Dream: Rescuing Betty Bradley

Dream 20020628, 6 AM:

Rescuing Betty Bradley

I have to go and rescue Betty from the slum. She is living in a tiny house, it looks like somebody built a trailer house out of old wood. It’s in a row of similar houses. There is a lot of trash piled up out in the street. Someone else is here, helping to rescue Betty; she comes out of the house on a very small wheeled bed, like a hospital gurney, and she looks really bad. She is sitting up, but looks like she has been sunburned until her skin cracked and peeled, and has lost almost all of her hair. The look in her eyes is very sad, and piercing. I know that she is blind, because of some reaction of the lye and the worms. She gets wheeled out into the street, and I go in to clean up her room.

I clean for a while, and Mom comes in. She talks with me a little, and I tell her it feels like somebody died in this room – she tells me that my Grandmother died in this very room. I remember that it looked like there were bugs underneath the bottom of a paper bag, but when I moved the bag, it was just a bunch of dust bunnies, and I cleaned them up. The space inside this room is taller and brighter than it ought to be, based on the shape of the outside of the building.

We heard something about Betty on the television news, but they got it wrong somehow. I remember thinking that it was not the way the story really was.

Later, I remember being in a tiny, tight space, like in the very prow of a boat, and there is a triangular trapdoor above me, leading up into an another tight space. I am trying to figure out if I can wriggle my way up into that other space.

INTERPRETIVE NOTES:
Betty Bradley is a very prolific artist; I think that she represents art and creativity to me in this dream. It is a part of myself that I need to think about “rescuing” – it has grown weak and sick through neglect. I think that the big open room is the Studio; I need to think about working on it so that my creative spirit can live in it again.