Analyses Welcome

Dream:

My grandma lived in an old motor home at my parents' house, parked on a little bluff. It was a strange, cramped place, full of old things and furniture - more like a mobile home than a motor home. There was a bedroom with a bamboo floor and another room with bookshelves and old electronics. The whole place resonated with grief and loss, which had something to do with my grandfather's death three years ago.

In the bottom of one of the bookshelves of the detritus-filled room lived a baby in a basket. This baby was familiar to me and I knew that my grandmother had been keeping it for about 50 years, caring for it, feeding it - and yet it never grew older. It continued to be a baby, crying when it was hungry and sleeping for most of the day. It was like a burdensome pet, given the most basic care out of guilt.

I felt very sorry for this baby and would go and visit it in its room. It was a rainy, chilly day in my dream, and I walked up a dirt path to look at the baby. I talked to it, I played CDs to it, I looked through the things in the room as I talked, sorting through mid-90s software and computer equipment. There were other familiar things from my grandma's house the waking world - vases, art, furniture. There were things from L's (piano teacher) house as well, little figurines and instruments.

I asked the baby why it remained helpless and speechless and unable to communicate. I was frustrated with its lack of sentience. I told it that it didn't have to keep existing in this basket, put away, reliant upon others for its food and mobility. And suddenly, it looked at me with comprehending eyes and deliberately sat up.

It - or he, rather - said, "You're right," in a perfectly coherent voice. "I don't have to live like this." And at that moment, he started to look older, like a young black-haired elementary-school boy. He got up, picked up a book, and walked outside.

My grandma moved out of the motor home and it continued to sit and rust away in the rain, full of old, sad things.