Escapades

There's a lot going on this week, but in my dreams, I've missed much of it.

Sunday night I dreamed I slept for 15 hours straight, waking up at 3:23 on Monday afternoon in the back bedroom of my grandmother's old house in Detroit. I felt wonderfully calm and rested in that soft bed, until I remembered I had missed a critical Monday morning rehearsal. I opened my eyes for real and it was still dark and that rehearsal lay four or five hours in the future.

I slept some more and had another anxious dream. I was at the rehearsal, but our modest, K-4 musical, organized on simple stairs and platforms, had become a nightmarish showpiece for theatrical technology--lights, smoke, and amplified random sound. Everybody in the vast audience loved it. It was like a rock concert. How did this happen? I hadn't been asked or informed or involved.

In bed the next night, I was two hours late for a dinner party, which wouldn't have been that bad--except for the half dozen people who were waiting for me to drive them to the party.

The person in my dreams is slipping. In real life I've managed to show up, but not without a nod to that impulse to sleep, or flee.

Once, long ago, in labor with my third child, I threatened to get in my little yellow car and drive away. The midwives and my husband thought I was being witty, pretty remarkable for a pregnant woman laboring to give birth to a nine-and-a-half pound baby boy. But I was not being witty. I absolutely meant it, considered it, believed or at least hoped I could grab my keys and just leave the scene.

The yellow car is long gone. I drive something bigger and blue and more responsible, but I still think about escape. What if I didn't park? What if I just kept going?