Post Trip, post dream.

What a summer its been! First I took a 3 week road trip with my sister Joni and two friends from Scotland, then I came home to idyllic July weather (hot and humid) and swimming every day with the kids, in the process bleaching out my hair and tanning my skin. It feels like its been a "real" summer for the first time in a long time. No pesky thing called a job to get in my way, thanks Branagan.

When you were young, did you ever get a whirlpool going in a round pool? We did all the time. My mom was usually the instigator. She would get everyone going with her "waterobics" voice pumping her open palmed hands into the air. As a kid I could get away with letting the current sweep me along; my little legs barely touched the bottom of the pool. But as an older member of the whirlpool, I was expected to keep the current going until we all collapsed and enjoyed the ride. I've been riding the current lately, taking time to watch my toes bob in front of me, noticing the conversations shooting over my head and watching out for the ladder as I come around again. Its been a time to rejuvenate, to look at the cyclical patterns so inherent in my life, and to see where the "current" has driven me into the proverbial ladder. I always thought of the ladder as something to be avoided, maybe it was a not-so-subtle hint to get out of the pool. Oh that metaphor could go so many ways. One thing you will learn aobut me is that I LOVE metaphor. I've heard it referred to as the language the heart understands. I could sit all day and play out a metaphor to all its possible conclusions. That is, I think why I love Joni Mitchell so much...QUEEN of the extended metaphor(I'll write a blog about her one day soon) ...but I digress.


My mind has turned recently to contemplating dreams. Being home again, I am remembering recurring dreams I have had over the past few years, as most of them are set in Oswego. There is one house that reminded me today of a dream I had several times in the past. It was a cyclical house with lots of entrances and exits and I remember either trying to get out or to keep someone out and feeling like neither was going to happen. Then crossing the river today, a dream I had recently came flooding back to me.

In the dream, I am swimming in the river, which I sense is none too clean, but I am with a tour of people I may have known from high school and the tour guide is, wait for it, Bob Newhart. He starts giving us a run down on the history of the canal system that runs through town. I keep looking around and seeing all these people with 80's hair and "nice" clothes (for 1985) bobbing through the refuse strewn water with me. The river holds no menace, as it has in past dreams, I am just feeling slightly icky and knowing I am going to regret this dip in the cess pool that is the backwater under the bridge. Kind of like when you've eaten at McDonalds; you know it was the wrong thing to do and it is going to wreak havoc with your system, but it's too late to do anything about it now. I keep thinking to myself, why am I here? What am I doing?

I've been in the Oswego river in dreams before, but under much more dangerous circumstances. I am usually trying to cross it, either in the emergency bucket with a swirling maelstrom below me, or I am voluntarily jumping from the serene lock canal into the wild side of the river knowing that the jump means certain death and not being able to stop myself. River dreams have never been good ones. The latest is sort of an anomoly in this particular recurring dream. Anybody got any guesses as to meaning?