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The Perks of Being an Artist

Tag Archives: dreams

Come Rain or Come Shine or Come Insecurity

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by emilypageart in death, dementia, humor, music, sip and paint studio, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

anxiety, audrey ii, avocado, dad, death, dementia, depression, dreams, nightmares, PTSD

I’m sad, guys. I don’t know why I’m sad now. I just know that I’m grieving my dad HARD right now. I know grief comes in waves. I think partly that this is because I’m in a period of real transition now that I’ve closed the paint and sip studio and things have stalled with the next adventure. Insecurity in my life isn’t helping. I think it’s also because it’s the time of year that I tend to get a depression flare. It happens just about every year around this time: my depression kicks it up a notch and my brain starts telling me I’m a giant loser and a miserable person who makes terrible, cowardly choices, and the future is very, very bleak. Again, insecurity in my life isn’t helping.

I’ve been having nightmares about my dad again. I say “nightmares,” but they’re not really scary – just really, really sad. I’ve woken up crying several times. And my dreams always share one feature: he always has dementia. He’ll be in different stages, but he’s never just him. In a dream a couple days ago, I was dancing to “Come Rain or Come Shine” with him, and for a split second, he was dancing and interacting with me like he was normal and healthy, and I thought, “This is a dream, but it’s a fantastic dream. I’ve got to keep this going.” I very rarely am aware that I’m  dreaming, but I knew it this time and I was desperate for it to continue. And then, in an instant, he changed and I kept grabbing his arms and trying to force him and my dream to come back. I woke up so bloody angry that I couldn’t even remember him as my fully functioning father in a dream. Why can’t I think of him that way? Why is it always him in some stage of dementia?

Two nights ago, I had a flashback. I was feeling really tired and a little nauseated and lay down, and suddenly I was convinced that I was crumpled up, crying, in the hallway outside of the room where my dad was dying. I could hear the oxygen machine going and smell the nursing home stink. I could feel the carpet underneath me and the wallpaper at my back. PTSD, anyone? Ugh. I just want to forget those final three, pain-filled days.

So yeah, it’s been a hard couple weeks. And Wednesday is my 40th birthday. How can I celebrate it without including my dad? How can he not be here for it? He’s supposed to be here for it. I miss him so damn much all the damn time.

But there’s nothing I can do about it. And since I’m in a depressive cycle, I need to focus on the good things. I’ll share one with you.  This is the pit I discovered when I cut open an avocado for lunch today:

avocado pit

How cool is that? It looks like a tree. Or Audrey II (there was that total eclipse of the sun a little while back…). Or brains. There is an excellent possibility that I chased the cats around the house with it chanting, “braaaaaaaains.” I may have also tried to chase S around the house with it and he may have taken it from me and thrown it out when I wouldn’t stop. It may also have attracted fruit flies and I may also being currently trying to get them drunk/kill them on cheap white wine and dish soap. Hey, it’s not the worst way to go.

Life goes on, come rain or come shine.

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Creeping Towards Normalcy

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by emilypageart in death, dementia, family, gratitude, mental health, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Danube, dementia, dreams, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, mother, nightmares, relationships, travel, Viking River Cruise

Here’s how I know that my heart’s blisters are starting to heal a little bit. Last night, I had a dream that my dad wasn’t in. My husband, my mom and I were in a woodworking studio (no idea why) and we were trying to figure out where to eat dinner. We all knew that my dad was dead, and we were just doing the normal thing of figuring out where the three of us wanted to go. That’s it. So simple, but it’s the first night in a long time that my dad hasn’t been present in the dream with some stage of dementia. He was in our thoughts, but just as a reality of someone who used to be with us but no longer was. It felt so normal, and I woke up comforted.

My mom and I are preparing for a trip together. Over the last year of Dad’s life, we agreed that neither of us should go out of the country because more emergencies were arising with him. My parents had always said they’d travel when they both retired, but Dad got dementia before that could happen. But Mom still wants to see the world. She has done a couple of those Viking River Cruises, and really enjoyed them, but the women who had gone with her no longer feel capable of traveling. A deal popped up that was basically a 2-for-1 deal, so she asked if I’d like to go with her (on her dime, no less). It’s the slowest time of year at the studio, we don’t need to be nearby for Dad anymore, so there was really nothing to stop me from going. So on Saturday, we’re off to cruise the Danube. I’ll likely be the youngest person on the boat, so I plan on pretending I’m a wealthy retiree. I’m considering getting a top hat and a monocle.

While seeing cities I’ve never been to excites me, what I’m most looking forward to is making new, happy memories with my mom. I’m looking forward to spending time with her away from the city where every building, restaurant, tree, or person, reminds me of my dad. We’ll get to be together, exploring, seeking out joy in this mad world of ours. We’ll be moving past just supporting each other as co-caregivers, to celebrating our friendship.

I think this trip is part of what caused that dream. It’s starting to feel more normal that my dad is no longer here physically. It still hurts like hell. The blisters on my heart are still there, and they refill periodically and at the strangest of moments, but I feel like maybe there are fewer of them. I feel like we are creeping toward normalcy.

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Mondays With Muddy

20 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by emilypageart in culture, MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, dreams, journaling, Landscape with Figures, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Dreamed I went shopping and bought a ‘wine-rose’ dress. It was a shade somewhere between the rich ruby of a stained glass window and a rose wine. In accordance with the acceptable illogic of dreams, it seemed perfectly plausible that although the linen-like material was opaque, the color itself was somehow transparent.

While I was waiting for the salesgirl to wrap it up, I began to wonder what had possessed me to buy that dress because apparently I’d had some other color in mind. I looked at the racks of dresses and saw that most of them were that shade. It was obviously the fashionable color.

I began to feel a little resentful that my choice of what I should wear had been determined by the arbitrary decision of the dress designers. Why should they, and interior decorators too, decree what colors should be in vogue at any given season? And why should the public accept their decrees? The more I thought about it, the more unreasonable it seemed. By what law, I asked myself in the dream, should wine-rose be imposed upon the world at this time? The answer flashed into my mind: ‘The world today needs wine-rose.’

Then I woke up and wished I had someone to tell the dream to, because it amused me. I used to keep quiet about what I dreamed because when my generation was growing up, we were given to interpreting dreams according to Freud, not only our own but one another’s – particularly one another’s – accompanied usually by a smirk that conveyed: ‘If you only knew what you’ve revealed about yourself.’

I no longer take the experts, let alone the amateurs, so seriously. I’ve lived long enough to see how theories held as profound and incontrovertible truth – in arts, science, religion, child-rearing and just about every field of thought – change. In the past few years I’ve noticed that even some of Freud’s theories are being rejected or modified by his professional followers. In any case I no longer have any hesitation about revealing my dreams although I do not doubt for a moment that they have meaning, and often one that may easily be interpreted as ‘Freudian,’ meaning usually, sexually.

For instance, over the years I have had a recurring dream that I am trying to identify a bird which I have only glimpsed. I pursue the bird trying to get a clear view. It always just eludes me. I catch a flick of color but am not sure whether it was on a wing or tail; the head emerges clearly from the top of a shrub but by the time I get my binoculars focused, it flies off to a farther tree; I follow after but just as I come within the good viewing range, it drops down out of sight in the tall grass.

Now it is conceivable that this dream shows that I am an unconscious voyeur – or is there a word ‘voyeuse’ for the female? However, when I try to attach that appellation to a sweet, old-fashioned neighbor we once had here, who was still eagerly bird-watching at ninety-four, the theory strikes me as delightfully droll.

Not that I question the sexual symbolism of many dreams. I wonder, though, that the more thought is given to the overtly sexual dream as – at least in some instances – a symbol for something else, much as many of the mystics used the language of passionate love to symbolize their union with God.

Be that as it may, I have gradually developed my own dream vocabulary, limited to be sure, but rooted in actual experience. I have discovered that my bird dream occurs only at times when I am trying to catch hold of and clarify an idea hovering at the back of my mind. In other words, to me a bird represents an idea. (The correlation shows up in language: we speak of a ‘flight of ideas’ or ‘winged thoughts.’) I have also discovered that in my dreams kitten, for instance, usually stand for feelings of affection and tenderness; big cats like lions and tigers represent savagery, wrath or violent emotion of some kind; butterflies, playful or carefree moods.

I think, however, one should tread cautiously in the field of symbols. There is too much tendency to look at something only as a symbol and lose sight of its inherent reality. IT was become a cliche, for instance, to say that a landscape, the ‘good earth,’ is a mother symbol. I’ve no doubt it is. What irritates me mildly is the implication that it is nothing else, and that the desire to live in the country is therefore a ‘regression,’ an unconscious longing for the infantile state of being cosseted by the warm, loving, nourishing, protective mother. If this be so, it then follows that all mature persons prefer to live in a city, having successfully broken their childish ties to ‘Mother.’

One can easily carry this symbolism to the point of travesty. For example, any drilling or ploughing up of the earth is presumably motivated by an unconscious tendency toward incestuous rape.

To get back to last night’s dream. I don’t know where I got the word ‘wine-rose’ or what the word or the color connotes. But as I’ve said before, since I’ve been here I’ve discovered the fun of letting my mind shake loose and play with absurd notions. Therefore, I’ve decided that perhaps the dream meant just what it said: ‘The world today needs wine-rose’ – not only as a symbol (the phrase ‘color of joy’ went through my head as I wrote that) but wine-rose per se. It may be that it, and every other color, has some cryptic significance, like birdsong, in the cosmic scheme of things, which our limited human minds can’t comprehend. It may be that designers and decorators are unknowing channels for these colors to flow through, and when the public goes along with them, we may be conforming not just to fashion but to a natural (or supernatural) law.”

 

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Emily Page

Emily Page

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