Sylvia's Journal

I woke up from a deep dream exactly when it was time to ‘go to work.’ This only means going downstairs to my computer and start preparing for a phone conversation with someone in South Africa. But before I could do that I had to write down the dream.

I was in a court room that could also have been a theatre room or an old fashioned physics classroom. I had my day in court, together with Axel and a third party who I did not really recognize. His name was Jeff and he was vaguely familiar. Sometime he was present and sometime not. The courtroom was full of people I did not know, spectators I assumed. It was hard to find a place to sit, which made the uncomfortable plastic chairs look appealing. There was a woman in mini shorts; I assumed she was the judge because she took charge. She took us out in a limo. We had to visit places. Axel was still in his plastic corset and, albeit in high spirits, looked crippled even though he walked OK. I can’t remember much about this Jeff other than that he was tall and slender, healthy looking and vaguely familiar.

We had to wait for our friend Lynn from New York who was a witness. She showed up huffing and puffing and annoyed about her bus trip from Manhattan on what was a very hot and steamy day. Lynn too wore hot pants, like the judge. Lynn and I started chatting. I told her we had just come down from upper New York State ourselves where we had been in a B&B. We were reprimanded for chatting and not paying attention as this was a serious moment. A new character had entered the room (and the dream). He, or it, wore a large alligator head and stood on a high platform, like a preacher in a gothic church. I noticed that all the woodwork was painted white. He demonstrated a trick with two frogs in a cage at the foot of the elevated platform. They that had their legs tied to electrodes. The alligator man did something on one side of the cage that involved fire and water. The otherwise dead and rubbery looking frog started to pump its leg on that side; then the trick was repeated on the other side. Now everyone crowded around the cage. I tried to figure out whether the frog was real or not. There was a number stamped across his body, like you’d see on a plastic toy, indicating some manufacturing data, but the legs did move quite vigorously.

Then we were taken to a side room where there were very lifelike mannequins, like the baby dolls advertised on Facebook, lying or sitting in various positions. One was in the middle of childbirth – I gathered it was for a trial about mismanagement of delivery. In a corner was our exhibit, three life-sized rubber dolls in various positions related to our positions in the crash. I was going to be asked a question but never heard it, because I had woken up.

My waking up felt like ascending a very long and steep staircase out of the underworld. Luckily I had remembered to program the coffeemaker which had a cup of coffee ready and so helped me download the images from my head via the keyboard into my computer. Some are lingering on but the details, or what I imagine to be the glue between the various scenes, is gone.

And now I am sitting here wondering what that was all about. Maybe the crash appeared in my subconscious because I had my hair cut last night. We always talk about life, which includes husbands, children, and what happens when things go wrong. For me the ‘going wrong’ is always about the crash and then the community that rallied around us which turned it into something good. For my hairdresser what is going wrong is the economy, she is hanging on by a thread. Luckily we are not, but the dream seems to indicate that I am conscious that one more calamity could jerk us like the poor frog’s leg.