one bad dream

I'm taking a class about dreams at the Process Work Center for the next few weeks and so dreams become even more noticeable than before (although, in my opinion, dreams are always noticeable)...

I dreamed last night that CB and I were clinging to the lowest branch of a very tall, skinny tree on a cold, dark, winter day, in the wind and rain. Even though we were on the lowest branch, we were still very high and, looking down, I could see that we were on the hill in Georgia where my dad has his house. We were high up, it was cold and getting darker and I was scared and uncomfortable. CB and I were talking about firewood.

In the dream, we weren't trying to get out of the tree, we were trying to stay in the tree. At one point, I leaned too much in one direction and and we both fell out of the tree -- it had the makings of one of those classic dream moments: the scary fall from very high that feels so real and ends when you jerk awake, terrified. It started out like that, but I didn't jerk awake, I found myself bounced right back into the tree with CB, unhurt.

I felt so trapped in the tree and I realized that CB and I were back together. We didn't have any firewood at the house and she was explaining what we would have to do to get some. It was impossibly complicated. There were all these trees at the bottom of a lake -- we would pull the trees from the lake and drag them to a particular place and saw them up and split the bits into firewood. She presented this impossible plan with enthusiasm and I looked down from the tree, all around us at the dark, sodden landscape feeling dread and weariness -- everything was thick with wetness, nothing would ever burn. I thought of those logs at the bottom of the lake and wondered how on earth they would ever dry enough to catch fire. Maybe in one whole summer season, laid out in the sun, but it was winter *now*, we needed wood to burn *now* -- what would we do?

That was the dream. When I left CB last December, it is true that the firewood was low and I worried after I left that she wouldn't be able to get more. Without firewood, I knew she would use the electric heat which was so expensive and already she would be too broke to afford it because I'd left her with the whole mortgage and her work had become sporadic. I pictured her sitting in the house, wasting away, drinking every day, not working and freezing. This dream seemed to want to throw me back into that misery. Fuck, what an awful dream.