Dreams

I think that trying to live without guilt would be an admirable moral project to undertake—admirable and, for me, impossible. Almost everything makes me feel guilty: dairy and egg consumption, not talking to my grandmother, talking to my grandmother, shopping, sports, swimming pools, paper cups, wilted spinach, brown bananas, booze. I have a quotation (whose source I don't know) written in a notebook that relates to and undermines my life-without-guilt ethical ideal:  "I do not respect hocus pocus morality that tells you to close your eyes and ask your 'conscience' what is right and wrong. This moral system—which most people follow—is merely an unconscious attempt to justify your own moral prejudices as moral facts, and it has lead to every kind of immorality and bigotry ever encountered." Hocus pocus? Well well well.

This morning everything seemed to be still-soggy from last night's heavy rain…everything except a certain span of sidewalk on campus that I pass over during my walk to class, which had dried underneath two pitiful, struggling worms before they could make it to the earth on either side. These worms make me so sad. I once had a biology teacher who said you could cut a worm in half and it'd survive, because every worm has five hearts, although I assume worms that have been cut in half have fewer. Suggesting that it's alright to cut a worm in half because it'll survive the sectioning seems a bit like saying it's okay to punch people because the bruises don't last forever. Worms really have it rough. There's no way to express how rough they have it. You could say, "Victims of the prison industrial complex are the worms of society," but what are worms? Worms are worms. Worms are impaled as fishing bait while they're still alive, evidently because their writhing attracts the fish, who are of course also alive when they're hooked.

Watching parched worms dying on the sidewalk is especially sad to me. It just seems like if things have to die—and they do—at least they can die where they belong. It's sad that fished fish have to die out of water. It's sad for a worm, whose home is soggy, muddy earth, to die on dry cement. So I picked the two worms up with a leaf and moved them to the wet mud, but then, a few paces later, I saw another struggling worm. This time, though, four or five students were standing nearby, and, because I was too afraid of looking cooky, I didn't relocate the worm to soil. How awful is that!

Very awful.

And maybe the hocus pocus quote is right, because as I continued to rue my moral failure a few hours after it happened, I remembered a dream I had last night:  as we were taking a family walk, Graham suddenly turned into a caterpillar, and I had to carry him on my finger at the same time that I had to carry Jeffery, who, in my dream, had an injured leg. I was all the time worried I was going to crush caterpillar-Graham, which I eventually did, under a plate with watermelon on it. (I went to bed very hungry last night, and I always go to bed thinking/worried about Graham.)

My mom remembers dreaming when she was pregnant with my sister that she left my sister in the frozen foods section of a grocery store, next to turkeys. Except when they were of bunnies and kitten and tiramisu, I remember my pregnancy dreams being terrifying.

I never enjoyed looking at Graham's three-dimensional ultrasound images. (I very much enjoyed the ultrasounds images that look how a TV channel you didn't actually have used to look before the invention of cable boxes, which make every non-channel a boring, motionless black.) Graham's facial features were discernable in the three-dimensional sonograms, which should've been cool, but the images present in a brownish-orange color, and in them he's covered in gunk—blood, I guess, but it looks like someone had tossed him into a mud puddle. Maybe I wasn't ready at that point for him to be real as those images made it feel. I had a strong impulse to wipe the mud-looking gunk from his face, but of course I couldn't, which made me feel like a faraway mother to the baby growing right there inside of me.

The night after we saw those freaky images I dreamed that I miscarried. In the dream the midwives informed that they'd have to remove the fetus' remains from my uterus, which was an easy procedure:  they simply reached in between my legs and pulled out a small piece of terra cotta, which I held in my hand and wept over. I woke up weeping.

The next morning I ate, showered, and then started to pack a lunch to take to work. I made peanut butter and graham cracker sandwiches, and the graham crackers kept crumbling under the weight of my the peanut butter-heavy knife, which frustrated me so much that I began to sob. At first I thought, Hormones. That's why you're crying. Get over it! But then I realized something alarming and obvious:  that graham crackers had the name Graham in them, and they also somewhat resemble terra cotta. It felt like my nightmare was coming back. During my cry-fest in the kitchen Jeffery had been standing by the door to the back yard, waiting for me to open it so that he could go out, and when I finally paid enough attention to notice his waiting and open the door for him, I found this sitting on the stoop.

I guess I believe in lots of different hocus pocuses, or hocus poci (and I love the movie). And I think our emotions have moral content. Or maybe I just have so many emotions that it's inevitable that some of them sometimes end up being right. Whatever "right" means. But of course maybe I saw this small terra cotta pot the day before I had my nightmare. Or maybe Jeffery is out to get me.