Dreamtime Dreamscape: The Garage

I've been having a reoccurring theme in my dreams for the past two nights about throwing things out and rebuilding. Last night I dreamed I was at the house I grew up in, only it wasn't exactly like that dream (as is in the manner of dreams) Specifically I was dreaming about the garage. Somehow, things were stuck in the rafters of the garage, and we had to seal it from the inside.

I had come to the house when we had a lot of friends over, old friends that I grew up around. They were helping us clear out the garage. Now, as a kid, the garage was used to store things, not our cars, so I can understand where the dream came from, once every five years or so we'd clean out the garage so we could park the cars in it.

So the garage was filled with all kinds of stuff. Stuff from other dreams. Ropes I had seen in a nautical dream. Some little bits and bobs from the thrift store nightmare dream. A lot of packaging material from all kinds of dreams. We pulled all of it out and made it to the floor of the garage when something yellow-green spat out of the rafters and dribbled down onto the mattress that was across the rafters as well.

Dad was there, he didn't want the mattress to get ruined. He also said that he had a spray we could use to coat the inside of the garage to keep it from rotting. In the manner of dreams, all of a sudden the wood in the rafters was really old and really brittle. We got everything out of the garage in a manner of moments, and I was handed a spray wand like comes at the end of hoses, and was told to spray this magical liquid across all the wood.

The spray was noxious. Full of bad fumes and it would burn my eyes if I got it in them, but I gave my mask and goggles to my dad, insisting he use them instead of me. We started spraying this snot colored liquid around. It made a perfectly clear varnish over all the wood surfaces and we were doing very good keeping it from getting on me or in my eyes, but every now and then I'd have to clench my eyes shut and stop breathing just to keep it from getting in my face. I can imagine these were moments where the cpap had to work hard to keep me breathing from my apnea. It just fits too well that I'd stop breathing in my dream and in real life.

It was a horrible part of the dream, doing that varnishing, climbing around in the endless rafters, but we got it done.

Then we had to lug all the stuff from the garage into the swamp. The swamp I grew up around makes the occasional appearance in my dreams, usually a lot bigger and more mysterious than it really was. Instead of just lugging everything around to the back of the house and dumping it over the retaining wall as I did growing up as a child, this time we treked across our neighbors yard, into the next yard, and then to the back of the houses into the swamps. It was mostly the packaging material, but all of us tromped ourselves back there in one long line.

I was starting to wake up at this point, so I questioned my dreams. Why did we walk all the way over, through the neighbors yards? I asked. Because, we couldn't bring the stuff down a steep incline, down the hill, because it would roll off. No, because some of the stuff was liquid. Of course. My dream brain comes up with all kinds of logical excuses.

So we got everything into the swamp. The dreamtime huge swamp with it's giant trees, and bubbling green water, where all manner of things live in the murky, cattail covered depths, and I thought to myself There, my chores are done, now I can wake up knowing that garage is clean and varnished.

And so that's what I did. I woke up.