world of dreams

I dreamt of Kathleen last night, though it was not nearly as poetic and moving as hers about me, and about her house. It was just odd.
I dreamt that Art Spiegelman had died, and I was distraught. The only other person in the dream was Kathleen, consoling me on the carousel of Pullen Park in Raleigh. "How can I live in a world that doesn't have Art Spiegelman in it?" I asked. I woke up whispering frantically, "Spiegelman! Spiegelman!" Thank goodness I don't actually know anyone named Spiegelman, or my husband might have been suspicious. What an odd dream, made more so by the fact that he is very much alive. I suppose the dream is a testament to art and its place in our friend life together, combined with Kathleen's ability always to say and do the right thing, no matter how dire the situation. Every day, I miss Kathleen.

I find that my dreams mostly take place outdoors now, or in places that are not the one in which I live. Empty, cavernous, unsafe feeling rooms. The grocery store. My car. I no longer dream of my old house. It's not my safe space anymore - it's someone else's. I betrayed it.
This house is too small to hold dreams. No hidden spaces like the tiny space next to the steps in the old house, where fairies and leprechauns hid during the day and came up the stairs to give me happy, capricious dreams at night. No nooks like the "reading center" for the girls, where my younger daughter once got her head stuck in the slats of the barrier between it and the ceramic tile a story down, and I nearly had to use vegetable oil on her head to get it out. (Maybe that was more of a nightmare space.) No quarter of a garage stuffed behind the work bench, where I had convinced myself that my dream world's gnomes and trolls lived to come through the floor and haunt me on restless nights.
This house is too straightforward. There's a basement, but we already cleaned the ghosts out. When gnomes and trolls follow one from house to house, one has little need for ghosts. (The basement door would open spontaneously, and more than once, my husband and I heard phantom feet march up the steps. In Boulder, we found a Native American cleansing herb that was supposed to get rid of them. You were supposed to light it, like incense, and carry it around the house. It made the house smell like we'd smoked about an acre of pot. We had to send the children outside. But, we haven't heard the phantom feet since.)
I've purposely kept my room terribly messy; maybe the magic crew lives in there, in the corner behind the mannequin or in the cabinets ten feet up that I can't open, and make my brain glom onto avant-garde artists in my sleep.