Dream Journal: Do not go screaming into that good night

Background: The dream curator heard Susan Stamberg discuss "'Renoir in the 20th Century': A Master's Last Works" on NPR Monday morning. She said:

Renoir had crippling rheumatoid arthritis — at the LACMA exhibit, there's a flickering black and white film that shows Renoir painting in 1915, despite his afflictions. His hands look like stumps of old trees — you can barely see his fingers because they are so curled in on themselves. Fabric is tied across Renoir's palms, to protect his skin.


In the newsreel footage, he clamps a paintbrush between the thumb and fist of his right hand. Renoir leans into the canvas as he paints. He talks while he works. He's lively, and his eyes are piercing.

The dream:

I am visiting a village in the Himalayas.  At dusk, a boy who makes baskets to sell in his family's market stall is standing precariously on top of a pile of boxes, working on a basket.  He is up there because it allows him a few more minutes of good light for his work.

As I walk through the crowd with friends, a see a large man wearing a distinctive green vest quickly subdue an acquaintance and take him away.  I have seen this happen before.  These people do not return.  We have all seen it before, and the friend that I am with continues talking about the injustice that temporary workers at our company receive no benefits and we hire too many of them.

Comment: The dream curator is in his fifties, old enough that an increasing number of friends and acquaintances are suffering from illnesses ranging from the inconvenient to the terminal.  Although we wish it wasn't so, these seem to strike at random.  My parents and mentors are uniformly compromised in their abilities.  I am inspired by Susan Stamberg's description of Renoir, and by my dream image of a Himalayan boy calmly doing what it takes to work a little longer.  With apologies to Dylan Thomas (Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night), I will not go screaming into that good night, but surely work amid the dying light. 

Dream journal: My visit to the Institute

I am visiting a research institute. During the day, I meet with people there and talk one on one. They are supposed to be brilliant productive scientists, but a lot of time is spent in the dining hall, sitting around rearranging napkins in idle chat. There is a bald Israeli among them. I go to my room to change for dinner. My nice pants are full of acid holes, completely worthless. I will have to wear my jeans. Some students come into my room. They quarrel and a woman student pulls a gun on her friend. He laughs and holds the gun. She is not laughing. "You can't do that. This is a gun. You have to take it seriously." Then, she turns on me. "Nobody can figure out why you are here. [A researcher who studies goats] said that you showed no interest in what she had to say but just went off on random tangents."

Dream journal: The pit mine

Sitting in my living room in my underwear, I notice that someone has badly damaged my car with a backhoe.  I get dressed.  I cannot go out the front door (more on that later) and must go through people's back yards. Amazingly, they are home and let me through.  In fact, they are all having parties (to which I was not invited).  I see old friends, but I am in a rush to investigate my car, so I can't chat.  When I arrive, the backhoe is gone, as is my car.   The front lawn has been dug up.  We gather around and speculate as to the motive.  Were they after something?  What?  I start to remember that the former owner had been some sort of gangster.  Buried treasure.  They just took the entire yard away to sort out later.  As we look and speculate the hole gets deeper, impossibly deep, like a pit mine.  Archaeological artifacts, including a pre-Colombian sea turtle, preserved and decorated, have been left, jumbled together with things that had been in my basement (the washing machine, old electronics, stuff that's really down there).

About this blog (The Dream Curator's Dreams)

On this blog I present my own dreams.  On the companion blog, "Dreams Curated," I present well-written descriptions of interesting dreams that have been posted online.  Because I have limited time, these entries will not necessarily be well-written.