Pondering the once-agricultural, once-wild setting of New York City on November 18 worked its way into a dream on November 20. I titled this dream “Arguing in My Cornfield”:
Sunny. I’m standing sideways at the end of my farm, which is a single, raised field about 20 x 30 feet. (Raised = like a raised garden, the dirt being piled about 6 inches above the surrounding ground level and contained within a sort of wall of single, rough-hewn planks laid on the ground.) I’m just inside the very tall (8 feet) chain-link fence along the shorter end of the field; at the top, the fence curves in toward the field. Twenty feet beyond the fence is woods. In the other directions, the forest is much farther away; the ground is mostly grass (not a lawn), plus the similar field of my neighbor, off to the left (?). (Feeling: Precarious, because I might be balanced on the little wall, and there’s not much room between the fence and the crop.)
[I only gradually became aware of this after waking:] I’m a man—early middle age, paunchy, round-faced, with strawberry blond hair. I’m wearing brown pants and a rough, long-sleeved, pale orange shirt with slightly billowy sleeves; the cuffs are buttoned. The period [now that I think about it] seems colonial. (Feeling: I feel a sense of entitlement and proprietorship—not to riches, but as being male. Someone who feels no need to justify myself. I’m also very cranky.)
My field is not just corn, but several other tall crops all mixed in together. It’s extremely dense—too thick to move through. (Feeling: There’s something almost wrong about this density, slightly obscene and greedy. This is extremely intensive farming!)
My neighbor, too, is out in his field, and we’re yelling across at each other, arguing nastily. I tell him to ~ stay off my land; apparently I think he’s trying to encroach. (Feeling: Very territorial. Not cooperative at all.)
For me to dream of myself as being male and as being in a different era are both extremely rare. The associations I made right away to the dream’s content connect it solidly to my recent attention on Dutch history in New York, and particularly to the agricultural era. My looks in the dream are of a type I associate with being Dutch. The feeling about abundance that I have (“There’s something almost wrong about this density, slightly obscene and greedy”) led me to this waking association:
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, by Simon Schama, a book I’ve owned for years but haven’t read. > Strong day residue from 2 days earlier: I’d had this book down off my shelf for a few days (surprised to see I still had it), out of enthusiasm and the hope I can read it before past IASD President Robbie Bosnak does his talk here in January on an alchemical interpretation of the Dutch Golden Age. But of course I don’t have time to read the book yet, so I put it back on the shelf.
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