A Wasps' Nest

A night of uncomfortable dreams, only one of which I remember in any detail, and one other only in broad outline. The latter had to do with discovering, to my huge sadness and pain, that what I had imagined to be the love of my young life turned out to have been an illusion. Where I had thought to play an important role in the life of the object of my passion, I discovered in some way that I had meant nothing to her--that she scarcely even remembered me. I woke in the middle of the night in great despair...

I do recall some detail from later dream, closer to morning time. It found me clearing out a big storage tank of old stuff--things that had been thrown there higgledy-piggledy over the years and left neglected. The huge metal container, incidentally, was also filled with icy water: to reach the objects at the bottom would require climbing down into the water and bringing them out.

I had two assistants for the unenviable task. One of them I recognized as Daniel, my real-life assistant, who however played no major role in the dream. The other was a bright young woman whose identity was unknown to me.

We retrieved as much as we could without actually climbing down into the tank, and I realized that I could not ask my helpers to do the really awful part, climbing into the cold water. I was not even sure what was down there at the bottom, trash or treasure, but I prepared myself for the shock of the cold and stepped down into the tank--which mysteriously, but thankfully, was suddenly empty of the water I had feared. Instead, though, I began to notice something worse...

Wasps. (They're called yellowjackets by most people over here, but I have always called them wasps.) At first just a few of them, buzzing loudly. But then more and more. "Oh my God!" I yelled. "Oh my God!" And Daniel was asking me what was the matters. "Wasps," I said. I realized I had climbed down into a wasps' nest.

I needed help. The wasps were now swarming over me. I felt a thousand of them, glommed on to my lower back like a brace. More and more of them. At my request, the girl assistant swung open the top to the adjacent tank--these things were like dumpsters--to let the wasps escape, but they started swarming over her, gathering her mouth. She was panicked. "I can't speak," she started to say--but soon the wasps had covered her entire mouth, sealing it closed...

At which point I woke. I usually have some sense of what a dream could mean, but this one has me totally bewildered. Could it be connected to the earlier dream, when I had felt so rejected? What was Daniel doing there? And who was this young girl? I know that I have recently been rummaging among old memories, which may well be represented by all that stuff at the bottom of the tank. Intriguing, though...