Dreams

All throughout my life I've either been cursed or blessed... depending on your POV... with a general inability to remember my dreams.  I've done a little light reading on the subject and know enough to understand we ALL dream and roughly half of us remember every minute detail of our unconscious nocturnal adventures.  Not me.  Not usually.  Until lately, that is.  Over the course of the last month or so my dreams have been vivid enough to wake me up and some small bits and pieces of those dreams remain in memory.  I'll relate a small part of last night's dream in a minute, but first a digression.

The Second Mrs. Pennington was (is?) one of those types who recall their dreams in exquisite detail.  Her dreams were the subject for conversation over our morning coffee... every morning.  It was part of my duties and responsibilities as consort to listen semi-attentively to her strange and weird experiences; things would NOT have gone well if I had been less than interested.  Which, truth be told, I was... less than interested.  Some people may find it fascinating that you were trapped in a dark hallway with no apparent way out and the terror this situation inspired but I'm not among that select few.  But I did listen.  Duty and obligation.

The thing that always captured my attention, however, were those rare occurrences where I starred in her dreams and acted in an uncharacteristic manner... which is to say less than loving or outright cold, cruel, or callous... depending on the situation.  My response in those cases was "Hey!  I'm not responsible for what I do in your dreams!"  To which she would always reply "Oh but you are. Yes you ARE!"  I think she was serious, too.  End of digression.

So... last evening I was involved in a sort of French aristocratic tableau, where all the characters looked like the ones you see on the right and we were wandering around premises... both in and outdoors... that looked a lot like the image of the château below.

There were quite a few cameo appearances by people from my past but the chief actors in this dream-play were TSMP, her parents, my parents, and (of course) me.  The dream had that "endless flow of time" character that made it seem to go on forever... vignette after vignette that replayed our breakup in semi-slow motion and in the most exotic of surroundings.  There were interventions by her parents and mine, which is odd because our parents were dead when we ended, rather lengthy soliloquies on TSMP's part rationalizing her behavior and so on.  I won't bore you with more detail except for two odd images.  

The Château de Sceaux... where I played as a child.  Connections?

The first: my father was wearing an intricate, finely tooled leather cigar holster (?) from which he would periodically withdraw a lit cigar as he strode around the room, take a couple of draws on it and return it to its place.  I (virtually) thought "I need one of those!"

The second, which was the dream's final scene and the one that woke me up: TSMP was outdoors in a garden seated at a bench writing in a large gilded ledger... and this is after all the shit had hit the fan.  I walked up to her and asked what she was doing.  "This is the final entry in our book," she replied.  I looked down and saw the following... in large, bright red flowing script... "I was only playing at love."

Well.  You ARE responsible for your behavior in my dreams, Darling.  I understand where you were coming from now.