I used to keep better track of my dreams, though perhaps not as elegantly as Mlle Ghoul does. The following is four year’s worth of jottings for my own record, if anyone cares to read those sorts of things.
(14 Jan 2011) I was going on a business trip with a boss from two jobs ago. The house we were supposed to stay in had a bathroom with a large picture window that faced into an enclosure at the local zoo. In the enclosure were brilliantly yellow peacocks and two tigers. As I stared, completely shocked by seeing tigers in such an otherwise banal space, one of them pounced and tried to attack me, but he merely knocked his head against the window. Then, I was knitting something out of a beautiful red wool and my cat caught hold of the knitting needles and destroyed them. Perhaps the lesson is to beware of small tigers and small inconveniences? Then to confuse myself, in the dream, I dreamed I was dreaming and realized these dreams I was dreaming in the dream were a continuation of dreams I was dreaming in a dream right before I went back to visit the United States last June. I’m not sure if this is true or not but it sure could be.
(12 Jan 2011) Going to sleep with too much caffeine in my system, I dreamed a friend invited me to his house, a pleasant lakeside affair that was shared with several housemates—quite different from the dark, creepy abandoned structures I normally dream about. The other housemates were having a party in another room so I felt like a bit of a second class citizen. I was amazed at how wonderful the house was inside, beautiful blond wood paneling, lots of plants, intricate stairwells, and at the friend’s urging I helped myself to much of the party food, making sure to rinse off the dishes after each meal. Finally it was late and the friend got tired and I had to go home. Except, I only pretended to leave. I loitered some time in a tree outside, making sure everyone went to bed. Then I swam in the lake and made myself at home in a guest bedroom. One of the housemates upstairs started playing Paul Simon music loudly, which I thought was rude so early in the morning. I then saw it was after 10 AM and I would soon be discovered. Realizing my friend was awake I burst into his room. “I need to use your printer,” I said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He didn’t seem surprised at all to see me.
(8 Jan 2011) I dreamed about guava tarts, cats and my grandfather. He wanted to give me some water-proof book about piloting boats down the Potomac. I took it and read it out of politeness.
(7 Jan 2011) I dreamed of various things, like going to live in Fernando Pessoa’s house. In the dream it was tiny and out in the wilderness. I tried futilely to push heavy bookcases around and the cat was not feeling well.
(4 Jan 2011) My dreams were choppy and strange; a windy landscape full of misunderstandings. I went out for donuts without trousers on. K. rented a pickup truck instead of a regular car and found a strange camera inside it. I was angry I couldn’t drive it. A former roommate who I greatly disliked recommended me as a consultant for a biological anthropology professor’s syllabus. I sat down and read through it—he had fashioned it in a zine format with copious citations from Twitter. What was odd was he thanked me using the name of my blog instead of my actual name. Then a strange scrap of poetry:
The waves soothe the shore with gentle undulations
The green wisps of reeds sigh their contentment
‘The sea is a mother to everyone,’ said he.
(31 Dec 2010) I had dreamed of an old quilt my mother had made long ago. In reality, it was orange with a stylized applique of a cow on it and for whatever reason it ended its actual useful life as a sick-animal blanket. I would never let that happen to something handmade of my mother’s now. In the dream, I still had the quilt and taking bedding to the US was banned. K. wouldn’t let me keep it and gave it instead to one of his coworkers and friends to take along in her suitcase. I was pretty enraged. I woke up for awhile and then went back to sleep and dreamed instead that I was looking for someplace to take a bath, but no one would leave me alone. The dream ended with my entire family crammed into the bathroom, all asking pointless questions.
(30 Dec 2010) I dreamed I was staying on some estate outside of Manhattan on a tree-covered island. The first day there, I slept in far too late, so late that annoyed looking people walked in my room and started digging around in the closet. There was a massive library on the island that was owned by H.P. Lovecraft, who was apparently still alive and well. Every winter they would protect the bookcases (which were several stories tall) with cloth dust-covers. For some reason, the mechanism to unfurl these kept malfunctioning. Other strange phenomena took place in the library, which was traced back to whenever Lovecraft fell asleep. I spent the rest of the dream trying to keep him awake but he was a boring conversationalist. At some point amidst all this, a Tumblr acquaintance sent me a book of music in a green paper cover and I tried lamely to do justice to it on the piano. The music must have been completely invented by my brain for I know of nothing like it in real life.
(28 Dec 2010) I dreamed I had to take a test in Japanese. Two sections were very easy but the first made me write all the words out in katakana (the syllabary for foreign words), and I always have a hard time keeping the very similar looking symbols straight, even when I’m not dreaming. The next thing I knew, I was on an old steam-locomotive, apparently running away to Upper Peninsula, Michigan. My mother was with me and I tried to convince her that the scenery looked remarkably like Finland. She was unimpressed. “New York State looks just as nice,” she said. The train was having difficulty getting up a hill and dumped us all out in the 19th century equivalent of Target. The racks were surprisingly bare and it was dark and dusty. I ended up going to a swimming pool with a friend who I cannot recall now. The sign for the pool said it was closed but the man assured me it was open. The process of going into the building funneled me into an auditorium, where I sat down to take…a Japanese test. And so the dream went on, infinitely. I was lucky to escape.
(26 Dec 2010) Last night I dreamed I re-enrolled in college, at the University of Rochester. In the dream, I slept on a cot in a room with dozens of other girls. Apparently, I was pursuing a degree in museum studies, which I already have a degree in. I was speaking on the phone to my dead grandmother. I told her I was avoiding my life and although I knew it was pointless I was still doing it. I seemed incapable of concrete action. I gave my best friend the cobalt blue Aladdin’s lamp shaped teapot that belonged to my other grandmother, wondering the whole while why I would give away such a prized possession and who I thought I was becoming. When I drew back the curtain in this dream-world, I saw a snowy expanse of landscape, the trees bundled up into snug straw coverings and I realized I was in Japan after all.
(25 Dec 2010) I dreamed of a different life. I was in the Air Force, I was in a Catholic Church. It was endlessly complex and detailed and I woke up confused to find I hadn’t changed at all.
(15 Dec 2010) I had a terrible dream where I was in a car with many friends, so many of us that we didn’t all have seats and sort of just piled in. Unbeknown to us, a policeman was also in the car and waited until we had gone a distance before announcing that we were all under arrest for not wearing our seatbelts. In the dream I was tearful and upset because I felt this would ruin my life, and then I was annoyed because the policeman didn’t take my license or any information so I was getting off scot free and I didn’t think that was fair either.
(14 Dec 2010) Last night, I dreamed a bystander threw my Marimekko purse into the sea as a joke, and then chided me for being humorless when I became enraged about it. “That was THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS,” I wailed, knowing full well I hadn’t paid anything near that for the item.
(13 Dec 2010) I dreamed about dragging luggage through the airport, so many things to keep track of, some of which weren’t even the right-looking suitcases. The plane was tiny. I ended my journey at my mother’s house where one of the neighbors was making racist comments. I challenged him using the Socratic method, making him look foolish. Going home, I lost my car keys and went into the house—the neighbor, quite enraged, had followed me and stole some of the suitcases from where they lay on the lawn.
(1 Dec 2010) Last night I dreamed of Fausto and that I went to see him back in Okinawa. The people caring for him were acting dodgy and it seemed like Fausto didn’t remember me. The caretaker said he needed a rabies shot and suddenly K. was there to do it but he did it carelessly and left the needle in the cat’s skin. He winced and made human cries of pain and I removed the needle, feeling miserable to hurt the cat. Then I dreamed I was trapped in my house with some giant monster trying to attack me from the outside.
(29 Nov 2010) Last night, between the ticking and chiming of unfamiliar clocks, I dreamed of my old job at the Museum That Will Remain Nameless and that I visited two former coworkers there (one who actually had been my coworker at the MTWRN and another who was my coworker at a previous job.) I was surprised to find them both working there after all these years. My one coworker, who I shall call S., was sitting at her desk, telling me about the trials and tribulations she had suffered at her job and started crying. Feeling awkward and moved to sympathy, all I could think to do was hand her a white, lace-edged handkerchief to dry her eyes with—“It’s clean,” I offered lamely as she took it from me and daintily dabbed at her face.
(20 Nov 2010) Last night I dreamed about moving (not too shocking, there) and that someone had brought me back the pony I had as a child. I was shocked she was still alive, for in the dream I had said she was about 11 when our family owned her and she would have to be about 36 now if that were so. I suppose a pony could technically live that long.
(26 Oct 2010) Last night I dreamed I applied for a number of museum job offers, all of which were in different countries. For whatever reason, in the dream I was especially enticed by one in Singapore. All the jobs were to be announced at an assembly, and I was completely chagrined to find out I had successfully gotten the job in Baghdad, which I hadn’t even applied for. K. was super excited and offered to find himself a job in Baghdad, which I was even less thrilled about.
(23 Oct 2010) I dreamed last night I was a freshman in college again and fully cognizant of the fact this was the second time through—although I had the same roommates I did freshman year and the lovely ivy covered architecture at my dream-school looked nothing like the concrete expanses of my actual alma mater. In the dream I told myself I would spend lots of time just lolling around on the grass. I also dreamed former president Bush (the second one) ordered some exchange student to stay in our dorm and he wanted to use most of my closet space, which annoyed me.
(15 Oct 2010) I dreamed of being in Virginia looking for an apartment to buy. The one I particularly liked had a very strange layout—it had at least three different kitchens which would be redundant for someone who cooks as little as I do. Right off the kitchen was a swimming pool. Next to that room was the bedroom which had huge windows on each side, looking out onto the most verdant green lawn that sort of rose up onto a hill…leading right to a cell tower and next to a noisy highway. I tried to imagine I could get used to the noise. The realtor informed me it was selling vastly overpriced, given the market, and was at US$400,000 presently, so that was the end of that. Then I dreamed K.’s mother lent us a pickup truck to drive around. Fausto also got sick, but the vet was unconcerned. I was sitting in the waiting room when I woke up out of boredom.
(12 Oct 2010) I dreamed of hammocks and also, I think, Edgar Allan Poe.
(10 Oct 2010) Fausto scratched my hand while I was sleeping, which startled me so much I got hiccups and was distracted from a bizarre dream in which I was hiking around with a heavy suitcase, which contained, among other things, a Batman costume.
(22 Sep 2010) I dreamed I had a few cats, more than just Fausto. One day, a friend was visiting and K. came to say that one of the cats was dead in the laundry room, just lying on the floor. This particular dream-cat looked a lot like Fausto but was not. I didn’t want to see the dead cat, as it was upsetting to me but I insisted we had to bury him, and we should find a garbage bag and a cardboard box and do it, guests or no guests. With dread in my heart, I went to the laundry room and saw the poor kitty sprawled out on the floor, not moving. His back seemed to be cut, as with a knife and it was a little bloody. As I stared at the cat I suddenly said, “Come back to life!” The cat’s hind foot started to twitch and he opened his eyes, got up and seemed more or less fine. Clearly, he was no longer dead. Despite his miraculous recovery, I still wanted to take him to the vet, so I went to look up the phone number. I couldn’t read it and some of the entries for it were impossible numbers, like mathematical constants or Greek letters. How does one dial those on a phone?! I tried to dial many of the numbers but they wouldn’t go through. I grew more and more frustrated. Another part of the dream involving an abandoned couch with a severed human head hidden under one of the cushions and a quest for ice cream occurred, but those details are thankfully less clear.
(21 Sep 2010) I dreamed I was irritated by a hungry lion who stole my steak for dinner. I tried to recover the steak and realized how incredibly foolish an idea that was, and decided to leave well enough alone. Visiting Japanese people kept tramping through my apartment leaving me with their children. In the dream, my name was Sada Xavieropolis.
(20 Sep 2010) I dreamed I was in Japan somewhere that also had Lord Byron’s grave. I was going to drape myself dramatically in a lamenting pose over it for the camera. Instead, I got to horsing around and fell in the ocean, getting my clothes all wet. I then got thirsty and found some restaurant selling cups of water for 92 yen. I pulled out my wallet and for the life of me could not count the coins. I also could not order in Japanese properly, Chinese kept slipping out. It was dreadfully slow and embarrassing. Finally I found a bill worth 100 something, but it was 100 Taiwanese NT and the whole painful process of counting started again.
(18 Sep 2010) I had the strangest dream. I was running away from home via train, back to the town I grew up in. No one I’d care to visit even lives there now. I packed Fausto in my bag, which he was surprisingly okay with. Every few minutes, I’d open it and peek inside to make sure he was able to breathe. I feel like the phrase “letting the cat out of the bag” has some significance here. The next part of the dream, I was in Tokyo, outside of some museum. I noticed some schoolgirls wearing elaborate Prussian blue coats trimmed with gold sartouche braid, and wanted one. Once I got one to wear, I realized I looked ridiculous. The weather was beautiful in the dream, the rich russet colors of autumn. It was crisp and cold, it felt wonderful to wear a woolen coat. In the museum shop, I lingered over many silver pendants, and finally bought one that had a cryptic Russian word on it and a relief of a tall ship. I asked the shop keeper what the pendant said and she said it said “Slander and lies”. I thought she was lying…ironically. I went into the museum itself, which had something to do with the history of astronomy and was mostly outdoors. It was quite muddy. Some older man, who vaguely resembled Nabokov, came up behind me and struck up a conversation. I ended up asking him if he could read Russian, since I was unable to decipher my pendant. He studied it gravely and laughed, saying it said, “Slight chance of snowstorm”. I was amazed the universe brought me the right answer so quickly. We then walked through the rest of the site, which was under construction. Twice, he threw down an orange leather jacket so I wouldn’t have to walk in the mud, but I felt guilty anyone would have to act so courtly and only pretended to step on the edges of it as I hopped across puddles.
(12 Sep 2010) Last night I had the oddest dream that one of my friends was marrying my aunt. This wedding was to be beyond extravagant yet took place in something very like my high school gymnasium. It also was scheduled for Halloween. And we were supposed to sit on beds to watch the wedding, but I had no pillowcases. Anyway, my grandmother (the mother of the aunt) was there, although she is dead in real life. She was smiling and wearing a pale dove-grey colored kimono that had a Red Sox-themed badge fastened to the front of it, sort of resembling a dosimeter. This bit was directly gleaned from the previous day, as I had been looking at photos of Empress Michiko online and also another friend was telling me about baseball.
(11 Sep 2010) I dreamed I had a visa to go to North Korea, and also two more cats.
(5 Sep 2010) I fell asleep and dreamed of ghosts visiting me, all kinds of people, swirling and passing around my head, everyone with a story of their own. It was really unsettling. I woke up, wondering about it. Just then the closet door made two hefty thumps. I was surprisingly okay with that.
(31 Aug 2010) I woke up this morning and the world was still here. I had dreamed of Finnish lakes, dark and cool.
(14 Aug 2010) I woke up to the sounds of large metal cans being thrown into a dumpster from a bit of a height. Apparently this was important to do at 6 AM. It is just as well, I was having an annoying dream that involved a problem with my landlord, who does not really exist. He was being an ass and not letting my friends visit my apartment without me paying some kind of expensive fee. When I went to fill out some paperwork, the building caught on fire and I ran outside, badly shaken. Probably the sense of being on edge had a lot to do with the noisy clattering of cans. I took a nap after lunch, which isn’t so unusual, but then I woke up and thought I was awake, except I must have slipped back into sleep. In this new sleep, my life was almost completely the same except for a few particular tweaks, as in someone left a comment on my blog that didn’t really occur, someone’s blog design looked a bit off, I was still in Finland, my mother was still my mother but slightly different, etc. I realized quickly I was dreaming again, and tried to wake up and open my eyes, but I literally could not do it. I knew I was “awake” in the “real world” but the scene in front of my eyes was that of the parallel dream-universe, for lack of a better word. It was as though I was blind. It was an incredibly awful experience of being trapped between two universes, aware of both but unable to function in either. Finally, with immense effort, effort that went beyond mere tiredness and not wanting to wake up or any normal sensation, I was able to pull myself back into this life, with the accompanying sensation of being sucked in from another place.
(4 Aug 2010) Dreamed of small reddish wolverines biting me as I rode on my horse to the car-repair shop, where my old 1985 Ford F150 (an actual truck my father once owned) had over 500,000 miles on it. Did I mention this was all set in Thailand?
(3 Aug 2010) Last night I dreamed of my life in Okinawa, but slightly skewed. One August evening near dusk, I chanced to look outside and discovered it was snowing, white flakes falling thickly on the jungle, coating the palms in the yard and blotting out the now-weakened setting sun. Utterly shocked, I ran out into it and just kept going, completely ecstatic, although I didn’t understand how it was happening. I woke up feeling empty, as though I had lost something infinitely precious.
(30 Jul 2010) I slept poorly and woke up with the thought in my mind, a leftover scrap of dream, that I have to tell him about the concrete. I’m not sure who this applies to.
(28 Jul 2010) This morning I dreamed that I was late for an appointment when I suddenly discovered a large toad in my house. I tried to get it to hop into a bucket so I could toss it outside but it was less than cooperative. I suppose even the name, toad, does not sound like an agreeable animal. Worst of all, when I was nearly succeeding in transporting it to the door, it bit me on the hand with tiny perfect human teeth.
(24 Jul 2010) I dreamed I was visiting some fancy house, like one would find on Martha’s Vineyard. I couldn’t tell if it belonged to my family or we were sharing it with some other family or what. The whole house was filled with plates and crockery decorated with fish. I spent the whole dream dropping everything. My yarn got tangled badly around the rungs of a chair, I bought a magazine in Spanish instead of English, I spilled a bowl of tomatoes across the floor, and so on. I even found a dead bat and some other dead thing under the couch and wondered if someone had let the cat out. My grandfather gave a mighty roar from the garage and rushed in the house, holding his hand, which he had cut on something. I went to get a towel to press on it, as when he showed the wound to us it spurted blood and we knew he’d need to get stitches. When I came back with the towel, he had already gone to the hospital. I retreated to the back porch with the dog that I had in the dream and the neighbor woman glared at me and made me feel unwelcome. Suddenly I could myself from the outside, and I was much much younger, maybe twelve or thirteen, since I had super long blondish hair and the wistful expression of someone who always feels like they’re in the way. In the dream was an amiable blond haired young man who seemed to be from a well-off family, and was pretty much unflappable. None of my clumsy accidents or boorish relatives or faux pas seemed to bother him at all, and he had done many clever things like travel to Italy and know exactly how much food would fit in his lunch container, and so forth. He was kind and friendly and I don’t know who he was although I must have grabbed a face for him out of my brain somewhere, whoever it might belong to.
(23 Jul 2010) This morning I woke up at 4 AM as usual. It was still dark outside and I had just dreamed I was involved in some conspiracy in Sweden that involved crumbling mossy graveyards and precariously piled bookstores, as well as some quaint and imposingly laid out hotel. It occurs to me it would make a good movie if only I could remember what exactly was going on.
(16 Jul 2010) I dreamed I was back in Okinawa on some darkened shore but able to chat with people on my computer. I saw the water receding sharply out to sea and looked in the distance to see a giant tsunami on the horizon. I left everything behind and ran uphill, barely escaping. I found my car, which wasn’t mine and realized I had somehow transported in time back to the 1970s, yet I was still in Okinawa. I tried driving but nothing was very familiar, and construction and angry drivers forced me off the road. I went into a store that was still there in the future and the proprietress, a much younger lady, gave me a hard time. I looked at some overpriced clothing and she implied I could not be in the store if I could not read Japanese. I can read, I protested, and she pointed to a character I did not know and I lamely mumbled that while I understood its meaning I could not pronounce it. Her laughter pounded in my ears as I fled the store. I had no refuge, nor would I find one for another forty years.
(24 Jun 2010) I dreamed my roof was leaking terribly. I raced around gathering buckets to catch the water. Some Native American guy named Carl kept trying to talk to me.
(7 Jun 2010) This morning I had dreamed of cats. This afternoon, I was exhausted and thought I’d lie down for a few minutes. Instead I fell into a deep sleep for several hours and became confused. I suppose, because of the time of day, I thought I was actually awake. Except my dream-life was strange. I was a fashion model and had to wear painful cages on my feet…I wanted to ride my bicycle outdoors but poised in the doorway I could see nothing but sterile blackness outside and vague slitherings from the hillsides and I decided against it. My fingers were bleeding great drops of blood from many cuts and I tried futilely to bandage them…I thought I was awake and talking to someone and wept and wept. Last night I dreamed of the two eldest sons of George III, the future George IV and Prince Frederick. I have no idea if I was one of their numerous sisters (there were 15 children in the family) or not, but we were hiding in the garden from some disagreeable person or other. I remember thinking in the dream although George IV did not turn out to be a successful king, he was nice enough as a child. It was my most historically accurate dream to date.
(29 May 2010) I woke up with the word sybaritic in my head, although I doubt this island could be described as such. I dreamed of waiting in line for plane tickets. And something else I can’t quite recall.
(26 May 2010) I dreamed my eyes were impossibly blue, like cornflowers, and sometimes when I looked into the mirror I had no pupils at all, which was really disturbing.
(11 May 2010) I dreamed a wretched dream which I knew was some kind of Stephen King story I had read before (not a real story, I think) but I couldn’t remember how it ended in the dream, although I could see the volume it was featured in and even remember him discussing how he tweaked the plot in the Forward. I knew there were three versions of it, and one was vastly different than the other two. There was something about an athlete Nixon had appointed, who I *was* apparently. There were leaves on the ground hiding venomous snakes. I threw a brick at them to scare any away. In the dream, I had a companion that I can only think was much like the character Piggy from Lord of the Flies. He kept running off and making illogical decisions and I couldn’t keep up with him. The dream went through all three torturous incarnations, following the imaginary story I couldn’t remember the ending of. All of them were focused around some creepy library building in Maine, where no one was who they purported to be and the building was really some kind of murderous dungeon. It was really stressful, to say the least. By the third cycle, I started recognizing characters and knew there were terrible things to come but I could do nothing about it. To get in the library the third time, we had to change our shoes. Piggy ran on ahead and I looked desperately at the woman handing out shoes as if she could help me but she stared at me impassively. I didn’t know which door he had gone into and choose one that said something like “MSN Convention Ahead”. I found a table with my dream-friends (all male) asking me where he had gone and chastising me for losing him when suddenly from inside a soup tureen next to me, I heard his mournful voice. Somehow the building had put him in there…this was all too much for me and I grew tired of the dream since I had had it three times and couldn’t seem to escape.
(3 May 2010) I had a bad dream K. had a twin brother who died at birth. The twin’s name was Louis something and nobody was ever allowed to talk about him ever, except I somehow found out about it and then couldn’t stop thinking about it. Probably more important was the fact I felt all my relatives hated me.
(24 Apr 2010) I fell asleep on the couch and dreamed I discovered a golden gecko underneath my pillow.
(18 Mar 2010) I slept poorly and anxiously, and had bizarre, luridly colored dreams. I’m pretty sure I don’t dream in black and white, but I just remember oversaturated purples and greens and cartoonish scenery. Someone had a ‘headache in their ribcage’ and there was a dilapidated house that was supposed to belong to some rabbi, that was absolutely full of cockroaches. There was also some kind of resort with a swimming pool; it was too hot and too crowded to swim, and I spent the dream wandering around, desperate to escape.
(13 Mar 2010) I dreamed of a friend I had here, who has since moved away. I saw her in the mall, and she was with other friends, and made some airy remark canceling plans of ours and did not introduce me to her other friends. I felt snubbed and irritated but tried not to show it. Somehow, I ended up in a car with her and she was chattering away and suddenly she became demented, insane, or ill and I realized she needed to get to a hospital right away. But first, I had to wrest control of the car, bring it to a stop, change seats with her, and try to get there safely. The car was difficult to drive; it wouldn’t shift out of first gear. The engine made a terrible and dangerous whining sound. I found a train station, with a stained and decrepit locomotive that seemed to be hauling filth, but the conductor, a sleepy but young Chinese man, said I could put her on the train for a very inexpensive price. I was debating whether or not to do this when I woke up.
(11 Mar 2010) I absconded with my pillow to the couch, where I tuned to some random channel and then I don’t remember much, except I awoke from a dream in which Tabatha Coffey told me I was perfect for this receptionist position, and realized my subconscious mind had been enjoying Salon Takeover. This is much better than the time I dreamed a bear was eating my face, and realized I had fallen asleep to something like Fifty Deadliest Animal Attacks.
(10 Mar 2010) A vast endless plain of white snow and grey shadowy skies, near a frozen stream. In the middle of this landscape is a beautiful flowering tree unlike any found on earth, some exotic combination of lilac, cherry, wisteria and everything beautiful in spring, delicate blossoms covered with a wet dusting of drippy snow that makes black marks on the trunk of the tree and wet holes in the snow cover beneath, exposing tufts of long buried grass brilliantly, impossibly green.
(6 Mar 2010) Last night I dreamed I was as old as I am now, but somehow I was outcast and my mother and sister were homeless, too. We were wandering around the town I went to high school in and looking for someplace that we could live in that no one would notice. I remember walking up a hill, that is actually present in the town, but for some reason I was lagging behind my mother and sister, and I recognized my high school calculus teacher walking behind me. I figured she wouldn’t remember me, and it was also dark outside, but I heard her say my name, so I had to turn around and speak to her. She was walking next to my high school biology teacher, and there were some other students I remember from high school that I haven’t spoken to since, nor have really thought about in the intervening years. The feeling I had at this point was one of apathy. I don’t remember being embarrassed about my circumstances or feeling excited or interested in anything they were saying. I only wanted to catch up to my mother and sister. I left them behind. When I finally did, it was lightly snowing and we found an abandoned mansion that was nearly all locked up. In appearance, this mansion looked exactly like Lizzie Borden’s final home, Maplecroft. We went into the kitchen and started making ourselves dinner, and my sister went to explore the rest of the house. For some reason I knew there were several secret passages in it, leading to tiny hidden rooms in the upper stories. As I was preparing a pot roast, I asked my mother if she was sure we could stay there, and wouldn’t someone come and find us? She answered that a murder had recently taken place in the house, and that no one would live there, so we could stay as long as we liked. I thought it was odd in the dream that we would want to stay in such a house ourselves. In the middle of the house was a snow-covered courtyard and I found my sister trying to break into the rest of it. At this point, Fausto was sitting on my chest like a Fuseli-demon and the rest of the dream scattered away as I woke up.
(2 Mar 2010) I was in Finland. I was checking my email at a computer along the sea (because of course, in Finland, there must be Internet everywhere). I was wearing a nightgown, a raincoat and had a blanket. It’s possible I was homeless. At some point I started weeping, feeling abandoned. Some woman tried to take my chair. I started miserably for home but I forgot my raincoat and my blanket. This so dejected me I didn’t know what else to do. There was a carnival in the street but I was unable to enjoy it. In fact, it was blocking the entire sidewalk. Just then I noticed someone standing next to me…wearing my raincoat which fitted him poorly. I was surprised but started laughing when I realized he was trying to make me smile. He saw I had left it behind and went to catch up to me. It turns out in this dream-world, he was a rather famous Finnish cartoonist. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, I told him. He was pretty nonchalant about being famous, and somehow we ended back up at the sea and I was now wearing a swimsuit, where he started telling me about this annoying American girl with blonde hair who was trying to put on a giant American flag bib-necklace. Oh, that is my sister, I said, wondering how she got to Finland. Then he felt embarrassed. Just then, the rest of my relatives burst in. They seemed fatter, but mostly the same. Apparently we were at some party at the cartoonists’ house. His mother was about 90 years old and looked like Anna Wintour. She sat in one of those woven plastic lawn chairs chain smoking and staring off to sea. The cartoonist passed me a note, which read, “It was too good to be true.”
(20 Feb 2010) I dreamed I was some kind of a servant in a fabulous mansion, perhaps like the ones on Fifth Avenue in New York’s elitist heyday. One evening, the owners decided to have a dinner party, and I, for whatever reason, decided to kill them one by one, with something non-gory, like a poison dart. I lurked behind heavy oak-paneled doors and swathes of damask curtains, doing my nefarious deeds. When I had finished I ran out the backdoor, past the confused face of the cook, into the snowy March evening. Blades of grass were peeping through, as spring was not far away. I raced down the slushy dark streets into the dawn, on my way to somewhere, feeling remarkably free.
(16 Feb 2010) I dreamed I was moving. In my mind I could see the endlessly long sloping hallways of a hotel, but this time they were new and not crumbling into dust. I laid everything I owned out on a bed and discarded it all; I would take nothing that didn’t fit into a suitcase; I would leave everything else behind. It was literally old baggage. In particular, I remember some sweaters and other clothes I had long since gotten rid of in waking life, and it was strange to see them again in a dream, tossed aside. There was some measure of urgency to all this.
(13 Feb 2010) I dreamed I was trying to protect my sister from being caught for some crime she did, while at the same time feeling guilty and not wanting to go to prison myself. The whole thing was so irritating, I was glad to wake up.
(31 Jan 2010) Last night, I had a very strange dream that involved Tumblr and some kind of extremely specific conspiratorial mystery. In it, uncertaintimes had posted a story on his blog about an airline pilot who had been struck by lightning while flying a plane and had survived. Five other people on the plane at the time, the flight engineer, three passengers, and a flight attendant, were also struck in the same incident, all surviving. For some reason their names were not released to the public, and when I saw the story I became intrigued and decided to find out who they were. I then posted my own results and the now elderly pilot ended up contacting me and uncertaintimes, trying to get us to stop sharing the information to the public at large, as it was more than a simple atmospheric phenomenon. It was never quite explained what the significance was, but when I went back to Okinawa, my house was ransacked and no one had been feeding my cat for the last week, but he was fine.
(26 Jan 2010) Last night I dreamed about ice and snow, that I was camping on some ice-shelf with a family I didn’t know. Maybe it was supposed to be mine. There was another group, also, in the area, and it was all lighthearted and fun until part of the ice-shelf collapsed and the other group tumbled into the icy sea, along with most of our food. They were just gone. There was nothing that could be done, so we simply had to accept we’d either freeze to death or starve.
(13 Jan 2010) I dreamed of .jpg files.
(29 Dec 2009) I dreamed someone stole my Hodgson set, the empty space on the shelves actually made me RAGE in my dream. I don’t exhibit anger in dreams very often…although one time I dreamed I was being interrogated and was having a terrible time answering questions and I actually woke up crying for real.
(12 Dec 2009) I had been dreaming of a junky new-to-me car that apparently cost $500 and was dark green. Also present in the dream was Morrissey, who for some reason, pressed my hand to his heart so I could feel it fluttering madly. How incredibly odd of my brain.
(11 Dec 2009) Last night I think I dreamed about every single person I have ever known; real, imagined or virtual, seemingly hundreds of people in a complicated narrative that left me perplexed and a little sad, when I woke up.
(10 Dec 2009) I had a very weird dream I was somehow in high school again or possibly college, but I was living at home with my mother and sister. My mother was entertaining some kind of gentleman who had iron-grey hair and a penchant for dressing like a Revolutionary war hero and he kept commenting on the various books I had in the dream, to my consternation. “But I like HISTORY,” I interjected, blushing furiously. My sister was late for work, she was supposed to get up at 4 AM, but in her haste, left us all a note in crayon on a pillowcase, which I then spent the rest of the dream trying unsuccessfully to wash, as it was too much for the already overloaded washing machine.
My assessment: too much peanut brittle before bed.
(27 Nov 2009) I dreamed I was a green sea serpent and spent my life alternately chasing and being chased by the only another green sea serpent over the oceans of the world.
(21 Nov 2009) I had this very weird dream I was caring for this half-Chinese baby, which I am not sure was mine, except some of the baby’s hair was rather blond. I was walking all around this mall in Taiwan with this baby and there was some kind of an earthquake alert, so I had to run home. I was running down my old street in Taipei and into my crappy old building. Running up the stairs, I realized I should have taken an apartment on the first floor, because the baby is kind of heavy. Once I got to my apartment there is a huge model of some piece of land, perfectly to scale, with real grass and flowers in miniature. It is at this point I realize I am dreaming, so I kind of test how close I am to being awake by trying to move out of the dream, but I realize I’m stuck in there pretty fast. I pull out some of the flowers in the model and realize that, by some magic, I have altered the flowers in the real place, and they are gone forever.
(27 Dec 2008) I had an epic dream of snow and a frozen sea and somehow I was on the crew of a ship and I was supposed to help do something, the ship was setting sail too early, I could see the lights of it in the distance and I ran around on the snowy shore in a lavender nightgown and got someone to help me, there was also a magic German shawl that was made of oily wool that had way too much sizing on it, and my old boss was there. Also there was a party with lots of pink and cake in a tiny room which was somehow related to the house I lived in in high school.
(24 Nov 2008) I dreamed an elaborate narrative, involving many things, including me waking up with extremely blonde hair, my uncle losing an arm in some kind of accident and being OK with it, a pile of package slips in my post office box and lastly, my male cat adopting and nursing a baby raccoon.
(19 Oct 2008) Last night I had a bizarre dream that involved most of my family, including my recently deceased grandmother. We were all on a shopping trip to a strip mall, that standard of upstate NY consumerism, where half of the stores look like zombies might be hiding inside, due to their decrepit nature. Somehow I got left behind and while hurrying to catch up I passed a young woman with a pale face and hands pacing frantically outside the entrance to some long since defunct store, like Ames. “You have to help me,” she said, grabbing my arm in her cold fingers. “I’m so thirsty…” Startled, I noticed a Japanese-style vending machine. The young woman shook her head. “I want Pepsi,” she said. “Well…all they have here is Coke Zero,” I said. “It’s kind of the same thing…I’m sorry…” She flew into a rage like a supernatural beast and shrieked, “It’s NOT. THE SAME. THING. AT ALL.” and vanished. I didn’t remember the dream at all until I was in the parking lot of the supermarket and suddenly it all came rushing back.
Just now, I woke up from yet another nap and somehow this one featured an evil horse that died under mysterious circumstances and everyone was arguing about how old it really was. I think Judge Judy was involved somehow.
(29 Nov 2007) I had the worst nightmare, with an excessive amount of specific detail that somehow my brain cooked up into a horrifying amalgam involving K and I living in a gated community in Occoquan, Virginia in this fancy McMansion house. One day, a man who looked a lot like David Carradine, drove up to the house in a blue and wood paneled van with a Colorado license plate, and demanded entry. With him were these two coked out women who sat on our porch languidly and yet, suffering at the same time. I panicked and dialed 911 and described the situation in a calm and rational manner to the woman on the other end, and she didn’t seem too concerned. Because I didn’t really know where I was in the dream I was having a hard time giving her my address, so I thought to look on our mortgage bill and it was 288 Barton Hill Road. The three people tried to gain entry in our house, but our front door lock was broken so K. had to physically hold the door shut and I would peek out the window and call 911 every now and again, because no one was showing up. Finally the David Carradine-man drove away and feeling bad for the two coked out women, we let them sit in the living room while we waited for the ambulance or firemen or whatever to arrive. I happened to gaze out the large picture window in the back of the house, which oddly, faced a huge lake and also a rather absurdly placed mini-mart. Just then, a large airplane blasting rock and roll music, came barrelling across the sky and just like that, crashed into the lake and slipped immediately below the surface of the waters. I couldn’t believe what I had just seen, and after the initial horrified shock, I realized the 911 people were never going to show up because this was obviously a bigger emergency.
Finally, the 911 people called me back and the ambulance driver was a cool Asian guy, who was lost and I tried to give him directions…just then a horde of K’s parent’s middle-aged friends arrived for an impromptu potluck dinner, so I made the coked-out women stay in the basement while I looked for serving dishes for this awful plate of lima beans someone brought. At that point, I realized the dream was getting way out of hand and forced myself to wake up. It was 5:15 AM, and K was puttering around, so I told him what happened and he asked if I had had any spoiled rye the night before.
(15 Nov 2007) Last night I had some horrible dream that these Mothman things kept manifesting outside our living room window and flying around the house. It was awful. The worst part is that they weren’t sinister or trying to scare me, but at any given instant they’d be looking in our windows. One of them had a handful of old black and white pictures that turned out to be pictures of me when I was much older…and I was horrified to wonder how they had ended up with them.
(30 Oct 2007) I dreamed I used some weird bleach mixture on our kitchen counter top and it kind of ate the corner off of it, and then I was worrying about our loss of value in our home, and how I was ever going to replace the counter top. Throughout the dream I was carrying a boa constrictor wrapped around my arm.
(9 Feb 2007) I woke up from a bizarre dream where my pet turkey had rampant testicular cancer and needed to be rushed to the vet immediately. This caused so much angst that my rational mind realized it was just a stupid dream and I woke up so I didn’t have to think about it any more.
