BOX BABY

Though I had this dream when I was an adult, I’m posting it out of order because I think it illuminates my earlier state of mind:

I keep turning up variously-colored “Dream” file folders from different periods of my life—each one abandoned after only a handful of entries:

I dreamed I was in a store buying something, when I noticed my friend Linda, lying on a bed by the door with a baby that was swathed in blankets. I’d heard from someone that she had a disabled child but didn’t know whether they meant that Amanda had been injured or that Linda had had a second baby who was handicapped. As I took the baby-bundle in my arms and tried to settle myself on the bed, I kept inadvertently sitting on my friend.

At first I thought the baby had a head and trunk, but no arms or legs. Then I saw it was merely a box, the size of a cereal box—with a sort of prosthetic face. It had a smile that could change to a half-smile and eyes that could shift slightly. Wanting to see its real face, I opened the door on the front of the box (like a fuse box cover), expecting to find a head, however deformed. Instead I found, with shock, nothing but mechanical circuitry. Then the child spoke to me, with a desolation that struck me to the core. ’Sometimes I don’t think I’m human at all,’ it whispered. Feeling entirely unequipped to answer such despair, I said, “If you have a mind, if you can think, you’re human.”

When I woke up and remembered the dream, I knew that the box baby was me—and wished I’d reassured my infant self, “If you can love, you’re human.” I realized what I’d said revealed my father’s overriding influence: that it’s mind, intelligence, only, that matters—not heart, not soul.”