Paradise Found?
This morning after a breakfast of sweet milk coffee and fluffy baguette I wandered onto the veranda of my spacious colonial-style room with its tiled floor, whitewashed walls, dark cane furniture and pristine linen. Breathing in fresh sea air I gazed out over soft green grass dotted with cream coloured cows whose wooden cowbells clunked a lazy hollow sound as they grazed.
There was nobody about as I headed for a shady corner of the rocky-sandy beach. I peeled off down to my bikini and soaked up the view of fishing boats far out towards the horizon. The sea’s gentle lap-lapping was like a beckoning finger & I slipped into the warm water, tip-toeing, carefully tensed to the tickling sensation of imaginary jellyfish whispering around my ankles.
Some way up the beach, before it curved from sight, there was a group of 5 or 6 local children playing in water. Later as I lay drying on a faded cane lounger a young man came along and idly began combing the sand with a large rake, but he must have bored of the task because when I next looked up he was gone. Leaving me alone with my thoughts about how to describe this lovely place to you.
Mango
I have three recurring dream themes: Riding Horses, Becky Fitts and Animals (or babies) in Peril.
Freud suggests dreaming of horses represents sexual desires. He might be right although I think these horses are just plain old horses. The best of my horse dreams take me on sweeping gallops across endless landscapes sometimes alone, sometimes with friends riding alongside. For certain I’m dreaming magnified memories of a childhood spent on the
The second theme is more confusing. Again and again I dream about my ‘best friend’ from high school. These encounters are never nice. Dream-Becky is always manipulative & deceptive; the narrative invariably escalates to a crisis and I’ll awake feeling fragile & worthless. I tried to explain my latest upsetting Becky dream to Kosal in Phnom Pen one afternoon, as we rode out of the city to visit a wildlife sanctuary. He empathised by telling me how he’d had a bad dream last night too. ‘I dream my brother on his bike and he hit by a truck which smash his head and kill him. There was much blood and I was watching’.
And then there’s the dream I had last night, my first in idyllic
Once the danger had past I looked at the bundle and found a tiny baby with warm chocolate coloured skin. My instinct was to keep it although I knew I couldn’t. I examined the baby more closely and noticed its tummy was hairy like a little bear, and it was slow in its responses. His –or her- face betrayed the symptoms of Downs Syndrome. A ripple of relief that it was not mine crashed up against a swell of maternal feeling. As the baby clung tighter to my side I was loathe to let it go.
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