dreams

hiya. here's a dream and some thoughts from last night/this morning.

1.04.07

a short and quirky dream I had just before waking: my friend L is at her job, but it’s not the shop where she actually works. It’s some converted older house, with a screened-in porch and broad old fashioned stairs that lead to a gallery on the second floor.

She is sitting at a table on the ground floor, with a newspaper spread open and scattered all over the table, as if she has read it several times already. On top of it, she has a roll of Lifesavers, the minty kind, out of the package and she is examining each of them one at a time, and explains to me in great detail the intricate differences between each one, and how one should go about eating them.

“I haven’t had any work to do for hours,” she said, “so I’ve been going over these. See, this one has a slight crack on the top edge...” -- how she could tell the top edge from the bottom edge, or any other edge for that matter escaped me -- “...so when you bite it, it will crack along there. Then there’s these two, which are stuck together, and that’s a bonus, but also very unpredictable. You never know what will happen.”

Not much happened after that.

***

I worry about copyright infringement in my dreams.
I worry that I might get sued for the images I dredge up.

No, but it is interesting and notable that when I do dream these days, the heavy, almost panicked sense of being lost, or more accurately of needing to find a place that I fear I can’t get to is essentially gone. This has been true for some time now. When I find myself in situations that are bizarre, and in which I sense that I am indeed meant to be somewhere else that is inaccessible, I sort of have a sense of just going with it, rather than a loss of control, and desperation to regain it.

I don’t know if this change correlates to quitting the restaurant or not, or if I consciously feel better about where I am in life during my waking hours, but it’s been pretty consistently that way for a while.

Come to think of it, houses and buildings always seem to figure into my dreams, almost as if they are silent characters waiting to be discovered, or with whom I must communicate on some other level. There is the older, wooden-floored house of the above dream, there is the decrepit factory of the “blocked passageway” type of dream, and I‘ve had a few involving a large, almost communal type of house, one where dozens of people live, or at least stay from time to time, passing through. A sense of family, but an extended one.

Ah, fuck it. I’m probably just insane.

***

AH! Now it’s come back to me, the other dream that occurred around the same time as the Lifesaver dream: I am in Florida, I guess, at a Magic Kingdom type of place. There is a new, much-anticipated display/ride/event about to be unveiled. As we approach (I have no idea who I am with, but I know them, in the sense of when you go to a concert with a bunch of friends of friends that you don’t really know, but who you shared a ride with) we can see that the thing we’re about to see is a long series of huge iron buildings, a la the Eiffel Tower, strung together in a line. They are somehow suspended above everything else, and there is a series of stairs leading up to the display.

This is a hot ticket, lots of people milling around, and I ask the guy walking next to me where we go to buy tickets as we mount the stairs. He says, “tickets? We don’t need tickets--I’m press.” And he flashes me his press pass, and I also notice his cameras strung around his neck. I say something clever like, “Oh, I love having press passes! I also get to--” and he kind of tolerates me but doesn’t really acknowledge what I’m saying, as we are now approaching the press area.

It is a screened-in porch, with astroturf carpeting, plastic lawn chairs and shitty little tables, all occupied by fat and cynical looking older people. My photog friend manages to squeeze into a single chair along one wall, crammed in with a bunch of other attendees. I try to do the same but there is no room. So I cross over to the far side of the room, looking for a chair I can grab, weaving between these people as best I can, though it is a tight fit. I reach the far side of the room and grab a chair, and make my way back.

But when I go to set it up, it turns out the chair is some terribly convoluted, arcane thing involving strange, origami-like foldings and unfoldings, and I quickly give up and instead sit in a shitty, broken lawn chair listing to one side that was already there. The long bridge of iron buildings is now being lit up by fireworks and a light display, but you can hardly see anything from the angle of the room we’re in. the other press people don’t seem to care--too cynical I guess.

But I want to see more, and I get up from my sunken, broken chair and lean in closer to a window across someone’s table, wondering if there is a place one can stand outside on the walkway to get a better view.

As I rise, I realize I am naked, of course. And an older lady with great huge Jackie-O sunglasses and a jet-black bouffant hairdo notices and points and twitters. I am not really struck by any kind of modesty, however, and decide to just waggle it at her in a playful way. I am feeling quite comfortable being naked. Her entire table laughs good-naturedly, and someone tries to aim a camera at my junk and take a picture. Just as the flash goes off, my hand covers the essentials. We all share a good laugh. Then I’m with L examining Lifesavers.

But I think I’m dressed. Hmm.

***