A Revelation About An Aunt

4/19/2008 - Saturday Morning's dream

There was an early part with my uncle but it's not clear. At this part I am at the bottom of my grandma's driveway with my grandma, we are leaving the vehicle there and walking up for some reason. We were doing something together earlier but I don't remember what. I am supposed to occupy myself with something, she has said (I don't exactly remember why) and I choose to sing. But then I can't think of any song that seems appropriate to sing with my Grandma there. All the ones I can think of have something that would be embarrassing to sing in front of her. She tells me to hurry up and pick something if I'm going to sing. I think of one and start thinking "Girl from the North Country Fair". To my surprise, she joins in and we go up the hill to her house singing it together in snatches.

At Grandma's the others are already there visiting. It's sunny and summery and we are sitting outside on the back patio. My mother tells me some news about my aunt N-. Apparently my aunt is a lesbian, and now she is planning to bring her girlfriend around at the end of the summer to introduce to people, she's coming out. I am not as surprised about her being a lesbian as one might think, it's like I suspected it in the dream and it seems like other people also did or they knew about it. However I think it's totally wrong for her to be still living with my uncle at their house half the time (she has another apartment elsewhere near her job: true in the waking world as well) and be planning to introduce her lover and basically announce that she is a lesbian. Why doesn't she move out from my uncle's house? Are they going to stay married? My mother says she doesn't know, but she imagines that she is continuing to stay there because she has been so far, why change now? My mother is fairly calm about the whole thing. I wonder why, and I wonder if she had somebody in her family who was gay and this is why she's so comfortable with the whole thing. I feel sorry for my uncle and feel that my aunt is taking advantage of him (not because it turns out she's a lesbian, which again for some reason I kind of take in stride, but because she's still acting as his wife but introducing her lesbian girlfriend).

This thread continues through other parts of the dream, I think my aunt herself shows up at one point as well, and there are other parts involving other family members but with this plot running through. The rest of the details are faded.

It seems like I've been having a number of dreams over the past months that attempt to illuminate or explore my irritation with this particular aunt.

A money-making scheme, a sexual revelation, and a group of five

Sunday, November 11th - Two dreams from last night

In the first dream, I can only remember a few details. I had come up with a brilliant plan to sell hairbrushes built like human hairbrushes as dog hairbrushes, because I'd discovered that they worked a lot better on dogs than dog hairbrushes. Of course, they would cost a lot more than either, which was the marketing gimmick... brilliant, I thought! I gushed enthusiastically to several people and family members about my scheme. Everybody else pretty much thought my plan stunk, probably because it did.

The other detail I remember from this dream was that my sister revealed she was a lesbian. She expected me to have already figured this out, I think. At first, I was totally shocked, but then I remembered her telling me on many occasions about lesbians who approached her thinking she was lesbian, and I thought that maybe telling me about these had been her way of trying to let me know.

I'm 99% sure she isn't.
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second dream
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There is a group of 5 kids who hang out together, four boys and a girl, probably between 10 and 12 years old. They wander around the fall neighborhood, looking at the leaves and such, and pick up the pumpkins that are still good from people's yards, with the idea of reusing or selling them, dodging the neighbors that don't want them picking through their yards.

A costume contest is coming up at school, or they have to go in in costume the next day at any rate. One of the kids, a boy with thick black hair (who seems to be my primary character in the dream - I don't appear as myself) is very poor and not looking forward to this very much. However, he has a big crush on the girl and is trying to impress her and get her to notice him. The others get dressed the next day and head out to wait for the bus, wondering where he is. They find he has spent the night sleeping in a garbage can nearby, which is almost full with a layer of leaves on top, and him on top of that. He did this to be sure that he wouldn't be late that morning, and he heaves out of the can and joins them, with some kind of rudimentary costume on.

Death of an Orange Tree and a Mocker Reappears (to mock the Death of the Orange Tree?)

Tuesday Night, 8/21

I'm getting ready to go to a Taekwon-do demo somewhere a ways away, which requires driving. I'm actually planning to work out and participate, and am trying to get my old suit together and ready to go. I'm kind of frustrated about something having to do with getting the suit ready (or perhaps the impending demo), and then out of nowhere, B-, shows up.

He's huge when he first appears, maybe 14 feet tall. I see him from a distance standing beside a tree. He shrinks up to his normal, still tall, size as I get closer. I try to act friendly and happy to see him at first, but quickly he starts to grate on my nerves. He distracts me from getting ready to go and I lose track of what I'm doing (time is short before I have to get in the car to leave).

He somehow draws my attention to the fact that my orange tree has been cut down. He is somewhat amused about this, as he acts about all things, and I pretty much lose all pretense of pretending I was ever not annoyed by him. We are in the chicken yard looking at the cut tree. It was planted along the fence, and somehow got cut down when my father drove the tractor discing a thin link along the inside of the fence. The path of torn up ground made by the disc is only about a foot wide, although this does not seem odd at the time. I am very upset about the death of the tree, which I had nurtured for 10 to 15 years, but mostly this is directed at B-, who is being annoying about it, and not at my father who cut it by accident. I count the rings on the large tree trunk which is the size of a dinner plate. Each ring is over an inch wide.

B- also makes reference to his "wife," which might have been hypothetical, and it causes me to stop and look at him suspiciously (he's gay). He follows up with something joking like, "or maybe I should say husband." It leaves me wondering if he is no longer gay? Or what the heck is going on?

In the waking world, I have an orange tree, but it's in a pot and safe, although not spectacularly healthy. It is the same age as in the dream, but the stem is smaller around than my wrist. The level of upset if something happened to it is probably quite like in the waking world. Although when I was moving away, he said we should "get together" sometime here, B- has never followed through on this plan, for which I am grateful. In the waking world I was recently working on a TKD site for someone, but I end up inserted back into TKD in my dreams with surprising frequency, considering how long it's been since I've attended a class.