Kanye with Aunt Nancy's coffin

When something is repeated several times in a dream, I take it as potentially significant.

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It was snowy and windy outside, and I was inside a structure that I thought of as a "pillbox," but when I pictured what it looked like from the outside, I thought of it as looking more like a pink Thermos bottle. It was the same shade of pink as Jackie Kennedy's famous pillbox hat, so I suppose that was the connection. Inside, it wasn't pink and seemed like a garage or storage unit -- concrete floors and walls, no furniture.

I could hear someone outside in the snow, coming up to the door. It was the artist formerly known as Kanye West, and his stopping by seemed utterly unremarkable, as if he were just some regular guy we happened to know.

Ye was carrying a big box shaped like a coffin, but obviously not a real coffin. It was made of pieces of plywood nailed together and looked like some cheap prop that hadn't been painted yet. The ease with which he was carrying it made it clear that it was quite light and therefore empty.

Ye explained to me that "Aunt Nancy" had gone to sleep in that box and never woken up, and then he showed me why. He lifted up the coffin so that the bottom surface was visible, and there was something written there in pencil: "Please wake me up at 5 p.m. Aunt Nancy." Apparently no one had seen the message, because she had carelessly written it on the bottom of the box, and that's why she had never woken up.

I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be some sort of weird joke, or if I was to understand that Aunt Nancy had died from sleeping too long, or had been mistaken for dead and buried alive, or what -- but I was pretty sure that that was Ye's own handwriting and that the whole thing was fake.

"Ye, where did you get this?" I asked, and he said the name of some generic American retailer you wouldn't expect a billionaire celebrity to frequent -- Best Buy or Home Depot or something of that nature. I took this as an admission that he had bought plywood and made the coffin himself, and that "Aunt Nancy" was either alive and well or had never existed at all. Ye took the coffin back outside, put it in the back of a white van, and drove off.

A few minutes later, my mother showed up at the pillbox. I said, "Hey, 'Yeeaay' was just here" -- drawling the diphthong in an exaggerated way -- and then proceeded to tell her everything, about the plywood coffin and the Aunt Nancy story and all that. Since my mother's name is also Nancy, I made sure to clarify that Ye had obviously meant his own aunt, not her. She listened to the story without particular interest and later left.

A few minutes after that, a generic "man" came in, and I told him about what had happened with Ye and then about my telling my mother.

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So the Ye-with-a-coffin story occurred four times in the dream: First I experienced it, then I told my mother about it, then I told the man about it, and then I told the man about telling my mother about it. No idea what it means, if anything, but the repetition itself seems to make it worth noting.

I assume "Aunt Nancy" has something to do with Anansi, the anthropomorphic spider trickster of West African folklore. I know very few Anansi stories -- just the usual stuff an American child is exposed to in the name of diversity -- but running a search for anansi coffin turned up this:

As time passed, Dew worked especially hard and tirelessly to build up a large amount of wealth. He bought a scythe, hoe, axe, new clothes, and other equipment. Dew then told his mother his plan: he would tell Anansi that she had died and would then make a mock coffin in which to bury her. In the meanwhile, Dew wished for his mother to hide in their home upstairs while he prepared, so she did. Dew then made a coffin and announced her death to the village, inviting them to come see her burial. Once they had arrived, he snuck his mother from upstairs and had her hide underneath the floor where the mock coffin lay, as well as the many things he'd purchased, as he knew Anansi's greed would spurn him to steal from Dew if he saw them laying around. Now that the plan was in order, it was time for the mock burial to begin. . . .

I'm quite sure I had never encountered this particular story before, but the coincidence with the dream is impressive: the name Anansi/Aunt Nancy, the "mock coffin," the mother. I'll see if anything develops from this sync-wise.