Shepard's Call

This old lithograph hung across from my bed, when i lived at my grandparents as a young child....gazing at it gave me a sense of security and well-being.....I keep a smaller version of it, still; and the effect is the same.....Yet, although i still have the chair in which i was breast-fed, sentimental pictures that reinforce feelings of security and even "little golden records", i still suffer the fears of a child, abandoned by forces that it cannot comprehend.....

Last night I had a very detailed dream, much of which I can still remember, as I have made it a practice to develop the discipline to do so, in hopes that my dreams may facilitate the deciphering of my emotional being in this difficult world....

The Dream, or that which I am conscious of: I am in the old Lyric Theatre, seated with my parents.....a stage show, like the "Asi Nisi Masa" magician's show in "8 1/2", is being enacted before us....I do not understand it at all, for I am a child, however....and begin to squirm about.....Mother asks if I had eaten before we came.....When I murmur that I had not, I am sent out, alone, to find a restaurant......So, I journey into an exact replica of my hometown as it existed at the time depicted in the dream....except...instead of the white, black and chrome Krystal that operated across from the Court House, there is a duplicate of a northern Italian restaurant, Nino's, which exists now.....I enter the restaurant, ask for take-out, and am handed a covered dish of food, which I take to the Lyric, and having misplaced my ticket, fumbling for it in my pant's pocket, discover a peculiar, large postage stamp with a depictment of myself, as an adult, upon it....I present the stamp to the ticket-taker who, not even glancing at it, waves me into the theatre, which has become more like the Fox, in Atlanta....only far more immense and foreboding, yet full of beauty and wondrous sounds and scents of delicate flowers.....after a long "Veristes In Wonderland" type journey, in which the theatre is filled with trees, the carpets becoming mossy knolls and small creatures scramble from behind theatre seats that mysteriously appear.... until I am suddenly at the curtained arches which admit one into the great auditorium, from which thousands of people are exiting.....I see my parents, still seated, waiting for my return....Then I realize that I have misplaced the food! I am an adult, suddenly, as I am now....I see my parents looking about anxiously for me, but cannot recognize me! They leave.....the Theatre begins to de-materialize, and I am overwhelmed with anxiety and fear, awakening with a racing heart and tears in my eyes.....my cat is sleeping, soundly across my immobilized ankles......I think about our Collie, Cindy, gather my senses and make some French toast with bananas and peach preserves.....I awaken, the room is still and dark.....the cat is watching the moon, through the window...........