I went to another room [now not a restaurant, but a house]. All those birds were coming into the house…windows open, getting cold and they wanna stay. One is sitting on on my shoulder, but unpleasantly squawking. I try to speak to her, but she does not copy the sounds.
There was a
Hitchock movie called ‘The Birds’. I recall that
Tippie Hedrin was in the movie. She was in another Hitchcock movie called Marnie– my eldest sister’s name is Marney (she was named in part because of my father’s fondness for this film). She
hadn’t called me for my birthday. Maybe, I wished she (so, who is ‘she’…my sister?,
Tippi, …) had called (she later did a day late). One expects to be remembered by those that you love, and that love you, on that day. There may be some resonances too to my first pet, - not
Tippi but Tiffany – Tiffi for short, a little
lhasa apsa dog, who died, I remembered, on my 6
th birthday. She was loved, she always affectionately remembered you, and is now remembered by me.
...windows open, getting cold and they wanna stay....It was truly getting cold in my bedroom as I slept, as I have a habit of keeping the a.c. up high.
I had passed by a sign the night b/f the dream while driving. It said ‘Exotic Birds’. I wished to stop and see them, but I
didn’t as I needed to drive a friend home and it would become late. Again, there is the notion of time and not having enough of it…both short term (needing to my friend home), and long term (yet another year of life has gone by, marked by a birthday).
While in college near Boston (where the ‘original’ Indian restaurant
Taj Mahal was) - a girl I did not know, at the time, came up to me in our cafeteria and told me her friend wanted to meet me. After a brief introduction and exchanging names, She said to me ‘There are always so many exotic women around you, you lucky bird!’. This witty remark depended on my real name also being the name of a bird. So, in the dream I got to be with those exotic, intelligent birds - which I’d been deprived of the night before. That is, I wished to have those University educated birds around me.
I had recently met a girl from Iran. But, she had said she was from Persia, which I thought was odd of her to say instead of Iran. This must have struck me as exotic, and not only because she was Persian. I have been spending a lot of time trying to find a
Persain cat, which are also referred to as Exotics.
The next part of the dream refers to two birds – one, a parakeet I’d had when I was a child, and the other, a Parrot from a Poem by the Persian poet,
Rumi. The apparently annoying squawking of the dream is pleasurable when I recall that in the poem by
Rumi, the Parrot would enjoy even the squawking of its fellow, beloved birds (parrots, but perhaps also Robins?) to the sweetest music.
I recall that when I was little we had a parakeet, which I tried, but never could get to 'parrot' my words. My Exotic friend, like my parakeet, would not copy the sounds, or thoughts, of others. Again, there this admiration and yearning for originality. I must have liked the fact that this Exotic parrot [my Persian friend] had many original things to say.
I recall now another friend of mine, not from Persia, who had once read to me a poem by the Persian poet,
Rumi. It was called I think the ‘Indian Parrot’. And, I recall this foreign friend telling me that he was the Parrot in the Poem the 'Indian Parrot'. What the Parrot says she yearns for most is for her freedom…and, she gets it..... I recall, though, that in the poem, that while the parrot yearned for freedom – it also yearned for even the squawking voices of its friends, more than the sweetest music. They enjoy even each others squawking voices, and by extension each other’s company. We were able to appreciate the other's voice, even when the opinion was not agreeable...even more so, for that reason.
*Thank God, she is fine in real life, so far as I know.
**I looked for the poem and found a similar line – “the sound of their quarreling high in the trees would be sweeter to hear than any music." It may have been that in the translation I had originally heard, it read squawking. In either case, the meaning is similar.
http://www.mythfolklore.net/3043mythfolklore/reading/rumi/pages/12.htm Some of the content and interpretation had to be left out...some things can't be said even on a private blog, which is after all, public.
