Another two hours or so of work.

I painted for about an hour and a half this afternoon, basically stopping because my fingers were too cold and stiff to continue. (I was working in the garage and the wind was pretty nastybun.) I like the direction this one is going in…hopefully as it becomes more defined and I’ve chosen colors I will continue to feel the same way. I noticed that I’m able to block out the shapes much more quickly than I used to be able to. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my canvases are much smaller than the ones I’ve used in the past. Anyhow, I may work on this more this afternoon, and if not, I will tomorrow.

I had dinner with Jon, Brian, and Martha last night at Victoria’s. It was the most I’ve eaten in one sitting in months, so it was a strange sensation to have that much food in my stomach (strange how one’s body becomes accustomed to things.) Brian and Martha had to go to a concert at the PAC across the street so they took off while Jon and I enjoyed dessert. :3 We came back and watched an ep of Black Books and a couple Good Eats and by that time I was getting pretty tired. Jon whipped a pillow at me to get me up and I feared being a’salt’ed again so I collected my things and headed home. It was pretty late so Mom was already long asleep, but I still wanted to meditate so I put on the Heart Chakra CD and sat there until I was literally falling asleep, then I got into bed and drifted off before the CD ended.

I had a pretty awful anxiety dream in which I was still with Ross and he decided to break up with me and disappear. I was actually in Australia with him though, so it was extremely intense because I was actually able to yell at and argue with him face to face. While things still seemed to be going well, he and his stepsister were talking about pronunciations of things and I remember they were discussing tiny little differences between certain Aussie accents and I was disappointed I couldn’t hear the difference. I thought it would be funny if I pronounced the words in my own accent but they just ignored me.

I went to bed and when I awoke Ross was gone and someone told me he’d decided to break up with me and he was off at camp in France. I couldn’t believe it, so I went off in pursuit of him and ended up in a remote part of Japan instead, where there were a lot of triangle-shaped houses on stilts in a circular formation, sort of like a tiny little Native American village. Almost everything on the inside was made of bamboo or other plant material. Even the showers. It was apparently some sort of religious retreat place. At any rate, as I was about to leave and go back to Australia, Ross came through the door wearing his camp shirt and a backpack. He came in the room confidently but when he saw me he lowered his head and tried to turn around and go back the way he came. I chased after him and angrily demanded that he explain his reasons to me. He was really reluctant to talk to me so I started shouting at him at the top of my lungs in a way I’ve never done to *anyone* in real life.

He told me that I didn’t know the real him (he used the words “You don’t know the real Dylan,” which I take to mean a reference to Dylan Moran, who I’ve thought resembles Ross somewhat,) and he started to play with toy trucks on the table in front of him. I didn’t understand, so I asked him to be more specific and he said “I’ve also got a contagious disease.” I questioned him on that and he said he had this mixture of herpes and hepatitis c. My eyes bugged out and I asked if I should go get tested for it and he said “Why should you? We never did anything.” I was really angry at this point because he didn’t even seem to feel sorry for what he did, he was more interested in running from me. I gave him one last look of disbelief then I stormed out the door. I found my laptop and I decided I would go back on IRC just so I could see if I could talk to Jules about it, but the connection was really shoddy and it didn’t stay connected to the network for much time at all. I was able to get a message to Jules and his response seemed to be that he wasn’t surprised that Ross had done what he did, in fact he pretty much had seen it coming for a long time before that. I was appalled at that and wondered why he hadn’t told me but I was unable to question him further because the connection died. I think I woke up in the middle of another argument with Ross and I actually attempted to go back to sleep to try to resolve the problem, but I was unable to.

That was quite possibly the most intense anxiety dream I’ve ever had, and I have never, ever yelled at anyone the way I yelled at Ross in that dream (either in real life or imagined.) Wow. I really don’t know what to make of that, except perhaps that is my brain’s way of working through some of the frustration I felt after Ross actually broke up with me. As things are now, I’m not upset with Ross in any way, and we’ve come a long way to mend our differences since the breakup. I would say we are on quite excellent terms with each other now, and I’m happy to still be his friend. Perhaps I still had some latent hostility built up from being hurt, though…I don’t know. I don’t feel upset or drained now, after waking up, as I might have expected after a dream of that intensity, so I guess I needed to get that toxin out of my system.

I feel quite a bit better now, like I’ve let go of something. It just occurred to me that with the heart chakra meditation I’ve been doing, it has been my goal to cleanse this chakra, to let go of the feelings that were poisoning me so I can move on. Perhaps this dream is a good indication that it is working. I feel lighter today, like I was able to just let some of that tension dissolve. I’ve identified several things that are holding me back, but this was kind of a surprise to me as I didn’t realize I was holding onto any sort of grudge-like feelings for Ross. Hopefully that was my way of bringing the feelings to the surface so I can deal with them and get past this. I plan to paint today, and it is my hope that painting will open up some of the other things I’m trapped behind.