Anxiety Dream #2

So, I'm greeting people who have arrived for the ceremony part of the nuptial festivities, and there's a huge throng (looks to be two parents with several dozen youngsters in tow) that I cannot identify to save my life. The man/father starts talking to me with great familiarity, noting that he didn't get an invitation to the ceremony, or, indeed, the wedding party at all, but since they are as close as family, he figured he would bring his crew, anyway.

It was the father of one of my sons' old high school friends. I had actually never met the man, but because our children were so close, and I did, in fact, invite that old school chum, the dad felt he belonged there, too. He brought his second wife and the several dozen children he had had with her in the time since our school chum sons had grown up and moved on along.

Actually, this is not the second anxiety dream I've had. I've had several, as a matter of fact, but they tend to be fleeting and not worth commentary. This one, like the first, went on for quite some time. It was a long, extended dream about me putting on a brave face in the face of too many unexpected people. That and terrors about ceremonies that will not end seem to be at the root of all of my wedding anxieties, seeing as how they provide the content for all of my anxiety dreams, long or fleeting: too many people and painfully long ceremonies. Really now, if that's all one is worried about pre-wedding, I'd say things are looking pretty good. In this one, the groom didn't even morph into a diminutive guru in dingy white robes, unctuously spilling forth on things spiritual.

Still no word from the groom on any anxiety dreams he might be having. Apparently, he is having none. You will pardon me, folks, for finding something utterly precious in that. This means only one of us goes through life as an anxiety-ridden, over-thinking bundle of nerves.

I lay claim to that description with some hesitation, mind you, given what is reported to happen to women truly sucked into the evil vortex of the Wedding Industrial Complex.

Satuaration?

For the past four days, I've been laid up in bed with some gawd-awful illness that is not swine flu, but between its hard edge and my low tolerance threshold for feeling ill, might as well have been. I've managed to stumble back into the classroom today (I've promised two classes tests today, and I don't like disappointing the kidz), but am still hacking and wheezing and people are throwing their hands up in front of them with feigned displays of horror to ward me off whenever I come into sight. I feel so loved.

But back to being laid up in bed... . Sometimes during teacher in-service days (when the teachers are not necessarily "in-service," I've learned), spring break or summer break, David M. has a thing for turning on the noon airing of old 'Perry Mason' reruns. There is something about that sound that takes me right beck to staying home from school sick with some sort of hacking cough and fever. It starts a whole chain of remembrance: "Perry Mason' comes on; I visualize myself as a child lying sick on a sofa in the family room; I start to feel a remembrance of feeling flu-ish; the file drawers in my mind open, spilling out theme songs and sound-bites I cannot control -- 'Dialing for Dollars', 'Let's Make a Deal', 'Dark Shadows', 'Love That Bob'. I have a sound-track for childhood illness.

I may have created a sound-track for adulthood illness over the past four days, and it involves design shows on HGTV, and reruns of 'The Beverly Hillbillies', 'America's Next Top Model' and 'Say Yes to the Dress'. I could not bear to turn on 'Perry Mason', of course, because that would have just made me feel sicker, but I don't think I did myself any favors with the programs I picked. Or perhaps I did. Is it really acceptable to ever say you watch 'America's Next Top Model' other than when you're sick? I do, of course, and I'm not in the habit of apologizing for it. Why do that, when I can intellectualize it? As a colleague of mine recently noted upon her return from a conference in Norway, teevee really provides quite a rich source of data for content analysis portions of one's field research methodology. I'm an anthropologist interested in popular culture. Of course I watch bad teevee. Wanna make something of it...?

What all this teevee watching did during the course of my bed rest, however, was to make me literally sick of those shows. I've finally had enough of 'Say Yes to the Dress', or so it seems at this particular moment. I may be back in mid-season form by next Friday's new airing, and I'll even be willing to make book on it, but right now, the thought just sends me into a coughing frenzy.

It could be that, or it could be I've thought and said just about all there is to think and say about the Wedding-Industrial Complex. Surely not. Surely there is much more to go into, many more levels of analysis and interpretation with which to engage. I'm going to guess that my interest peak has been reached, rather than my stupendous brain with its stupendous powers of interpretive analysis tapping out the subject. I'm pretty much just personally done with it.

That said, it could just be that I'm now having anxiety dreams about 200 guests showing up (the house maxes out at about 75-100, and those RSVP postcards begin to look like a mighty high stack when the "# in party" spot is filled in with the number "2" or "3" or "4"), and am, consequently, so finding the idea of a small, quiet affair with one witness and presided over by an Elvis impersonator in everybody's favorite Sin City rather appealing.

Anxiety Dream

I had my first anxiety dream about getting married last night. It involved the actual ceremony taking so long to perform, that it went far into the night. People started to drift away out of sheer boredom, having better things to do. Rings kept getting lost and the procedure interrupted by arriving and departing guests.

To make matters worse, the groom was not wearing his suit. He was wearing a dingy white tunic robe. He kept morphing into some other body that was shorter than me by about a foot, bald and rotund. In fact, I think he kept turning into a particular bald guru-guy on the local Public Access channel who wears a white robe and sits in a chair in front of the camera speaking with slow condescension about things spiritual (readers from this area will know to whom I'm referring). I was getting married to that guy. And when I started to cry, because he wasn't wearing his suit, people chastised me for being demanding with my to-be husband. They suggested I was losing sight of what I was really there for.

I was there to marry a four foot tall, pasty-white, bald public access guru who doesn't have the decency to put on a tolerable suit for his wedding? Reminds me of the women in my family admonishing me endlessly as a girl that I could "catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." You mean, men are flies, and women are supposed to not only be content with that, but to want to actually attract the buzzy creatures? Is that what it's all about?

Pass the vinegar, please.

The anxiety dreams were bound to start right about this time. I'm just amazed that first one didn't involve me putting on tremendous amounts of weight and being unable to get into my dress. According to the targeted advertising that keeps popping up on my Facebook page, this is what I'm supposed to be fretting over in my nocturnal musings. I'm going to have to quiz the groom to see what -- if any -- anxiety dreams he's having. Surely he must be. Then again, he's far less inclined toward angsty obsessions than I am.