Time Warp

This one is a recurring dream. I have a lot of recurring dreams, some which are and/or should be much more upsetting than this, but this dream always leaves me with a huge feeling of loss and distress.

I'm in the doorway of a building. The building itself is made of big stone bricks, each probably about two feet long. The original door frame is made of slabs of the same stone, but there is a wooden door frame inside that. The door is big and heavy, and is standing part way open, just enough for me to lean out. Either I am short, or the door is very tall (and the ceiling very high).

The handle, which is long and curved rather than a round knob, is next to my shoulder. The street I'm looking
out at is made of cobblestones rather than paved, and there are big pot holes in it. There don't seem to be sidewalks, or at least I don't notice them. I don't see any grass, either. I am wearing a dress that feels like something out of Little House on the Prairie, but without the bonnet the girls on that show always wore.


Outside is chaos. Fire falls screaming from the sky. Everywhere it lands, there is an explosion. People are running, trying to get into buildings, with a few running from one building to another, and some just running down the street.

My main concentration is on a woman running toward me. Much about the way she looks reminds me (when I am awake) of Ma Kettle (Marjory Main) if Ma Kettle weighed more. She is moderately heavyset, but her face isn't fat. She's chesty (gravity has taken its toll) and has her dark hair up in a loose bun. The front puffs out just a little too much, and some strands have come free in front,
and are flopping around her face as she runs. Her dress is of a mostly plain style with long sleeves, but there are flowers on it. Her flat-heeled boots, the fanciest thing about her, lace up and are taller than the hem of her skirt, even though she has it hiked up so she can run. She has no jewelry.

I am yelling at her. By how fast I put the syllables together, I'm yelling two words. The first fast group of syllables is HAH-dah-sah, with all of the "a" sounds being like the a in ball. The second fast group of syllables was LOW-fin, with the ow in LOW sounding like the ow in brown and "i" in fin being so short it almost isn't there. I said the first fast group a lot more than the second. The woman is running right for the door and is only about ten yards away when fire lands on the back end of a big green truck - it is about the same size as one of the smaller U-haul trucks - and it launches into the air, turns over, and falls with the big flat back on top of her, covering her completely so I can't see her. I know she has been crushed. I yell the first three syllables again, drawing out the last "ah" sound and I'm going to say something else, but that is when I always wake up.

I don't know where the heck a dream like that would come from, except that maybe I saw it in a movie when I was a little kid - I used to sneak out of my room and hide and watch whatever Mom and Dad were watching - but in the dream I can feel the cold of the stone wall against my hand, wind blowing on my face, and the warmth of the indoors against my back, and I can smell smoke and dirt, and I always wake up from this feeling heartbroken.

I have posted about this dream before, in another blog. I was informed by a couple of commenters on that blog that the words I couldn't identify may have been real. One said that the word HAH-dah-sah is probably the name Hadassah, the Hebrew name of Queen Esther. Another agreed, then told me that Lowfin may have been the German word, laufen, pronounced the way I wrote it. Laufen means to jog, the commenter wrote, and theorized that I may have been yelling for Hadassah to run. He said the way I pronounced it as a command addressing someone formally such as a boss. It makes me think that maybe I am dreaming a scene I saw in a movie. I wonder if maybe the woman was the little girl's family member, or nanny.