Dream #2: The Whipping

In a dream I found myself in conflict with my maternal grandfather, a stoic, kind, consistent, and entirely responsible person for the twenty-five years I knew him. On this anomalous occasion he had spilled his morning cereal all over the kitchen floor and decided it was my fault. He took me down to the basement and ordered me to drop my pants and bend over, so that he could exact the retribution of corporal punishment, something that he never did, approached doing, or, as far as I know, even imagined during his actual lifetime. He used a broad belt and inflicted twenty-four lashes. He also required my dream-friend Luke (unknown to me outside the dream; like me in the dream, apparently about eighteen) to remain present as a witness, despite Luke's embarrassment and constraint. After the whipping I told my mother that I would never voluntarily speak with Grandad again. Soon after that but at least twenty years older, I was in conversation with a colleague, stating emphatically that writing was very difficult. I was trying to identify the elements of the poem that I wanted to extract from this strange experience. Luke, my grandfather, and my mother had all disappeared.
Almost as soon as I awoke I found myself thinking of Robert Hayden's poem, "Winter Sundays," which suggests that I understood the dream's unfairness as soon as I was released from it. I'm sure it was about me, not about my grandfather: I miss my mother and wanted to talk with her while she was still in her fifties; I fear my own aging and wanted to separate myself from it, from my mother's long, gradual decline, and from my grandfather's imagined loss of rationality, of being himself. The lashes were not painful, but since my mother, now four years dead, is unavailable, and since aging comes on no matter one's abhorrence of it, I think it's fair to call this a nightmare.