I must hand it to dreams–sometimes they know what they are doing. The last couple of nights I’ve had the funniest anxiety dreams, so finely crafted, so detail-oriented, so nuanced that I couldn’t (and certainly won’t now) articulate a mixed-up miasma of complicated feelings any better.

Sadly I’ve forgotten the first dream, but the second one involved most of my siblings and our mother and a dollhouse version (that actually does exist-as do my siblings and mother) of my mother’s house. The task at hand while I slept was moving this dollhouse from one sibling’s house in Richmond where it has never set foot or foundation, to god knows where. (I’ve never been very goal-oriented.) Even though I knew exactly how it could be transported and knew that the correct vehicle to do the job was my old minivan, (which in fact did drive the dollhouse from my mother’s house in Maryland to her new place in Philly–seeing the miniature house roll across Locust Street was a surreal experience) which in the dream was sitting in the old Egan driveway in Maryland right next to all sorts of bizarrely proportioned vehicles that couldn’t possibly have fit the damned dollhouse in them, this information did in no way help the situation. Nor did communicating such information in the nicest and then perhaps the not nicest way to various and sundry relatives. The many obstacles that were never overcome and the multiple wrong-sized vehicles that one sibling (guess who?!) kept showing up with nearly made the dream version of me pop an aneurysm.

How much better for me that I woke up from the dream not in a cold sweat but rather laughing at myself–and perhaps at a sibling or two. Now that’s a good dream. Sometimes I do have such affection for my brain–especially when it’s sleeping.