Thwarted! (Dream)

The Forest at Night IV
by me, Mary Stebbins Taitt

“Ya cain’t get they-ah from Hee-ah!”

I am going to a personal retreat at a rented cottage that seems to be (in my mental map) south of Syracuse (Tully, Pompeii?) in the hills.  I am driving my normal little silver Cruze headed down there, happy and excited.  I start feeling a little confused, like I’m not total sure of the directions, but I think I can find my way there.  I come to a construction site and the road is totally torn up, the pavement is gone.  I consider continuing on the road past the ‘closed” signs until I see ahead huge earth moving equipment.  Then I become a little nervous about continuing and decide to turn around.  It appears from the tracks that other people have done the same thing and I follow the well-worn tracks of a U-turn that takes me onto a different road that seems to be heading the way I want to go.  But a little while later, the road diverges west.  I keep turning on other roads trying to head back south, but every road takes me in the wrong direction. The next thing I know, I am walking south, determined to get where I am going.  I run into other people also trying to get to cottages in the same area and we talk about the cooks that will be preparing our meals.  The cooks are fat.  The other people are younger than I am and walk faster.  The trail we are following takes up over what appears to be a mountain pass.  It gets progressively more difficult and dangerous.  The people ahead of me enter a mass of huge, pointy rocks and boulders.  I follow, but a few minutes later, they return.  “You can’t get through?” I ask.  “No,” they say.  I consider going to look for myself, but they are younger and fitter than I am, and if they can’t get through, I probably can’t either.

I wake up distressed.  Dream, Thursday, April 24, 2014

How does this make you feel?  What does it remind you of?

“I consider going to look for myself, but they are younger and fitter than I am, and if they can’t get through, I probably can’t either.”  I need to remember that that statement is not necessarily true—think of climbing Seward, Donaldson and Emmons, when I was only one out of 26 people, all younger than me, who made it to the top.  (Speaking of which, a “secret” inner goal of mine is to be able to climb again, but I feel very discouraged about that happening [which is why it is secret].)

I am feeling confused about where it is that I want to be going.  I want to be healthy (physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and spiritually), I want to deepen my relationship with Keith and with Frankie and my kids and I want to publish my books.  I want to be lean.  But there is also the feeling of something deeper.  In the dream, I seem to be going to a personal writing retreat (not an organized one, but one I set up for myself, like the one at 7^th Lake.)  But since this dream theme is constantly recurring, I need to explore it a little. I would like to do some special work on it, including writing and journeying, as well as talking to Brian and friends).

I feel as if I need to pick ONE project that is the most likely to succeed and try to keep it on or very near the front burner until it is finished.  But meanwhile also look at the trajectory of my life and deep goals and see where I might be failing or headed wrong, or how I can remove the roadblocks.  I also feel that for me, it is OK to work on more than one project at a time, because they act as mind cleansers and feel each other and give me a break when I feel mentally exhausted from.  But not more than 2 or 3 on the front burners.  (A regular stove has four burners, so maybe that’s a good symbolic analogy-2 on the front burner, two on the back burners, the rest in the fridge and freezer.)

In the dream, I feel sad and thwarted.  In my phenomenal life, my health, my writing and other aspects of my life (tidiness, cleaning) seem to meet with one obstacle after another.  Some are internally generated and some are from outside myself, or seem to be.

The Forest at Night III
By me, Mary Stebbins Taitt
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