My mother's legacy

Dream: I have been living here for a number of years--the same number of years that I have been teaching at XU. The rooms are on the bottom floor of a large, multi-story dormitory. It is incredibly cold during the winter because the walls do not reach all the way to the ground and sway like curtains from the top down. There is a gap of at least an inch in place between the ground and the wall. It is therefore impossible to keep the front door locked. Noise comes in, and light, and the weather. I have petitioned for a change but the institution has been very slow in responding to me.

I can't stand it for one more minute and resolve to send a scathing message (the office is closed) for the person in charge. But the phone is so decrepit that I can't pick out the right numbers to dial, and have to begin again and again. After trying to get the number correct about twenty times, I ring through but the number has been disconnected. I begin dialing a different number but see a university official of some sort outside my swinging walls and run out to grab his attention.

I bring him in and show him how terrible the conditions are, the walls that swing flimsily back and froth and do not meet the ground, the furniture that will not stay in place and keeps sliding out into the open because the floor dips towards the front; the tattered curtains, the bunk beds that are built far too high for any human being to get into, and my things all packed up in boxes. I am ready to move, but I don't yet have a new room. I am waiting on the university to give me one. "I would be happy to move just one floor above," I wail.

The official sees everything and agrees that this is a terrible place to live, far and away the worst housing in the entire institution, and asks me why it is suddenly so important to get to a new set of rooms, since I have obviously been able to stand these for a long time. "I am frightened. It isn't safe." I am worried that someone will break in and hurt me. I am also worried that they will steal my stuff. The official goes away without guaranteeing any change. I continue to hope that the institution will move me before the summer ends. I am losing my mind staying here.

Things quickly get worse. A couple who have been tormenting me return to abuse me some more. They are a couple from my department in real life, whom I know and particularly loathe because they are very popular and powerful but also very artificial. They are only nice to people who can do things for them, rude and cruel to persons whom they perceive to be beneath them in the pecking order. Each of them has been beastly to me in real life. They have both got tenure and a child. In my dream, they are much nastier.

The woman has stolen a number of items that belonged to my mother--mostly objects made of china: vases, bowls, a Della Robia relief; breakable things. Only they don't break. I have on several occasions screamed at this woman for taking what clearly does not belong to her--my mothers possessions, which she left to me. The thief is not related to my mother; she didn't even know her. She has plundered me of the very objects that I treasure the most. And she won't return them. The situation is so dire that I absolutely need to talk to someone about it. I try to reach my sister but I can't find her new phone number. I don't have any friends in town whom I could go to see. I have no friends. I am alone.

I try to steal them back, but she threatens me. If I don't allow her to keep them, she says, she will begin to murder random, innocent, and helpless people. In my rage I pick up the items one by one and smash them against the ground--on the brilliant and rational principle that what I can't have no one can have--but they will not break. They refuse to shatter no matter how wildly I throw them, no matter how hard the ground. She goes out, but threatens her terrible threat again before going.

In her absence I plot how to get my mother's things back into my possession. I complain to anyone who will listen about the unfairness of the situation. I start to car them back to my pitiful, ragged and unsafe rooms. On my way--I am distracted by sexual need. I want to fuck, to be fucked, but remain frustrated. I have been yelling at the woman, who has taken something very important of mine with her. She hurls back insults and a bloody head. "Good!" I scream. "Give me your head!" But the head is not hers. It is attached to a different body, and both belong to a poor and hard-working elf from up the street. A completely innocent man, and now his blood is all over my apartment. I am stunned, beaten. Finally. "Who was he?" I ask a similarly small, impoverished, small-faced and small-bodied elf laboring up the stairs to his house, next door to mine. "He lived up the street. Can you please call off this vendetta so that we can stop worrying about being killed? We're all panicking here." I nod my assent, numbly, dumbly, and go back into my rooms, which adjoin the couple's house.

The man returns, in a foul mood. I point to the dead body. "Yeah, I tend to lose my temper. Told you you should shut up about the stuff." He is the murderer. And I am now at home alone with him. He gets a beer from the fridge, loosens his clothes, sighs. I am beaten, terrified, silenced, passive. I leave everything that she has stolen exactly where she has put it, or where I have thrown it. If an item is out of place he will kill again and I can't have that on my conscience.

She has what I deserve, what belongs to me, my mother's legacy to me, and people will die if I seek justice.

Possibly relevant facts for interpreting this dream: my mother died when I was pregnant with B. My colleague got to have her career and her child, but I had to give up directly rearing and mothering my child in order to have my career. I am stuck in my career.