11.27.2006

House fire

To my knowledge, I've only had one recurring dream, and I've only had it twice.

However, both times, it was identical. At least ostensibly.

My memory of the dream has gotten cloudier with time, but here's what I still recall of it:

My parents' house sits up on a hill on a highway out in the country. In the dream, I am driving or walking, not sure, past the house, as if coming home from school. It's daylight. I look up at the house and sense that it's on fire, even though the outward appearance of the house seems normal. There are fire trucks and people around, trying to salvage what can be salvaged. I walk up the long, winding driveway and notice that everything but the garage is on fire (still, nothing looks like it's on fire from the outside). Inside the garage sits my father's copper-colored '73 Camaro (a graduation gift from his parents that, yes, he still has to this day). It is untouched, gleaming. Underneath it, my best friend at the time, Wendy S., is asleep underneath.

Seems like I try to wake her and get her to get out, the house is on fire, etc. She doesn't budge. For some reason I go inside the house, up the stairs from the basement, and into the kitchen, which is suddenly huge and gutted and charred from the fire. Everything inside is made of stainless steel, which didn't burn, but I can see the rafters in the ceiling are charred and broken and the roof looking ready to collapse.

I go up more stairs (it's a split-level) and head toward my bedroom — the old one I lived in before my sister moved out and I took her bedroom. My childhood bedroom's walls were painted Pepto Bismol pink (my awful, awful choice at the time; talk about internalizing social pressures — my favorite color was yellow but I chose pink because I thought little girls had pink bedrooms) and I had billowing white curtains. When I opened the door, the room was pristine, bathed in sunlight and warmth. The curtains were blowing in the wind, and there was a pile of stuffed animals (I used to have an enormous collection) on the bed, arranged neatly, all of them looking right at me as I stood there and wondered why my room hadn't burned when nearly everything else had.

That's all I remember.

4 comments:

nashgirl said...

I wonder if you will have the fire dream more now after your sister's fire. Fire seems like a terrible thing to dream about.

phallicpen said...

I used to have a recurring dream about a bomb going off in my bedroom and walking around afterward (me, not the bomb) to check out the damage. Everything was destroyed, but one of those plastic baby dolls had managed to come out with only a bleeding bullet wound.

My mother was in the dream, drying her hair while my childhood blew up. Put that one in your Halloween basket.

theogeo said...

Yeah, it was pretty bad the first time around, but to dream it again? Weird.

PP, is that true? Please tell me you've told Celia (sp?)!

phallicpen said...

Hey, you spelled it right!

I did tell her. It came up in my brain scan.