Bill, Tom and Linda Roomies

Just up. Lively dreams last night. Problematic situations but I’m glad I had the dreams — they were full of life.

Linda, Bill and I moved to New York together and found an apartment in North Brooklyn Heights — my old apartment at 36 Hicks, though bigger and more interesting than the real thing (the apartments in my dreams are always great places). The neighborhood was as it occurs in many of my dreams, less built-up and dense, all the distances enlarged. Some examples: The block my apartment is on has small yards in front of all the buildings, with side yards between buildings instead of the buildings being joined. Where the big elementary school sits there is instead an open field. The distance to Henry Street is about three times greater than it really is. The community is not surrounded by metropolis and highway infrastructure: instead, a short walk in last night’s dream took Bill and I up a small wooded valley modeled on our “little valley” up behind the farmhouse. Bill took me up there to show me a vine swing he’d made. After he left, I found that he had rigged it so that it would break while I was swinging.

Bill in this dream was constantly mocking, antagonizing and playing mean jokes. He was a merry bully. He would get me so angry it was hard to tell which of us was the more violent, negative and hateful. I knew that all of my meanness was in response to his — self-defense, giving him his own medicine back, going into rages over his abuse — but I couldn’t convince others of it. They saw us as a pair of hateful, violent knuckle-headed hicks, with Bill coming out a little rosier in the wash because his lack of conscience made him seem cheerful and somewhat likable, whereas contending with his continuous violence and trickery and belittling made me grumpy and tiresome. 

Linda and I finally got Bill to quiet down for awhile, which allowed me to be positive, thoughtful, curious, appreciative. It affirmed for me that my real nature wasn’t one of fighting and yelling. But I think if the dream had gone on longer I would have been faced with a new conundrum: convincing people that in my sunny state I was being my true self, while Bill in his likable mode was only pretending.