batshua

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בתשוע

I'm at my parents' synagogue and the last cantor is there. (He doesn't work there anymore, but he's the one I knew last.) We're doing something weirdly interfaith with a local Catholic church.

I'm wearing a very bright pink pantsuit, like, a hot pink, but darker than Barbie pink, it has some purple undertones. (Not something I would ever wear to shul, and thus probably not to a church either?)

We're at the church, but we're having a … sort of religious show-and-tell, so we have brought a travel aron with us and I can't see crosses anywhere, so I assume they've been covered up It looks sort of like a combination between an amphitheater and a synagogue, but I know we're in a Catholic church.

The cantor and a priest are co-presiding. There's also a … Jewish female clergy of some sort I've never met, and I assume she's a rabbi. The chazzan is doing the scarf/stole style thing with his tallit, all formal but she's just like draped hers all over her and folded and folded so it doesn't fall down. Not in a weird way, just in a like "This is just another regular service, and I like wearing a big tallit" sort of way.

One of the two male clergy announces that they're calling me down for an honor because I'm nonbinary, but then like, uses she/her the entire time, and I'm gritting my teeth about it. But I come down from the where I am, and there's suddenly a bunch of children there, and someone is holding out a tallit and I'm like, okay actually, I don't wear a tallit gadol, can I use the … I said "atarah", but I meant "gartel" -- I look down and their Torah gartel is somehow ALL METAL, and I'm like, okay, not that, I'll use someone else's tzitzit, and they're like weirded out but also like "okay, fine".

The lady who I think is a rabbi prompts me to sing Ein Kamocha, and I am TRYING to lead my nusach but everyone overrides me (this is common IRL, the version I know and prefer is only slightly different from what I've heard in other congregations so it throws people).

So I sigh internally.

(We don't do Shema, Echad, and Gadlu…)

Now there's a tiny tiny tiny Torah on the table, like… it also doesn't look exactly like a Torah, more like sort of like half a Torah half a Megillah, there's like a pull-tab at the bottom of the text that I assume does … something, but I'm not sure what.

We're leining out of something … else? A Tikkun, maybe? 

I get the feeling this is a show-Torah, they brought something passul because they didn't want to bring a REAL Torah into a church but we're gonna lein, so we're using a kosher text from a book nonetheless, I grab the absolutely teensy eitzim and I say the brachot, and since the Torah is tiny, the bracha should sound tiny?

I pitch my voice higher up than normal, but I can't quite stay on key. The aliyah is over, and I bless again, doing slightly better this time, and I try to walk back to my seat, but… I can't find it.

Partly because I came from one side of the seating and left by another, but also dream, and also In my dream, I'm actively worried about my real-life homework, or something like it. I'm aware I have two assignments due Thursday.

Earlier in the dream, Emily and I were supposed to walk together to my car to get gas. (I am trying to remember to buy gas before I get on the road today). We've become separated, but we reconnect now.

I'm wandering the church halls and find Sunday school rooms, also somehow this church, my parents' synagogue, and another unnamed shul that I think is Reform are connected by underground tunnels.

In fact the Reform shul is almost entirely underground, only the main entrance is aboveground. Everyone here knows about my relationship with Sauvin and that he died but apparently he was well-known for spinning yarns so people here also think I'm a fugitive from justice because of … something we allegedly did?

I'm trying to get some of my homework done in the Sunday school rooms but people keep asking me weird questions about my name and my relationship, and I realize that they are trying to convert us? And I'm like, does our clergy not know that these are not our friends?

  Then I hear that there's been a bombing at the other shul, but like, the logistics are strange, people have made a human chain to blockade the entrances to keep people from getting in and whatnot, but folks are sneaking in and planting bombs. The bombs are small, so people aren't dying, but there's fire and the building is taking physical damage and I don't think our church "friends" are involved because it seems like a lot of them are now legitimately concerned about it and people are up and running everywhere trying to help. 

Chaos ensues. I'm still trying to get my homework done.

Current Mood: surprised

I've … never woken up embarrassed before and a very large part of me doesn't want to journal this dream, but it was so vivid and part of the reason I journal dreams is because I don't get a lot of them.

I dreamt my family was in New York and my grandparents were alive. Some elderly female relative was going under financial conservatorship by the state and my parents were really mad and because whoever was in charge wanted to require we buy her a fancy car.

A certain ex was inexplicably in the area and came over. (I'm not sure if in this dream we were still together or not.)

My dad walked in on our relatively innocent fooling around.

I literally had to be like "IT ISN’T WHAT YOU THINK". (It absolutely was.)

But on the upside, my father’s interruption was literally “I just want to make sure you take care of her”.

Current Mood: embarrassed

My father owned a synagogue event space with two chapels a sanctuary and a social hall.

We were hosting, among other events, a cousin's wedding.

I announced I was a lesbian and Marilyn and Ruth were thrilled. (Marilyn is my father’s first cousin and Ruth is her daughter.) I turned to my brother and I was like "Bro do you remember what happened when I came out to mom? She literally said nothing."

My dad was like you have no idea how much was spent on this wedding and I’m not telling you because you’ll get jealous and I was like "Why would I get jealous? I’m literally gonna die alone."

All I wanted to do was get down to my bedroom for some privacy because apparently the shul is also part of our house.

Wedding was on a Friday?! And I missed Kabbalat Shabbat.

John DeLancie was one of the waiters and he was trying to tell me something; so was Brent Spiner and he said I’d cut myself off at the knees.

My grandparents were alive and in attendance. My great aunt was there and I pulled a very cruel dangerous prank on her for reasons very unclear to me. I was ashamed of it even in the dream.

My grandmother and great aunt decided to marry me off to some unknown female cousin so they could be done with weddings, apparently.

But that didn’t go anywhere because as much as I wanted to be at the wedding I didn’t want to be there right then, and I kept trying to get downstairs to my bedroom.

Apparently there’s a small gym down there also?

I just wanted to be given a little peace and quiet but as usual, everyone was chasing me to be present.

At the reception, they sat me at the kids' table. Everyone else there was a literal child. The kids seemed like they were all camp friends and I felt very excluded. Not only was I a lot older and had nothing in common, but it seemed all they wanted to do was ask personal questions as a way to tease me.

My grandfather was at a nearby table with strangers and not seated with my grandmother.

Apparently I’d recently gotten an apartment and the elevator was basically an electric dumbwaiter in the kitchen sink and went through an industrial dishwasher and I was like "This seems impractical and unsafe". The building owner seemed really nonchalant about it.

My mom was getting rid of out of date Jewish books. I was reading about a movement started in the late 1970s to early 1980s by Rabbi Harold Wise of Central Wall Shul that he called Para-Orthodoxy, although other people were calling it Hypo-Orthodoxy. I was SUPER CURIOUS, but the books were published right as this was emerging, so there wasn't a lot of info. And then apparently the movement just … DIED, I guess? Sometime before I was old enough to be aware of it?

Current Mood: curious

I dreamt I was going back to Bryn Mawr (for education?) and ran into a Jewish guy about my age and we were having a conversation about where to find kosher food in the area. Apparently at dream-college there is exactly one restaurant and it's the same one from back when I was there last time.

He seemed concerned that I was romantically interested in him and went out of his way to say his engagement party dinner was that evening. Don't ask me how I got an invite to this dinner, but the food was all elaborate and themed. It turns out two of the bride's best friends are extremely close (they bought identical cards and wrote similar messages on them) and one of them was in my AmeriCorps cohort.

I remember at one point taking both his hands in mine and thanking him for taking me along for the ride on such a momentous occasion on the same day he met me because I needed more male friends, hadn't made any new ones in three years, and was going back to a women's college.

I guess dream me is not prepared to be in an all-female space again. Good to know that's not likely anytime soon?

Current Mood: confused

I dreamt that my parents were helping me get all the Judaica that belonged to me out of the house. I discovered my grandparents had TWO silver menorahs, which he'd glued brass decals to, which were union emblems although some are round and some are flame and Statue of Liberty shaped.

One of the menorahs had a regular music box, but the other one had a music box that played with words and the first time around it played Hatikvah with traditional Hebrew lyrics, but the second time it played Hatikvah with lyrics in English about the working class rising up against their oppressors.

o/~ We will rise up and fight for our rights
Fight the power and take back what is ours o/~

Current Mood: amused

I dreamt that a consignment shop was doing a traveling fundraiser. They set up shop in my parents’ downstairs bathroom. In addition to clothes, they had some animals, but mostly kinds I’d never seem before. I remember there was a bat and two or three very small maybe-camelids and a bunch of other creatures I’ve forgotten much else about. I took a green and yellow budgie with a clipped left wing that turned into a crow and then later into a crow wearing a top hat, spats, watch, and bow tie.

She was a very sweet bird with a very powerful grip, although she did end up pooping on, well, everything. Including my weighted blankets. I was very annoyed about that and asked my brother to do the research on how to get out the stains and my mother to help me get them washed properly. I also remember the bird and I went to a nearby taco joint together more than once.

My father and I were in a van. My seat belt wouldn’t click to either the regular attachment or the alternate(?!) site. We ended up at a Krusty Krab themed drive-in (a converted gas station?) with a veggie burger that looked really good but tasted like rice and liquid smoke. I remember that mustard, mayo, purple onions, and hot rice with liquid smoke is a strange combination.

I dreamt that I was dating a guy who worked at Large Hadron Collider. I didn’t really understand what he did for a living, so he took me to work, and I got to see microparticles!

I was somewhere in Eastern Europe at a supermarket and someone was having a bris? Initially I thought it was performance art, but, no, someone was randomly holding Shacharit in a supermarket. The mother of the baby had a toddler who was … breathing amniotic fluid. She was like, still enclosed in a sac?

I was at a fire department that was trying to do something fun for kids. I’m not convinced that they succeeded.

I dreamt I was at my grandparents' house and it had been renovated. I don't remember a lot of the plot but there were a bunch of kids around (younger cousins, maybe?) that my grandma was wrangling. I went down to the downstairs bathroom to discover something was wrong.

For one, it was somehow a very long hallway? For another, the new shower was actually a tunnel of very strong jets at various heights alternating from the left and right sides that started turning on at the far end of the hallway and started "chasing" me back to the door. I wasn't sure how they'd turned on and I wanted to make sure they got turned off, so I rushed out to ask my grandmother about them, and I think that's about when I woke up.

I was visiting my parents in Texas, so it was presumably Passover. We were at a Large Family Meal, as in with extended family I don't normally see. (This includes many family members who would not be at our seder IRL, and apparently a large number of my friends, many of whom are not Jewish.)

At some point in the meal, my parents served a dish involving scallops and shrimp. I am totally shocked. My mom is like, "What, you believe God really cares what you eat?!" And everyone else at the table (besides my suddenly very politely quiet friends) are like "Yeah, really?” … and I feel so baffled and alienated and hurt and why are they mocking me and why is kashrut suddenly no big deal to people who all as far as I know IRL have never eaten this stuff.

I get so angry because I feel so betrayed about being served shellfish at the seder that I declare I'm never coming back here again! And I turn to one of my friends to whisper angrily at him how NOT OKAY all of this is and when I look up it's my dad who is like "Okay do you want some ice cream?” and I am STRUGGLING not to SCREAM at him but thankfully because of my mom there's some frozen non-dairy dessert abomination that I shovel into my bowl and storm off and eat.

I then have a meltdown about what sort of utensils you use to eat pareve ice cream after the treif course.

Eventually, my friends and I all go to bed (in a giant bed? in a sleepover pile on the floor?) and play a weird game involving a song about a cow and things in the dream get markedly less coherent.

Current Mood: confused
Current Music: Jolene

I dreamt one of my mother's nephews was moving to California, and was going to college … somewhere east. Boston? New York? Philadelphia? Apparently I was going to grad school for social work in the same city.

I ended up on a caravan with a bunch of naïeve pro-life protesters who were holding up signs saying basically "What if you abort the next Benedict Cumberbatch” and I remember saying something polite like …

"We don't have the same opinions on this at ALL, but bringing Benedict Cumberbatch into this is NOT going to help your cause.” At that point, we parted ways because I did not want to be involved.

One of the side effects of my treatment is supposed to be more dreams and possibly even vivid dreams. I don’t know if this one counts, because I am not sure I was still actually asleep.

I dreamt that a friend and I were talking to this man about death rituals. Apparently in his culture, people throw themselves (or their bodies are thrown) off cliffs into the sea. He wanted to know where our “fall lines” were — I assume the place where we sent our dead forth into the water.

I had to explain to him that Jews bury their dead so they can decompose and go back to the earth. He asked me why we would do that, because apparently if you go into the ocean, you “come back” [get reincarnated]. I explained that we don’t come back, that’s just not … an expected result.

Then I woke up and was surprised that I was correctly explaining Jewish eschatology accurately in my dreams.

Current Mood: amused

This one was a lot more upsetting.

Content warning: violence, broken stairs, uh, more violence…

( Read more... )

Current Mood: blah

Last night, a large number of threads in my dream world finally came together. For years, I've been dreaming that my grandparents' house appeared smaller on the inside, that there were parts I didn't have access to and had never seen. In the past, this mostly meant the existence of a secret walk-in closet and master bathroom, a couple of secret crawlspaces that could get you from one floor to another without using stairs, a secret attic storage and library area, and an attic in the basement (think like a giant warehouse space). I had always felt that my dream-grandparents were holding out on me. While the inside of their house wasn't *small*, it felt like there was a bunch of unused, "missing space" I wasn't privy to.

I dreamt we were having a very large family gathering, and hosting a seudah. I started singing Brich Rachamana, which got me the stink eye from some unknown cousin who thought I was trying to derail his attempt to start Birkat Hamazon. Apparently, once he started benching (with a group on the other side of the room), I used that as cover to ask my grandfather for a copy of the blueprints to the house.

He said that Ed (some dream-friend of his) had last seen them, and had shown them to Mara in a fit of ... foolishness, I guess? There was an implication that he didn't approve of what Ed had done, and that at the time it was 3 AM and Ed wasn't exercising best judgment by showing the blueprints to someone my grandfather barely knew.

Eventually, he scrounged up a copy of the blueprints for me. I asked if he'd sneak out of the party and sit with me and help me decipher them. I was hoping to go to a secret part of the house to take a look so I could match up the secret parts with the blueprints.

There was the implication that this was a very bad idea, that having a copy of the blueprints was dangerous enough, and I needed to be able to disavow my knowledge of that space. I eventually got in there, and there was a second kitchen, an additional bathroom with only a toilet (no sink, even) a lot of extra space, what looked like a lot of cabinets down a hallway, and … then I saw this crazy, unfinished area that looked super unsafe. Like, plywood and framing and just … not … not built.

As best I can tell, my dream-grandparents are part of some secret organization or movement sort of like the Underground Railroad, but not for people fleeing slavery, more like people who needed a place to hide, or were looking to integrate into a new community, but didn't yet have a place to live. It sounded like immigrants, transplants, and people fleeing domestic violence.

They also had some sort of more-official association with the government as a shelter in case of domestic war. There were tunnels somehow attached to the home that let people leave without being seen, as well as a way to secretly bring in larger supplies to people hiding in the house.

I … guys, my dream-grandparents are apparently really awesome, and they were trying to hide it from me to keep dream-me safe?!

Current Mood: surprised

So…

My entries are still importing because everyone and God's brother who hadn't already left LJ is doing it now, so the poor DW servers are slammed. Once they come in, though, if you can't see entries here on DW that you once saw on my LJ, it's probably because I failed to grant you the same access rights that you used to have.

Just let me know, and I'll fix it.

I don't really know how much I'm going to use this site, since I haven't journaled in the past few years, but I figure at the worst, I'll have a backup of my old journal someplace safe.

Current Mood: annoyed

Woke from a strange dream, where among other things, a large birdlike goddess was holding me in her claw.

She delivered me to

sauvin.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

Dreamt that three men with automatic guns broke into my grandparents' house with my parents and brother and I were staying there. They were looking for something that either we couldn't find or wasn't there anymore.

I finally somehow convinced them that my parents and brother needed to go to shul, and hoped my family would be able to call the cops at some point before returning home.

I ended up locking myself in a bathroom and calling my friend Irving The Snitch, who sent his buddy Murray to help us round up the fourth member of the team. Cops came and arrested all the men, and Irving and I drove off to Chicago with the intent of visiting a free museum before returning back to New York.

We'd stumbled upon a book giveaway when I woke up.

Apparently my grandparents' bedroom has epic stained glass windows, too. Who knew?

I actually had an "my eggs are aging" dream last night. :(

Not awesome, guys, not awesome.

I dreamt I was in a kindergarten classroom and I told a teacher I'd been waiting years to talk to my kid's first teacher. She asked me where my kid was, and … I was like "Oh, I don't have one. I'm so sad. It's too late now."

Seriously, this dream scared the crap out of me. It was so heartbreaking.

GAH!

I spent no less than three hours trying to change these dreams but failed.

I dreamt I was in some alternate reality where my grandparents were dead but we still had their house, and we were holding the seder there, and my Catholic relatives showed up (!) and decided we were doing an entirely unfamiliar seder which they said was Sephardic style with a Hagaddah I was entirely unfamiliar with. I remember the print was very small and I felt lost most of the time. They also wanted to serve BREAD. Like, it was rice bread, but fluffy.

Possibly related, before that, I'd tried to go camping (?!), but the van I was driving didn't have good brakes and couldn't park.

I think the major theme here is feeling lost and out of control, but I'm not sure why it's coming up right now. Nothing major has changed in my life to cause this to be a Big Thing.

Current Mood: confused

For a long time, I've known that there was something strange about my grandparents' house. It's clearly bigger than it's supposed to be, and I've always wondered what secrets it held. Occasionally I've caught a sense of some of its secrets; a closet or bathroom I didn't know about before, or a secret passageway, but I got the sense that there was a much bigger picture that I was missing. So last night, I asked my grandmother if she'd tell me the big secret. Of course, she pretended not to know what I was talking about, and I pointed out that it might be one of my last times there, so maybe it was time to tell me before it was too late. She finally agreed and we suited up. We passed my grandfather, who surmised exactly what was going on and grunted some comment or other to my grandmother about it. She was just about to show me …

When I woke up enough that I couldn't get back into my dream.

Well, damn. I've wanted to know that secret for years!

Current Mood: disappointed

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