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Friday, December 9th, 2005
(I seem to be remembering more dreams these days.) Last night Nathaniel was planning a long-distance run from New York to Washington, D.C., in protest of the war. "Planning" is too strong, he just decided to do it; and I said I would accompany him. After a few blocks I got tired and said I would get my bike, then double back and ride along with him. When I returned he was also riding, an expensive Italian bike (maybe named Torrino, I'm not sure) that it turned out he had liberated from being parked on the sidewalk. I felt worried and tried to tell him I didn't support that sort of thing. The last image of the dream is me looking at the bike, which still has part of a U-Lock hanging off its front wheel.
posted morning of December 9th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
Last night's dream involved charting a course for a day trip. I was pedantically explicating the route, with whiteboard and pointer, to Deedee and my nieces, who were not familiar with it. We were at home in New York City, on the Upper West Side. The plan was to drive first south and west, to a Canadian city, which was identified, but I cannot remember how, nor what we were going to do there. Then we would double back east into Toronto, where I would attend school; then east into Queens where we had some errands. There are a couple of levels of misnaming going on here. The most obvious (to me) is that New Jersey has been dubbed Canada, and Newark Toronto. Then there is the reversal of my day -- instead of living in the city west of Newark and commuting in to New York City for work and school, I am living on the Upper West Side (where my school is IRL). (I believe the unnamed Canadian city west of Toronto was a dream representation of South Orange.) Not sure what all this means but it seems kind of interesting.
posted morning of December 7th, 2005: Respond
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Saturday, November 26th, 2005
Last night I was watching a Beatles movie -- I remember at the end of the movie/dream, when John was rushing about trying to produce a film, saying to Belle Waring, "What is this movie? It's better than Let It Be [by which I meant Magical Mystery Tour] but not as good as Help!" -- she agreed but did not know either. I felt aggravated at there being a whole nother Beatles movie about, which I knew nothing of. For part of the film I was onscreen, trying to inveigle my way into hanging out with the lads; my plan was to convince George that I was a friend of John's, and John that I was a friend of George's -- surely I lifted this from the plot of some old sitcom or buddy movie. George and Ringo were rather short, and John and Paul were taller. Everybody was at Coney Island or some similar place, where John was trying to put together a large conceptual art project. I do not remember its precise nature but it involved a lot of props -- scenery, costume jewelry, etc. I was in the process of bullshitting George about my acquaintance with John, when Jim Cross called me on my cell phone -- I pretended it was John and told him to "come on over here, I'm with your friends" (I had suddenly forgotten George and Ringo's names) -- come to think of it this particular sequence had a strong feeling of "I Love Lucy" to it. There was a short sub-dream after this one ended, in which I woke up and feverishly scribbled down the bit about John's conceptual art project on a tablet I kept on my bedside table for the purpose of recording dreams. Ellen woke up too and was reading over my shoulder -- my script was uncharacteristically sloppy and I was misspelling a lot of words. Lots of self-reference in this dream about movies and writing. Ellen said this morning, she thought we should rent "A Hard Day's Night". Update: We are watching "A Hard Day's Night" this evening, and I am surprised at how close the appearances of the Beatles in my dream were to this movie (except for Ringo, who looked more like the Ringo on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's, sans uniform). But: the dream Beatle whom I identified as George, was John; and vice versa, mutatis mutandis. Don't have much clue what this means. Sylvia, in response to the lyric "I know this love of mine, will never die, and I love her": "Sometime you'll die!"
posted morning of November 26th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Last night I was reading a post by Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings -- it was a long post about a visit he had made to meet the new baby of his friend Caithie in Iowa. The first part of the post was how he had felt out of place in the Midwest, like his clothing identified him as an outsider. He spoke of reading a newspaper editorial opposed to gay marriage and gay adoption. (Here I picked up that Caithie was gay.) The next part of the post was about a restaurant where he had dined, one nationally famous for its mouse. (I think that's what it was; this part of the post seemed to have been composed and edited in a hurry with a lot of typos.) He said he thought the dish was actually some different small rodent; it was very good, "but the end kept running out from under my fork." This seemed like an excellent image -- there was still the main body of the post to read, but I skipped down to the end wanting to leave a comment about how I was picturing a little mouse tail and legs scampering away from his fork; but at this point (in the dream, still) Sylvia came in and started climbing on me, which took my attention away from the post and woke me up. (Odd that I could be woken up by something happening in the dream.)
posted morning of November 15th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
At the beginning of last night's dream, I was reading an article in a history journal, regarding the discovery of a bag or box lunch which Martha Washington had prepared for her husband. It was believed to have been from early in their married years. The central idea of the article concerned the discovery that George or Martha (I forget which) had not deigned to smell the lunch; or maybe that George had requested that Martha not smell it, or prevented her from smelling it. This was presented as evidence of a lousy marriage, specifically of George denying Martha's full humanity. I remember thinking both, Wow, how would you discover something like that in the historical record, and That seems like a pretty wild extrapolation from the data point. Maybe they just didn't have good smellers. Or something. I was reading the article on the train going in to work and as it arrived in Hoboken, I climbed out the porthole onto the platform -- this train was equipped with portholes next to each seat. I was sitting in the front of the second car, as is my wont. Apparently I did not wait until the train came to a complete stop, because a conductor (a black woman) yelled at me from the first car to please return to my seat until it did. As I made my way back to the second car so did she, more quickly than I, and when she got to my seat she found the bag lunch which I had forgotten to take with me, and handed it to me through the porthole. Not sure what the relationship is between the two parts of this dream.
posted morning of October 26th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, February 20th, 2005
Been a while since I did one of these... In my dream last night, there was a small fad amongst the educated bloggers, to come up with words with a high number and variety of shades of meaning, and then to write a snarky post exploiting the variance... I think this stemmed from the debate between Katherine and Rilkefan at Obsidian Wings, over whether the Bush administration's lies merit the term "lies" or not. Anyways, I was reading a post on one of the language mavens' blogs, introducing a new twist -- his idea was to pick a word with many shades of meaning, and write rhyming definitions for all of those meanings. (He cheated a bit by ending all of his definitions with a participle, naturally they all rhymed.) He also used some interesting invented words in the definitions but I am not sure whether this was part of the game or part of the dream-reality. Meanwhile Tom Tomorrow was writing a narrative comic strip about his being given a mansion by the widow of a wealthy industrialist -- the mansion was in the town of Tomorrow, California, in the Sierra foothills. I entered into the strip's reality and added a storyline in which my mother was ballooning in the foothills and landed by the Tomorrow mansion. Scooby-doo-esque adventures ensued (with a bit of a darker edge) but I don't remember any of the details.
posted morning of February 20th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, April 6th, 2004
In this dream I simultaneously am watching a movie (or something like a movie) and am a character, or several characters, in it. The dream-cinematography is shot from a God's-eye point of view, looking down from on high, with quick cuts to shots from the point of view of the characters. We see a village on the banks of the Colorado River -- middle-class American suburbia of the late 20th Century. One night everyone goes to sleep... When I wake up, groggy, I can't quite tell what it is that seems different -- everything's changed somehow. Everyone in town feels the same way but no-one can quite remember where we are or what we're supposed to be doing. For instance it seems like there is supposed to be a lot of water somewhere; everything's so dry. A professor at the local college works out that we have all been asleep for a billion years, and slept through major geological change; the river that was once there has been covered over by hundreds of feet of sedimentary accretion. (The physical town, instead of being buried, has somehow floated on top of the sediment, and has not deteriorated.) My house, it turns out, is directly above the old river and will have to be destroyed in order to dig down to the river bed -- I feel some resentment and "why me?" My wife is running a load of laundry (the machines are located, oddly enough, on the third floor) and I notice a bulge running across the floor -- still groggy I wonder idly if this is something to do with the geological changes; suddenly shocked into awareness I realize that the drainpipe is clogged and our plumbing is going to burst from the strain on it. Will I be too late to fix things? This is the cliff-hanger ending.
posted morning of April 6th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, April 5th, 2004
Fitful sleep last night with scattered images. I was at work when everybody left the building to participate in a funeral procession for a friend of one of the traders. It was huge, masses of people marching through the streets; one of the people I was with yelled to one of the others that he thought our group was creating too much of a stir in the procession which it had been late to join -- the response was "But he was a Tiger!" -- I took this to mean that he had been from Detroit or had gone to school there -- this was accepted as valid reasoning. The march seemed to have no destination; we were walking down a freeway which I identified as CA rte. 99 in the foothills of the coast range -- I decided that I would walk as far as the peak of the next hill and then turn back. By the time I got there the rest of the procession had melted away and it was evening, I was looking back over the long vista of the Central Valley. I was at Hoboken and noticed my train had a baggage car in front of the engine, quite unusual as (a) the trains are usually just passenger cars and (b) the baggage car was open shelves. I was carrying Sylvia's Clifford doll and Hello Kitty doll plus some suitcases and decided to leave the stuffed animals in the baggage car. Then walked down to where I was going to sit and put my suitcases down there. I then thought to ask the conductor whether I would be able to get at the baggage car when the train stopped in South Orange; could not find a conductor so I walked up to the engine and asked the engineer, who shook his head mournfully. So I picked up the stuffed animals and was walking back to my seat when I noticed a cop following me. I started running -- at this moment the train pulled out of the station and I jumped toward it, holding on to a rod projecting from the side -- the cop did likewise and we had an exciting chase scene but I can't really remember much of it. I was looking in the window of a new general store and noticed a box of old tools for sale -- the (quite fat) owner was standing near me and I asked if the store was opening soon; he said not for another month at least but if I wanted to go in and look around that would be alright. So I went in -- the store was quite full of people for one that was not yet open -- I saw a really nice old set of weights but decided it was too bulky and I was too far from home, to spend any time actually debating whether to buy it or not. I found the tool box and looked through it -- not much there except an interesting brace and bit. There was some pretty weird looking machinery behind it but again, too much effort involved in transporting it for me to spend any time on it. I asked the owner if I could buy that brace -- a lot of the people in this store were making transactions so I think his saying it was not yet open was purely pro forma -- and he said it was 50¢. Then I got involved with trying to get it shipped to me, can't figure out why I would have needed this, and trying to find a box of the right size.
posted morning of April 5th, 2004: Respond
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Saturday, April third, 2004
We were visiting the Bay Area and dropped in unannounced on my Uncle John and Aunt Jane -- it turned out to be a kind of bad time for a visit as stuff was pretty hectic there -- Jane's daughter Heather (who was only 5 or so in the dream world) was screaming because she did not want to go to bed, and John was on his way out the door going to a conference of some kind. I felt kind of embarrassed that our main reason for coming was to get John's opinion on the plausibility of a plot device we had seen in a science fiction movie (I can't remember what, something to do with rockets) and was trying to make small talk, which was not really working. Sylvia also started wailing. John made a date with us for the following Friday afternoon, and we headed back to where we were staying.
posted morning of April third, 2004: Respond
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Tuesday, March 30th, 2004
I ran into Maurice while walking down Eighth or Ninth Avenue in midtown -- I was taken aback as he is one of the last people I would expect to run into on the streets of New York; he has been sojourning in Perth for a few years now. I asked "Are you Maurice McGinley?" and he replied with a congenial grin, "I'm Patrick Conley!" (No idea.) He wasn't saying much as I walked east with him -- on Seventh Avenue was an abandoned construction site, where he was now living. I watched as with each step he took into his grotto, his veneer of a functioning member of society came away; when he reached the bottom his clothing was in tatters and leprous scabs around his waste were oozing pus. I was gripped by dread as I tried to resolve myself to follow him but before I could act, I woke up.
posted afternoon of March 30th, 2004: Respond
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