I'm in my new offices of the Writing Across the Curriculum program, with our program assistant Mindy. But the offices are in a big, dark old mansion and are shared with the management offices. (It's about to get better.)
This is our second day in these offices and Mindy and I are moving my desk around, waiting for John and his staff to arrive, when we notice an enormous and incredibly dense spider web extending from my desk up to the ceiling. All the walls are stained a dark dark brown, and the ceilings are high and vaulted, with exposed beams. The web wasn't there yesterday but looks like it's better there for centuries. It's the thickness of several webs, with a big, spotted spider right in the center, which reminds me of the eye of a hurricane.
John walks in, very jolly, and greets us, "hey hey hey" (like the character Rerun from the 70s sitcom "What's Happening"). We're about to start talking about the office set-up -- we have a whole mansion to choose from -- when I notice three little snakes, one yellow, one green, one black, hanging from the ceiling. I instantly try to deny they're there and just go on with the conversation, but after a few minutes I can't hold it in and I tell everybody else the snakes are there. John grabs a broom and bats down the web, which turns out to have some dead snakes in it, and the dangling live snakes. When they fall, they look just like rubber snakes, but I know they're real and stomp on them until they are smashed and broken into pieces on the floor.
The rest of the dream involves calling a mechanic to come tow all our cars, which are broken down out front, and figuring out how to get pest control for the mansion.
A few notes:
-My partner and I recently found a small snake in the grass when we were house hunting
-The Writing Across the Curriculum program, which I run, recently did move to new offices, which it shares not with a band but with the Center for Teaching and Learning (run not by my friend John but by Don Scott)
-Mindy, who is amazing at her job, has been helping me move furniture around
-I recently saw a very large and beautifully intricate spider web on a porch in Rhode Island, with a big spider sitting in the "eye"
-I grew up in Southern California, and when I was a kid I often saw groups of men with shovels smash and tear apart rattle snakes
-The word "serpent" came up in my French class recently
Comments (3)
This reminded me of Jung's example of the boy who had a dream about a snake. I wonder if all of these dreams do come from a collective unconscious or if we are effected by experience around us. This is sort of a nature v. nuture question, which would suggest that collective unconscious would be a part of our inherent composition.
Posted by Tina Ramos | September 28, 2006 3:29 AM
Posted on September 28, 2006 03:29
I like the setting of this dream. It is very Dickensian and/or Victorian: vaulted ceilings in a dark mansion. I like the Gothic feel of it all. It's amazing how visual our minds are, especially in dreams, and especially when most of us have never experienced the things we dream of.
Posted by Mr Thompson | September 29, 2006 9:59 PM
Posted on September 29, 2006 21:59
What an interesting dream. The way you structured it reminds me of how Freud would. First he lays the dream out, and then he presents all of the associations from the conscious world. Perhaps Hartmann's discussion of houses could correlate to the mansion seen withing your dream?
Posted by Lady Hira | October 1, 2006 3:14 AM
Posted on October 1, 2006 03:14