Allan's Taboo Topics

Here is a dream that someone else shared, followed by my interpretation.

The scene is a house, relatively modern, quite large.  I am house sitting.  I’ve been working hard and go to the bedroom only to see that a fine layer of grey clay has been tracked on the floor.  I come back later and realize with great dismay that now there are hills of silt and its blown in through cracks between the window frames.  There’s a storm that’s been serious enough to blow dirt into the house.

I go check on the living room and its got a couple of children playing with toys.  This room is vast and just a mess — legos, the building block toy — are scattered everywhere.

The first task is clean up.  And we’ve got to seal the cracks so silt can’t blow in.

In the next sequence Allan and I are standing in line at an outdoor Mexican food stand.  Its outside and we are with a small crowd peering over the wooden slats that separate the little courtyard from the kitchen.  The cooks aren’t paying attention and nobody can get them to take their food order.  We realize that we have to put in our orders together.  One man comes up and gets ready to order.  We tell him he can put his order in with ours.  Then we all realize that we had worried so much about the cooks not taking our order that we had forgotten to decide what we wanted.

The only common theme I see in all of this is disorder and chaos. There is disorder from natural causes with the silt drifting into the house, disorder from technology with the Lego blocks, and social disorder with the people who can’t manage to place an order for their meal.

Or maybe (in keeping with my firefly tale) the silt is where it’s supposed to be and the house is out of place.

You are house sitting for someone else and are concerned with what a mess has arisen on your watch. Is this saying something about stewardship?

The Mexican food stand segment is clearly about giving all one’s attention to the process and forgetting about the goal.

Myself, the cats woke me up suddenly and I didn’t remember any dreams even immediately after waking.

1. I was climbing on boulders that had split off from layers of rock. I thought of the forces which had lifted up the mountains and felt grateful for the teachers who had led me to understand such things.

“It will have to be on a Thursday.”

“Well, it can’t be tomorrow, because there’s not enough time to prepare.”

“Then it will have to be next week, because that’s the last Thursday in April, and after that everyone will be busy with finals and graduation.”

2. I got a receipt from Central District Conference for our church’s latest contribution. There were several penciled cursive notes from the conference secretary on the form. She noted that it was more than our previous contribution and wondered if we had a new member.

She had written the names and addresses of our only members that she knew about, which I recognized as the last two people to join. One of them was a veterinarian and she asked if he should be listed with the title of Dr. The notes ended with a request for me to complete the membership roster.

3. When I got home there was a lot of mail to go through. The telephone company had sent a thin phone book in a white cover dated 10/05 with just the Ames listings, and a thicker one in a similar cover dated 12/05 with the usual contents.

I opened the thick book to see where area code 563 was.

Notes after the fact

During the daytime I was climbing over rocks just like that. (This was along the Yuba River in the Sierra Nevada mountains.)

I got a missed call from area code 563 on my cell phone during the trip, and at the time of the dream I hadn’t found where the list of area codes was hidden in the phone book in the motel. (Later I found it in the yellow pages under Area Codes rather than in the front matter.) (Someone at church suggested it might be meaningful to look at number 563 in the hymnal.)

Those are the only private meanings I can assign to these images. I’ll be interested to hear what they suggest to the rest of you.

(One of our members is a dentist who had to retire due to disabilities and has been somewhat at a loss as to what he is to do with his life now. The question in the dream about whether someone is still entitled to be addressed as Doctor seems to me to be a very obvious reference to this, but nobody else caught it.)

[Dreamed in 2005 and originally published in 2006.]