This is Home, Part 30 - Lamps, the Black Forest clock

This is part 30 of my mother's book about her life, written in 2004.



Lamps

Mom had a lot of beautiful lamps. One was pale pink, with embossed roses. It was glass, tall and graceful with a tall, slender chimney. She had one with brass, antique-looking feet and painted roses, and another that had gold trim and an old-fashioned picture on the side. That one was red. There was also a similar one that was pale blue. There were three plain glass ones with glass chimneys. One with a red base and a black Scotty. I loved that one. She brought them with her when she came out here.

The interesting one was the Aladdin lamp. It was metal. It gave out a white light. However, the inventor wasn't really thinking what he was doing. The flame had a small wire above it with a top and two sides. Stretched over the wire was gauze. It kept catching on fire and Uncle Doc kept rushing out and throwing it in the snow. We kept using it because it put out a lot more light than the other lamps. We could see to do lessons better. An ordinary lamp put out more light than a candle, but not a lot.

The Black Forest clock

Mom bought a Black Forest clock about the time I started high school. It had a door near the top in front. Instead of a talking bird, the children -- a boy and a girl -- came out if it was going to be a nice day. The old witch came out if we were going to have bad weather.

It really worked. I guess the extra dampness in the air made the witch come out. I remember looking at it before I left for high school. It was hanging on the wall in the kitchen, by the front door.

I remember stopping to look at the clock as I was leaving for school in the springtime when the air felt alive, heavy with moisture, and movable.

It felt wonderful and interesting, not just hot and dry like it does out here in Arizona, It made me feel alive.

Dream - The descent: Witches, flying reptiles and the tall tree-like man

Starting around February 12, 2008, and very bad for a week, less bad thereafter, I was very, very sick, with a bowel obstruction, kidney stones, and a bad case of the flu. I didn't get much sleep for a week, because the pain in my side was too much when I lay down. I didn't spend much time laying down, though I did catch a few minutes of sleep that way. Sometimes I caught a few minutes of sleep sitting down and sometimes even over an hour, sometimes even a few hours. Some days, though, the total sleep was measured in minutes rather than hours. I spent long periods of time standing, sometimes assuming different positions, sometimes even bent over double, trying to relieve the pain in my side somehow.

The day before this started I had worked for about five hours on my sister's yard, starting late in the afternoon, stopping long after dark when I was too cold and sick to continue. I wasn't even wearing a coat.

For a few days before this started I had been feeling bad, and had noticed that my lips were sometimes very pale.

I had a few dreams during the time I was sick, some of them with very disturbing elements. One of the most disturbing ones happened around February 20, 2008.

In the dream, I seemed to be at a house we had lived in in the early to mid 1960s, though sometimes it seemed to be my grandmother's house instead, the one she lived in a little later on after she moved to Arizona. The houses were on the same street, but not close to each other. A lot happened earlier in the dream that I don't remember.

At some point I went out back and toward the side yard to the east. It was dark. A large number of people were there, even out in the alley and other yards. I also felt they were all over the place, even down at the end of the street. I wanted to fly, and went toward the side yard. The people, who it seems had already been witches of some kind, started to become witches in appearance, and some of them turned into flying reptiles, with some of the people riding the flying reptiles.

I was someone with magic powers, like the others, and part of the group of people. I started to change into something else and flew for a while, though I'm not sure if I changed into a flying reptile or into a more traditional witch appearance and rode a reptile (or rode something else). I flew around for a while, east toward the end of the street and back.

The dream turned darker, and it seems the witches were now out to get me, and were apparently also vampires of some type. They were also changing into various monsters, often or usually some variation on the flying reptiles theme, with huge claws even on their elbows and other places. They wanted to get me with the claws, to cut and stab me.

The houses were gone now, the scene changing to uneven ground with different places at different levels, kind of an outdoor scene except it seemed to take place inside an enormous cave. At some point I seemed to have returned to my normal appearance. I kept trying to avoid the creatures, who seemed to be in almost a continual process of slow change. They seemed only marginally aware of me, occasionally turning toward me with an evil look, especially if I got too close.

There was a tall tree-like man with fingers like long branches or roots and legs turning into trunks and roots. At first he was on an area of higher ground in the cave, a place to the side where it narrowed somewhat and then went on. The winged creatures seemed not to be concerned about him and did not pay a lot of attention to him, though there were frequently a few in his area. I went toward him, but as I got closer he raised his arms and started to try to move his legs, to try to come toward me, and I backed away.

Sometime later I noticed that he had managed to move thirty or forty feet, and was now on a lower area but still a ways out from the middle of the cave. I kept feeling that he wasn't really my enemy. I went toward him again and got pretty close, but then he raised his arms with the long root-like fingers that could stretch all the way to the ground and tried to get me again.

A winged creature was passing by behind the tree man, stopping every few feet, seemingly unaware of what was happening or that we were even there. It was bent over in almost a crouch, with extremely long arms and legs and torso. It was slim but muscular, and had big shoulders. Its head was raised up and pointing forward, and was large and bald and somewhat thin, with a greatly exaggerated nose and chin. Its eyes were large and had somewhat wavy slits for pupils, pupils that were a pale yellow in color. The eyes themselves were an odd color, slightly dark and almost clear, and tilted a little with a curved under part and an almost straight top part. The mouth was pulled up in a huge grin. The skin of the creature was a kind of pale greenish-brown, and even bent over like it was it was still about the height of a man. As it paused behind the tree man, its left elbow went through his back and out his chest, splitting it open, the elbow with its huge thick gray claw sticking out the front. There seemed to be no blood, just a big split in the chest.

The tree man stared at me in pain and sorrow, and seemed to somehow be blaming me for what happened. He was not stopped by the injury, and still reached out for me, partially changing into something else, one of the clawed creatures. I pulled back and away. The original winged creature moved on, pulling its elbow out of the tree man's chest, never once looking at us.

There were other creatures everywhere but they seemed to not be paying attention to me, just milling around. Raised areas in the ground went around the middle section of the cave in a kind of square path, or paths. Sometimes the creatures followed the paths and sometimes they didn't.

I could also see a path that led up and down along the far wall, with a creature slowly coming down it. Others had gone up and down it earlier. I felt the creature had come back from someplace higher up, out of the cave or at least a different section of it. I wondered if it had gotten orders of some kind, and was on a mission. I made my way toward it, coming from the side. As with the others, though, it seemed to have no real purpose or awareness unless I got too close, and then its head turned toward me and its eyes got slightly bigger, and long clawed fingers reached out, and when I pulled back the awareness faded, I could see it fade from its eyes, and it turned back to what it had been doing, walking slowly along the path.

In retrospect, the situation in the dream seems to have turned into some kind of a representation of Hell.

Dream - Flying with a leprechaun

Sometimes in dreams, we may meet people, strange beings or even places that we seem to have known for a long time but without really knowing why. I met a leprechaun, once, in a dream that occurred probably in the first half of 2004.

To be very, very brief, in the dream I first went through a time of driving around doing various things. I think it started out sometime during the day, but progressed to evening and night, then started to get toward morning. Eventually, I turned a corner and started to go down a long street with a gentle downward slope. It was a mostly residential area.

At the end of the street, where another street crossed it leading to a more commercial section, a house had the remains of some creature buried in the front yard. It had been there for over a hundred years, but it was buried very shallowly, and parts tended to come to the surface from time to time. Sometimes it was supposed to be a smallish bigfoot, but frequently it looked more like some kind of dragon instead. I tried to cover it back up to protect it and sent someone to get an archeologist to come and see it.

Finally I had to leave, though, and I went to the other street and turned right and started walking toward the center of town. A lot of other people were doing the same thing. They seemed to be tired and waiting for something to happen. The sun came up as we stood there waiting.

I finally went to some professor's room, where I was supposed to see about a test. I think I had already taken it and he was grading them. The room was half sunken into the ground and I had to go down a few steps and open the door. I kept repeating the scene over and over. He was always sitting behind a desk in the small room, with papers in front of him. He had a beard and looked vaguely lumberjack-like, but he didn't seem to be very tall. He looked older as the scene kept repeating itself (always with variations), but he almost always looked at me, if only briefly, with a knowing smile. He usually had someone in the room with him.

I finally moved on. I felt I had to get to school (I do not attend school in real life, and have not done so for a long time). I started floating in the air, perhaps because it was easier, perhaps to impress the other people.

Some of them did seem to be impressed. In fact, I started getting chased by a mob of people. The surroundings had changed, and now contained long buildings with concrete walks along them. At least some of the buildings were more than one story high. I went along, moving from building to building and then I turned left and started moving down the long length of a building.

At that point, I met a leprechaun who was hovering in the air near the building on the other side. We seemed to know each other from long ago. He went with me and we flew down the length of the building, with the crowd after us. I was under the impression that the other people could not see him.

We reached the corner to turn left again, but there were some rough wooden steps going back and forth as they went up the building, which was several stories high, and the leprechaun wanted to go up the stairs and hide. He seemed to be getting out of breath.

I wasn't sure about this, and sure enough I soon heard footsteps of someone coming down the stairs. I also heard the leprechaun hurrying to get out of the way. He couldn't be seen, but he didn't want to be walked on. The footsteps kept coming and getting louder and louder. The leprechaun finally got back down the stairs (to the level of the top the first floor) and then left the stairs and went back to flying.

I left the leprechaun behind and continued on, turning left at the next corner. There was a parking lot there, empty except for a witch by the wall of the building, surrounded by a group of her followers.

I flew on, getting higher in the air and going over lot after lot. As I went, I sensed that I was crossing invisible barriers that had been set up for monitoring purposes. They had been activated by the government when they heard what was happening, and they were trying to track me. For some reason, they thought that because I was flying I knew something about UFOs and aliens.

Finally, they activated a barrier that was supposed to contain me. I went through it anyway, and then flew around in an arc to the right and started flying through a different area. The new area had big low buildings, like libraries or schools, with big lawns in front of them.

As I came to each lawn, the sprinklers came on, in an apparent attempt to do something to me, perhaps to have the water outline me, as if they were having trouble seeing me. I would reach out with my mind and twist the metal pipe of the sprinkler, to keep it from spraying me, but it always sprayed me before I could do anything.

As I continued flying, the grass on the lawns thinned, and patches of dirt started to show. At one point I stopped briefly and talked with a woman who came out of a building. I was under an overhang that ran along the building, and I hoped that I might be hidden from the pursuers that way. I was just about out of energy and couldn't fly anymore.

After talking with the woman, I walked on, under the overhang, and then a man came out. He had evidently heard about me, because he started chasing me. I ran from him, but he caught me. I got away and ran a short distance across the now mostly bare ground until I reached a barrier of dirt that went across it.

I threw myself onto the barrier, trying to get over it. I was just draped across it, though, staring at another dirt barrier and the dry ditch that went between them. I had the feeling that it was something for flood control. The man was still behind me, but seemed to be frozen in place.

A small amount of water started running into the ditch, seeming to come from the other barrier and down aways to the left. It was slowly eating away at the other barrier. I realized that something was buried in it: a small, old-style locomotive, a train engine of the type that might be seen in amusement parks. I felt it had been there for a long time, probably over a hundred years.

Then, suddenly, the dirt was gone and there was a sidewalk with the train beside it, shiny and new looking. An engineer with a big mustache was smiling and leaning out of it and talking to some teenage boys, of which I was one (in real life I am much older). I felt that I had somehow gone back in time, and that we were being recruited for something, that there was some role we were supposed to play.

And that's where it ends.

(Not quite as brief a story as we might have hoped, but it could have been worse.)