Dream: Rebuilding the Greenhouse

Dream 20031210, 7:00 AM:

The earliest part of this dream that I can remember begins with mice. I’m in a building that’s not the house, maybe it’s the garage of the Kingwood House. I’m looking at some sort of closet or cabinet; there is a shelf with a bunch of different items on it, and I notice a little buff-colored mouse running along it. I know that mice are a problem, and he would eat the stuff on the shelf given a chance. I kill the mouse with a small drinking glass, by pushing it down over him so that it snaps his neck; the edge is on his neck, with his body in the glass and his head outside it. I scoop him up using the glass without touching him with my fingers. Then, I notice another mouse. I kill six or seven of them. A couple of them I have to kind of squish with the glass. One of them pops like a smashed grape, squirting mouse-juice on nearby items. It doesn’t seem particularly disturbing or anything, just matter-of-fact. The mice seem to die instantly; there’s none of the squirming, twitching, or noise that typically accompanies real death. I remember something about having the mouse bodies in a little Zip-lok bag, and they get too hot and I can smell them cooking, it smells like fried food. It’s a tasty smell, and I think that it’s a little gross for fried mice to smell tasty.

Without apparent transition, I realize that the stuff on the shelf has shifted into plants. There are a variety of different kinds, some blooming, some in tiny temporary pots like you get transplants in, others just bits of plant lying on the shelf. I am in a greenhouse now, with plants all around, although it seems kind of disarrayed and neglected. I look around, and realize that the plastic “walls” are gone; Chris is here with me, and I ask him if he thinks it’s feasible to repair it before winter really hits so that we can save the plants. We start looking around at the walls, estimating how much sheet plastic we’d need to staple up to repair the walls. The ceilings are a kind of clear corrugated sheet plastic; it’s like the fiberglass stuff that the porch roof is made of, but clear, and the corrugations are wider and flatter. I point out to Chris that the center of the greenhouse is an old Victorian-style glass conservatory; it has beautiful leaded glass in little pointed spires and gables. I’ve apparently inherited the greenhouse from some friend or relative who has died.

As we’re in the process of figuring out whether we can get this project done, I notice that there is a new building, or another renovation, going on adjacent to the greenhouse. I go over to look at it, and there is a man who is doing the renovation who shows me around. It’s very Southwestern looking, with a very adobe-like look, and he shows me how they have even textured the old cabinets with a sand-like stucco to make them look right. Parts of it seem like they were hollowed out of rock, rather than built. The building buts right up against my greenhouse, and it concerns me that the crew working on it might mess up some of the plants. I look at a large shelf of blooming fuschia-colored zygocacti (Christmas Cactus) and notice a big, wild-type weedy one growing out of the rock hillside where the other house is. I pull on it, and uproot it, and leave it on the shelf of the greenhouse, as if to come back and replant later.

The greenhouse has grown into this huge sprawling complex of greenhouses. It reminds me some of Nine T Farms in Ennis. I’m walking through it, with the sense of exploring my new inherited domain; I am amazed at all the stuff, while at the same time overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs doing. Chris is with me, and possibly other people. We run across a small group of other people, and the woman who is in charge of it asks me, “Who are you?” and I explain that I own all these greenhouses. She tells me that she’s the manager who runs the ones down at the end. Apparently, there are some houses at one end of the complex that are still fully functional, planting and selling plants. We walk down there, and look around.

Then, I am on the bank of a river or creek behind the greenhouses. A huge, heron-like bird flies up and lands in the water across the stream. It’s awe-inspiringly beautiful; its head is black with a green sheen, like the wing of a butterfly. I point it out to Chris. Then, there are two of them, but now they’re more like dinosaurs, the green and black shifting to a lizard-like scaly skin. They still have long, bird-like faces, though. They talk to us for a while; I don’t remember what they say. I can’t tell if the water is sloshing around my feet because it is rising, or if they are just sloshing it around by moving in the water. One of them is holding a baby, and shows it to me; it looks more like a cross between a salamander and a catfish, and is mud-brown.

Then, I am back in the greenhouses, looking across the river at a development of new apartments or condos. I want to go look at them, and so I walk carefully across the intervening thin air. It seems like I do it in some special way, because I remember remarking to Chris that you have to walk carefully. It has a sort of springiniess to it, like walking on a rope bridge. I walk along near the apartments, seeing all the people on their balconies. They look at me, amused and some surprised to see me walking along mid-air. It amuses me, and I laugh. I go to a bathroom at the end of one of the buildings; it is separate, with a door to the outside like the apartments. All the buildings are sort of sand-colored. There are a lot of people here now, filling the common space which seems like a big courtyard.

I switch flying methods. Now, I’m no longer walking through the air; I’m sitting down mid-air with my hands in a mudra position, and somehow the direction that I move my hands in dictates my flight. I hover around a statue at the center of the courtyard, where a man in a blue elephant suit is harranguing passersby. A funny, cartoonish looking fat man tries to hand me pamphlets. I remember that the blue elephant guy is cool, but the pamphlet guy bugs me, so I move a little ways away. There are some camel-llamas here, and I try to ride one by hovering in my same position but placing my feet lightly on its back. It looks menacingly over its shoulder at me as if it’s going to spit. I rise up, and put one foot delicately on its head behind the ears, then hover higer up and move away. The camel-llama’s lips are glistening with spit, as if it had expectorated at someone. I think that I put my foot on its head to keep it from aiming at me.