My Kiva

I am living with my mother in a mobile home in a community and situation similar to those I do in waking life. Lillian lived next door just as she does... But everything in this dream seems very dingy and dull-grey: in fact it's almost like living _inside_ black and white television, but rather darker! To get away, there is a place I go out in the nearby desert where I sit and let my imagination run away into fantasy. As soon as I arrive in this desert place the dream suddenly becomes vividly colorful! There is a shallow, circular depression in the sand, and I sit in the center of this and daydream. I wear long colorful fancy skirts when I go out to this place and I spread them out fan-like around me as I sit. I imagine that I am a very independent woman who makes her living from her artwork and lives in a circular house way out in the middle of the open desert somewhere. Inside "my" circular house is an inner circular room with a mural painted completely around the wall. The floor of this room is all of smooth soft sand with a depression to sit in similar to the one I'm sitting in as I fantasize all this! The room has a high beehive-like domed ceiling, open at the top: so it is somwhat like a Kiva. (A circular sructure built by various Native American Pueblo tribes that is used for sacred ceremonies.) And I begin calling this fantasy room "My Kiva". Halfway up the ceiling inside the room, above the mural, is a linear pattern that has both spirals and zig-zags incorporated into it. It is rather like the complex decoration found on Southwestern Pueblo pottery. The walls of this room are a soft adobe color, and this pattern is in yellow, blue, and a red-brown. I would (in my daydream within the dream) sit in the center of this room, again with beautiful skirts spread out around me. I would feel overwhelming joy; and I would lift up my arms and sing. I went to this dream-within-the-dream retreat several times within the course of the larger dream, every time alternating between the colorful fantasy world and the dingy black-and-white one where I pass the time in mundane chores and trivia. One time while I am at home (black and white) I jump up wide awake suddenly in the middle of the night as I think I hear thumps and cries coming from Lillian's trailer next door- as though she were trying to get someone's attention (she's elderly, so this is a concern). I run out the door to look at her place, and I see that there's a chimney on the end of her trailer closest to me that wasn't there before. Mounted vertically at the top of the chimney is the very old canister-style vacuum cleaner that my mother has owned for years and still uses sometime! Then suddenly I think that the chimney blows up!!! But in fact I then see that it's just the vacuum starting up! It spits and sputters; backfires and black smoke rolls out the outlet pipe: just like some old car trying to start. Seeing that's all it was, I go back to bed... Another time in between fantasy trips a young man comes to live with Lillian for a while, and he would come over occasionally and talk to me. We would sit in the small living-room on the front end of the trailer I lived in, and we had intimate conversations: we confessed our dreams and hopes and frustrations to each other.

The final scenes in the dream go this way: I am out, fantasizing in my Kiva, and I suddenly feel a flash of fear. Something has intruded into this retreat in my head! I feel a strong fear of being hurt although there isn't any tangible threat present! I somehow collect myself and go on home. When I get there the young man is in the front room waiting to chat with me. I tell him about my fantasy place (something that, 'tho we had "talked intimately" in the past I had not revealed to him.) and the scary thing that has just happened there. He laughs and says, "A Kiva? You can't possibly have a Kiva - only men can have Kivas!" Shocked and upset, I walk through the door into the dining room and find my mother standing there holding a book. She has it open to a page which she sticks under my nose and declares, "See these pictures? Patterns like these are what people see when they're crazy!" The page has pictures of black and white pottery vessels; every one decorated with spiral or zig-zag patterns similar to or just like the patterns on the walls of my imaginary Kiva! I'm frightened, but don't say a word in response to my mother for fear of either being pronounced or acknowleged crazy!

I woke up suddenly at this point and vividly recall saying out loud: "Kivas aren't only for men...women need Kivas, too!" And I was _laughing_ as I said this!