A Mouse in the House

My late friend Alice liked to interpret dreams in the manner of the biblical Joseph and his heir in the lineage, Freud. Alice used to talk about Big Dreams that were a different order of magnitude from the run-of-the-mill ones.  By those I mean the usual “naked at the final exam in advanced calculus, a course you were not enrolled in” type that we’ve all had many times.  Big Dreams come from a stranger place, a place that your conscious mind doesn’t recognize, but some other part of you knows all too well. They stay with you for a long time and deeply impact your waking life. I hadn’t had such a nocturnal visitation for years until the other night horror came to call on me while I was sleeping. I dreamt that I had dozed off sitting up on the couch. What does it mean if you fall asleep and dream that you are falling asleep? Possibly it suggests that the content is so shattering that it begs to be buried very far down in your unconscious, two layers of sleep beneath your waking mind.

In the dream, I felt a sharp biting sensation around my left hip like Jacob, the father of Joseph the dream wizard. Jacob was the patriarch who wrestled with an angel and was injured at the hip. I woke up (in the dream) and discovered a small gray mouse, about an inch and a half long, attached to the joint by both its claws and its teeth. The mouse was scratching and gnawing at my body. I tried to dislodge it, but it wouldn’t let go. Like a leech or a deer tick (only much bigger and scarier), the more I tugged at it, the deeper it sunk its claws into me. Good one, huh? Feel free to venture an interpretation of this apparition, I’m open to suggestion. I’ve gotten as far as…something has gotten hold of me and won’t let go. My first inclination is to call this something darkness and that feels both correct and inadequate. It’s correct because we spend so much of our time in the dark…the blackness of night, the gray chill of winter, loss, grief, atrocity. There is always a mouse eating my flesh. If I understand that, I can wait (for the most part) until he’s done with his dinner and drops off naturally. The sun also rises. Soon small buttermilk-colored flowers will grow on the side of the road. Loss and grief may find a way over time to settle and re-integrate into my experience. 

Atrocity is another story. In the face of floods and fires, torture and hostage-taking, the slaughter of trapped civilian populations, the disappearance of free speech, the mouse, poor thing, has nowhere to go. He can’t get enough of me….and you, I’m guessing. We may have exhausted our capacity to hold the darkness as the election year 2024 breathes down on us. Don’t forget that the global suffering that we are witnessing now is on top of the suspicious spot on your forehead, your brother’s stroke. As if you could forget any of those things. 

We hear a lot about resilience now and maybe, making the most of the metaphor, that means giving the mouse its fair portion, but saving some for yourself. This can take the form of nibbling on a piece of sourdough bread your granddaughter brought over straight from the oven. Or pondering, as always, the mystery of living and dying by writing an abecedarian in the poetry group at the local library. An abecedarian has twenty-six lines, each one beginning with a letter of the alphabet in order. Mine’s a work in progress but here’s my O-U:

Over there

Paradise, says Dante

Quite the spot

Right on the beach with ocean views

Sand between your toes rather than

Tossing what’s left of you right into the muddy, wormy

Underground.

The mouse does not move out of the neighborhood, but loosens his grip when he hears poetry or music or love language. I feel the mouse’s nibbling weaken in response to my pleasure in the homemade sourdough. This little guy is powerful and determined, this mouse that roars, but he also has a weakness for gentleness, for compassion, for awe. When an Arab and an Israeli embrace one another, the mouse is beside himself with unexpected joy. 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In January, seventysomething is delighted to offer the artwork, prose, and poetry of Berkshire artist Rosemary Starace. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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