Monday, November 9, 2009

oh boy (literally!)

My brain is definitely responding to my fear of having more adolescent dreams and/or dreams about young boys*. The very night after the washing-machine dream, I dreamed that I was in a church-ish setting. I think they were having church, but there were some other things going on too, garage-sale sort of things outside. There was an old wooden Middle-America church-ish building with a high porch, and the inside where the church service was actually taking place there was also a balcony in the entrance, where you could stay and look over the proceedings without committing yourself to going in and sitting down.

When I was still outside, I saw a very small boy with curly hair who appeared to be lost. I didn't see any corresponding adults around, so I thought I should try to help him find his people. As soon as I approached him he darted away and was replaced by an older boy, maybe 10 or 11, with straight dark hair.

This older boy also claimed to be lost, and although I didn't have quite the same urgent feelings of concern for him, he was still young enough that he should know where his parents were, and vice versa. So I walked around with him a little outside, and we didn't find any parents. We then went inside and stood on the balcony, and I started to get the distinct impression that he was sticking around more because he had a crush on me than anything else**. I wasn't sure what I should do, whether I should continue the [somewhat fruitless-seeming] search for his parents; whether I should just stand there and listen to him talk, thus encouraging him; or whether I should just start completely ignoring him and hope that he would go away. In the meantime I realized that he seemed older than he had outside, and that, indeed, his voice had changed from preadolescent to adolescent. This freaked me out a little.

An unrelated but interesting detail was that there were food vendors in the back of the church. Someone had converted an old chicken coop to a portable stand for selling what they called “oeufs caillés”***. They were eggs cooked somewhere between soft- and hard-boiled, in the unbroken shells, but when one got to the yolk it had been transformed into soft little spheres the size of the big tapioca pearls in bubble tea. There were two versions, just plain lightly sweetened, and chocolate (although the white in the chocolate version was still white). The operators of the stand had set it up so that it was self-service, thus cleverly avoiding offending anyone with compunctions about buying and selling in the church building. I thought the whole thing was very clever, although I wasn't sure how much I liked the eggs in question.


*Not that kind of dream. Really.
**Wait! This is the second dream I can recall dealing with underage boys having inappropriate crushes on me IN CHURCH. What is going on?
***I don't think such a thing exists. Literally it would be "curdled/clotted/coagulated eggs", and a search doesn't show up anything. However, there are "oeufs de caille", or quail eggs; but the eggs in the dream were definitely chicken, not quail****.
****Wait! Eggs. Is this whole thing really about my biological clock? Is my brain really that twisted that it's presenting me with these weird parallel themes of pursuit and procreation? Does my brain fancy itself a controversial Italian movie director from the 60s or something?

2 comments:

Leah said...

Wow, I'm not even sure where to start! I like your final interpretation, though I doubt I would have come to the same conclusion.

And yum, yum...curdled eggs.

"Does my brain fancy itself a controversial Italian movie director from the 60s or something?"

That may be the funniest thing you've ever written, and you write some clever, funny stuff.

CëRïSë said...

Yes, that last footnote was pure gold!