Today after lunch–ate way too much, such that I have no calories left for dinner–I tried to read more of The Power That Preserves (I finished The Illearth War the other day), but I found myself literally falling asleep over the book. I was lying on my stomach, and I closed my eyes, and a few minutes later I realized that I wasn’t going to open my eyes anytime soon. So finally I gave up, bookmarked my place, took off my glasses and rings, and curled up into sleep.
I slept from then until just a few minutes ago, and I (of course) had an odd dream.
I had given birth to a baby girl. She was maybe a week or so old. But the labor had been painless–I wondered if someone had perhaps given me an epidural, and the details were so hazy that it was unclear to me that I had given birth at all. The realization came that I had a baby, but had not been attending to it at all. My dream consisted of me desperately trying to make that first week up to the child.
I began by talking to her about how I had managed to overlook her for those long days. My narrative was interrupted, though, and I desperately thought, “That’s all she’ll remember if I don’t rectify it soon. All she’ll know is that her mother forgot about her.” So I got back to her and kept talking, and explained how I loved her so much, and how I would never let her go.
At some point, I realized she was breathing strangely, and had an irregular heartbeat. Someone said that she had too high of a sodium intake, so she was now very fragile. I vowed to make my own baby food for her. “I’m going to start only buying frozen vegetables, so she can have those. I can cream them in the food processor,” I said, but the other person remarked that she was too young for baby food, and I felt ridiculous.
I spent the rest of the dream holding her, trying to make her smile and yet afraid of endangering her heart and lungs, and then–inexplicably–I went to a bar with my boss.