Climbing the ladder of my dreams

Climbing the ladder of my dreams

By Nancy Pickard

 

There were two recurring dreams in my childhood:

Recurring dream #1:  I'm climbing a ridiculously rickety ladder to a great and terrifying height.  Often, the ladder is one of those metal construction types with holes manufactured into them, and flimsy handholds.  The ladders in my dreams are barely held together.  There are wide spaces to traverse.  Nothing but space surrounds these ladders.  I am scared out of my mind, paralyzed with terror.

Recurring dream #2:  I'm in a dark basement or attic.  Frightened of I know not what.

I've been fascinated by dreams for nearly forty years.  I've kept journals of them.  Studied Carl Jung until Archetypes were coming out my ears.  Had Jungian dream analysis just for the fun of it.  Belonged to a "dream group" where we discussed our dreams.

But the most satisfying dream work" I've ever done didn't involve talking about them or studying them.  It was all about living them in real life.

I have a professional photographer friend, Roy Inman, who was doing a photographic journal of the renovation of Kansas City's magnificent Union Station several years ago. 

It's our elegant old train station, which I remember from the days of the Harvey Girls, and train porters, and long wooden benches under a vast ceiling.  That ceiling in the Grand Hall is 95 feet high.  I know that fact now. . .because I climbed a metal construction ladder up to the top of it.

One day, Roy called me and said, "I go over to the Union Station every Friday night to take pictures after the workmen are gone.  There's a construction ladder in the very center of it that goes all the way to the top where there's a false ceiling where the painters work.  Sometimes I take a friend along.  Want to go?"

I remembered my dreams.  I felt my fears.  I thought, I have to do this, or I will forever regret that I didn't accept this challenge.

"Yes," I said to Roy, and my heart began to pound long before that Friday.

When the day came, I was excited.  This was gong to be my chance to overcome something major, a terror going back a long, long way.  I felt shaky; I felt determined.  I met Roy in the parking lot and we entered the huge building, now dimming in the twilight.  Our voices echoed in the vast emptiness inside. 

There in front of us was The Ladder from my dreams.

It was silver metal.  It had manufactured holes in its steps.  It had railings made of two thin horizontal bars fastened to the stairs by vertical bars.  There was space between the bars.  A lot of space.  You could look down through the holes in the steps to the floor, or up through the holes above you to the ceiling.  It twisted and turned.  Eight steps up.  Small platform. A turn to the next eight steps up.  The next platform.  And on and on, up and up.

It was my nightmare ladder.

My knees weakened, my bowels did, too.

I planned to hang on tight with a hand on each railing.

"Here."  Roy handed me a bulky black tripod.  I stared at it, uncomprehending.  What did he want me to do with it? 

"Carry this up for me, will you?" he said, making his wish all too clear.

Then he also handed me a large light bulb, one of those things with shutters and clamps.  I began to understand why Roy invited friends along.  We were his ladder-climbing pack mules.  Weak laugh.  With all that stuff in my arms, I was barely going to be able to grasp one railing.  I thought of the hoary old plot device: make it bad for your heroine, now make it worse, now make it impossible.

"Ready?"

"Okay," I whispered.

He went first.

"Don't look down," he said, but that was impossible.  I had to look at my feet to be sure each one landed securely, and every time I looked I saw through the holes in the metal. All the way to the floor.  Alllll the increasingly long distance down.

Because it was metal, the ladder vibrated with our steps.  It trembled, like me.

Halfway up, I whispered, "Roy, I don't think I can do this."

"Yes, you can," he told me in a  calm, firm tone.  "Just keep telling yourself you can do it.  You've already come halfway. "

 I'm stubborn.  It's hard for me to quit if I believe I'm doing something that could change my life for the better, even when everything in me is screaming that it wants to STOP! I inhaled a shallow, shaky breath and put my right foot on  the next step.  My left ankle gave a little.  I really really wanted to cry.

I told myself, construction guys run up and down these steps every day.  It's nothing to them. 

It was something to me.

Up, we climbed, up and up.   My hands were sweaty.  The tripod and light were slippery in my grasp.  My legs were quaking.  I thought I was going to drop Roy's property.  I thought it would slip from my hands and tumble all the way to the bottom, clanging against the ladder, and I'd scream until it crashed to the floor.  And I'd be glad that I didn't have to carry it any futher!  I thought I was going to drop me, too.

One more step, another one, another one.  Panting.  Sweating.  Roy talking me up.

"We're here," he said, quietly, and then he turned and grinned at me. 

 We stepped off of the ladder and onto the false ceiling!  A floor!  I was standing on solid wood!  Okay, there were maybe 87 feet of empty space below us, but it was solid ground, sort of!  I suddenly felt so joyous!  I did it!  I made it all the way to the top!  I was so flushed with triumph that when I saw a small, ordinary painter's ladder going to the very tip top of the ceiling, I climbed it, too.  And up there was my prize:  the original ceiling painters had left their painted signatures there in 1914.

And then we had to go down.

It wasn't as hard.  It's supposed to be harder, right?  It wasn't.

Only when we were once again on the floor did Roy say, "Most people I bring here can't do it.  They get part way up and have to come down again.  You're one of only three people who made it to the top."

"You could have told me that earlier!" I yelled at him, and then laughed hysterically.  But I realized that if he'd told me that most people don't have the nerve, I might have used that as an excuse to give up. 

"Me, neither," I might have said, and turned carefully around to go back.

We toured the whole place then, and I practcally skipped through all the long halls and ornate galleries.  I was giddy.  I'm still giddy about it.  I triumphed over my nightmare—in real life.  And those basement dreams?  When I wrote my first novels, I did it in a basement office, working a lot of the time at night, with the light on only in my office.  Creativity emerged from down there.  I realized a few years ago that I'm not afraid of the dark any more. I can walk into a pitchblack room—basement, attic, any room—with no hesitation or fear.

  When have you faced a fear and stared it down?

Do you think it changed you in any way?