Monthly Archives: May 2002

Dream: On a dark stage wandering

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It was one of those dreams that seemed to last all night.

Presentations were being made in a large, murky auditorium. The recruiting director was going to be giving an award that had something to do with 40(k) plans, and they suddenly grabbed me because I was the one who had suggested Jerry Orbach (for what, who knows?). I went to the stage with her, but it was hard to get onto because it was high and there were no steps. I sat on it and pulled myself over onto it very ungracefully.

It was more like a maze than a stage, with walls and equipment everywhere, and it was very dark. The audience couldn’t possibly see us, and I was lost because I didn’t know what to do. Finally, without ever addressing the audience in the darkness that I could tell, we turned around to leave.

I was in front, and it was nearly impossible to find a way out. There were some steps finally that led down into what looked like a cellar, only it seemed to be in the woods. I lost the director somehow, and then two dogs began chasing me to bite me. I tried pinning them both down so they at least couldn’t reach me with their teeth. The collar came off one, which gave him more leeway to bite me.

And so I awoke.

“The End of Her Journey”

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She had a strange power of realising things from another’s point of view; it was only from her own that she was narrow; but when mentally she looked from Teddy’s she saw clearly, judged herself from it and understood, and did not wonder much. Only there was this great bitterness — it was all done in ignorance, a result of the strange fetters that seemed to bind her body and soul. If she could only once have broken away from them, and have found the voice that was never hers save in the secret recesses of her heart, where, as if in an iron chamber from which it gave no outward sign, a restless fire burnt that made a still agony of life — if just once she had dared to put into words that which she knew well she could never have said at all, for before it reached her lips it would have become distorted, and her voice uncertain and husky. It was no use. For ever before his eyes and in his thoughts she must be the woman she seemed, without charm, passion, or excitement. His judgment was just; she knew and felt her own narrowness, the narrowness of her outward self, and had no power to help it. It was as if there dwelt in her some other soul besides the one she showed to the world and lived by — some soul that told her of the dulness of its mate, of the unattractiveness of her face and form, of the commonplaceness of her words and gestures, of the bands that bound down her heart, so that even from its depths there came only lukewarm utterances while it vainly longed to find the voice that should have been its natural one. Oh! it was terrible to have that absolute knowledge of self, with the consciousness of the uselessness and hopelessness of striving against it; to know that she had no power to be other than she seemed, to appear other than the woman she looked. A common thing enough, perhaps; for many have secret souls with which to feel, and working ones with which to make themselves felt and known.And if they are judged according to the latter, is it not fair enough in these days, in which it matters little what a man is, but only what he does?

— Lucy Clifford, “The End of Her Journey”