Voices In My Head

from my journals, 1990


Another hotel dream:  This time, I went into the hotel while Carrie stayed out in the car.

For some reason, it was in my head this evening that the way to get a hotel room was to find an empty one, claim it and then check in with the front desk.  So I walked resolutely down the main hall that cut through the hotel front to back, not even considering any of the rooms being passed as possible vacancies until I got to the hotel’s far side, to a perimeter hallway, really a motel now —where I saw one door that seemed to mystically tell me that it would open to an empty room.  I opened it and walked in.

There had been a person walking behind me down the hall —walking nonchalantly, just another patron I thought —until he walked into the same room behind me.  He didn’t say anything, but he looked like he was forming the start of a protest on his lips.  “Hey!  What are you...?” or something like that.  But I didn’t give him time for this and didn’t even turn to him and instead walked through the room to where there was another door into an adjacent room.

I opened that door and found a couple on the bed, making self-absorbed love.  I closed the door, turned around and walked out of the outer room, lowering my eyes from the man who was, I now realized, this room’s proper occupant.  I had made a mistake. And it all came back to me —remembering conventionality and realizing where I had strayed.  I walked quickly back to the front desk to start all over.
 
Carrie was there in the lobby.  There was no point in describing where I had been, but she had a wondering look on her face.  I went up to her, hugged her affectionately and decided that the best thing to do would be to propose.  So I stepped back a formal distance from her.  I wanted to do everything just right; I wasn’t on my knees, but I still assumed the air of a man beseechingly proposing to an honorable woman several levels above him.   Someone brought out a textbook —a hymnal —that had proper procedures on how to propose.  It started out straightforwardly: Not ”Carrie, will you marry me,” but something as direct but with a few more flowery words —“How grateful would I live if you should be my wedded wife,” or something like that.  And then there were a dozen other things to say, all very ceremoniously intended and laid out on the page.  Each statement came in threes: I had to make a decision on which option to read out of each trio.  The first one was often something in Latin; the second and third differed in their degree of religious or secular tone.  The effect of all this was that my perfect proposal lost much of its glamor, and I largely stumbled along.
 
But I got through it.  And she said yes.

And immediately we were in separate hotel rooms.  I was in mine with six or seven friends / relatives, and Carrie was in hers.  My room had two beds, and I laid down on the bed nearest to the wall.  I reached over for the bedside phone and started dialing a number, but someone grabbed the phone, said that’s not right.  I don’t know who it was, but he was correct: I had dialed my home number, and though I hadn’t said anything, he knew who I was trying to reach.  “You’re both in the hotel, so you don’t have to dial so many numbers,” he explained.  This, he said, is how he had known I hadn’t dialed right.  And he took the phone and dialed for me and we reached Carrie’s room.

Her brother George answered.  Somehow, briefly, I could see the whole room, and I was there, and it was the moment Carrie and I were breaking the news: We’re getting married!  No reaction.  There was Mr. C and Mrs. C and several others all leaning over something at the kitchen counter, going about their business.

But then I was on the phone again, apart from Carrie, and speaking to George.  He was concerned —not unhappy, but concerned.  “I don’t think you guys should rush it so much.  I mean, the seventeenth of this month?”  It was a date obviously arrived at in that room only; it was the first I had heard about it.

George was also concerned about our financial standing and our schooling.  I assured him that we would be okay.  I talked at length, strolling around with a portable phone.  I was doing most, if not all, of the talking now. I talked and walked, and suddenly I found myself walking outside and down a nearby street.  Eventually the reception faded.  “George? George?”  I didn’t have the phone’s antenna all the way out (—this was the early days of mobile phones—) but even after extending it I could only hear static....

I woke up and fell asleep several times after this, and I tried to finish the dream.  It seems that I did get several episodes added, but they were all hazy, and are  now completely forgotten, but each had the same positive tone on the same theme —we are getting married, and Carrie’s family wants it all to go smoothly, and somehow I have the feeling that it will.