My Two Dreams

It's only fair, now that I've told you my mother's dreams, that I tell you mine. Out of all my roommates, I still think my best dream auditor was Kevin, the actor and art history major, who sat there drinking my coffee and eating my eggs, ready to dissect every impulse, every sign. But there are, for me just like my mother, only two dreams that I remember vividly.

Dream 1
Mr. Heinitz, one of my English teachers in high school, has assigned that each of us should build a model of our ideal home, the house of our dreams. The day comes to display our crafts, and my classmates have cleverly made theirs out of wood, foam, popsicle sticks, clay, etc., painted them vivid colors, and laid them out on their desks. But I reply that mine is outside. We go out behind the school where a broad, flat green field (really, the field behind my elementary school) awaits.

The sky is bright with the sun momentarily hidden by passing clouds. In the middle of the green field is a large white tent, about ten feet square and eight feet high, of soft, clean thick cotton fabric, rippling lightly in the breeze. We approach the door flaps; hung over them is a postcard sized framed print of a Cézanne green apple. We open the flap and step inside. The grass inside has been covered completely in deep, fine, white sand, as soft as talc. Mounded and strewn across the sand are piles of perfect green apples, round and smooth and unbruised. The tent glows with diffuse warm light. People wander through the sand, picking up the apples, feeling them, smelling them. The air is full of the scent of warm apples. I bend down and run my hands through the sand, between the apples, brushing them with my fingertips. No one speaks. You only hear the breeze flapping the fabric, and the soft shush of sand.

Dream 2
It's my art appreciation final exam. I enter what seems to be a huge warehouse, and the examiner hands me a clipboard, deep with pages, and tells me I have two hours to write a brief appreciation of each work in the room. The warehouse is piled from ceiling to floor with wildly differing works of art, and the place is packed with mute, furiously scribbling students, all bent over their papers, looking from canvas to page and back again.

While there must have been a hundred pieces in the dream, I remember only three. The first was a series of black velvet illuminated paintings, a medium used most frequently for Elvis or Dogs Playing Poker, only these are religious scenes — the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi — in bright, almost fluorescent paints, and in the forefront of each painting are portraits, in the classical style, of the patrons who paid for the paintings, only these are thickset middle-class Midwest Americans, one of whom looks remarkably like Tammy Faye Baker.

The second is a painting in autumnal ochres of a golden poppy field on a dark day, all the poppies rendered in photorealistic fidelity, except for smack in the middle, like something glued on from another universe, is a gigantic Impressionist poppy in all its thick impasto.

The third work is the strangest. In the dream, I approached it in disbelief. It is an entire tenement from the Lower East Side, including cheap Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, six stories of tenants, their furniture, themselves, clotheslines, fire escapes, the whole thing. Art students are crawling in and out of windows, staring into dusty corners, opening cabinets, peering into the restaurant's woks, writing. We have to treat the whole building as if it were a work of art, and its every detail chosen by the artist to provide some meaning. I climb over the surface first, then duck in. I feel I am on the verge of understanding it, but I never get there. I admit, I still wonder: did I get a passing grade?