Girl in the Red Beret

Had a floater dream. Went to bed stressed about a job I really want and will find out about tomorrow. According to my friend, Sara, we each have a dream board, a committee, that sits around in the middle of the night on folding chairs at a table smoking, drinking coffee and planning our dreams. They select what images might be the most beneficial. For me, always a board member in a red beret. A girl. When she checks my mood-o-meter, she nods, and, inevitably, serves up a floater. My floater dreams are not quite nightmares but are close. They come from reality, long periods early on, mostly adolescence, when I floated outside of the spaceship of my family and banged on the windows. Inside the ship, my parents were eating peas, potatoes and steak and didn't notice. (That's how it felt.) Faces appear from that decade. I've seen those people more times in dreams then I ever saw them then, Sandy from junior high, Barb from my sophomore year, David from college. The worst part about my floater dreams is that I have no friends and can't make them. I am a ghost on the school bus, in the grocery store, the church aisle. I have no vocal chords. When I open my mouth, a cold mist comes out. I am alone. A state of being I don't question, a permanent assignment. Why the girl in the red beret keeps sending me back there, I don't know. All I know is I when I wake from such a dream, I want conversation, am desperate for conversation like an alcoholic might crave a drink.