Saturday, February 15, 2025

 Saturday, February 15, 2025 

     I had a nightmare this morning as I lay in bed.  I woke up shortly before 3 am. I had clocked a good five hours of sleep straight through. I dozed intermittently and meditated on my new view of my dad.  My blood pressure has been running high for a month now, ever since I proposed sharing my teaching methods with my friend Steve for him to share with the school in India using 14th-century instructional methods. He is trying to guide it into the 19th century.  The 21st would be too much of a reach. This response on my part is why I never could put myself out there and promote my ideas aggressively, like advertise.

   Then I had this nightmare. I was wandering somewhere and came across a Grief Recovery workshop in session.  It wasn’t my group or my leader. The leader looked exactly like Van Johnson, a movie star from the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was active in Hollywood from 1935 to 1954 but is not well-known today.  

   The group must have been in a later stage than ours. The participants were half-undressed and clinging to each other as they expressed their grief.  There was nothing sexual about the scene.  I see it as a metaphor for emotional rather than physical nakedness.  I wasn’t part of the group.  I wanted to watch without being intrusive to help myself deal with my grief. 

  I tried to get Van Johnson’s eye to ask him if I should leave. He ignored me, turning his back on me, an act of hostility. I decided it would be better if I left. 

   When I turned to walk away, I discovered earth movers had been at work reconfiguring the beach. They had formed a four-story mountain of sand as steep as the side of a cinder cone.  There was a narrow pathway formed by others who had climbed it.  The pathway went straight up the side instead of weaving from side to side, which is the best path when dealing with a steep incline. I viewed the hike with trepidation but started up the mound.  

    I was about a third of the way up when I heard and then saw an earth mover at the top. It was about to dump a load of sand on top of me. No one at the top could hear me screaming. I tried to turn around to go back to the bottom, but the pathway was too narrow.  I actually tried to turn in my sleep but got caught in the sheets.  No wonder my blood pressure is through the roof.  

   The nightmare is a metaphor for how I felt around my parents. For my mother, everything I did was wrong and worthy of heaps of criticism.  For her, that’s how she showed her love for me. She believed any praise was dangerous.  As for my dad, he presented me with formidable challenges, like saving the world/humanity from its capacity to do malicious harm to at least another human, if not animals as well. I offered ideas.  He told me someone else had thought of that, like Christ or Buddha, and sighed in disappointment.  He also taught me to be a deep thinker then couldn’t address my need for a deep understanding of addition with regrouping.  ‘Go hang your clothes on a hickory stick, but don’t go near the water.’ The classic double bind.  I understood that was the situation both my parents created for me. I understood my mother’s darker motivations for many years.  I understood the negative impact of my father’s disappointment. The new realization was that there may have been some malice involved, not for me as his daughter but for me as a female. For him, I was born to be a creative thinker because I was a female.  He trained to be one by from a very tender age, and then he resented me for it, and. Again, felt diminished by a female.  I knew from a young age he feared I would surpass him.  He told me so outright. I was twelve when he spoke about the student eclipsing the teacher.  He sounded sad at the prospect.  

   I cut back the myrtle crepes as Margo had suggested after I sent her the photo of the leaves shriveling.  I suspect they weren’t doing well because of the last time I cut them back. I may have cut back too far and shocked them. I dumped Osmocote fertilizer granules on one of the plants. I only had a bit for the other. I committed to watering both plants daily. Hopefully, they revive. I need to get a lot more Osmocote. She told me it’s a failsafe fertilizer. Margo said she only had a problem with it when she dumped the granules into standing water. They released too quickly and burnt the plants.