Ex-Wife in a White Dress, Racquetball
This is the first of two dreams from last night. It takes place in New York City, where I lived during the mid to late '80s into the early '90's...
I am walking along a crowded sidewalk on a city street. My soon-to-be ex-wife Kerry walks by me going in the opposite direction. She is wearing a fitted white dress—kind of a business suit. The dress glows in comparison to the dreary dark gray color of everthing else. I watch her walk away for a bit and notice that she is walking with an exaggerated sway of her hips. She is thinner and younger looking than she is now.
I turn and keep walking. I get onto a bus heading toward the lower east side. This is where the location gets strange, because now it seems like a combination of Honolulu and New York. I grew up in Honolulu. So anyway, I'm on the bus riding along with all the other passengers.
Sorry, that's all I can recall about this dream. Preferring the freedom of driving my own car around, it usually feels wierd and restrictive to ride on a bus, and this is no exception.
I guess the white dress is pretty symbolic, huh? Part of me still cares for her, even though I realize we weren't right for each other. I know she's worried about finding someone new. Neither of us is getting any younger. She mentioned how angry she is about having to start over again at age 50. So I feel badly for her. But we just weren't cutting it as a married couple, in one major way, which I won't go into here. A compatibility thing.
The next dream is also a snippet...
I'm playing raquectball with a skinny black guy who looks sort of like someone I just met yesterday. I can't seem to bring my raquet back fast enough in preparation to hit the ball with my forehand. I try several times to no avail. I'm getting frustrated and start looking at my raquet head to see if this is really the same raquet. I seem to remember playing earlier and not having a problem. To me, the raquet does look slightly different, it's made of wood and the head is smaller than what I remember.
I decide to go get another raquet, so I walk out of the court. Outside, I notice that another game—doubles—is going on in the court across the hall. I see my former friend from my advertising days in N.Y.C. Julian, playing with some other people. I don't want to see him so I try to hurry around the corner and into a crowd of people heading toward a staircase. I think to myself, if I hurry, I'll blend into the crowd and go up the stairs and he won't see me. But my legs won't let me move fast enough.
I'm almost there when I feel a hand on my shoulders and it's Julian asking me how I am. We go up the stairs, and I wake up at that point.
I'm a bit miffed at him because he, myself, and a former business partner named Peter had been trying to start an online business together and they ended up getting an offer from some former model who had some money to invest and connections with people at a TV shopping network to do some merchandising. I had sat on getting a contract together for the three of us, too long. And when this TV thing came up, Peter decided that signing a contract with me might jeopardize the TV deal, so our thing fell through. Life goes on...
When I woke up, I realized that I had both of my arms folded across my chest. I've noticed that how my limbs are positioned while sleeping, often affects the feeling or perceptions of my movements in dreams, at least when I close to waking up, i.e., closer to the physical realm.
In this case, my arms were wrapped up and in the dream, I couldn't move my right arm back fast enough to get behind the raquetball and hit it. Same with not being able to walk or run fast enough to get to the stairs since my legs are wrapped up in the comforter. My theory—un-proven— is that if we are closer to waking up, sort of half asleep, then we become slightly aware of the physical sensations of our bodies.
