octopus arms

We were in my grandparents' home, down the road from where I lived when I was a child. I was in the third bedroom, the spare room with a double bed. My friend called me and I found her in the first bedroom where I slept over many a night when I was young, in a single bed alongside the window. The bed was gone and a big silver refrigerator stood where the cupboard had been. The fridge door was ajar and my friend was looking inside and to the floor in horror. 'Look', she said. There were two long octopus arms, one on the top shelf of the fridge door and the other on the floor, writhing and wriggling as though they were alive. The arm on the shelf was obviously trying to get inside a jar that held something soaking in a milky liquid and the arm on the floor was travelling across the carpet, back toward the fridge. We stared, fixated on the macabre spectacle, not sure what to do. What was it inside the jar that so compelled the suckered arms? Suddenly my friend was angry and said something I didn't understand. Her sentence made no sense and the words seemed mixed up. She stormed out of the room and phoned someone, seemingly to do something about the wandering arms. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed an axe, thinking that my friend was upset because I had not acted quickly enough. I hurried back to the first bedroom and my friend had already returned there, also wielding an axe. She swung her axe through the air, chopping the arm on the floor in half. I tried to knock the other arm off the refrigerator-door shelf onto the floor, but in so doing, I knocked over a container of food, which spilled all over the carpet. Now the second octopus arm was squirming about in a mess of lentils. I painstakingly scraped everything up off the floor, depositing it onto some newspaper, which I disposed of. The person my friend had called had arrived and now they were leaving together. I was upset as my friend was still angry with me and I was not sure why. She had spoken to me a few more times but, frustratingly, I could not understand her words. Sitting on the floor in the first bedroom, I called out to her, desperate for her to come back so that we could work it out. Instead, her friend came into the room and, with her face very close to mine, so close I observed her mascara, said it was sad that I would be sitting at home crying, working all day on my birthday while my friend was out. I was shocked to realise that it was my birthday and even sadder to think I would spend it alone, working.

I woke from this dream with the sadness in my body. Rather than beginning the day this way, I chose to close my eyes and return to the scene of the dream. Although I didn't fall asleep, I imagined the dream playing out a different way; I imagined a happier dream. At the point where we were standing, watching the octopus arms wriggle towards the jar, I asked my friend what was in the jar. She told me it was the rest of the octopus, soaking in milk to soften it for cooking. We decided that, seeing as the octopus body parts seemed to be alive, we would return them to the ocean and, because it was my birthday, we would take the day off, swim and enjoy the day and each other's company. We collected the arms and the jar and took the car that was garaged underneath the house, driving through the suburbs to the sea. Once there, we emptied the contents of the jar and the two arms into the waves, leaving them to reunite, and we frolicked on the shore. I felt much happier after re-imagining my dream.