"you're toast if you just yank the wheel like this," a childhood friend said while showing me how i was supposedly cranking the wheel of fortune without thought, without deliberation. we were at some carnival ground and by the way the townsfolk were dressed, it could only be a sunday. "but you're golden if you do this," he said while ratcheting the wheel like it was some baseball he was letting go towards the peaked end of the diamond.
i don't know what a shrink would have to tell me about this dream last night. how he would interpret the fact i never played baseball as a child. would he consider the genesis of my teen angst my betting openly in this game of chance knowing in my mind that someone in the crowd would tell my puritan mother, poring over her thick, gilt-edged bible back home, i had been backsliding, and how?
i've never understood my dreams. not ever. nor i've found it urgent to have it read back to me. but in a way, even before i could articulate it, i've always believed my dreams to be a visual statement, an argument of images that my true self (whatever this phrase means) puts forth that could never be argued with by the very vocal, the very verbal physical life i live in. it's the way, perhaps, my quitely reticent interior self ascertain its own experiences.
say, this afternoon, sometimes, the rain would stop for a while. the clouds would break and let in a little sunshine. and i'd think, wow, this is what the songs, the poems, the literature i have been reading all along are talking about. silver lining, sunshine behind the clouds, eternal hope. but i'm certain, on some cold evening later, i would dream of some circus tents being folded down and readied to be trucked away while an inebriated clown, still with his make-up on, pees in front of a mortified child, unable to argue about the ghastliness of this vision.
