A bunch of herb school classmates from Chicago and I are at a place I understand to be my teacher Michael's house. (I have never been in his home in real life.) It is a large and sprawling place. He is nowhere to be seen.
The house has many hallways, narrow ones, with hardwood-sided walls and floors. It reminds me of a Japanese house with sliding screen doors. I have a sense that just beyond any wall or door there is water.
I am standing at the threshold of a wide panel of glass sliding doors that look out into the 'backyard,' which looks more like a huge meadow with pathways and tall grass. It is raining softly and the clouds hang low. It is warm out and the air is still. I begin to step outside onto a gravel pathway to be out in it when someone behind me asks where I am going. "Outside," I say.
I come up to a plant on the path and "know" that it is bupleurum. (I have never seen bupleurum in real life either.) It is dry, yellow, feathery. It does in fact resemble the real bupleurum, as an image search reveals. The variety in my dream seemed to have a finer, more feathery quality, but perhaps it is because it was dry. I wondered why I didn't see my herb ally, white peony, instead.
I stand up from squatting before the plant and see that others have come out onto the paths.
Heading back to the house, Michael appears. He doesn't say anything and neither do I, but he smiles warmly and takes me by the arm and we begin to walk briskly toward the house. I pass my teacher Althea and his wife Lesley, who seem to be selling earthenware on the path (?). They smile as we hurry past but they are very engaged in whatever it is they are doing.
Inside the house, Michael is leading me swiftly through the maze of hallways. "Where are we going?" I ask, mostly unconcerned and actually getting giddy at the speed at which we are moving and the unpredictable twists and turns in the narrow passageways.
At a rare wide 'T' in the hallway layout we appear to be coming close to our destination when we hear a voice coming from around a sunlit corner. Michael hurries me toward a terminus in the hall. I look behind me to see my classmate Mary Anne coming around the corner and calling my name. Michael pulls me inside a door and as I look up I see it is the men's room! He slides into a stall, and I slide into a stall a few feet from his, lock the door and stand on the toilet so my feet can't be seen. Someone comes into the washroom and leaves.
We leave shortly after that and a man outside the men's room looks at me funny. "I accidentally went into the men's room instead of the women's," I say to him. I look back and see that the women's room is directly across the hall from the men's. An easy enough mistake. It doesn't really explain my teacher, who once again has my arm and is leading me somewhere, so I say, "I really had to go, so I just followed him in there and didn't realize there was a separate room for women." There, that makes sense!
As we begin to walk down the hall away from the restrooms I see a little black cat with a tiny fleck of white fur at its throat sitting along the wall under a chair. I bend down and begin to summon the cat. I wake up knowing that this is a form of my totem animal (as mentioned in the previous post).
