Last night's dream:
I'm living in a large warehouse with a co-worker and my boss from Flossy McGrews, a vintage clothing shop in Denver, Colorado (where I worked when I was 17 years old as a sign painter and window displayer). All the corners of the warehouse have a wig station where you can sit down and try on wigs. A small gathering is taking place. Old friends and new friends arrive. I am wearing a dress that I had as a little girl and holding my husband's hand, who doesn't feel at all like my husband's hand, rather the hand of a stranger. He leads me across a vast floor covered in sludge. I carefully tip toe across to keep from falling. He lets go of my hand and walks back towards the party.
I enter another room. Death ceremonies are taking place from all over the world. Bodies are everywhere, but the most noticeable to me are the bodies preserved in flowers, and dried shrunken heads with the hair still attached. The bodies cover the floor and walls. The smell of incense and musk fills my nose. There are no bad smells and I'm surprised by this. People in the room chant prayer and rock back and forth. Others roll around on the floor with the shrunken heads. I watch everything with wonder and for the first time in the dream feel peaceful. I sit down on the floor and begin to roll around in prayer with shrunken heads. It feels like dancing. I watch my thoughts dissolve into the incense smoke.
NOTE - Now that I am awake and I look for images of "shrunken heads" on the Google images, I again realize how drastically different my emotions are in my sleeping and waking life. I have a difficult time looking at the picture to the right. I think about how horribly these two people may have been tortured and whether or not they were children. But in my dream, the shrunken heads were beautiful. They were not the victims of torture, rather a way to preserve the dead.
Curious brains we have. Endlessly curious.
