Dream - I meet my grandmother in a hardware store
On January 30, 2009, I had a dream in which I met my grandmother in a hardware store. She had died long ago, and I was very happy to see her, and managed to get a hairpin from her as a keepsake.
In the dream, I was at a shopping center, looking at toilets and toilet repair parts, including hinge pieces. My mother was there, too. She wandered off looking at other things, though we sometimes met up again. It was mainly two big stores with a doorway between them. Both had hardware, but the one on the right was an actual home improvement/hardware store.
After looking for a while in the store on the left, near the doorway to the other store, I went through the doorway and looked some there. There was a high counter near the doorway, back in the store a ways. One or two people were behind it and a bunch of people were in front. There were also a bunch of things on display around the area by and on the counter and on the shelves that formed a somewhat narrow aisle leading to it. I looked at things for a while. A lot of stuff was in boxes, but some little things hung from wire racks.
Suddenly I saw my mother's mother, my grandmother, who died in late 1984. She was in the crowd around the doorway, leaving, trying to work her way through it to the other side. I called out to her and quickly tried to make my way toward her. She turned and looked back at me, head lowered slightly, with a very sad and slightly guilty look on her face. I followed her through to the other side, talking to her, saying how glad I was to see her again after so long, thinking not of the time since her death but the time since I had a significant interaction with her in dreams. She didn't respond, but kept trying to turn away from me. We were in the other store now, having crossed over, and were in a little aisle near the doorway.
She was carrying something like a long hairpin. It had a big square plastic head perhaps half an inch across, a very light purple in color with molded designs like flower petals in it, with two long wires maybe three or four inches long sticking out of one end. The wires looked fairly strong, what was visible of them, and I guess it could have been a very long safety pin. I don't know if I ever actually saw the other end of it, because it was usually being held in someone's hand. However, she wore long hairpins in life, though with more subdued ends on them, so it's more likely to be a hairpin, and I'm not sure what use she would have for a safety pin that large.
I got around to the front of her, facing out now toward the central lane of the store, the one that leads to the doorway. I reached for the hairpin. She gave it up somewhat reluctantly, holding on initially and looking up some at me, but after a second or two she let go. I wanted to keep it to have a remembrance of her. I hugged her. She felt solid, but didn't respond, and continued to look sad. After a while I realized that a slight coldness was radiating from her. I could feel it across my front, seeping into me, though it didn't reach very deep. Eventually I released her and she turned and walked away, still sad, and seemed then to rapidly melt away, in sections, not like a candle melts but more like water evaporating from a hot surface, some parts going faster than others, but all of it quickly gone, and she was quickly gone, in just a second or two.
I took the hairpin home to show my mother, who was now somehow at home, and somehow it did not take long to get there, as if it was just a few rooms away. She was in the living room with my younger sister. They both looked much younger than they are now, and were sitting on the couch, which was along a different wall than it is now, but where a couch used to be decades ago.
I was also carrying a small thing that I had picked up somewhere, maybe four by five or five by six inches, which was a detailed representation of a scene from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis, with tiny plastic figures on a raised scenic background, with clear plastic forming a rectangular dome over it. The display had a place in the bottom, where the bottom would be when the scene was hanging on a rack, where the top of a cane could be screwed on, at which time it would act as the cane handle for a cane that was just straight without a curved top.
I was saying that I thought it was something my great-uncle used (my mother's father's brother), but my sister immediately spoke up and said it was something they got for my grandfather, meaning my father's father. I frowned, still feeling it was something we had gotten for my great-uncle, but since she seemed so sure I realized I would probably have to accept her version.
I peered at it closely, trying to find a date on it, hoping that the date would help settle which person it was for. I thought that it was a tie-in to a movie that was made, not the more recent ones but something that was done earlier. I looked it over for quite a while, and thought sometimes that I could see a 98 on it. That was a few years later than I had pictured, in fact it was long after either one had died. Even the earlier dates I had pictured were far too late; my great-uncle died in 1960, and my grandfather on my father's side died around 1982-83, though I didn't think of any of it at the time.
In the dream, I was at a shopping center, looking at toilets and toilet repair parts, including hinge pieces. My mother was there, too. She wandered off looking at other things, though we sometimes met up again. It was mainly two big stores with a doorway between them. Both had hardware, but the one on the right was an actual home improvement/hardware store.
After looking for a while in the store on the left, near the doorway to the other store, I went through the doorway and looked some there. There was a high counter near the doorway, back in the store a ways. One or two people were behind it and a bunch of people were in front. There were also a bunch of things on display around the area by and on the counter and on the shelves that formed a somewhat narrow aisle leading to it. I looked at things for a while. A lot of stuff was in boxes, but some little things hung from wire racks.
Suddenly I saw my mother's mother, my grandmother, who died in late 1984. She was in the crowd around the doorway, leaving, trying to work her way through it to the other side. I called out to her and quickly tried to make my way toward her. She turned and looked back at me, head lowered slightly, with a very sad and slightly guilty look on her face. I followed her through to the other side, talking to her, saying how glad I was to see her again after so long, thinking not of the time since her death but the time since I had a significant interaction with her in dreams. She didn't respond, but kept trying to turn away from me. We were in the other store now, having crossed over, and were in a little aisle near the doorway.
She was carrying something like a long hairpin. It had a big square plastic head perhaps half an inch across, a very light purple in color with molded designs like flower petals in it, with two long wires maybe three or four inches long sticking out of one end. The wires looked fairly strong, what was visible of them, and I guess it could have been a very long safety pin. I don't know if I ever actually saw the other end of it, because it was usually being held in someone's hand. However, she wore long hairpins in life, though with more subdued ends on them, so it's more likely to be a hairpin, and I'm not sure what use she would have for a safety pin that large.
I got around to the front of her, facing out now toward the central lane of the store, the one that leads to the doorway. I reached for the hairpin. She gave it up somewhat reluctantly, holding on initially and looking up some at me, but after a second or two she let go. I wanted to keep it to have a remembrance of her. I hugged her. She felt solid, but didn't respond, and continued to look sad. After a while I realized that a slight coldness was radiating from her. I could feel it across my front, seeping into me, though it didn't reach very deep. Eventually I released her and she turned and walked away, still sad, and seemed then to rapidly melt away, in sections, not like a candle melts but more like water evaporating from a hot surface, some parts going faster than others, but all of it quickly gone, and she was quickly gone, in just a second or two.
I took the hairpin home to show my mother, who was now somehow at home, and somehow it did not take long to get there, as if it was just a few rooms away. She was in the living room with my younger sister. They both looked much younger than they are now, and were sitting on the couch, which was along a different wall than it is now, but where a couch used to be decades ago.
I was also carrying a small thing that I had picked up somewhere, maybe four by five or five by six inches, which was a detailed representation of a scene from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis, with tiny plastic figures on a raised scenic background, with clear plastic forming a rectangular dome over it. The display had a place in the bottom, where the bottom would be when the scene was hanging on a rack, where the top of a cane could be screwed on, at which time it would act as the cane handle for a cane that was just straight without a curved top.
I was saying that I thought it was something my great-uncle used (my mother's father's brother), but my sister immediately spoke up and said it was something they got for my grandfather, meaning my father's father. I frowned, still feeling it was something we had gotten for my great-uncle, but since she seemed so sure I realized I would probably have to accept her version.
I peered at it closely, trying to find a date on it, hoping that the date would help settle which person it was for. I thought that it was a tie-in to a movie that was made, not the more recent ones but something that was done earlier. I looked it over for quite a while, and thought sometimes that I could see a 98 on it. That was a few years later than I had pictured, in fact it was long after either one had died. Even the earlier dates I had pictured were far too late; my great-uncle died in 1960, and my grandfather on my father's side died around 1982-83, though I didn't think of any of it at the time.
posted by Stephen at 7/22/2009 09:11:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home