I Wish She'd Stop Doing That

Last night I dreamed my grandmother was sniffing my panties.

I am not a well woman.

When I woke up this morning, I felt a little scandalized. A little violated. A little ashamed. Because right before I woke up my grandmother was yelling at me. Jessica! Jessica! JESSICA! she kept shrieking. She was waving a pair of black satin panties above her head.

My grandmother wasn't happy because she thought I was having sex with an unsuitable man. She decided to take things into her own hands. She went into my room, burrowed through my laundry bin, and pulled out each pair of my panties. She was searching for evidence. Incriminating evidence of a fling with an unsuitable man.

"That doesn't make sense," my mother said today when I told her. "Gross. Gross! When I'm dead, please don't dream that I'm smelling your underwear. Because I will never do that. Okay?"

I told her okay, and she gave me a scoop of the cream cheese frosting she was making.

The grandmother in question was not the grandmother that sometimes thinks I'm a lesbian. No, this was my other grandmother--my mother's mother, my favorite grandmother, the world's best fudge maker--and she has been dead for three years.

And to dream about her being that angry at me--an level of anger I never saw in her--seems strange. I'm not doing anything weird. I'm not compromising my good reputation. I'm not sleeping with unsuitable men. Not even an unsuitable (or suitable) man singular. I've got nothing.

Listen, I was a psychology minor in college. I'd like to think I can effectively analyze this dream and understand its subtext, but there's also a part of me that thinks I must've watched something about panty-sniffing on television over the last few days and that factoid has been clunking around my subconscious until, well, until it got mixed up in a dream about my grandmother. And an unsuitable man I don't even speak to anymore. An unsuitable man my grandmother never met, never heard of, and doesn't know.

In one of my psychology classes we had a whole unit on dreams. We watched a movie from the 1970s where a man dreamed of living in a world decorated with checkerboard. Two tall half human/half parrot beings kept carrying him around on his bed, like he was a king or a pharaoh. The movie told us that Freud theorized that dreams gave us clues about unconscious desires we would normally censor if awake. (Maybe I want my grandmother to be alive again so much that I wouldn't even care if she sorted through my laundry and yelled at me about my love life?) We went on to learn about synapses and nerve firings and the workings of REM sleep and how those things seemed more realistic explanations to the random workings of dreams, but that never really satisfied me. I mean, I've had some strange dreams.

I once dreamed my grandmother (yes, the same one) was standing outside of my bedroom door and watching me doing something less than pure with a certain wily someone. Two minutes later one of the then-first-year MFA girls was outside my window, singing up to me and the boy. She was drunk. She was coming home from McGoff's. She was singing Irish folk songs. I have never said more than fifteen words to that girl in my life.

I have recurring tornado dreams. Often, I'm on the top floor of an all-glass skyscraper. Clouds build, build, build. They twist and become skinny until there it is--a finger of a tornado stretching down to the ground, and I know that even if I ran down the stairs to try to get out of the building it would be no use. I would die when the tornado shattered into the glass. I dreamed that dream the night before my parents announced their divorce. I dreamed that dream the night before my boyfriend cheated on me. Sometimes I think a body knows. It just knows.

So I'm wondering what, if anything, my body knows now. What's it trying to tell me? Is that my famous guilty conscience trying to express something I don't yet understand? Or maybe it's a warning from beyond? A cautionary tale? A way of my grandmother wagging her finger at me and saying, Watch yourself, missy.

I don't think my grandmother has any cause to wag anything, because I've done pretty well for myself (discounting a certain boy who may or may not be gay). Maybe it's just that she's mildly disappointed. Maybe she's remembering that day when I announced I wanted to be a nun. Maybe she's thinking of all the Catholic they tried to pump into me: communion, confirmation, getting my picture taken with the cardinal. Maybe she's sad I won't have earned the white dress I'll be wearing on my wedding day. Whatever it is, she certainly expressed herself. Jessica! Jessica! JESSICA! WHAT IS THIS?! And there they are: black panties in a slant of afternoon light that looks, suddenly, certainly, exactly like a spotlight.