πάσχειν γάρ τι τὸ μανθάνειν ἀτεχνῶς ἐστι

I dreamt I was moving out of my grandfather's house. It seemed he had also died while I was living there (in reality, he died a few months after I left). My father was helping me move, but it mostly consisted of throwing everything out, and I really do mean everything. I looked around, stunned to see just a bit of garbage and paper on the bare floors. As we were about to go, I saw his small collection of liquor bottles, sitting on a windowsill that in reality does not belong to his house but to the yeshivah. I wanted to take the orange-flavoured bitter one with me, to remember him, but wasn't sure if the airplane would allow it. And where was I going, in the end? To Belfast, alone.

In another dream, the kids were abducted by a cartoonish witch, although it was I who lived in a gingerbread house. Somehow I fought to rescue them from her, but on bringing them back home I realised that they had huge, floating, plastic hearts where their eyes should be, and other suit symbols in the deck of cards. I knew they would actually never be the same again.

In waking-life news, the city rains and hails. In Jerusalem they would be overjoyed. Even after months of rain, if anyone began to complain they would be quickly hushed up and reminded that it's a blessing. Here the rain is devoid of meaning and Swedish people go on jogging and powerwalking and berrypicking and doing whatever Swedish things they have to do. I mostly stay inside and work on writing Eikhah, which is newly out of season but only becomes more valued by me.

My dog bite hurts.

We were in Jerusalem, in Mahane Yehudah, which was transformed into wide, open courtyards with little stairs and columns here and there, mostly without stores, and without crowds. There was some sort of carnival going on, but the most we saw of it was a scattering of "stilt walkers" without stilts, but with colourful ballgowns, climbing up and down on the walls.

I was dressed in huge, raggedy winter clothes, all black. I was taking my sister to a Def Leppard concert, but I actually know nothing about Def Leppard, so in my dream it was a vampiric clown with leprosy who performed some music but mostly sound poetry.

I dreamt I was appointed by my whole high school to be the DJ for the final dance. I was at first apprehensive, then realised I was a fantastic choice as I could easily create a perfect mix. More than anything I wanted to open with "Hot Patootie," which I thought would blow people's minds as it's a completely overlooked song (in real life, I do think the lyrics "My head used to swim with the perfume I smelt / my hands kinda fumbled with my white plastic belt" are fantastic). Also to be included were Eyal Golan and a metric tonne of Mizrahi disco, sandwiched between the likes of "Jessie's Girl."

In the dream, it went well. In real life, I turned down a job on the basis of assessing myself to be insufficiently meticulous yet productive.

I was standing on King George Street, washed out in bright sunlight, on a rickety public phone. I was talking to my dead Nonno (who was nonetheless sitting in his house on his favourite chair), and crying, telling him I was never going to see him again. He told me that he would be seeing me in two weeks' time.

Then he was in Jerusalem, but actually it was dead Nonna and Zia Rita, old and stumpy, gold-chained, wearing those t-shirt-sleeved flower print dresses that button all the way down which elderly Italian women love. They were excited to look around the city with me. I took them to Agrippas Street to meet with another one of my aunts. We were overwhelmed by the street performers and all the colours and the unbelievably bright sun.

Dreams:

1. That Jimmy Stewart, who was 100% conflated with the administrative head of my yeshivah, was involved in huge amounts of drug crime, and dub step clubbing. The dream was mostly him dancing dub step on Toronto subway platforms. I do not actually know what dub step is or where I could have heard this term.

2. That I entered TD bank and saw a huge secretary phone with multiple buttons on a small table. It was shaking, which caused the receiver to hover above its cradle. I went over and tried to push the receiver out of the air, but it just wouldn't work. A clerk reached her hugely long arm over and with sudden violence stamped my hand with a pictograph indicating that it is forbidden to jostle the phone. It was actually a brand and it burnt my hand horribly.

***

I came home today feeling cripplingly depressed, my default mood these days since there is so much pain to deal with. As I walked in the hallway, I hear Y. shout "Forbidden for Yonah to enter the kitchen!" He explains that he's preparing for me a special drink and I must guess what it is. "It's not poison. I think you'll like it, yes, I have an idea that you'll like it." He sticks his head out and cocks it to the side. "You seem like a woman who likes it." After a few moments again: "Don't worry, it's not poison."

I tell him okay, and that meantime I'll go say minhah.

In the end he can't wait and comes to see me while I'm still wearing my shel rosh and talith. He doesn't bat an eye at this, however, as to him it's somewhat normal, and hands me a cup. "But this is just milk," I say.

"IS IT?" he demands.

I smell it. "Yes."

He folds his arms and tells me to say shehakol and drink it. I do.

"What is it?" he asks again.

"It tastes like normal milk, maybe with a little sweetness added." I wonder if he put in a slight amount of sugar? It's the sort of thing he'd do. But he triumphantly revealed that it was goat milk which he bought specially for me. I told him to try some, and he did, and happily exclaimed that he likes it just as much as me.

This encounter made my day. Also the whole thing happened with him wearing his tefilin (which I gave him, my old pair) and a tiny talith which we gave him just a year or so ago, already too small for his body.

A dream from Friday night: I was travelling with my friend Tsomi, egregious, and several other women, all of whom were very beautiful, walking from Jerusalem to an outlying village in a journey that would take us a couple of days. The first part of the dream took place in a vast spice and fruit store, where my friends stopped to pick up presents for our hosts in the village (as in real life, I didn't have any money, so I just loitered around and advised them on the best choice). Then we departed and walked through the night.

In the hot part of the afternoon we were at the bottom of a valley, and the path had narrowed considerably, hemmed in by olive trees and greenery. We were overtaken on the path by two tall men, Muslims, yet sort of monkish. They were dressed in flowing black robes, black kufis, but white embroidered pants and cuffs, and shining salt-and-pepper hair combed back in waves. They were reciting a list of problems in the world ("vomitting, injury to the hand, poverty," etc). We asked them for help on our way but they brushed past us imperiously, turning into a gate beyond which was their building. They belonged to the Order of the Recitation of the List of Infinite Ills. Their job was to recite all the problems in the world, constantly.

At this point we discovered that there was another gate adjacent to the Muslims' one, and beyond it a yeshivah. My friends wanted to go in. "I don't think they'll necessarily be any friendlier," I warned, but the gate burst open with very cheerful students. They looked Ashkenazi by ethnic stereotype (light brown hair, pale) and dress (overabundance of vests, tsitsith out not in). They brought us into their beith midrash which in retrospect was actually Hart House from the U of T, and showed us rooms where we could stay as long as we liked.

In one room I found a note from Ex-Nun, saying that this is where she wanted Cleocatra and Mercutio (our cats which she gave us reluctantly) to stay for the rest of their lives. I wondered if I could live here and made an appointment to see the Rosh Yeshivah. I asked him if I could learn there too.

"Actually, the only reason why we have only men learning here is because we never thought before of having women learn here too. But it's a great idea, of course you can," he said. He gave me a book and told me to go find a havrutha in the beith midrash. I was thrilled at the idea of living in this tiny yeshivah basically for ever, and the cats too.

I dreamt I left some sort of high school and was waiting at the bus stop with three women on a large, abandoned road. The wind was howling. Suddenly one of them pointed to the horizon and I saw there was a large, black tornado gathering and coming our way. At first I was unsure if flight was really necessary, but the women began acting terrified, grabbing their things and running away. I started to run, too (but in that way that you're trying to go much faster than the dream will allow), towards the miqlat (bomb shelter) of the high school, managed to wrench open the giant iron door, and dived in. My feet were still outside as the tornado swept by and tried to suck me out, but the people in the miqlat pulled me in and closed the door.

Once inside, I wandered around in shock and took in the people who were quietly milling about, tending to their kids or injuries. A group of people approached me and I became nervous. They beat me horribly for the entire long rest of the dream and it became apparent that they were IRA.

***

The other day, Y. came up to show me proudly how he'd put on his arm tefilin (my old pair, which I gave to him last year). I thought he was showing me the correct way he positioned it, which sadly so many people cannot seem to grasp, and praised him for it until he walked off happily. Later, H. explained that he was showing me that he was covering it with his shirt sleeve, which as he told H., he learnt from me.

I'm feeling adrift these days.

In this dream the yeshivah was a house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and I still lived with my parents. Jean Chretien was still Prime Minister. I was at the yeshivah for some sort of soiree and was annoyed to hear one of the teachers, who in real life is, as H. put it, "a Hellenistic, body-glorifying freak," arguing loudly in the living room that no fat people should be allowed to serve in the Canadian government. As a side note to this he noted contemptuously that Jean Chretien had recently thrown up and that made him unhealthy enough to be "as bad as" fat.

I was enraged by his hideous guffaws and snuck into the dining room, where I found his plate laid out for him. I tipped over his wine glass into his plate, in some sort of weird parallel to Jean Chretien vomitting.

Then I went back into the living room, where all my teachers were sitting and drinking. I said to the Hellenist, "I think I've done something awful." "Don't worry," he replied, "Probably the person won't even notice." But then he got up and went into the other room and returned in an incredible wrath. "Yonah, you did this!" he shouted. "If you had told me before I would have forgiven you, but now I never will!" The entire room was disgusted and furious with me, even my first Talmud teacher whom I greatly respect and fear.

I decided to show myself out and on the way saw my dad arguing with someone working in the kitchen. My dad was saying "Can't you just give me the fork and we'll boil it ourselves?" I turned to the cook and said in Hebrew, "What's the matter with the fork? Tell me what happened." "No," said the cook coldly. I realised that they were kashering every utensil I had touched in the house and my dad was trying to save me embarrassment.

In the lobby, I put on my boots, coat, and H.'s special woolen hat that I always try to steal from him in real life, in order to look good. I resolved to go to the river which runs through Saskatoon and drown myself before the morning.

I dreamt that the alarm failed to go off and I was late for yeshivah, in fact I had all but missed morning sedher. I started yelling at H. since he had promised to put on the alarm for me and had apparently tricked me. He acted like it was no big deal so I told him I would divorce him, not that I really wanted to in the dream but rather I wanted to hurt him. To my shock, he also shrugged to this and said "So what if you want, the Beith Din doesn't even meet until Thursday."

Realising that he didn't love me anymore made me want revenge. "I'll write you a get right now," I fumed, and stormed to the desk to take out some ink and a quill. "Haha, like you could write a kosher get," he said. "YES I CAN" I shouted at him, but to my horror, the ink kept blobbing and ruining every single word that I wrote.

Accuracy rating: one star. We're very close and not fighting. The one star is for my subconscious recognising that I would be the one to write H. a get and not vice versa, due to how we did our wedding.

Meanwhile in real life, I had an interview at a pretty seriously filthy gan (kindergarten). It would be just three hours a day for no good money, but something. Not sure if I'll take it. Then I went to learn about how to open and close tefilin for the purposes of checking them, and all the steps that involves. While waiting for the scribe to see me, I wandered around the neighbourhood and sat down on a park bench, beside which there was an amazing graffiti stencil of Tel Avivi drag king Cornelius Crocadildo wearing a top hat. I guess that was the good part of my day.

It's been suggested I go through the yellow pages and find a plumber who will take an apprentice. I'm thinking about it.

I dreamt yet again that my yeshivah was on a shabathon, this time in the mysterious woods. I saw a student there whom I barely know in real life wearing tefilin. "So you too wear it during the day," I said to him.

He said, "Not only that but I'm thinking of having a tefilin party at midnight tonight."

I said, "What! That is completely bizarre, don't you know you can't put them on after sheqiah and can't go out in public if they already were on during the night? And--" here I put on the most contemptuous tone I could muster "--have you ever heard of qaluth rosh? is that a term that's at all familiar to you? Because that is definitely what a party would be."

He started to cry and began blabbering about Dragonlance novels in which the dialogue was written in an imaginary language but the narrative was written in English. I've never read Dragonlance but I've heard the title before.

Anyway in real life I told the guy about my dream of him, and he said it was surprising since just the night before he had had a dream in which he was wearing tefilin on Shabath and trying to hide the fact in embarrassment. In reality this student came back from an egalitarian yeshivah in America very serious and proper about tefilin.

Another dream concerned my old friend from Saskatoon. He had built a tandem bicycle from scratch and was riding it to visit me, in order to show me a haut couture menswear shirt he had sewn from beautiful earthtones. This is actually something he completely would do and maybe has even done it already.