The night my boyfriend moved in I had no dreams. There was a hanger shortage. Actually a closet shortage, which left him stranded, Hefty bags of boots and towels in hand, piles of dry-cleaning bags sticking to his arms. There was a scene, one involving flying sweaters and freshly cut keys, after which he went to bed. I stayed up, shuttling between the linen closet and my basement storage locker, wondering if I’d get the chance to call the dream hot line. It was only open one weekend, 56 hours: all you can dream decoded absolutely free.
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I packed up the ugly sheets and the extraneous mattress pads, the college-level towels and the heating pad. One unfinished sewing project and six or seven unstarted ones. Sports equipment for sports long abandoned. Cameras–the complicated kind–and a set of beautifully pastel and thoroughly incomprehensible lens filters. Some B-grade purses. A garment bag sequestering a long-lost bodysuit. I taped up the boxes, scratched out the invoice from my last move, and inked on the new: Linen closet, low-level. I took down the cat carriers and discovered that the sewing machine nested comfortably next to the fridge. I straightened out a stack of dream journals and moved them to the bookshelf. I segregated four loads of neglected clothes to give away. Scrubbed down, the closet looked almost inviting.
Mary wanted to know if the boxes were on the steps. Was I packing the boxes? Did I resent packing the boxes? How did I feel? Tired. Then she got down to interpretation. A student at the Berwyn School of Metaphysics, she’d volunteered to stay up all night and coax symbols out of dreams.
Back on the line, Mary had the goods. “OK,” she said. “Boxes represent limitations in your life. Also you felt tired. Some limitation in your life is making you tired.
I thought I’d take a nap before we opened the champagne but sank into a dark and dreamless bliss that parted at 9 AM. I dialed the dream hot line.
