Dismemberment dreams

There was a girl in a locked room of the large house. I tugged and pulled with all my might but the door wouldn't budge. I could see her face through a window panel in the door itself. Her face distorted from a combination of being forced against the glass and agony. She was being attacked by an invisible force.

I remember how urgent I acted but inside feeling quite calm from time to time - like I had run out of emotion or perhaps there was a part of me that realized this had to be dream. Somehow I ended up on the other side of the door with her. I, too, was dismembered. The lighting would disappear and flicker back on to reveal us in stages of varous dismemberment. We were both still alive and I kept wondering why it wasn't as painful as I would imagine. Legless, just a body from the waist up and I dragged myself to the window through which I had seen the other girl with such horror on her face. Outside, instead of the other room I saw a beach, warm ocean water.

The mother who isn't really my mom at all stepped into the field of vision. The other girl and I had our bloody hands spread against the window toward her. She couldn't see us or sense us but we could hear her speak. She was leaving the house, moving. At first we didn't realize but she said it had beenm 10 years since she'd heard from us, 10 years since I somehow made it into that room. I wanted to tell her to stay but she could not hear me.

Flash back to when the house was freshly moved into. A room opens up to the beachfront/ocean. Every time we walk by it though, the room changes on its own. First we walk through it to the ocean. We dash into the water, swimming, playing until the giant waves scoop us further out to be attacked by piranhas. More dismemberment dreams. After the piranhas have had their fill, we are swept back to shore. Rush through the door and it shuts behind us.

We run to tell others in the household about the ocean and that room, yanking arms practically out of their sockets. By the time we reach the room, it had frustratingly transformed into an innocent, regular room without the door outside to the beach. Just a few windows, plain square room. It's laughing at us.

There's more dream but I can't hold on to it all right now. I think right about now I have woken up too much to remember.

Butchering the tree of me

I woke the other morning with the dream tree echoing in my mind. Off center. Unnatural. Butchered. Altered. Sad. These are the words that describe the tree. Its image stays with me.

In my dreams, there is a "school age" white girl with long, slightly wavy hair - the ends feathery and brushing mid-back. I believe she is my mind's symbol for myself when I am watching from third person perspective. I have seen her in other dreams.

She was leaning against a white painted fence without the vertical pickets. A black book bag sits at her feet and she is reading in front of a one story suburban house while standing beneath the tree's canopy. A boy shows up and I shift perspective between the boy and the girl as they have a conversation. I don't know if the conversation is important. The autumn sun is setting, streaking gold and plum strokes across the sky.

Suddenly, while I am the girl, I fixate on the tree and realize that the trunk is far to my right and the canopy is simply the rounded leaves growing from a single, long branch with its tip resting on the roof of the house to my left about 25 feet away. The leaves to the right of the trunk don't overhang the trunk more than a few short feet. I look up. Someone has woven a wire lattice for a creeper plant to twine itself, giving the illusion of a fuller canopy than it really is. All other branches have been cleanly sawed off, close to their source.

This realization saddens me, saddens her. The tree's natural growth, it's organic symmetry has been brutally altered to meet the aesthetic preferences of those dwelling in the house and the city. The result is a this dramatic lopsidedness. Unbalance.

The tree is me. The sadness that wells in me stems from the part that does not like what she sees. I play my role well at work, at home. But for all the effort I have butchered parts of myself that I held sacred to cater to "their" symmetry, "their" ideals. I think it's interesting that the RIGHT side of the tree (right brain) is the side that suffers all the cuts while the LEFT side of the tree (left brain) weighs heavily on this house for support. It hangs high because of it, and serves it's purpose well, but it's still fake.


How to turn what I built on the left side into genuine achievement and how to re-teach the right side to grow again without detracting from the left?