cauchemardeux
Saturday 23 June 2007 | I like a cookie
In the dream, after an affectionate but disjointed last session with the DBT, I arrive at Page Street exhausted, thirsty, hot and desperately needing to pee. Neither Mandarin nor the Umbrella offers me tea or a bathroom, or asks how my visit went, and before a minute is up I’m incensed, not only fighting mad but actually fighting.
I mention melodramatically that I “just can’t handle” such and such a person.
“Oh?” Mandarin asks, not really curious. “Now that I know everything is one, I haven’t actually met anyone or any situation I can’t handle.” She waves her hands in the air, suddenly rhapsodic. “The coffee, the beans, the hot water, the steam, the milk, the sugar—it’s all one!”
I’m suddenly completely fed up with all this, and become very cold and precise. “Excuse me—I should have been clearer. To say I ‘can’t handle’ someone is in fact a metaphor. As it happens I somehow managed to ‘handle’ without undue incident the very person about whom I was trying to tell you. I ought to have said that sometimes I have strong feelings about the situation, feelings which usually subside when, as you say, I consider the unending and glorious oneness of everything.” I subside, affronted and haughty and indignant (and ashamed of myself).
Then for some reason I feel compelled to add more, but I can’t remember that part—only that it was something very cutting and vicious and nasty, something to the effect of “And maybe if you weren’t so busy being self-righteous with me you’d have understood that.” Mandarin quietly leaves the room and I, still hot and thirsty, ignore the whole conversation and start searching for a bathroom. Though I know the layout of her house perfectly well, I look and look and can’t find the loo anywhere. As I’m wandering through a warren of bedrooms and closets, the Umbrella comes to confront me.
“Why on earth did you say that to her?”
“It doesn’t matter—she’s not identified with herself anymore, I’m sure she doesn’t care what I think of her,” I reply acidly.
“Is that right,” he says, looking at me in that even, unblinking way of his. “Well, she just put her fist through the mirror in the living room, there’s blood everywhere, and I think she may lose a fingernail.”
I stare at him. To say I feel horrible does not even begin to cover it. The guilt wells until it actually wakes me up. I lie there all sweaty and thirsty, and then stagger around the Brujo’s bedroom groping for his bathroom door in the dark.
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