Tag: Dreams

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Dreams, by LewisThompson

Why is it that I only seem to remember the dreams that scared the ever-lovin’ shit of me? It seems that I’m constantly dreaming at night, yet, when I wake up I have only the vaguest notion what they were about.

At the age of ten, I underwent my third operation on my left eye to correct a condition known as “strabismus” or muscular asymmetry. The operation was to be performed in Kansas City, 200 miles from my home. I was too young to remember the first two procedures but, at the age of 10, it took all the gumption I could muster to “take it like a man”.

In those days, the anesthetic of choice for children was ether. Without conscious pre-planning, my last defense against this assault on my state of consciousness was to hold my breath. As I recall, the procedure involved sprinkling the liquid ether onto something held over my nose and mouth. Being highly volatile, the ether would quickly evaporate, meaning that the anesthesiologist would have to apply more of the liquid. Later, I learned that it took 2-3 times the normal dose of ether to put me under. The consequences were far more terrifying that I could ever imagine. The one image I have of that immediate experience is being on the top of a roller-coaster a mile high and just starting the plunge into the abyss, surrounded by a mustard yellow sky.

But the worst was yet to come. Once home again, I began to have the worst nightmares of my life. For four or five nights, I was terrified to go to sleep because the dreams were so horrible. At first, I was pursued by gargoyle-like monsters. I could escape them by flying and perching on high-tension wires, where I could look down on them. But later, I was confined to the ground and was chased by monstrosities through the basement of our church and, then, up a three-story staircase to a door behind which I knew I would meet a horrible demise.

After awhile, I came to the point where I was conscious of knowing that, if I could only force my eyes open, the nightmare would come to an end. And it worked.

Shortly thereafter, the horror stopped. Ether is no longer used as the principle means to put children to sleep. We should all sleep better knowing that is a fact.

© 10 November 2014

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way. 
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Dreams, by Gail Klock

As she strolled confidently past our car on that warm summer day I was struck by her beauty, inside and out. It’s been at least twenty years since our eyes met as she graced me with her heartwarming smile. I still think of her…I dream of having her spirit.


Twenty years ago having the self-assurance of this transvestite was beyond my being, but not beyond my dreams. I had some major internalized homophobia to overcome. Let me digress a little, well maybe more than a little, to my nascent years as a lesbian. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, and yes, in the seventies and eighties meant dealing with many negative thoughts about who I was as a sexual person, as a person who chose a lifelong mate of the same gender.

As a high school student the closest term to homosexual I ever heard was fairy. In the deprecating way it was used in hallway talk, “if you wear green and yellow on Thursdays everyone will know you are a fairy,” told me this conversation was not about wee little sprites of the enchanted forests. Out of some undisclosed shame I knew to wear orange, blue, lavender, anything but green and yellow on Thursdays.
In my freshman year of college I had my first sexual/emotional encounter with another woman. She was older and much more experienced in such matters. I can still vividly recall the warmth and excitement I felt when we secretly held hands in her car. I also remember when I spontaneously exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, when she demonstrated her sexuality by reaching out and touching my breast. My fear of identifying myself as a lesbian ended this relationship quickly but not those insistent feelings of attraction to women.

Innocent back massages, which slowly and delightfully crept to more erotic areas, began my sophomore year with my second girlfriend. A self-awareness was also beginning to surface that I had never felt this way with the nice, good looking men I was dating. Through-out the three years of this relationship I began internalizing homophobia. All of my available resources to help me figure out who I was were creating a sense of self-loathing. The books and movies of the time, when they dared create a theme of homosexuality, either ended with the woman leaving her female lover as soon as a man entered the picture or contained characters who were so miserable they said lines I could relate to all too easily such as, ‘I’m tired of living and scared of dying”. At the same time many of the conversations I had with my girlfriend were about the men we would meet and marry and the children we would have. This was the only pathway to have lasting love and having a family we knew about, totally betraying our love for one another.

These feelings of being involved in an inappropriate relationship were so overpowering and controlling that I never even discussed them with my roommates my junior and senior years, whom I suspected at the time and later confirmed to be true, were also gay. I even shared a small bedroom with one of these roommates, some nights each of us sleeping in our own little twin bed with our respective girlfriends. I knew what was happening in my bed; I didn’t know if my roommate was likewise engaged and was too ashamed to discuss it. Maybe there would have been some strength in numbers if these conversations had taken place and some of my shame would have been reduced.

Psychology 101, oh I was looking forward to this class, I thought it would be really interesting and I might learn more about myself, what it meant to love someone of the same gender. Well, I learned and it stung, “Homosexuality is a mental illness…”

Six years later the field of psychology was still more of a prison than a tool to help set me free of my unjust self-determined ideas of what it meant to be gay. A psychiatrist I was seeing to help me overcome my feelings of unrest and depression, which were due only in a small part to my sexuality, suggested I use shockwave treatments to cure me of my unnatural feelings of attraction to women. I did not need these treatments, but perhaps he did!

Gradually, as I followed my own proclivities, they became more normal in the eyes of society. The best decision I ever made was in the eighties. I chose to have a child through artificial insemination. My partner of seven years was very honest and told me she might leave me if I got pregnant. I really loved her and didn’t want to lose her but I had dreamed of having a child since I was in elementary school. Fortunately, by the time my oldest child turned three, my partner- yes the same one, and I were arguing about who was going to be the birth mother for our desired second child. Wisely, we followed the advice of a wonderful psychologist and I was not the birth mother. By making this decision we experienced both roles (birth mom and non-birth mom). At this time many people thought of the birth mother as the only “real” parent…the same as a relationship with a person of the opposite gender was the only “real” relationship. To this day some insensitive/ignorant people still ask me which of these young ladies is my “real” child.

I also, in solidarity with my partner, made a decision to be open with all of our children’s teachers about our relationship. At an unconscious level I sensed if we were open about who we were, our children would not take on the guilt and shame which homosexual closets spurned. As a result we received support from a lot of good people. Neighborhood children would sometimes ask their mothers why they didn’t get two mommies. Many people in Golden became a little more educated and liberal due to our family and at the same time my internalized homophobia began to dissipate. Coming out of the closet for my girls was an integral step of becoming what I had dreamed of so many years before.

Yesterday my oldest daughter and I enjoyed seeing “Kinky Boots”. One of my favorite lines was, “When you change your mind, you change the world”. Slowly my mind changed and slowly my world changed along with it. I have almost captured the essence of that beautiful transvestite I briefly encountered twenty or so years ago…she gave me a smile and a dream.

© 9 March 2015

[Editor’s note: This story was published previously in this blog.]

About the Author

I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents. Upon completion of high school I attended Colorado State University majoring in Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison, Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and Colorado School of Mines.


While coaching at Mines my long term partner and I had two daughters through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home required by coaching I resigned from this position and got my elementary education certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County Schools for ten years. As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.

As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.
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Dreams – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, by Gillian

Good or bad, but I don’t dream much.

Oooooops! I forgot!

I try not to say it that way or I’m guaranteed a lecture on how we all dream, it’s just that I don’t, for the most part, remember mine.

Let’s start again.

Good or bad, I don’t usually remember my dreams. Even if I have, on occasion, they must not have been very interesting because I can’t remember the content of a single one. Some people apparently have vivid dreams just about every night, and remember them clearly. Betsy’s daughter-in-law, or daughter-out-law as we refer to her as she lives with Betsy’s daughter in Georgia where they will probably never sanction gay marriage, is amazing. She can spend hours recounting every dream from every night down to the minutest detail. Understandably, she takes some interest in the supposed significance of the content of dreams. I, equally understandably, do not!

Good or bad, there was a time when this absence of dream memories changed, for a while. I had to take prednisone for a few years. Now that is not good, definitely bad, in fact downright ugly. I am off it now and hope it stays that way. But one of the side-effects when I was taking it, was dreams so vivid they were more like hallucinations; I remembered them equally vividly. Of course I don’t think you can really use the word hallucination for things that occur in your sleep, but it’s how I think of them, simply because they were so very real. No, they were beyond real in a way I can’t describe. I have never done drugs so I can’t compare, but perhaps that’s what a “good trip” on hallucinogens is like. If so, I can see why people get hooked. Or maybe most ordinary everyday, or I should say everynight, dreams are like that for most people. I simply don’t know. Mine were never scary, nor even weird. They were terribly mundane, and very short.

I would walk along a beach, or in a wood, or drive on I70 or pick flowers from the garden. I don’t know how long they lasted, in my memories they were maybe a minute at the most. But so clear: blindingly bright. They are the only thing I that I regret the loss of from no longer taking prednisone, and that one regret will certainly not send me back on it.

Good or bad, I rarely daydream either. As a child I suppose I conjured up possible futures the way most children do. I think, though, that, even at a young age, I knew at some level of consciousness that my future was to be different from what I was currently experiencing. There was something in it I couldn’t see, around some hidden corner, or should I say in some dark closet, that I was happy enough not to see too clearly. So I never was much of a daydreamer. I tended rather to roll along, letting life take me where it may. In some ways I guess that’s bad, not picturing your future, not having goals and really very little direction. But I ended up with a wonderful life so it can’t have done me much harm. And these days we are encouraged by spiritual leaders to live in the moment and in fact not to daydream, so perhaps I accidentally fell into good habits!

Anyway, there’s little to be done about any of it, good or bad. In my seventies, I don’t see myself suddenly spending hours daydreaming of my future. And there is no way, as far as I know, to make myself remember dreams for the first time in my life. Except for some drug-induced method, that is, and in my seventies I don’t quite see myself taking that route either.

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams,” said Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman I greatly admire and usually agree with. But I have to say I have managed to live a life just about as good as any I could imagine, without the influence of dreams: good, bad, or ugly.

© November 2014

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Dreams by Gail Klock

          As she strolled confidently past our
car on that warm summer day I was struck by her beauty, inside and out. It’s
been at least twenty years since our eyes met as she graced me with her
heartwarming smile. I still think of her…I dream of having her spirit.
Twenty
years ago having the self-assurance of this transvestite was beyond my being,
but not beyond my dreams. I had some major internalized homophobia to overcome.
Let me digress a little, well maybe more than a little, to my nascent years as a
lesbian.  Growing up in the fifties and
sixties, and yes, in the seventies and eighties meant dealing with many
negative thoughts about who I was as a sexual person, as a person who chose a
lifelong mate of the same gender.
As
a high school student the closest term to homosexual I ever heard was
fairy.  In the deprecating way it was
used in hallway talk, “if you wear green and yellow on Thursdays everyone will
know you are a fairy,” told me this conversation was not about wee little
sprites of the enchanted forests. Out of some undisclosed  shame I knew to wear orange, blue, lavender,
anything but green and yellow on Thursdays.
In
my freshman year of college I had my first sexual/emotional encounter with
another woman. She was older and much more experienced in such matters. I can
still vividly recall the warmth and excitement I felt when we secretly held
hands in her car. I also remember when I spontaneously exclaimed, “Oh my God,
it’s not fair, it’s not fair, when she demonstrated her sexuality by reaching
out and touching my breast. My fear of identifying myself as a lesbian ended
this relationship quickly but not those insistent feelings of attraction to
women.
          Innocent back massages, which slowly
and delightfully crept to more erotic areas, began my sophomore year with my
second girlfriend. A self-awareness was also beginning to surface that I had never
felt this way with the nice, good looking men I was dating. Through-out the
three years of this relationship I began internalizing homophobia. All of my available
resources to help me figure out who I was were creating a sense of self-loathing.
The books and movies of the time, when they dared create a theme of homosexuality,
either ended with the woman leaving her female lover as soon as a man entered
the picture or contained characters who were so miserable they said lines I
could relate to all too easily such as, ‘I’m tired of living and scared of
dying”. At the same time many of the conversations I had with my girlfriend were
about the men we would meet and marry and the children we would have.  This was the only pathway to have lasting
love and having a family we knew about, totally betraying our love for one
another.
These
feelings of being involved in an inappropriate relationship were so
overpowering and controlling that I never even discussed them with my roommates
my junior and senior years, whom I suspected at the time and later confirmed to
be true, were also gay. I even shared a small bedroom with one of these
roommates, some nights each of us sleeping in our own little twin bed with our
respective girlfriends. I knew what was happening in my bed; I didn’t know if
my roommate was likewise engaged and was too ashamed to discuss it.   Maybe
there would have been some strength in numbers if these conversations had taken
place and some of my shame would have been reduced.
Psychology
101, oh I was looking forward to this class, I thought it would be really
interesting and I might learn more about myself, what it meant to love someone
of the same gender. Well, I learned and it stung, “Homosexuality is a mental
illness…”
Six
years later the field of psychology was still more of a prison than a tool to
help set me free of my unjust self-determined ideas of what it meant to be gay.
A psychiatrist I was seeing to help me overcome my feelings of unrest and
depression, which were due only in a small part to my sexuality, suggested I
use shockwave treatments to cure me of my unnatural feelings of attraction to
women. I did not need these treatments, but perhaps he did!
Gradually,
as I followed my own proclivities, they became more normal in the eyes of
society. The best decision I ever made was in the eighties. I chose to have a
child through artificial insemination. My partner of seven years was very
honest and told me she might leave me if I got pregnant. I really loved her and
didn’t want to lose her but I had dreamed of having a child since I was in
elementary school. Fortunately, by the time my oldest child turned three, my
partner- yes the same one, and I were arguing about who was going to be the
birth mother for our desired second child. Wisely, we followed the advice of a
wonderful psychologist and I was not the birth mother. By making this decision
we experienced both roles (birth mom and non-birth mom). At this time many
people thought of the birth mother as the only “real” parent…the same as a
relationship with a person of the opposite gender was the only “real”
relationship. To this day some insensitive/ignorant people still ask me which
of these young ladies is my “real” child.
I
also, in solidarity with my partner, made a decision to be open with all of our
children’s teachers about our relationship. At an unconscious level I sensed if
we were open about who we were, our children would not take on the guilt and
shame which homosexual closets spurned. 
As a result we received support from a lot of good people. Neighborhood
children would sometimes ask their mothers why they didn’t get two mommies.  Many people in Golden became a little more
educated and liberal due to our family and at the same time my internalized
homophobia began to dissipate. Coming out of the closet for my girls was an
integral step of becoming what I had dreamed of so many years before.
Yesterday
my oldest daughter and I enjoyed seeing “Kinky Boots”. One of my favorite lines
was, “When you change your mind, you change the world”.  Slowly my mind changed and slowly my world
changed along with it. I have almost captured the essence of that beautiful
transvestite I briefly encountered twenty or so years ago…she gave me a smile
and a dream.

© 9 March 2015  


About
the Author 
I grew up in Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents.
Upon completion of high school I attended Colorado State University majoring in
Physical Education. My first teaching job was at a high school in Madison,
Wisconsin. After three years of teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend
graduate school at UNC-Greensboro. After obtaining my MSPE I coached
basketball, volleyball, and softball at the college level starting with Wake
Forest University and moving on to Springfield College, Brown University, and
Colorado School of Mines.
While coaching at Mines my long term partner and I had two
daughters through artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home
required by coaching I resigned from this position and got my elementary education
certification. I taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County
Schools for ten years. As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my
granddaughter, playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the
storytelling group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT
organizations.

As a retiree I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter,
playing senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling
group, gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.
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Dreams by Pat Gourley

I have always had a very active “dream-life”. It is hard to
actually measure this for sure but it seems that at least half of my sleep is
dreaming. These would be the dreams that I am aware of or can remember in the
morning. The dream recollection process is not something I often bother to do
and I do not keep dream journals and probably never will. I take the same stance
toward my dreams that the Grateful Dead took with their music. The reason they
allowed even encouraged people to tape their shows was the attitude “we are
done with it and you can do whatever you want with it”. An attitude greatly
facilitated by a huge repertoire of tunes often performed with unique
improvisation with each rendition. I view my dreams the same way – well that
was interesting but it is over and I need to get on with the day and besides I
have to really pee.
Though I have always spent a good part of my night from back
to early childhood dreaming a lot these nocturnal adventures seem to be in
sharper focus than ever these days. Perhaps that is due to the recurrent
interruption of my REM sleep with the need to get up and urinate mid-dream.
Usually I am able to go back to sleep easily and it seems I swear that the
dream picks up where it left off. I often think, usually in a dense fog or semi-dream-state,
how exhausting is this to revisit the same idiotic situation, aren’t we done
yet?
 My personal bias is
that most pharmaceutical sleep aides are bad for you certainly if used
frequently and particularly those that actually create an amnesiac state are
not good for a healthy and vibrant dream life and may, at least in a transient
fashion, contribute to waking memory loss issues. I try to live by the old
Buddhist axiom that if you wake up and can’t get back to sleep it is actually a
call to the cushion. Nothing like trying to meditate late at night in the dark
to make you start to nod off in a hurry and for me it can be as effective as
Ambien. The only time I have taken Ambien was on a transatlantic flight to
Paris, which essentially resulted in me waking up in Paris feeling dopey,
anything but rested, wondering at first how the hell I got here and second why
no one was speaking English.
In poking around the ether a bit before writing this I was
looking for a current theory on dreaming and I happened on an article from
Scientific American from a few years back. A few sentences from that piece
seemed at least somewhat applicable to my own dream life:
Dreams seem to help us process emotions by
encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our
dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these
experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the
emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the
emotion itself is no longer active.  This mechanism fulfills an important
role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this
increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is
increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short,
dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our
experiences with our emotions and memories.
Scientific American:
July 26, 2011. Sander van der Linden
It seems to me that there is some heavy-duty
Zen implications implied in this explanation that I will not ruminate too much
on but just say we can’t always control the shit that happens to us but we can
usually choose how we react emotionally to it. Apparently dreaming may be a
great and safe way to address all sorts of unfinished waking business.
Let me relate a few of the general
dream themes I have personally and you are all free to psychoanalyze them or
not. I most often tend to pay them little heed. The closest I come to a nightmare
these days is a recurrent dream I will have about getting to the airport on
time, needless to say I am frustrated at every turn and never do make the
flight.
A dream I had repeatedly, now several
decades in the past, was that I was going to be called on to fill in and play rhythm
guitar for the Rolling Stones because Keith Richards was not able to make the
show or perhaps was passed out back stage with a needle in his arm. I would
awake from this in quite an agitated state just as Mick looked at me to bring
the opening cords of Sympathy for the Devil or Tumbling Dice. Why this always
involved the Rolling Stones and not the Grateful Dead is a bit of a mystery to
me. Oh and by the way I can’t play a single cord on any type of guitar.
The only nasty type of childhood dream
I really remember having involved being chased down a long hallway by some
demon or the other and getting to a door that was always very big and
inaccessible to me. The door of course required a key I did not have. This
would seem to go on forever and never ended well.
The most vivid and intense dreams of
my life followed the death of my partner David in 1995. These dreams reoccurred
periodically for more than a year after his death and always had to do with my giving
away his stuff and that dear old queen left me with a lot of stuff.  I actually was slowly giving his things away
to friends or charity so I suppose I had those dreams coming. He was never
happy with the choices I was making in dispersing his estate.
I would say that overall my dreams these
days are extremely mundane and boring and rarely ever a source of consternation
while occurring or upon awaking. Often they involve very mundane things about
work, like did I give the right drug to the right patient or did I wind up
killing someone. Something that has apparently never happened since I still
have a job. I suppose I should examine for a minute a why my dreams about filling
in for Keith Richards were more disconcerting to me when they were occurring
than making a medication error at work and killing someone.
The closest dreams ever come these
days to exciting are the rare sexual ones. Ironically these always end in a
very frustrating manner with the much anticipated happy ending always just
outside of my reach.  And the age-old
phenomenon of a nocturnal emission never happens. But I guess a guy can dream
can’t he?
© November 2014 
 About the Author  
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Opera – Love and Hate by Betsy

I
love opera.  I hate opera.  I guess that means I have one of those
love/hate relationships that makes people neurotic, usually about another
person.  But in this case I am neurotic
about an art form.  And a beautiful art
form it is.  There is nothing that stirs
my emotions more intensely than a great piece of music.  A symphony, concerto, string quartet created
by one of the masters.  I don’t care what
period it is from–Rococo, Baroque, Classical, Romantic–any of it can put me
in a  listening trance.  The better I know the music, the more
stirring it is and the more it does for me. 
I
can say this about some opera, but not all opera.  I am a fan of, I  think, what is commonly considered popular
opera.  A Puccini area a la La Boheme will
bring me to tears faster than any Beethoven piano concerto or Schubert string
trio.
Unfortunately,
I don’t know the names of the arias so familiar to opera fans.  I’m really not interested in their titles,
nor do I feel any need to learn the unfamiliar words.  Suffice it to say that I love dramatic
music. 
There
is plenty to say about my hatred of opera, in spite of the love feelings.  I remember one time as a very young adult–20
something–I was in New York City and decided to take advantage of some spare
time, raise my level of cultural exposure, and attend an opera at the Met.  I was very excited about this and just knew
that the experience would increase my developing interest and appreciation of
good music.  I was learning to really
appreciate Russian music so why wouldn’t I enjoy this Mussorgsky
masterpiece.  What I didn’t know is that
Boris Gudanov is probably the longest opera ever written.  And heavy is the only word that comes to mind
when I try to recall this experience. 
The truth is I do not really remember much about it because I slept
through at least one half of it.  The
entire opera is  4 hours and 15 minutes
long not including intermission.
I realize I do not sound like much of a music
lover when I use words like heavy and boring to describe what I truly feel
about some opera–the heavy, boring kind. 
Not to mention names, but I’m thinking of the Wagner-esque type of
opera.  

And
so the development of my appreciation for opera was arrested sometime around the
age of 20 something.  But no
problem.  There are the few stirring
well-known arias that still bring me to tears.
I
must mention another point for love.  The
performers are my heroes–well, more likely my heroines.  In my dreams I am an opera singer.  In my next life I am an opera singer.  Oh, to be able to open my mouth and produce
such sound. Why do I always fall in love with these women?  Perhaps it is their bosoms.  Maybe I love them because they remind me so
much of my grandmother, an accomplished contralto, who often held me as a young
child next to her ever so soft, cuddly bosom.
There
is really nothing I can do to resolve the love/hate situation here.  Just to admit that I probably will never be
an opera-goer and stick to only those few arias I love.

© 7 June 2011

About the Author 

Betsy has been active in the
GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians
Organizing for Change).  She has been
retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years.  Since her retirement, her major activities
include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor
with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning.  Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of
marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys
spending time with her four grandchildren. 
Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing
her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.
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First Times by Ricky

A person has multiple “first times” in their life: first car, first bicycle, first breath of air, first fight, first argument, first joke told that was actually funny, first kiss, first kiss not from mom or dad, first romantic kiss, and et cetera. So, here are a few of my “firsts.”

My First Scary Dream at Age 0-1 Years

I see solid pale-green; like a “green screen” television screen which fills my entire field of view regardless of direction of looking, but I don’t look around and remain fixated on that pale-green. Then, I get a “funny feeling” in me; I don’t like it and tense up. I recognize the feeling as that of falling and I panic but don’t awaken. (I have heard that Freud equates “falling” with fears of sexual failure, which is stupid, as babies don’t have sexual knowledge sufficient to fear to perform correctly.) Years later, I learn to apply this dream to the times my father would toss me up in the air and catch me on the way down. To this day, I have much stress and fear of the negative gravity feelings brought on by roller coasters or other amusement park rides.

My First Girlfriend (Age 5)

Her name is Sandra Flora. With her curly hair, she looked like a 5-year-old Shirley Temple. I carried her kindergarten school photo in my wallet for many years into my adulthood before I finally managed to misplace it.

My First Boy Friend (Age 5-8)

His name is Michael Pollard and his sister is Joan. They both were near the same age as me and both are redheads complete with freckles. Mike lived across the street from my house on Mathews Avenue in Redondo Beach, California. We played together quite often. His father was a roofer and the family pickup truck always smelled of tar due to the “puddles” of dried tar in the truck bed. At age 6, Mike and I caught the city bus alone and rode it to the beach where we went into the roller-rink and played a game of pinball or two before we rode a bus back home. I don’t think either of our parents even knew we were gone for that 1 ½ hours.

My First Scary Movies in a Drive-in Theater (Age 4 or 5)

It was at a drive-in theater somewhere in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. There was the usual a double feature. One movie was “Rodan” and the other I think was titled “Them.” “Rodan” was a flying-dinosaur-type creature and regardless of the actual title, “Them” was about giant ants that made a nest in the sewers of Los Angeles. In that movie, James Arnes played an army colonel ordered to destroy the ants and the nesting queen. In any case, the monsters scared me so much that whenever one was on the screen, I would hide in the back seat and not look until one of my parents said it was okay. I guess I should say that I actually started to watch the first movie from the front seat between my parents. I guess I wasn’t very macho. During the intermission between movies, I walked to the refreshment “stand” to buy myself a piece of pie. The teenage attendant could not understand me very well and after explaining that they only had pizza pie sold me a piece placing it into a small box to take back to the car. Naturally, as I left the building I saw all the cars in front of me and wasn’t sure how to find my family’s car. I was lucky and found it after only a very mild panicking. When I got inside to eat my pie, I started to cry because it wasn’t pie. My parents ate it instead. I guess I didn’t understand the teenager either focusing on the word pie rather than the modifier “pizza,” which I didn’t know what it meant anyway.

My First Scary Visit to the Beach (Age 2 or 3)

The family went to the beach several times I’m told, but I only remember this one time and only then this one event. I was really cute in my blue little-boy bathing suit. You know the type; the ones that squeezed the front so tight whatever size “package” a toddler might have was squashed into not showing a bulge. I was playing in the sand right next to the water line where the waves would reach. Earlier, dad had taken me in deeper and we bobbed about and I played while safely held in his arms or hands. I must have decided to play in the water a bit so while my parents relaxed on their beach-towels a couple of yards away, I moved into water that was up to the middle of my lower leg (about 5 or 6 inches deep) during the maximum reach of the wave on the beach. A series of unexpectedly larger waves arrived and the first one knocked me down and rolled me along towards the shore. As I tried to stand, the retreating water kept pulling the sand out from under me and I went back out into the deeper 5 to 6 inch water. The next three waves did the same thing and then dad arrived and picked me up. Naturally I was crying because I was scared but I don’t know what of. To this day I am very uneasy around large deep bodies of water, including swimming pools. It took years before I could pass my First Class Scout badge by swimming 50 yards.

My First Award (Age 1)

During the summer of 1949, my family was living in Lawndale, California. The city parks & recreation department held a “Baby Show” that mother entered me into. I won a couple of 2nd place red ribbons and one blue ribbon. Mother questioned the judges about the red ribbons as I was clearly the first place baby in those two categories. The judges told her that they just could not award me all the blue ribbons because the one I did win was the “King of the Show” award for being the “best baby” overall. I still have the cardboard covered crown with gold foil and stick-on stars as well as the photo of me wearing the crown. Mom and dad must have been very proud to have a child to brag about. Interestingly though, my future wife was crowned “Queen” of her baby show that same summer in Ohio.

Crowned 5 August 1949
My First Crush (Age 10)

After living with my mother’s parents for 2 years, mom and my new step-father came to Minnesota to show off the newly-born twins and to bring me back with them to California; south shore of Lake Tahoe to be precise. I turned 10 two weeks later. When school started, puberty had already begun for me, but no one had any idea it had (there were no outward visible indications). I was assigned to a 5th grade class with a brand new teacher, Miss Herbert. Until I was picked up from the farm in May of 1958, I had not seen my mother in about 2 years so I missed her and my dad for that long. Now I was living with her and yet by October I was madly in love with Miss Herbert. She must have known or suspected because one day she arranged with my mother to take me to her house after school to work on a project for our classroom bulletin board. To say I was in overjoyed mode would be a gross understatement of how I responded to the situation. Miss Herbert offered me cookies and milk and then we got to work. Nothing sexual of any kind happened, but if she had tried to seduce me, I would have been putty in her hands. Then the forest ranger entered into her life and I told the other boys in my class that she was going to marry him, but they didn’t believe me. We started Christmas vacation and left the school leaving Miss Herbert behind and returned to Mrs. Walksdahl (the ex-Miss Herbert) as our same teacher. I also returned after a case of laryngitis had healed over the Christmas break. When it was over my voice had permanently changed, so I never went through the “squeaky” stage.

My First Time Sex (Age 10)

During the autumn of 1958 or the spring of 1959, I was alone playing bus driver in an old 1935-1940 style bus, which someone had turned into what we would call a motor home. I had done this during several weekends for about ½ hour each time before I got bored and quit for the day. One day, the second to the last time I ever went there to play, another boy showed up. He was 8 or 8 ½ as I recall. We took turns driving the bus and being the passenger. At one point, he told me that his older brother, who was 11 or 12, would make him suck his brother’s dick. I thought, “You can do that?” followed by “I want to try that.” So, I asked him if I could suck his dick and he refused my request at first but I kept asking so he gave in. I made him promise to not pee in my mouth and began to suck. It was a wonderful. About 2 minutes into the act, he saw an adult heading our way so we stopped.

My First Scary Movie on TV (age 40ish)

You may think that I would have seen many “scary” movies in the theater and TV by the time I was 40; and so I had. The difference was that by this time, my emotions were sufficiently “blocked” that my mind kept telling me its all fake so nothing was really scary. However, this movie got to me because I was now the father of four children, three of them girls, and in this movie there was a little girl (8-10) who was in danger throughout the movie. You may have seen it, the second Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver.

My First “Scary” Book that Unsettled My Mind for 3 Days (Age 62)

The book was titled, “Lost Boys,” written my Orson Scott Card a rather famous LDS author. It was one of his earliest works and according to him was inspired by Steven King’s “Pet Cemetery.” The story was rather slow to develop but all the elements were in place by the end. The story revolved around the family’s oldest boy; an 8-year old “perfect” child who became very sullen when the family moved to a new small town. The townspeople did not realize until well into the story that young boys were being abducted by an apparent serial killer. The ending had an unusual twist that totally unhinged me. I had wanted the boy to live and figured that he would be the one to expose the killer; and in fact, he did. So there was a partial happy ending but not one that I would have expected.
My First “Scary” Porn Story that Really Got to Me.  
(Age 57)

This one bothered me for a day or so because I could actually imagine that it could really happen unlike the story I related above. The premise of this story is that scientists actually identified a gay gene in human DNA. As a result, laws were passed that all male children reaching age 10 were tested to see if they carried the gene. If so, the child was either castrated by a doctor or nurse or a “clam shell” was fitted over the boy’s scrotum which could not come off as the opening was too small to pass the testicles. The “clam shell” device contained a small radioactive particle which eventually killed the testicles and they shriveled as they died until they were shriveled enough for the device to fall off the scrotum. Boys thus altered were sent to “summer” camps where they were all instructed in the details and methods of gay sex. At the completion of their training each boy was partnered with a known pedophile. As long as the man only interacted with his assigned boy, he was not prosecuted. If he strayed, nullification and life imprisonment awaited.

As I said at the beginning, I can actually see where this could happen if a gay gene is actually found. Thus, it really bothered me for a day or two.

© 23 January 2012

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is, TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Dreams by Ricky

     The first “dream” I can remember occurred several times between birth and the age of one. I’m asleep (how else could I have a dream???). Suddenly, two things happen at once: I see the color green as if it were an old green-screen computer monitor. The green is everywhere I look, but I am not looking anywhere but ahead. I also feel a funny sensation in the pit of my stomach (of course, I had no idea what a stomach is, but that is where I felt the sensation). The feeling was associated with falling. I think, “Falling, falling, falling” with no language to express it. I feel what I later identify as “fear,” but I do not wake up. It will be some time before I even understand the concepts of “me, I, I am me, not me, not me but you, mommy, not the mommy, and daddy”.

     Thirty-four years ago, I finally understood this dream. One night I was placing my sleeping first born into her crib, when she slipped out of my arms and fell the last four inches. She did not awaken and my green dream popped into my mind and I understood. My father had the habit of tossing me (as an infant) into the air and catching me as I came down. The feeling of negative gravity became associated with falling. I never liked him (or anyone) tossing me up because I hated the falling feeling. To this day, I do not like roller-coaster-like rides because the falling-feeling fills me with fear.

     This next dream is gross but perhaps is an early indication of my sexual orientation. It only occurred between five and ten times when I was between three and four years old; and before I received a traumatic spanking for exploring my penis. First, a little set up. In June of 1951, my mother and a friend took me to visit my grandparents’ farm in central Minnesota to attend their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We were there for some time as I have photographs of me with my third birthday cake taken on the ninth of June. Their anniversary was not until the twenty-fifth. There was no indoor plumbing at that time, so I learned how to use the outhouse, which seems to provide the framework for my subconscious imagination to dream about.

     In my dream, I am inside the outhouse, down in the pit looking up at other people’s butts and penises. The pit was clean. In a companion daydream, I would imagine being swallowed by a giant and pissed out his penis.

    I have no explanation for these dreams. At this age, I had not discovered the pleasures in manipulating my penis or the difference between males and females. I did not even understand the significance of the words “boys” and “girls.” I do know that when potty training was in progress at age two, I really gave my mother “fits.” So, perhaps I was still interested in body functions at that stage, but I really don’t know.

    Around twelve years old, I began to have dreams of flying. This is no mystery to me as I had recently rediscovered my childhood large, illustrated, Disney version book of Peter Pan. When Disneyland first opened, my parents took me there; I was probably seven. Of all the rides and sites to see, the Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland rides were my favorite. So, I rediscovered the book and at the same time, I was telling myself that I never wanted to grow up; I suppose my dreams of flying began there.

     In my flying dream, I could only fly if I held in one hand, a handful of the dreaded #2 pencils. I could escape from anyone trying to catch me. I would also “show off” to my schoolmates. Over the course of several such dreams, (they were serial in nature) I gave in to my friends and schoolmates’ requests to have a pencil so they could fly also. One by one over several dream episodes, I gave away my pencils. Every time I gave a pencil away, it became harder and harder for me to fly, while everyone else could fly perfectly well with only one pencil. When I finally gave away all but one pencil, I was grounded and the dreams stopped. I guess it was no longer enjoyable.

     A similar dream began after I joined the Boy Scouts (at age 13) and could not advance in rank until I could pass my First Class swimming requirement. In this case, I began to dream that I could breathe underwater. This dream also stopped when I finally passed the requirement one-year later.

     I also had at least one scary dream that would repeat somewhat regularly and exactly. In this dream, I was scared because I was being chased by a huge T-Rex. Eventually, I would reach a large three-storied building, which appeared to be around 100 yards long. (It resembled a long corridor of rooms like in a hotel, but that is all it was, just a corridor, no hotel.) I would enter the ground floor at the left end of the building just ahead of the T-Rex. I was afraid he could see and get me, if I stayed on the bottom floor, so I went up the stairs and started running down the corridor towards the other end. Inside, I could see that the corridor is lined with rooms with no doors. As I ran down the corridor I looked to the left out the rooms’ window and the T-Rex’s head would be there and his right eye was watching me as he ran parallel to me on the outside of the building. To gain some distance from him, I decided to go down the stairs located midway between the building’s ends, knowing that the T-Rex would have to go around the building to resume the chase. As I exited the building, I saw my mother and little brother and sister standing there. I made them follow me but they could not run fast enough so I found a “hollowed out” large tree stump and we all crawled in and waited. Shortly, the T-Rex arrived but could not detect us and went away and the dream ended.

    Sometimes, I would wake up early in the dream, breathing hard. At first I would just lie down again and go back to sleep. But, after three episodes where I just went back into the same dream at the same place I left it, I would get up and get a drink, etc. before I went back to sleep to insure that the dream was gone.

     After leaving home for the Air Force in 1967, I began to have home-sick adventure dreams. These dreams revolved around the geographical area of my home at South Lake Tahoe. In these dreams, I was in control of where I went but not all the details of whom, (or what) I would meet or whether or not they were hostile. If I went west, I would end up in a cavern with a secret entrance to an old mansion. If I went east, I would go to the desert area east of Carson City and have a mine adventure. To the south, there was just forest and no real activity so I did not go there too often. Eventually, I got over being homesick and the dreams ended.

     While in high school, I had several dreams with a sexual theme. All were within different school designs, but all the settings were in boys’ locker rooms. In some dreams, a few boys were already engaged in sexual activity. In other dreams, no one was. But in all of those dreams, the object of my desire was available and willing but at the crucial moment just before consummation of desires could begin, my mother would walk in; what a mood killer. That is when the dream abruptly ended. Could I just close my eyes and re-enter the dream as I did with the T-Rex one? Nooooo! I was very frustrated as a teen.

     When I was 63 years old, I finally figured out why my mother was always showing up at the wrong time in that dream. When I was five, I received a spanking (a very traumatic one for me) for examining my penis. My mother was the one who caught me at it and immediately told my father who rushed in and spanked me. Therefore, in the dream my subconscious was stopping me from doing something that I had been punished for doing.

     I did not remember the sexual dreams until forty or more years after they stopped. Clearly, I should have recognized the implications of these dreams, but I was so naïve that it just did not register.

© 1 May
2011




About the Author
Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, CA

Ricky was born in June of 1948 in downtown Los Angeles, California. He lived first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach both suburbs of LA. Just prior to turning 8 years old, he went to live with his grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years while (unknown to him) his parents obtained a divorce.

When united with his mother and new stepfather, he lived at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After two tours of duty with the Air Force, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he lived with his wife of 27 years and their four children. His wife passed away from complications of breast cancer four days after 9-11.

He came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. “I find writing these memories to be very therapeutic.”

Ricky’s story blog is “TheTahoeBoy.blogspot.com”.