Bread and Soup

The stuff that dreams are made of . . .

You've been having a lot of them lately, haven't you? And they're filled with grand metaphors and upheavals, like the suppression that has long ruled your life has finally given way and your subconscious is spilling all over the place with sign after sign after sign.

The one you told me of before, while we were lying in bed together... the one where you were driving in some car with your dad and you had a 3-D map of all the states, but one of the states had a hole in it and you were trying to fill it with bread, and there was a road sign with words that were too blurry to make out... that's such a good example. It even had an actual sign for you to read.

Me: Why bread?
You: I guess that bread is money and my concern about my job.
Me: Isn't bread also food... sustenance?
You: Yes, it is, isn't it.
Me: You're in a state with a hole in it and you're filling it with something you need to exist.
You: ...Bread, sustenance, affection... you.
Me: [laughing] I'm your bread!
You: You are. You're my bread.
Me: And what kind of road sign was it?
You: Sort of a divide... a fork in the road.
Me: A choice ahead of you.
You: Yes. But why would my dad be in the car?

[...some time passes...]

Me: Didn't you tell me the other day that on the day of you were married, your dad said to you in private, "If you want to back out now, it's not too late; I have a car waiting outside," before you walked down the aisle?
You: Yes, that's true.
Me: Maybe you've finally gotten in that car?
You: [laughing] You are such a clever girl.

I haven't been having many memorable dreams at the moment, maybe because my waking life has been so dreamy of late. But recently I had a deja vu of a previously recurrent dream that I'd had over the course of most of last year.

Before I had the first dream, I had been going to bed each night and saying to myself, my subconscious, my guides, whomever or whatever was paying attention to my brainwaves, "Please show me my perfect match... my 'soul-mate'... my whoever or whatever you call it so I'll know him when I'm with him." It was a bit of a mantra I had with myself every night before visiting slumberland... a bit of an experiment to see what might happen.

What happened was the recurring dream that came back every 2 months for the whole year of 2004... maybe about 5 times total. It's been since October that I'd had the dream and it had almost slipped my mind.

In this dream, a man came to me from out of darkness, just appearing before me. I already knew him, or so it felt, but I couldn't recognize him because every time I tried to focus on his face, I instead saw my own face through his eyes. I only knew he was not much taller than me, and parts of our bodies were strangely equal in many ways, but he was definitely anatomically male. It felt as if I were meeting a masculine version of myself.

Without words, our clothes came off quickly and we made love. As he exhaled, I inhaled... and as I exhaled, he inhaled. We were in perfect rhythm... a perfect circuit. As we kissed, the circuit was complete and the orgasm became electrical in quality, with me feeling both my sensations and his. I tried to see his face many times during this beautiful dream, but all I saw of him was entirely in shadow and always quickly switched to a vision of my own face looking at him.

The dream orgasms were so strong and so real that my own moaning woke me from my deep sleep... only to find myself in a velvety flush of my own making. "Underpants soup," as I call it.

Thinking of this now makes me smile and sends an electric thrill throughout my body, into my fingertips as I type here, making me *sigh* aloud to release the charge.

I'd forgotten about this dream until this past weekend, when we were locked in a similar embrace and I looked up your face as it was half-obscured in shadow by the darkness of the room, half in candle light, but I could see that you were gazing at some far-away place in your head. In our heat and shadow, I attempted to bring you back to me by whispering, "There is nothing more perfect than this moment." Your sadness seemed to lift as you kissed me, while images of that dream flooded back into my brain.

[...interruption as cell phone rings...]

I just hung up the phone. You called me at 2AM, right at the moment that I was typing about you. The sadness in your voice made my eyes well up without even knowing why. I sensed that you desperately needed to lean on me... that if you were calling me so late it was because something had happened since last we'd spoken and it was weighing so heavily on you that you couldn't sleep.

The people who read the words that I write here cannot fully understand how hard it is to go through what you are going through right now... what I went through 5 years ago... unless they've been through it themselves. In this case, I really hope everyone could be blissfully ignorant. The power struggles and pain of a failed marriage are some of the harshest lessons in life.

I can give you pro-active advice, and I can tell you about the mistakes that I made, but ultimately my only real role is to provide you with emotional sustenance while you take the wheel and steer your own vehicle. I hope you're wearing your seatbelt. Try to read all the signs carefully. And when you need me, don't be afraid to ask me for directions. I've been there before, so I can point out all the landmarks and warn you about the bumps ahead.

I started this blog because I'd been thinking about you as usual. I hope you can get some sleep, but I imagine that it will be difficult. My insomnia started during the crumbling of my marriage and it hasn't improved over time. Now I stay up 'til the wee hours of the morning to write about you for the world to see... but mainly as a record for myself of this moment... to discover the stuff that dreams are made of.