permission to wallpaper
I was standing in an enormous old ballroom with Tom and his dad, and as I looked around I noticed that the wallpaper was starting to peel off the walls. All around the edges, at the corners and baseboards, great sheets of paper were lifting off and curling up as if they’d been starched. This peeling wallpaper bothered me, and so I went in search of someone in the house who could tell me how to fix it. I found a wise old aristocrat who advised me to take a package of tinned meat (spam?) to Tom’s dad and I would be able to fix the room then. I returned with the package, and gave it to Tom’s dad, who was now dressed appropriately for a holiday in India or something, with white walking shorts and sunglasses. Next thing I knew I was smoothing down lovely new coloured wallpaper, and the room looked like it was ready for the next few years. I had the feeling that this ritual had to be performed on a regular basis, and the aristocrat just waited around for the next person to arrive and take this task upon themselves.
This dream seems to be representing my nesting instinct, which normally appears as a small voice that says, “wouldn’t it be nice to have an extra bedroom to decorate as a nursery?” or as a compulsion to paint shelves, rearrange furniture, sort baby clothes and pull up the manky linoleum in the bathroom. I’ve been resisting these urges, partly because we still haven’t got firm plans for where we will be post-phd, and partly because we don’t have a lot of extra money to buy piles of baby furniture and decorate a nursery. But the anxiety still comes and goes from time to time. I know something will work out, tom will find a job and we will have somewhere to live, but I get impatient and want to know NOW what that something is going to be. I’d like to either begin the difficult process of uprooting and packing early, or put my roots down a little deeper here and get settled in and as stable as possible before we pass into family-dom.
What I don’t understand in the dream is the offering of tinned meat. Why do I need to give the gift of spam before I can re-wallpaper the room? Tom’s dad doesn’t even like meat – in real life he’s a vegetarian, and would most certainly never be caught dead wearing white walking shorts and sunglasses.
