The Dream That Was Real
December 1986
typed on looseleaf

This dream was so preternatually vivid that for a long time I considered this to have really happened, albeit in some alternate reality. Now, I see very strong shades of Flowers for Algernon. This was dreamed in 1986, but it also brings to mind The Matrix, and the Stargate episode "Learning Curve." I'm also weirded out to see how this compares to the recent "Institution" dream I had. This is a very long transcription, and somewhat abstract, with fewer of the environmental details that I seem to recall more often in dreams now--but I think this has to do with how I wrote it down, rather than how I remembered it at the time. I've edited the original version only a little, for clarity's sake. I was seventeen when I had this dream.
 

I was taken to a place: a group of large buildings with some hills by the sea. In the beginning I was conditioned--mentally--and was supposed to proceed through a row of carnivalesque stalls, buying food and drinks, paying the proper money, saying the proper words. The stalls were set in two rows facing each other, as on a midway, and they were in color, like stage sets; but there was a broad black and white pathway between them. The colored stalls were a constructed reality; the black and white path was real. I should have been able to see only the brightly colored stalls, turning from one to the other without seeing or being aware of the "behind-the-scenes" walkway. Yet I saw both.

Despite my dual vision, I went through the stalls. However, I did not deliver the rote and ritual responses that I should have. I was answering bizarrely, but in a way that seemed natural. My mind was blank, I was amiable. I would smile as I spoke cryptically and heretically: I had no conscious notion of my heresy--that I was violating social ritual--but there was this part of me, very small and very far down inside me, that was giving me these answers. That part of me was fighting, but I couldn't acknowledge this or it would be captured--if that rebellious part became conscious it could have been trapped and erased, so I practiced my heresy without knowing, really, what I did. Yet it was right and natural, and it pleased me to answer in ways that confused and upset Them. However, they managed to trap something. Maybe my unconscious went even further underground for a while, because the black and white backstage/reality became harder to see, farther away and fading, then it was gone, leaving me only able to view the false, constructed reality. I did the right thing, gave the correct change, the right answers. I think I was aware that something was different but that memory was gone.

Aside: One stall, before I was captured, was a liquor stall. I was supposed to pay for a glass, drink it, then buy another, drink it, et cetera--maybe three times, or six. But I walked up, smiled, asked for a drink, paid for it, and left it there, untouched, smiling. Then I asked for another. The woman behind the counter got upset and confused, but she poured me another. I paid and didn't drink it. I think she asked me if I wasn't going to drink it. I might have just smiled. Doctor McCoy and Nurse Chapel were with me then. We went to the next stall, across the way--I went, smiling, as they followed on either side of me, concerned. I recall a sense of pity from them. I don't remember what kind of a stall it was but someone was asking me something and I said Doctor McCoy was a doctor. Then I said to another question that Nurse Chapel was a doctor. Then I said we were all doctors. Soon after that was when reality slid out. Doctor McCoy and Nurse Chapel--I couldn't see them anymore, though they must have still been there. I could only see the colored stalls--the reality that They wanted me to see, and nothing else.

The next thing I remember was watching a movie. I was sitting in a kind of curved auditorium watching the movie played across the walls and ceiling, with many others around me. I remember thinking it was just like Pink Floyd: The Wall--images and music with little plot; it was supposed to give all of us watching the same subliminal messages. Then we all began to dance--up on a higher plane, all black--with lights, a little like stars, more like a disco--but not above--they were on the floor. All the others were dancing in one group. They were hearing what they were supposed to hear. I didn't hear it as they did. I danced further away. Separate, in ecstasy that I knew was being placed in my mind, was erasing my past; conditioning me; yet still a part of me said that at least I was not with all the others--I still was individual enough for that small thing. Then the music and movie ended and we all settled back down, through the air, into our seats.

The next memory is of being in the main part of the "institution" (rather like a kibbutz). I unconsciously or intuitively knew that it was a place where they sent orphaned and abused children. Erasing their pasts so they would not be unhappy or different. But all alike. Our pasts were gone. I was content to stay there yet I did not wholly fit in. It was as if the frequency that was played to condition the minds of others did not fully reach me--as if I had some filter that distorted reception; even while I was fully conditioned to be blank and memoryless I had retained a few individual kinks. They meant nothing to me consciously yet perhaps were the few resistances and graspings of that small buried individuality, which was now the tiniest grain of sand or speck of dust in the universe of my mind. The feeling this carried in the dream was intense pathos felt by others around me, a permanent atmosphere of vague pity, of the kind that permeates Flowers for Algernon. Intense sadness.

I wanted to write children's stories. They said I couldn't because I was incapable of remembering anything about the world, reality, and so would have no reference points to put in the story so that children could understand. We were two separate places--two worlds--and I was trying to write about things that had no meaning, no memory for me. I had lost all knowledge of what things were, what happened out there; what the purpose of the lives of people was; why they did what they did; what they did. Yet they let me try to write the stories. I think they gave me a time limit; and I have the vague feeling I knew it was likely to be hopeless, yet I would try anyway to remember the past and write the stories.

My next memory from the dream is my mother. She had come for me--a distant, analytical observer "I" within the dream (separate, actually) was mildly surprised to see that she had actually bothered to come for me. She wanted to take me back into the world, reality. Take me home and reteach me my life. They said no; it was impossible for me now; even if I didn't fully fit in where I currently was, I couldn't leave--I would never adjust, the outside world held no meaning, no connections for me. I would be in my own world. So she left and I stayed.

Memory--walking down with a group of the others, down the hills in front of the buildings, low flat plain buildings in which we were housed. They were all streaming toward what I think was a playground, but I could see something else as I walked. I walked, smiling, intuitively breaking away from the others and heading in another direction, knowing it was right. It was a large, dishlike bowl place, with babies. They had been too young to be affected by their pasts before they had been brought here, so they would not need to be conditioned. They would be brought up as normal children, free, exposed to any and all ideas, their thinking uncontrolled, reality just reality, no blank, dark, inbetween spaces they couldn't see--they saw these as part of their everything. There were men, one particular nice old man, taking care of them. I went up to him smiling, trusting, amiable, and he smiled back and welcomed me. It was then that it came to me to wonder why, if they had gone to so much trouble to condition me, he would welcome the fact that I had walked away from all that. He was a little sad, too; he knew I would never be the same as I had been before, normal like the children would grow up to be, and yet I wasn't like the rest of them--that had been conditioned and were unknowing, totaly controlled, blanked. I had some spark in me that hadn't given up or in, and managed to make a few small accomplishments. I wouldn't know that I was like this. I was content; I wasn't conscious or aware of my loss or my small gain. I was just--well, I was aware that I was different from the others in some way, but not of how.

I had been a disruptive influence on the others but I had been allowed to stay, halfling as I was, doing things in my own way. At first it had seemed that none of the others would or should have noticed but they did, and began to do things out of order, not according to routing, and that's when officials (the workers taking care of us) began to get upset and disturbed by the disruption of routine. Yet they didn't do anything to me that I remember. They just tried to control the others and put them back as they were before. There was a period, very vague, when everyone was running around, doing things at the wrong times, eating the wrong foods, taking drugs and generally speaking out--in effect rebelling in basically meaningless ways. They weren't quite the same as I was yet you had to have some respect for their petty infractions, disobediences, even if they were basically hopeless and meaningless. This part I know I have forgotten--very vague--one small scene of a hotdog with LSD, and being caught and going up and down under water in some tube slides--blah, never mind.

Next full memory: watching another movie/music scene. We were all in seats, rows like an auditorium, but next to the railing running along a cliff where the ocean was. I was watching, smiling and calm and I began clapping, out of time, for no reason. Except it seemed right to me. Others began to clap also. Then two girls began to talk to the others about how they should all leave, go down to this place under the cliff, by the sea, where they couldn't be seen and could live freely. Then all the others said if you want to live by the sea, in the sea...and they threw them over the cliff and into the ocean and came back and sat down more calmly than before. I remember wondering why those two girls had talked about leaving and gotten themselves thrown into the ocean. I didn't understand why they had gotten killed and I hadn't. I was sad for no reason I could understand.

Sad ending. Somehow sadder, yet with very little more conscious knowledge and still calm, content, amiable--content to stay as I was, where I was--I went to the orientation that was being held for the arrival of a new batch of others, kids to be conditioned. This is a part I have forgotten too, but I recall I had gone there to take the training or conditioning over. Voluntarily. And I didn't know why, had no real reason; it just seemed right. I was the only one who had been there before, yet I knew only vaguely what would happen. I didn't really think about it because I didn't think. I had no memory retention, really. It didn't matter. Myself, and the new ones, were all at large school-cafeteria-like tables, and there were old condtioned ones walking around doing something vague to prepare the new ones. Though I was supposed to be the only reconditioned participant, as I looked around I recognized a few of those who had been in the first group with me. Particularly Holly Duncan. There was a kind of smiling/sad exchange of looks between us that is confusing. Neither of us could have consciously understood or known our situation, our respective positions, but there was the feeling of a difference between us that stands out in memory.

Death and Pigeons: Sinister! Sinister!
unknown -- circa 1992-3?
computer print-out

I wonder if the dreams I've been having over the last several nights have anything to do with the position I've been sleeping in--on my back, for most of the night, I think. Last night more intricately plotted dreams of death. Three people move to a small town. They wander down the street to meet people, and return again the next day, walking through many black children, perhaps a scattering of fifty, playing some disorganized ball game in the street. To a young boy in a suit [I?] say, "My, you're dressed up for playing ball." Toothy smile and forgotten response. They walk up to a table of locals who rise, greet them. Of our three visitors, the older couple finds seats, the other lady is left standing behind the man's chair, jostling to get a hip in, literally and figuratively.

Chat with the locals goes awry when the man, who was making a modest hit, asks some question that pokes too far into locals-only territory, perhaps political, touching on some secret. There is a silence or a non-answer which passes for an answer. They all leave, the man in a huff, the woman not wanting to say I told you so, but feeling it. They walk into the "old fogies" house where the man supposes they will have to go now for company. The couple who own the house are out, but their pigeons--or some bird different in name, similar in type--are everywhere, perhaps even inside, covering almost every surface with their bodies or paraphernalia. Outside in an enclosed back patio there are stacks of cages, thick stacks of pigeons, all with complicated feeding and shitting schedules, needing medicines and whatnot. Someone is taking care of them for the absent couple; the man remarks that maybe keeping company with such people isn't practical--they need all their time for upkeep of pigeons.

They walk home and matters alter as the three people become two women living in a new house in the same area, who keep trying to find a 7-11, or any convenience store or open supermarket, for a soda. No luck, though it is only quarter to nine in the evening. But the lobby of their landlord's house seems to have a crude counter stand for drinks and such, where they get a 7-Up and chat. A bit of transition here I've forgotten, where the women begin to adjust to living in the locals' town. One woman seems to be adjusting, if that's the word, better than the other. She gets a sort of phone-sex job and through it meets a local woman who was a caller, who shows up on the doorstep one night, annoying and making the other woman quite reasonably insecure, because her friend seems pleased to see the big brawny nutcase on the other side of the screen. The nutcase ignores her while shouting an offensively cheerful greeting to her friend.

More here I've forgotten, but we cut to a woman wandering into a club which is very deep and complexly designed; mazelike; going further back she happens on a room which warns against entering, but has a chair outside its half-open door. Vague image of money tied to this, and a joke or game involving the room, which you are not supposed to enter, but which is somehow designed to seem inviting. Perhaps it is a private joke. Nonetheless, the woman enters and looks around. It is a kind of meeting shrine with Nazi-type secret trappings; when she turns around to leave she sees two women in an adjoining closet-room. They see her and she's lost. She is overcome, both by the women, and by a paralysis of will. Helped to a chair in the closet, she's solicitously given a glass of water which is drugged. She's a dummy here, but that's plot for you. She is left to fall asleep in the closet.

Transition here I've forgotten. An attempt to escape, perhaps, leads to feelings of being trapped and pursued in the house, in the sinister town, with its sinister inhabitants, with their secrets. Many forgotten plot elements coalesce only in random spliced details: the original old house taken over by cultist killers, the secret coming unraveled and unconcealed, several confused murders or attempted murders. A boy--a late hero--finds some bodies and goes to find the police, but ends up at another of their sinister dens, finding and then running from a homicidal man. The homicidal man first takes out a gun to kill the boy, then--when the boy touches it--gives it to him with the bright idea that the boy should kill himself now that his fingerprints are on it.

Unfortunately, in giving him the gun, he fixes it so that it's locked; the boy can't fire. He tries several times to shoot the man, as he backs down the stairs, followed by the man descending and smiling at his ineffectualness. The boy can't figure out the trick of the locking; they wander in this way outside. The boy then breaks the gun, or does something to irritate the man, who puts a coffee can over his head and--armed with a knife--approaches the boy with the gun. He takes the gun from him and arms it. The boy is chased into a cloudy, rather soft thicket, or "thorn" bush. The man finds him and tries to shoot him, but something goes wrong again. While walking the boy back to a killing spot, I think the boy asks him if he's some particular person, thus suggesting he's "one of them." And so they head toward the original house. The gun can be shot now, and the boy casually asks if he may look at it, and then if he may fire it "only out over the lake" (he promises sincerely). Duh. He gets a bit of distance between himself and the man, turns, fires, misses a few times, and runs out of bullets--and the shots dwindle into water pistol squirts. Yet the man is somehow wounded and follows the boy as he runs for the lake and I awake as I contemplate his being eaten by a sea monster.

My Baby is a Tomato
May 31, 1995 or '96
written in notebook

Dreamed of fucking Dave E. last night--such beautiful long hair, my little troll-doll man.

Walking through strips of woods intercut with roads, went into a bad neighborhood to meet a man who was going to help us escape to Poland or Barvaria, in disguise. I sit at a table in a restaurant: I'm in disguise. I was a foreign lady, maybe a countess. I was sitting with a drag queen, maybe two. My baby was with me. Sometimes it forget its disguise and spoke English. I sang Polish to it in a lovely voice. During a period that might have been an escape attempt, I hid in a bathroom stall. My baby dissolved--it was a tomato and it decomposed into a bloody handful of itself. In my hands, cupped, it shriveled like a heart turning inside out but it was a tomato--that red-orange striation at the peeling, broken edges. The goo of the inside, the spilt, broken outwards.

Kodachrome
June 14, 1995 or '96
written in notebook

Last little bit of a dream I could remember this morning: Something about "here's your party food" and it was just pizzas and cokes--feeling of disappointment. Choosing between pizza slices. How mundane and unsymbolic. Then the last bit: walking along a field with a brown paper bag, my purse, et cetera, feeling as if I'm wearing a knapsack and am a Scottish hiker, I hike across a field and it suddenly starts to rain--but I let it pour all over me--I'm almost "home" and there's a soundtrack, "Kodachrome," by Paul Simon, sung with a man's slightly Jamaican voice. I be-bop along. Words: "I don't have much but I have my Kodachrome..." More of course that I don't remember before this.

The Second Anna
April 26, 2000
first sent to e-mail list

Sans segue, I feel compelled to say that I just woke up from a disturbing dream in which my mother was showing me a huge apartment by the water, owned by a hitherto unknown relative, and she introduced us by telling him I was Anna, but the second Anna of course, the one who had not died in infancy. (Hello?!) And somewhere in the course of the dream, things got really freaky and I was standing on a catwalk with the avuncular relative dangling by his fingernails which were really sharp claws and he went all stephenking on my ass and there was a cat involved, also with claws, and later I broke into a car, wrenched off "The Club" and began driving away from the weirdness, along a post-apocalyptic highway.

It was more interesting and creepy in reality. I'm really glad I never get trapped over there.

I Don't Wear Golf Clothes
July 30, 2000
first sent to friends

I just woke from a long detailed dream where I traveled back in time and tried to save Bobby Kennedy from assassination. We spoke for a long time. I described to him that he'd get killed in a parking garage (just like the one we were entering at the time), and during the course of our conversation asked him, "So are you really comfortable with this sense of entitlement you have?" (He was charismatic but arrogant. In the parking garage he had to get his ticket stamped on my behalf--no, I'm not really sure what that means--and they wouldn't have done it but he made a big honking stink.)

Then he brought me to a crowded hall to attend a class he was teaching. He made a big point of seating me in the middle of a row--he actually made some poor kid stand outside the classroom so I'd have a seat. Later, we knocked on a plain unobtrusive door in the hallway and were admitted to a secret society which was not at all like Skull and Bones. It was held in a dramtically narrow and sloping auditorium and membership involved being voted on, signing a clipboard, and getting a large plastic bag full of clothes. Mine were golf clothes. Another girl who joined at the same time got flowery clothes that had probably been intended for me. She was not pleased. We sat and discussed various things, none of which I can recall.

Later, I went to a laundromat which was, like, Romanian or something; it involved signing in and having a record album confiscated at the door. I did laundry in an old-fashioned washing machine--it looked over fifty years old and was really cool. 35 cents. Then I sat in a waiting room with the proprietor and some children. We exchanged candy. I gave a kid a piece of sesame candy and he was unthrilled.

Satan Doesn't Like Basil
July 23, 2000
first sent to e-mail list

I just watched "End of Days" (perhaps one of the ten worst films ever made), and then fell asleep and dreamed I was in a giant mansion where Satan's son was being raised and taught by child tutors. I don't remember much except that at one point I wandered enviously through the parquet tiled hallways in search of chocolates, and at the end of the dream I got rid of Satan by blowing some spices on him. Pepper, rosemary, and oregano, I think.

Or maybe basil.

We sent all the kids home, and as one seven-year-old was leaving she took the time to correct the Latin I'd used in my incantation. ("Isn't that supposed to be hominem, not hominen?")

All of which illustrates the basic themes of my life: need for chocolate, envy of the rich, and a fear of Satanic children who will correct my Latin.

Richard Sharpe and the Emotional Ensign
August 8, 2000
first sent to e-mail list

[End of an unrelated post.] And because I do, I will make her read about the very tail end of this afternoon's dreams, in which a sixteen-year-old ensign said "I love you" in a broken voice to Richard Sharpe, who was deeply moved. And then I woke abruptly up, damn it, and the dream dissipated.

Bay of Sofas
December 14, 2000
first sent to a friend from work, A.B.

I had this dream with you in it. I was up at this placed called M--town; it was a bit of land in Maine that my family owned, where a few aunts and my grandmother had these cottages on a lake--a bay, really. A backwoods sort of place, with dark Maine waters and a rocky shoreline. My grandmother and a few other people were there and they were impatient to leave, to drive home (wherever that was) but I said, no, no, A.'s coming, she's riding with us. And I kept looking for you, and you finally came but we didn't leave right away. I kept asking if you wanted to go now, with grandma & co., or if you wanted to stay a while and look around and then go later. But you were vacillating. <g>

So we kind of wandered around on the rocks outside the cottage and I showed you how when the tide receded we could step down into the sand and find coins--dimes and such--left there. Kind of like finding shells or snails, except in the dream it was money. And I think there were all these sofas floating in the water that we stepped on as we walked around. I don't remember much else--I think I showed you one of the rooms in the cottage, which was all wooden with these cunning bookshelves and lots of children's books.

I had some other dreams this morning but can't recall them...

The Bad Spike Dream
December 15, 2000
first sent to e-mail list

So, Te, after reading your story last night I had a dream about Spike. I'd wanted to dream about him for some time, but my last Buffy dream (my only other Buffy dream) was about Lesbo!Buffy doing a West Side Story-style knife dance (her wrist bound to her enemy's) with a girl gang (lots of quasi-Matrix fighting that my subconscious couldn't quite pull off), after which she got up on stage in a high school auditorium and crooned with the girls in a kind of heroin-chic / chick-rock kind of way.

Anyway.

Last night I dreamed that we were on a high floor of a tall building, sort of in the open air with some structural beams and things hanging out, no wall, but rather like a balcony. Spike was there, and a few scooby types I couldn't identify in the background doing a slackerish party-drinking thing, and I was just being besotted: "Oh Spike!" He came over to bite me, but there was something wrong with his face--sort of a "Two Face" mutant thing going on, as if half were acid-burnt demon, half pretty, vertically divided. And he was going to bite me, but I said, wait wait, let me get myself ready. I don't recall what that entailed, but in the meantime he made himself really pretty for me and I was happy.

Finally we positioned ourselves--he came up behind me and I slumped back against him romantically and arched my neck and he bit me with his nice fangs right in my neck and I sighed happily, and then we conjoined our, er, naughty bits. And everything was going very nicely...until he ripped out my spine, sort of like stripping the skeleton from a fish. And I was like, "Hey!" There was no pain, but I was terribly disappointed. Basically, I was saying, I wanted the good bite, not a bad bite.

But he was not interested in giving me a good, romantic turning. I struggled to get away and I realized we were hanging in mid-air, high above the city. There was this rather horrible bit where I wrenched away from him and he kept plucking long strands of my innards out through the gaping wound in my back--accompanied by sharp pain that I was really feeling despite this being a dream, yech--and he dropped me and I fell all the way to the street far below. And then I realized he had turned me, and I was going to live despite this, but with a big gaping wound in my back and probably paralyzed, and I imagined myself in a hospital bed for the rest of my life, being fed blood by nurses. Not a pretty picture.

I staggered off (upright, but bemoaning my paralysis and future) and somehow this segued into a story where I had this really great opportunity to interview a New York Times reporter about something. We met up at lunch and she turned out to be someone I knew and I was very excited, but then this reporter, one of my competitors at the paper, came up to take over the interview. She was kind of like Sally in Sports Night, and kind of like that pushy female reporter from Broadcast News (not Holly Hunter, but her nemesis). I was outraged but she ended up having lunch with us. I remember in detail the soups we had before the meal, but I couldn't eat mine--and it was the most depressing lunch, the kind where you thought you'd shine and establish rapport with your companion and you know you could have, but there's this interloper and she's the one bonding with your companion all of a sudden, in a really obnoxious old-girls-school way.

The whole point of the interview, as it turns out, was to talk about the new TV show Ed, which the NYT reporter had helped create and write. I kept starting to tell her gushy, inarticulate things about how much I liked the show ("His smile is just...guh!"), and the interloper kept breaking in with full knowledge of episode titles and minutiae and how it reflected TV history in some way or another--and every time she said something like this, they'd share a girlish bonding moment. I just got quieter and more miserable and then I eventually woke up.

The Meeting with Cake
December 28, 2000
first sent to a coworker, J.V.

....And on that note, I had a weird dream this morning about work while I was oversleeping. We were all crammed together at these long tables to do our work--Z., you, someone I don't know, and I were at one and I was like, I think these tables are a bit short. So we measured them and we were really crowded, only three people should have been sitting there. You said, thoughtfully, "Do you know where the kitchen is?" And I was like, um, yeah. I think you wanted me to sit there.

Then we had a meeting with Resolution, except there were about fifty of us in the room, all sitting at this big y-shaped table. And it was almost completely silent. No one had anything to say. There was cake, though. And while y'all were passing it out, I was struggling to get a bottled water from the machine. I remember this part vividly. It took me twenty minutes and there was no water--the machine popped open and there were all these half-full bottles floating around in melted water inside, including some weird gummy bubble bath.

So I came back down to sit in my place, and I said to someone, "This meeting isn't really taking off, is it?" Then Resolution people started bringing in other reps they'd grabbed off the floor--they queued up in a line, each holding a rep by the arm, and waited to present them to the meeting with a few words about them and their jobs; it was like "show and tell" with people. A woman also came in with tee-shirts, but never mind that. The meeting languished because no one would do anything, and I fell asleep and woke up again when the room was half empty. People were still sitting around in the twilight as if something might happen.

I went back to my desk and then I came over and found you and the others--you were setting up a new office for someone full of TV sets--A. was monitoring them, and you were crying and upset because B. was leaving on an away team. Then there was some stuff about bus crashes and a guy with a mangled leg, and me calling an ambulance, and I made myself wake up.

The One in Real Time
January 23, 2001
first sent to friends

I just had a horrible night's sleep. I was dreaming of holding a party and I felt as if I were dreaming it in real time, FOR HOURS. Horrible. For some reason I didn't prepare for the party, and I began by keeping several guests waiting on the doorstep for ten minutes while I applied lipstick. Then they came in and I went to the kitchen and washed dishes: washing plates and glasses...in real time. My mom was for some reason lying sick in bed with a cold. My dad was in there lounging with her. My brother was loose in the house and being a pest. There was an interval where I got up on a stool to get Halls cough drops for my mom from the cupboard...in real time. (There were small matchboxes up there--the kind I've been looking for and can't find--remember when I asked you about yours the other night, S.? <g>)

Then I went to find my guests and they were all watching TV. I asked if they wanted anything to eat or drink. One said a wine cooler, and I managed to find some OJ and wine, then realized I had to go to the store because we really had nothing else. So I began to take down orders for what they wanted. One guy wanted some sexy tee-shirt and I said I was going to a supermarket, and they did not sell clothes. This was the straight, boring side of town, I said--and in the other side of town (I made a hand gesture that way) the stores were closed. One of the woman guests said to him reassuringly, "I know what you want. You want some used panties, all twisted up and smelly." (Er, I think this was residual appropriation from having recently Dan Savage's column about sending used clothing through the US mail.) And then there was more, but I woke up.

The One with the Flood
January 26, 2001
first sent to a friend

I thought I'd regale you with last night's dream (or dream du juor...or dream du nocte...? uh, anyway).
 
I am sitting in a closet (very Fraserish) trying to hide myself with an inadequate selection of couch pillows, because I have snuck into someone's house. Across the room from me is an old man sitting at a table eating breafkast. The room expands out into an open veranda and we both have a vantage point to watch the dusty driveway. The old man is sending his family away; they are being taken away standing up crowded together in the backs of trucks, the kind with wooden fencing built up from the bed. His family is about the size of a village, a hundred or more, many with similar familial features--dark hair, dark eyes.
 
The old man has a plot of some kind, which is why he sent his family away. I go out into the yard, toward the barns. Beyond that is a big platform and a muddy hill. The man is following me. I jump up on the platform and look around, then leap over to the muddy hill as the man climbs up behind me. It is not a far leap, but I begin scrambling up the hill, following a line of trickling water and electrical wire. I enter the woods and trace the path of wire until I find where the water originates--from a rut in the earth leading up through some trees. I go around a tree and heave myself against it and it falls over. I maneuver it into the rut so that the water is blocked, and then I continue upward to the cabin from which the water and wire run. I go inside and find that both are coming from another closet. The old man has set up a bank of stereos and VCRs. Individual threads of water are coming from the wall inside and stereo wires have been twisted and affixed to each trickle, leading to the bank of machines, and then leading out of the cabin--creating the very path I traced.
 
I begin picking up machines and tossing them out a large window so that they smash on the ground below. I have just about got them all (six or so) when the man comes in and complains that I've destroyed his VCRs. I feel my work is done and I leave with the man. As I walk out, I look around the cabin. It's very large and architecturally interesting, all wooden interior--a complex house, really, but it also has shabby fixings and tacky wallpaper and so forth. The kitchen has a bin of vegetables and fruit, relatively fresh. I can't tell how often the old man comes here. "This is a nice cabin," I tell him. "It could be renovated."
 
We leave and head back down the hill, and I see that my tree has diverted the water. Rather than dam it effectively, it's now created a flood instead of a trickle. As I keep walking, my black patent-leather shoes sink into the mud. I think about taking them off, but then I'd have to put my muddy feet back in afterwards. At least now they are only muddy on the outside. After I get past the worst of the mud, we reach deep water, nothing like when we arrived. I sink to my chest and start to paddle. The man picks me up and begins carrying me, draped like a dead body in his arms, while I continue to paddle along next to him. He is telling me something of his plans for world domination, but I don't follow them well. Eventually the water grows more and more shallow and thins out across the asphalt highway. I slide up onto the highway like coming onto a beach off a wave, then stand upright and continue walking.
 
The man turns into an old woman and I begin to berate her for her plans to take over the earth with her giant flood. The old woman has always lived here, in Maine, and is provincial. "Think about this," I say. "If you flood them all, they'll all have to come here. Think about the entire population of New York City. Have you ever been to New York City?" She hadn't. "Millions of people. It would be like three New York Cities. Trying to fit three New York Cities into Maine. You'll have people everywhere. Imagine a woman and her family up here, hungry, trying to find a place to sit." We are standing next to a truck where her minions are unloading food. I am painting her a picture and we visualize the woman and her kids. "She is asking you, Why? Why did you bring me here? Why did you make me leave my home? I am hungry." The visualization is like a starving-third-world-children commercial, and I begin to sob as I mouth this imaginary woman's words, getting all worked up, trying to make the old woman cry.
 
And then I wake up, and I'm not crying, but have a vague muscle memory of fake dream crying.

Kittens in the Shower
February 3, 2001
first sent to a friend, S.

You were in my dream again. I dreamed you were coming over to pick me up at noon, and I'd sworn to be up and ready. Instead, I woke up at 12:15. I jumped out of bed and plugged my phone in just as you buzzed the door. I went out and called up to you: "S----?!" You called back down. You were irritated that I was not ready. You came downstairs and I said that I'd be ready in two minutes, five minutes, I'd hurry! I was frantic at running late, so a constant thread of panic ran through all my actions. I grabbed some clothes and started a shower.

The water pressure kept cutting out, down to a trickle, as I washed my hair and scrubbed soap on my body. Then there was a kitten in the shower, orange. Halfway between kitten and cat, really. It climbed in and stood on the soap dish and got soaking wet. When it got wet, it was able to climb around on the walls like a fly. I called you in to look at the kitten, very demurely and properly remaining behind the curtain. <g> You eyeballed the kitten and left, and I struggled with the shower then barreled out to get dressed. In the closet, the rod had come down on one end and all my clothes were slumping to the floor. I think I made you look at the closet too, bewailing my disorganization, and then...can't recall anymore of that bit.

There was more with my old friend Liz, who in the dream had moved out here to Seattle. Long interval where I was in her car, and then her house, waiting for her to come back, terribly hungry and nothing to eat. A postman visited, walked right inside, surprised to find me there in Liz's house. When she returned outside, stopped to talk to Liz through a speaker set up in the yard. More stuff in this vein, mostly boring, then I was in a gym trying to kick a field goal. This was a long and complicated endeavor, because we kept changing gyms, and balls, and the person holding the ball kept changing positions, and I was nervous and knew I'd fail to make it at forty yards. One of the footballs was covered in glitter. <g>

There was another bit where my friend A.B. came over (all kinds of friends in this dream) to pick me up, and her boyfriend (who in the dream was, I think, Vince Vaughn) put in my "Clay Pigeons" CD and grew enamored of it, so I had to lend it to him.

I'm sure there was more, but it has faded....

Flirty Spike
February 9, 2001
first sent to e-mail list

I dreamed of Spike! Not just peripherally but in a "My, we're being very flirty" kind of way. We were at a bar; there were three of us women, whom I'd like to be able to correlate to real people, but can't, and two vampires and some other tagalong. We all kept trading off partners, emotionally if not physically, trying to get each other worked up and then feeling jealous--it was rather like seeing ten seasons of "Friends"-style musical chairs packed into ten minutes. We had all gone to a bar. I remember Spike and the other vampire went off to play competitive pinball and I went off to get the other vampire a glass of blood from the bar, and Spike--who was suddenly cuddling up to another female--glowered at me jealously. (I'd never buy him blood.)

The buying of drinks was somewhat tedious. I asked for a gin and tonic and a glass of blood. "Do they still actually call it that by name?" the bartender asked. He was kind of mocking or rebuking me because I didn't know or use the codeword for a glass of blood. "I don't know if they do, but I do," I said. The rest of the drink ordering involved me dumping out the contents of my wallet to find a credit card, and then later dumping out a big pile of change on the bar to try and separate out some small change from the quarters to tip the bartender.

When I went back to deliver my drinks I realized there was some big stud vampire attacking the bar crowd, and my friends, and I turned into Buffy--or, since this was my dream, "Not Quite Kick-Ass Buffy." My gymnastics are always so lame. [My subconscious is terrible at choreography.] I did kick ass, though, as much as necessary. I think I even managed to hold on to my drinks.

I wish I could remember more of the beginning when I was actually going through the ambivalent "Oh my god, I'm flirting with a vampire!" phase. It was a lovely segue from previous revulsion to realization of desire.

Touched by a Michael
March 4, 2001
first sent to a friend

Hey...I just woke up from a dream about Michael. <g> [from La Femme Nikita]

I was at a party of some kind--small, intimate. Was talking to a woman, the hostess, and several time during the conversation I kept ducking into a small room. It was like a closet on the front of the house, but with a window; the room was just slightly larger than the desk that was in it. Michael sat at the desk in the greyish dark, facing the window; it was night outside. On the desktop near him was a bottle of some expensive whiskey--Glenlivet or something like that. I kept pouring myself shots from the bottle, on the rocks. He kept staring out the window, brooding, still, lost in a deep interior zone. The last time I went in I poured my drink, and apologized for disturbing him. I was whispering so softly I could barely hear my own voice. Asked him if he wanted me to take the bottle. He nodded. I picked it up and then before I left I reached out and stroked the back of his head, his hair, his neck. Can remember the texture of his hair, very strawlike and yet soft.

I GOT TO FEEL UP MICHAEL!

Life is good.