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Last night I had a dream about turkeys, enormous flying birds, sort of prehistoric looking.  Actually, they looked like tortoises, and flew with great, almost calcified wings. They appeared to be made  of barnacles, their skin white and lumpy and hard.   They had faces like old men and dark, deep, well-like black eyes.  We longed for them to fly back from the neighbor's yard and come home.  We loved them,  needed them to come back.  We were reading books about how to get them to come home. 

Later (or before) in this dream were small rodents.  Mice.  Hamsters.  All of them scurrying around in a locker room, women scooping them up and tucking them into purses and satchels.  Then a dog--a boy and a dog sleeping peacefully on an unmade bed.

Even later was my youngest son going on a heretofore unprecedented bender.  I was trying to put him in rehab.  We were in a motel in Florida at night, the red lights shining on us (and who were we?)as we walked toward the bar, trying to find him.

Finally, we did find him, and he was at a bar, drinking something sweet from a small bottle.  My oldest son was there.  Everyone was kicked out for stealing money.  We couldn't go back.

I look at these images, and I have to wonder.  Clearly, this was a brain garbage night, dreams constructed of things from the day--bits and pieces of conversation, magazine articles, newspaper headlines, conversations.  And in a way, the days' thoughts are like this.  We come upon random and unconnected things all the time and try to make sense out of them.  Certainly, we don't find turtle turkeys with shell wings, but we see a turkey in a field.  Stop at a stop sign. Drive to a gym.  Talk to people in a locker room about children.  Teach a class.  Hear words shouted down a corridor:  "Kitchen," "Like, no way," "Dude."

All the while, our brains construct a narrative we can live with.  At night, we lose some control, but our brains keep at it, working things so that they make some sense.

Some days, it's harder to do this.  When bad things happen.  When we are disappointed.  When we are surprised.  When we are sad.  I suppose we can just look at things like great turkeys flying to a neighbor's yard.  Maybe they will come back, maybe they won't.  We can only wait.

Jessica