A dream woke me. As soon as I became conscious, I knew it was significant and must capture its details before they faded.
The dream had started off urgently – I was trying to ring Dirinda. But Kheila would not let me use her phone. She was furious because (get this!) she was jealous of my relationship with Dirinda.
This is most unlike the real Kheila. Kheila is a revolutionary and her activism is what powers her. As for Dirinda, she is naturally self-contained and only cares for her family. If anyone is jealous in our little triangle of women, it is boring bourgeois me.
Anyway in the dream, I was in the area behind Kheila’s apartment. In real life this is a barren place with rusty broken things. Only now – in dreamland – it was a well-tended yard. Sturdy walls enclosed the green space. It felt like my grandmother’s place, somewhere I felt secure.
No safety now. The overhanging dry branches were crackling with bright orange flames.
But Kheila had not noticed. She was too wrapped up in feeling hurt by my need to ring Dirinda.
This was no time for jealousy, I thought. I screamed to Kheila: “Your garden is on fire.” Then I woke up.
The dream was dramatic – the urgency to ring Dirinda, the fire only I had noticed. But what also struck me was the veracity of the feelings. Kheila’s passionate possessiveness, the way it could obscure a life-or-death situation. The dream seemed to carry a coded message. But what?
I lay in bed, going over the details, trying to commit them to memory.
I had read somewhere that every protaganist in a dream is a part of yourself. So was Kheila’s jealousy actually my own?
I could not see how any of this fitted with my real life-and-death dilemma of whether to sacrifice my (relative) safety to take in Dirinda’s son.
Someone’s jealousy was obscuring a danger.
Tags: fiction, Mystery novel
