I was in a yoga sort of class, and Dr. Sautter (NMU’s yoga instructor) was reading from an old Yogic text and said that if one could shape one’s legs to form the letter “R,” their body would become relaxed and rejuvenated. I could see in my mind how to accomplish this, and rolled to my side and arranged my legs so that they indeed formed the letter “R.” I laid on my side facing the left, and brought the left leg up into the top enclosed place, and used my bottom leg to act as the bottom outward leg. Somehow the top was equal with my head, and I had the lower portion of one leg beneath me, folded. I was wearing boxer shorts and socks that were somehow black when they were used as part of the “R” formation and white when they weren’t. My legs were also white when not in formation, and black when they were, but it seemed like a black rectangle formed around them when in the R pose.
Dr. Sautter seemed impressed by the positioning of my legs (and yes, in reality, to do what was done in the dream is not possible without three or four legs) and looked at the top triangle my legs formed. “That’s a 120 degree (something) triangle, isn’t it?” she asked.
I felt bothered that I didn’t know what she meant, and remembered that all triangles had angles that added up to 180 degrees, so maybe she was just talking about one angle, but none seemed extreme enough to be 120 degrees on its own. I said I didn’t know, it had just taken whatever shape because of how tightly my leg was bent. She asked if my leg was bent tightly, and I looked at it (it seemed like I was somehow sitting up) and I didn’t feel like answering because the question wasn’t too useful. I wasn’t holding it tightly, if that’s what she was asking.
She said okay, you’re going to show everyone, then.
Then I was in a church so grand it seems like it should be called a cathedral, and it had two aisles for people to walk up rather than just one down the middle. The aisles were crowded with people all approaching the altar to drop to one knee, cross themselves, and return to their seats. “Cross yourself for your art,” a minister said, or something similar to that, perhaps as a dedication of the art or work we do in life?
I followed them up and saw that instead of having an altar with a high back like the altar I am used to seeing (I went to a beautiful German immigrant built church as a child, and we had a huge figure of the resurrected, enrobed Christ standing above it, his pierced hands outspread), theirs was just a table with a cloth over it, but if you approached the altar and looked up, you saw a cross fitted up in a space behind a wall that blocked your view from the congregation in the pews. The cross glowed as it was lit from behind. I thought it was a bit tacky and ridiculous, and I didn’t cross myself in the proper fashion, purposefully using my thumb to touch my right shoulder to make the symbol meaningless upon me. Perhaps if the symbol used was one of life, like a rock rolled from the opened and empty tomb, or a fisher’s net, important not because it represents the fisher of men but because it interconnects every knot with another knot in the web of the world, rather than one of suffering and death, I wouldn’t have so. Really, the whole “Jesus died for your sins,” argument never made sense to me, and I’ve pretty much always rejected it. Besides, it doesn’t seem like a useful thing to focus on. I thought the whole point of his death was so he could arise from it, showing his followers that we are eternal and there was no need to spend one’s life fearing the end of it. But I digress.
After the church scene, I was in a building where I knew I was about to show the “form your legs into the letter ‘R’” trick to the country. I was changing my shirt, but I put on the wrong shirt, putting on a chemise rather than putting on a T-shirt. It was my old Tool T-shirt, with a spirograph sort of design with the Alex Grey eyes someplace on the lines. I figured it was better to wear, and more interesting to look at, since I was going to turn my face to the floor while in the R position, not caring to be recognized on television, but wanting someone to think “whoa, that design is nifty. Who did that?” a sort of free advertising for Alex Grey. I ended up putting the shirt on over the chemise, which was hot and uncomfortable because I was still wearing a bra under the chemise, and I thought it’s all right if they wait for me, and took of my shirts to get it right, so I was wearing just a bra and the Tool shirt.
This seemed to be taking place in the bedroom in my grandparents’ old trailer. Someone was living there, as there was a messed up bed. It seemed to be one of the women I remembered passing in the living room on my way into the room. Outside of the room during my shirt changing, I was overhearing a young man and woman talking in the hallway. I don’t remember what they were talking about but I kept waiting for them to comment about how long I was taking. It seemed like I was interlaced into three situations at that time: 1. changing my shirt, 2. Talking to people about how if I was supposed to sing in front of a million people, I’d rather choke and not sing at all rather than perform as I was expected, and 3., watching a television commercial for a western miniseries called “Mother,” where some violence had been wrought around a small town out in the West, where it seemed to be dim and cold often. One of the images in the trailer was a little girl, face smeared with dirt, seeming to be dead in a screaming woman’s arms. There were also a few other children running about in the commercial, but the commercial repeated two or three times while the scene where I was changing my shirt was playing. Such interlacing is pretty common in my dreams, although I don’t always write them in that way, and I wonder how many other people have the same experience.
I finally went out into the living room, which seemed to be the long living/dining room from Niki’s childhood home rather than the living room from my grandparents’ trailer. I recognized the first couple instrumental bars of the Sting song “the shape of my heart” repeating in the background, which I thought was relevant only because I would be demonstrating the shape of the letter R. Two women were sitting on the floor, trying to stretch and limber up. They didn’t seem to be particularly flexible, and I worried they would not be able to imitate the pose.
It seemed like one of them seemed pretty tight in the hips, and she couldn’t meet her feet in front of her without leaning back. “If you can’t do that, do this,” the other woman said to her, and showed her a spine twist.
“You really suck at this,” the unflexible woman said to the other.
I set my bookbag down, moving it out of the way, wondering where the cameras were hidden, because I knew they had to be there because we were going to broadcast live to the nation. I was glad I wasn’t late, and looked around waiting for Dr. Sautter to arrive.
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