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This morning was full of very intense dream.
The matrix around this was a very Miyazaki-like alien landscape in which various people were pursuing with attempt to destroy some sort of native land spirit which had forgotten that it was the local kami. I don't remember a lot about this part, but that was the world it was sorted out into.
I don't know what the community I was in was, though in the dream they were family. Also present were![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teinedreugan, artan_eter, and KJ. The extended family thing was broad and wide-ranging, a huge community of people, like cousins I guess. I don't know what relation they were to us; it was enough that they were related. The landscape was done in red and gold and peach and white, line outlines and bright grey shadows, with the warmth of blue and green limited to the places we lived.
He was there. I truly don't often dream of him, but I always want to write them down, the ghost of memories that is my muse. He was an adult, though still thin-faced and rangy like he was back when we were nine and I actually knew him. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt in blue and grey and thin lines of black and green over his t-shirt, which I think may be true to memory, or may be an interpolation in of other obsessions, other boys I once wanted to know.
He was there, and it was the same as it always was, my anxious awareness of him, like a prey-beast on the hunt. My notice of his presence made me self-conscious when with one or another of my husbands, knowing that of all that I am to them they are not him because he is back at the beginning of me, wondering what falsity that might introduce to my life. It is strange to have a romance with the ghost of a child now grown up, as the ghost of a child now grown up. I don't know how to say these things right.
But in this dream, I talked to him. He was there, not just as a distant watcher, a bemused commentor-upon, but as a person I could talk to, could address. We talked, on and off, in that anxious and anxiety-ridden getting to know you way that happens when someone has a crush and doesn't quite know how to deal with it. He commented, watching me with my family, that he had originally thought that non-monogamy meant that someone had a - direct quote, this stuck in my mind - "sham marriage" - but that he could see that he had been wrong. That was something that I carried with me, as I snuggled with my child and set her running off to play with the other children, the idea that my muse had thought I was broken but had decided he was wrong.
There was music there, him playing something derived from brass, other people contributing, making him a part of the fabric of that world. He played the trumpet in elementary school. That much was almost, almost a real thing.
We were talking, sitting apart from each other while the children played and the other people did various tasks in the - it wasn't precisely a village, or an encampment, or a fortification, but something like all of these, a sprawling not-entirely-rustic compound full of laughter and joyful work. And I said it, the thing that I did not want to say, in that way that happens when there is something in the mind that is strong and unspeakable that slips out by accident in a moment of loss of control of the voice.
"I love you," I said.
He looked at me kindly. He knew. He had always known.
I started to babble to him, as if his forgiveness for my speech unblocked the dam and made all things permissible. "I love you. I have always loved you...."
He remained kind, and gathered me into his arms, and I wept into that plaid shirt the tears of joy and relief that came of that.
He showed me, later, a folder of everything I had written to him. I do not know if in that dream world I wrote him things and sent them, or if by magic he had known what was his and gathered it up. It was two huge sheets of construction paper stapled together, one purple, one black, both faded towards grey with age, as if he had been collecting stories since we were children, since he gave my muse his face.
Every time I dream of him I worry anxiously if it is strange that my animus has the features of a man I no longer know, grown from a boy I desperately wanted to know before we moved away and I lost those futures forever. I wonder if it is creepy; I Google him, confirm that he is well, sometimes find more than I found last time. I think, every time, of writing to the man who grew from the boy that I dreamed of when I was young, which dreams became my antithesis and my synthesis.
I know the difference between fantasy and reality, of the imagined partner and the actual person. And still, knowing that the one in my head who comes to me in dreams is not the man designing concert halls and buildings to serve the Deaf community and buildings to house artistic models of the Periodic Table of Elements, knowing that, I still wish I could know the man.
... not least because he appears to be up to some really cool shit.
The matrix around this was a very Miyazaki-like alien landscape in which various people were pursuing with attempt to destroy some sort of native land spirit which had forgotten that it was the local kami. I don't remember a lot about this part, but that was the world it was sorted out into.
I don't know what the community I was in was, though in the dream they were family. Also present were
teinedreugan, artan_eter, and KJ. The extended family thing was broad and wide-ranging, a huge community of people, like cousins I guess. I don't know what relation they were to us; it was enough that they were related. The landscape was done in red and gold and peach and white, line outlines and bright grey shadows, with the warmth of blue and green limited to the places we lived.He was there. I truly don't often dream of him, but I always want to write them down, the ghost of memories that is my muse. He was an adult, though still thin-faced and rangy like he was back when we were nine and I actually knew him. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt in blue and grey and thin lines of black and green over his t-shirt, which I think may be true to memory, or may be an interpolation in of other obsessions, other boys I once wanted to know.
He was there, and it was the same as it always was, my anxious awareness of him, like a prey-beast on the hunt. My notice of his presence made me self-conscious when with one or another of my husbands, knowing that of all that I am to them they are not him because he is back at the beginning of me, wondering what falsity that might introduce to my life. It is strange to have a romance with the ghost of a child now grown up, as the ghost of a child now grown up. I don't know how to say these things right.
But in this dream, I talked to him. He was there, not just as a distant watcher, a bemused commentor-upon, but as a person I could talk to, could address. We talked, on and off, in that anxious and anxiety-ridden getting to know you way that happens when someone has a crush and doesn't quite know how to deal with it. He commented, watching me with my family, that he had originally thought that non-monogamy meant that someone had a - direct quote, this stuck in my mind - "sham marriage" - but that he could see that he had been wrong. That was something that I carried with me, as I snuggled with my child and set her running off to play with the other children, the idea that my muse had thought I was broken but had decided he was wrong.
There was music there, him playing something derived from brass, other people contributing, making him a part of the fabric of that world. He played the trumpet in elementary school. That much was almost, almost a real thing.
We were talking, sitting apart from each other while the children played and the other people did various tasks in the - it wasn't precisely a village, or an encampment, or a fortification, but something like all of these, a sprawling not-entirely-rustic compound full of laughter and joyful work. And I said it, the thing that I did not want to say, in that way that happens when there is something in the mind that is strong and unspeakable that slips out by accident in a moment of loss of control of the voice.
"I love you," I said.
He looked at me kindly. He knew. He had always known.
I started to babble to him, as if his forgiveness for my speech unblocked the dam and made all things permissible. "I love you. I have always loved you...."
He remained kind, and gathered me into his arms, and I wept into that plaid shirt the tears of joy and relief that came of that.
He showed me, later, a folder of everything I had written to him. I do not know if in that dream world I wrote him things and sent them, or if by magic he had known what was his and gathered it up. It was two huge sheets of construction paper stapled together, one purple, one black, both faded towards grey with age, as if he had been collecting stories since we were children, since he gave my muse his face.
Every time I dream of him I worry anxiously if it is strange that my animus has the features of a man I no longer know, grown from a boy I desperately wanted to know before we moved away and I lost those futures forever. I wonder if it is creepy; I Google him, confirm that he is well, sometimes find more than I found last time. I think, every time, of writing to the man who grew from the boy that I dreamed of when I was young, which dreams became my antithesis and my synthesis.
I know the difference between fantasy and reality, of the imagined partner and the actual person. And still, knowing that the one in my head who comes to me in dreams is not the man designing concert halls and buildings to serve the Deaf community and buildings to house artistic models of the Periodic Table of Elements, knowing that, I still wish I could know the man.
... not least because he appears to be up to some really cool shit.
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From:
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From:
no subject
To provide you with some context, though:
A is my muse; a Jungian would probably call him my animus. (I use the word "daimon" - note tags - which comes from a book exploring the animus concept in a spiritually-centred and woman-focused pagan-friendly mode.) I mean this in a fairly literal sense: the physical person from whom A derives basic traits and appearance is, fundamentally, why I tell stories.
Short version: in second grade I met a boy. He was everything second-grade-me wanted in a boy. I - not necessarily at the time, but by fourth grade or so at least - realised that what I felt about the boy was something that would someday grow into Grownup Stuff like Getting Married, and filed that as "not the current problem" and also "quite interesting". When I went to sleep at night, I would tell myself stories about the boy and how I would win his heart. As I got more aware, I got uncomfortable with these stories; I didn't know if he would react that way (call it a proto-understanding of consent). So I started telling myself stories about thinly-veiled-boy and thinly-veiled-me. And eventually that turned into genuine fiction, not directly connected to the boy at all, except that the storytelling impulse was that kind of neo-Freudian sublimated sex instinct. ;)
Anyway. I moved away from that town when I was ten. I had friends and all back there, but I drifted out of contact with them without a huge sense of loss - but I actively tried to keep in touch with the boy. Sometime in high school we tried to arrange a meet-up, since I was going to be at a competition his school was hosting and he was having band practice or something that day. It didn't wind up happening.
So he's simultaneously one of the most important people in my life, as the person who inspired huge chunks of who I am (as a storyteller and, frankly, as a hopeless romantic), and also a complete stranger, because really, who thinks that much about people who moved away when they were ten?
Every so often the daimon pops up in my dreams, and it always feels Psychologically Significant, and then I go Google real-life A (and this time I discovered that he's doing really cool shit).
From:
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Do you sense A as a presence, or a drive, or more concrete than that? I'm trying to wrap my brain around it and compare it to my own experiences of such.
Also, it's nifty that your muse has a well-established identity. It also reminds me VERY slightly of the appropriate Oglaf... :)
because really, who thinks that much about people who moved away when they were ten?
(raises hand) Yeah, so, people don't leave my heart very easily. I still miss, e.g., Steven, who moved away when I was 8, or Elias, who turned into a different person when I stopped seeing him every week around age 9, such that I didn't even recognize him ten years later when we chanced upon each other. (He recognized me, to my ashamament.)
From:
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I would say I don't typically sense him as a distinct anything, but he does appear in dreams, and the dreams are often vivid (and he kind of warps them around him like my own personal Mary Sue). But actually, what he is is a small god. Whether or not the daimon has independent existence from my psyche is completely irrelevant - he's who I talk to when I write, all the time, like a prayer, even if I'm not consciously addressing him. And he's not apart from me; he's a part of my self, even if there is this abstraction of the eternal and internal audience there. This is an interesting line of thought.
(Hee hee at the Oglaf. He was not that ferocious a fellow.)
... I guess, okay. I understand why I look for him occasionally, because he is in my heart, and so very important. I have no idea if I had any importance to him, though, so there's this strange gulf of investment that feels quite likely, y'know? Because I'm always self-conscious about the idea that probably other people don't build major psychological structures out of people they knew in elementary school....