Dreams of CTY

[kiya]

(Long long time ago, I can still remember....)

It's not really "dreams of CTY" so much as dreams set in the mythology CTY has of itself, I think. Certainly it wasn't at F&M or at Hopkins, though the buildings were brick; perhaps it was set in some of the more complicated and collegey portions of The City, which would make sense for it to be.

(How the music used to make me smile....)

The plot of the dream, such as it was, had the usual complicated mishmash of dream logic: spending time with musicians who were, in the context of the place, complicated and emotionally resonant (and I had a line about the frustration of singing along with sopranos being particularly draining when those sopranos are male, as I would; possibly some of this is frustration that my health has been so awful this winter that my voice is wrecked, consistently, which bothers me more than what's been happening to my ears). Not sure what I was taking, aside from "it can't have been a humanities course because clearly the study halls weren't totally miserable".

(And I knew if I had my chance ....)

CTY was perhaps my first experience of having an immersive culture that I belonged to. It wasn't something I fit into easily to start out with, because I was so bad at human, but there were customs, there were traditions, there were things that carried on year to year, they were arbitrary, they were meaningless and filled with significance, and they were something that could be mine. And I still carry that bit on, the way there are things that just mean things and perhaps it was a shallow first experience of what it is to belong to an initiatory line, in its way.

(Maybe they'd be happy for a while....}

The emotional resonance of the dream was entirely orbiting around being a no-more. Of having one last change to be in this transitory space which was the first place I belonged, my first sense of having A People. Of knowing that it was something that I was going to age out of, now, and would never have again, not in the same way. (Why don't they say young? It's so hard to grow old without a cause.)

(I can't remember if I cried ....)

I spoke, in the dream, of doing two sessions this last year (which I did, but the year in the dream was after the last year I went, I was older, though perhaps not as old as I am now, it's hard to tell in dreams), trying to hold on a little longer to that space before I lost it, trying to stay where I fit, where there were customs and traditions that made sense to me, where there was something that mattered to me in an ineffable way that I could not begin to explain to anyone else.

(But something touched me deep inside ....)

I don't even know who I was talking to. Just people. Trying to hold onto the ephemeral thing, born and dying in my hands, that was my place in the world. (So many songs we forgot to play.) Walking through the spaces between brick buildings, in the dappled shadows of the trees, past little shops and hangouts, into tangents in the dream about some complicated process of building dream houses in a virtual world because dreams are never linear, except that there is something there about building a home and...

(The day the music died.)

55 years ago Monday.

I will be turning 36. Still hoping for the best but expecting the worst.

I don't know how to say these things. How to articulate.

(No time left to start again.)

Comments

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

This spoke to me. Thank you for sharing it.

[brooksmoses]

(So many dreams swinging out of the blue?)

[kiya]

Platonically correct response is Platonically correct.

[regyt.livejournal.com]

That song still gets to me, always.