The Dreaming

[violet@slip.net]

I used to have Kate dreams all the time, but I haven't had one for a while
now.  The ones I remember most are these:

Kate and I, dressed in very light, flowered dresses, go to a hillside
overlooking a bay.  We stand there, in the afternoon sunlight, watching the
boats sail along. All of a sudden, a gust of wind comes along, and I say
"Oh, let's fly."  Kate nods in agreement, we both raise our arms out to the
side and begin to lift off of the ground.  As I go higher and higher, I'm
afraid that the wind will die down and I'll go crashing back to earth, but
it doesn't, and Im able to just float on the breeze.  We hover there,
looking at the harbor.  I wake up.

In another dream, I'm going home and when I reach my door, Kate is there.
She says, "I've been waiting.  I want to show you something."  I follow
her, and we go to a cliff by the sea.  She wants to make a storm, and our
clothes change to dresses made of dark clouds.  She holds out her hand, I
take it, and we start to fly out over the sea.  Our dresses billow out as
we fly, growing longer and wider, spreading across the sky behind us,
leaving stormclouds in our wake.  We fly faster and faster.  The sea below
grows grey and choppy, boats struggle to make it back to shore.  I laugh
with joy and the tears stream down my cheeks and I tell her that we are
everywhere.  I wake up.

I go to some kind of flea market, and am surprised to find that Kate is
there.  The real Kate.  The Kate that is famous and doesn't make many
appearances, not the Kate that sometimes shows up in dreams and is simply a
friend of mine.  I am excited, and go home to get a bunch of things for her
to autograph.  She is wearing some sort of ethnic outfit, and I think,
"Maybe it's Bulgarian."  She is heavier than I imagined.  I go up to talk
to her, telling her that her music has meant a lot to me, and she is very
cold.  I'm hurt that she isn't warm and sweet like I thought she would be.
Not only is she cold, but she's downright rude, and makes it clear that all
the people around are quite a bore.  Everything you say to her is
acknowledged with a curt, "Yes...well...." or "Mmm-hmmm."  I wake up
feeling depressed and upset.  (I've had several dreams like this, always,
in my dream, realising that this is the way Kate really is.)

Moving in a slightly different direction, I'd like to share a story.  It's
about a series of dreams I had that really freaked me out.  I first really
heard Kate in 1985 when Hounds of Love came out.  My brother got all of her
albums that Christmas, and both he and I fell for her, big time.  My
parents joked about it, because we did nothing but listen to Kate in all
our spare time, writing and drawing while the music played for hours on
end.  We would soon be doing this with all the albums, but at this point in
time, we were still just on THE KICK INSIDE and HOUNDS OF LOVE (focusing on
the first and the last at the start, we thought, was the natural way to
begin our obsession with Kate; we gradually added the other albums in
order).  A week after Christmas, on New Year's Eve, Rick Nelson was killed
in a plane crash.  I had watched old Ozzie and Harriet reruns when I was a
kid and I knew very well who Rick was because I'd had a big crush on him.
But that had faded as I grew up.  When I heard he'd been killed, I got
extremely upset and sick.  Each night for the next week, I had the same
dream.  I was in a white room, so white that I was blinded.  Gradually,
people came in and milled about.  Everyone was dressed in white.  I
realised it was a cocktail party.  Someone came up and asked if I wanted
some champagne, and I smelled a horrible burnt smell and felt sick.  I
turned to look at the person, and I saw that it was Rick, only he was all
black and charred and wisps of smoke were coming off of him.  I wanted to
scream, and he could sense it.  He smiled and said, "Don't be afraid, we're
all here."  All the people began to gather around me, and as I looked at
their faces, I realised they WERE all there.  I saw Marc Bolan, Buddy
Holly, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix,
every musician who had ever died was there, many that I didn't even know.
Rick asked me if I wanted to dance, and we started to waltz.  Then he bent
forward and kissed me and all I could think of was how burned he was, and I
would wake up screaming.  (This is the only time in my life that I have
been awakened from dreams by my own screams.)  I would wake up, shaking and
sweating, at the same point in the same dream each night at the same time,
3:06, for the next week.  I would have to rush to the bathroom and be sick
each time.  When I crawled back into bed every night, my extreme anxiety
and nausea could only be soothed by listening to "Moving" and the rest of
THE KICK INSIDE album, which I would play quietly through my Walkman and
only then could I gradually drift off again.  My brother and I had by that
point started listening to LIONHEART and on January 8th we added NEVER FOR
EVER.  I heard Blow Away for the first time, and I realised it was my dream
and I had been going to the room "full of visitors," the white room.  I was
really stunned, it was so strange that I would have a dream of a song I'd
never heard, but it was clear to me that that's what had happened.  There's
no way I can describe how I felt, but after hearing that song, the dreams
stopped.  I felt that it needed to come to me, I was supposed to wait for
it and know when I heard it that it was the truth.  I know it may sound
wacky, but I didn't believe that what I had was a dream after that.  I feel
that, for whatever reason, I went to whatever plane that room is on and got
that particular message.  These people were not gone, just somewhere else.
Hey!  I've never been abducted by a UFO or anything, I'm not a weirdo.  But
since then, I've had a more radical perception of dreams and what they
really are.  I've had several premonitory dreams in my life that I've told
people about BEFORE the fact, so I don't know how else this can happen
except that you do the thing for real in a dream as an OBE before doing it
physically.
But there are still questions that I don't have answers to that bother me.
Why did I wake up at precisely 3:06 every night?  What significance is
that?  I don't know why I was so upset by Rick Nelson's death.  I mean, why
Rick?  I didn't feel particularly drawn to him.  For the next few months, I
obsessively watched reruns of Ozzie and Harriet and taped every tribute
show, and would feel nauseaus each time.  I still feel sick when I see Rick
Nelson or hear him sing.
The fact that I don't understand bothers me.  Why didn't I get sick over
Kurt Cobain or other musicians who have died?  At any rate, I still feel
very calm and relaxed every time I hear Moving.

I'm really sorry this is so long.  I hope you didn't find this too boring.
It is just something Kate-related that affected me deeply and bonded me to
her even more.

Violet
xoxox