Monday, April 16, 2007

A Bloggy Dream

Last night I dreamed that I was at my parents’ cottage in the height of summer, and I was blogging. I blogged at night when the light in the cottage glowed yellow on the small lake, and during the day when the sun glinted off the water’s ripples in a way that made me keep looking away, retinas burning.

Someone on the lake was reading my blog, and managed to track me down based on watching lights in cottages at night and matching them to the time I posted my thoughts. She was a midwife or a doula or something, intent on helping people, and kind. Her daughter, who was almost grown up, was sick, not sick with a cold but with something if not life threatening than significantly life changing. I think it was life threatening though, and her name was Hope. I don’t remember the name of the mother, the woman reading my blog, but she was strong too, and swam across the lake to me one afternoon. I stood high up in the sun, looking down at her as she swam.

I was a bit taken aback at how interested she was in me when she reached my side. She asked me lots of questions, and invited me to a belly dance show she had tickets for.

When we met at the show entrance, she asked me how my day/weekend/whatever had been. She asked me how I was feeling and about my more recent posts. I talked and talked in response.

Then she mentioned her daughter, Hope, and I felt bad that I hadn’t thought to ask her and said so. She said she’d noticed or something like that. I tried to make a joke about how self-absorbed and self-centred I was but she didn’t laugh. She just said, “I KNOW!”

Then she walked out, angry, too angry to spend another instant in my presence. And I found myself without a ticket, without a valid reason for being where I was, and alone in a crowd, more self-absorbed than ever.

9 comments:

Mimi said...

Ooooh. Weird. What an awful twist at the end.

In other news, my middle name is Hope, as is Miss Baby's (and that poor poor Danielynn Hope Marshall Stern, blighted daughter of Anna Nicole Smith).

But what does it mean?

S said...

Yuck.

What a bad note on which to wake up!

11111111 said...

Ooo, sounds like guilt/stress/anxiety--or whatever.

Choose to do it or choose not to do it, but don't feel guilty for having "me" time.

(I'm no analyst.)

Mad said...

This sounds like a certain fear I have at the prospect of meeting other adored bloggers. What if all this blogging has made me nothing but an egomaniac who can do nothing but talk non-stop about myself in full paragraphs? What if I have forgotten the codes of real human conversation and interaction? Seriously. This is my waking nightmare. What if I have forgotten how to be a conversational human being? Where's the hope in that.

Why look? As proof of my theory I have used this comment to talk about ME rather than about you. Sorry.

NotSoSage said...

Oh. My.

Well, having met you I can say that I did not find you self-absorbed in the least. I don't know if that helps...

These bloggy dreams really seem to highlight interesting themes in terms of our self-consciousness around blogging and what these interactions mean, I think.

Thank goodness the Rheos concert has come and gone or you may have reconsidered...I'm glad I got a chance to meet the real Cinnamon Gurl!

Bea said...

I don't think I've ever had a bloggy dream. I'm starting to worry that maybe I'm not a real blogger.

crazymumma said...

I love my dream life. And sometimes it sends me for a loop.

That one of yours sounds particularily vivid and obviously touched a chord in you. Standing High in the sun looking down at her....quite majestic imagery.

Anonymous said...

So why do I always have freaky dreams about the apocalypse and crazy attacks on my small town in Idaho? Don't answer that.

Here via Beck...and the moral is that you should pay less attention to your blog, no?

:)

Kyla said...

Ooooh, that is unsettling.

The other night I had a dream I was blogging and explaining how BubTar kept crying in the middle of the night. As I was describing it, I woke up to the sound of his crying at that moment. It was the weirdest feeling...like I was blogging the future in my sleep.