Welcome to Dream Interpretation for Dummies, where Dear Abby meets Native Americana. Come to the campfire, peer into the yawning grave, and take a dive into the collective subconscious… or maybe just explore some weird clown imagery. We’ll wait for you here.
Howdy Note: This dream has been very lightly edited. Everything you are about to read has already happened, is happening, will happen…
Another Howdy Note: SPECIAL GUEST DREAM! Find Jade’s novel here.
Dear Howdy,
I'm in Rome right now, and woke up this morning from a strange little dream. Strange for me, because most of my dreams are very prosaic and quickly forgotten - but not this one! Before I went to bed last night I was thinking about a statue that I wanted to see, of a woman carved in white marble, lying on her side, draped in a shroud. This is supposedly how the sculptor Stefano Maderno saw Saint Cecilia when her grave was opened briefly in 1599, almost two millennia after her death in 200 BC. Uncorrupted, virginal, in death as she was in life.
So, the dream: First, I was on a sidewalk in Los Angeles, saying goodbye to my parents. It was a temporary goodbye, a see you next week. I live in LA but this wasn't happening in front of my house - it was actually in a long-ago ex-boyfriend's neighborhood. After I left my parents, I walked over to my car and felt the setting shift and heard a dad from an '80s movie ask me, annoyed, why I'd agreed to do this. Do what? Then two women got in the backseat of my car, and I remembered that I'd agreed to give them a ride to church (not something I've ever done in my entire heathen life). I waved off my movie dad and started removing the three potted plants on the driver's side floor of my car - they were brown and bare, pruned, with maybe a few leaves on them, a fruit tree of some sort, I think.
At that moment, an alarm that I don't remember setting went off very early in the real world (6:30 am!) and I woke up, shut it off, and got back into bed and retold this dream to myself so that I would remember it for you.
What I thought was moments later, there was a knock on my bedroom door and a friend telling me that it was actually 10:30am.
In a daze I got up, got dressed, and went to the Basilica Santa Cecilia, an ornate, frescoed church where a semi-circle of Benedictine nuns in habit were sitting around the ghostly statue, singing a sweet, eerie liturgy.
Is it all related? I don't know! It feels like it should be?
xox,
Jade
Dear Jade,
Thank you for the gift of your dream. When I was in my last year of middle school, I was allowed to walk across the street to the public library instead of waiting in extended care for the thirty minutes it took my mother to finish up teaching and come to get me. Something few people, at least in my adult life, know about me is that I was raised strictly Southern Baptist and didn’t meet a Catholic person until I was in college. Despite this, I fell into the arms of The Oxford Dictionary of the Saints, which I read cover to cover at least twice. I was entranced by the level of mysticism inside, and because I was so compelled, I knew I could never tell anyone. So I didn’t. Not until now.
Confessions (ha!) aside, into your dream we go: Before you enter Dreamland, your thoughts are consumed by a rendering of Saint Cecilia, whose patronage includes poets and the Archdiocese of Omaha, among others (more on that later). You, in the dream, and perhaps in others ways, are firmly rooted in the past. You say goodbye to your parents and then realize this neighborhood is far from your present. The dad in the car, even, is from the eighties. The plants are past life, past their prime, and you must remove them. The women, whom you don’t know, and don’t recognize, are asking you to perform a favor that feels anathema to you, yet you still agree.
Time is important here. Maybe it is in all things, but especially here. The past, joltingly, makes way for the present, and you are awash in it . You think you know where you are, but you don’t. You are in a place with a large, impossible history. You are participating in history, one parallel to the one around you, and it is your own.
Saint Cecilia’s other set of patronages is music. Great musicians and hymns, specifically, which you witnessed. This analysis may seem far-reaching, but I believe you are being sent a sign. This sign is coming from a place you don’t understand, a place that you’d never usually come to in all your heathen life (which, same). This sign is meant to say that you must make your own life important to yourself, and you must not let other people steer it for you. Not even if they seem saintly. Not even then.
I hope this helped. I’m sending you a dream of another kind of singing, one you recognize from a golden moment, maybe in the background. But here, in this dream, it is everywhere, consuming. Let me know if you get it.
See you on the other side,
Howdy
P.S From a Dreamer! “Thank you! This is so, so spot on and thank you so much for taking the time to interpret. Thanks so much for the juicy insight. :) God I hate Jamie High School Girl....” — Fran Tirado
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