Haley had never seen this many people in one place, and she was ecstatic with excitement. She would stop at random passersby and try to jump up on them, and almost yanked a hot dog out of a kid's hand. I finally got her back under control and into the apartment.
A kid came up to my mother's apartment to deliver the mail and a newspaper. He looked like Fat Albert... not the cartoon character Fat Albert, but Fat Albert might have looked like as a real person.
I told my mom about my hearing problem because sometimes I couldn't understand what she was saying.
I actually found myself warming up to her, in spite of my original trepidation at having to meet her. She seemed to be an okay person.
Finally I asked her, "Look, are you happy – no let's not go for happy – are you even comfortable with this situation?"
"Frankly, no," she replied.
I was about to tell her that I had a life of my own in Oklahoma and didn't really need to live with her or have some kind of reconciliation with her, even though my initial reluctance to meet her had gone. I was about to tell her that. But suddenly the scene sort of changed.
I was outside the apartment on the street again, and I levitated, flew or floated (or something) up to where I could see over the building's roof. It had become night, In the distance I could see the skyline – neither Chicago's nor Oklahoma City's nor any other recognized. I turned my head to the right, and there was the same skyline again. I was surprised and confused by seeing it twice, and it subtly shifted some, but not a lot. I looked in another direction and saw the dark structures of an industrial district silhouetted against the sky.
I tried to climb up on the roof, but hadn't gotten enough altitude for that. The roof was at about neck level and I couldn't get a grip to pull myself up. So I let myself float gently back to the ground. I was a little afraid to do that as well – I worried that once I quit consciously floating, I had just fall like a rock back to the ground. But I didn't.
There were some other elements in the dream, but I can't remember the sequence.
There was some furniture that was very restrained and tasteful, nothing like what anyone in my family would have ever owned.
My mother mentioned there was a famous veterinarian on her block who had treated an equally famous chimpanzee or orangutan who was alcoholic and was known in newspaper accounts as 'the drinking chimp.' There was alos a dog psychologist or something similar on the block who was quite well-known. Based on this information, I was able to tell my mother that she lived on the same block and perhaps even in the same apartment as my friend Stacy, who had once mentioned having the alcoholic chimp veterinarian for a neighbor.
(In real life, my friend Stacy has lived in many large cities, including Washington, DC at the moment. But never Chicago, as far as I know.)
And then I woke up and experienced a little cognitive jolt because the dream had seemed so real that I had forgotten or didn't know I was dreaming.
Earlier in the evening, I had two other dreams. In one, there were four glamorous women, all strangers, surrounding me and trying to seduce me.
In the other dream, the first of the three, I was playing Frisbee with Graham Nash from the Hollies/CSNY. We were in a grocery store or someplace like that. He was so far back among the shelves I couldn't actually see him – I'd see only the Frisbee (TM or ® or whatever) come flying out from the aisles. He had a technique where he could the Frisbee to float down almost to the floor then suddenly ascend again. I had trouble catching it.
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