Dreams Conjured

The earliest worth noting, or the earliest I am capable of recalling for the lasting indelible impression. There was no plot. It was a sunny day at my grandparents – the one’s who lived down the street from me. I was on their creaky back deck, and there was a party going on – a brass band was there, the Seattle Mariners were there, and the Hawaiin Punch Cartoon was there. There may have been others. I was very ambivalent about sports in my youth, so it is odd the Mariners were there. I was at least intrigued that a cartoon character could be in my dream, though I felt he was a little unruly and overexcited. As for the brass band…I’m not certain they were playing. I feel like there were just a lot of people milling about with horns, trombones, and tubas. I may have been eight or nine years old. I woke up wanting to be back in my sleep, relaxing with and making new friends. New friends I had absolutely nothing in common with.

Another came a couple years after living on my own. It was a characterless studio apartment in SeaTac; I was working nights and though I didn’t know it at the time, I was deathly sick. When I say working nights – imagine the worst possible schedule. Sometimes from 9pm to 9am; sometimes from midnight to noon – I would work 4 days on, 4 days off. I had a tough time determining whether I should spend my off days getting back on track or trying to keep myself up all through the night. Anyways, the dream. There was a mad, loud, slow thumping at my door. This is in the tiny studio apartment. And I push my brow to the eyehole and ask who is out there but I cannot see a thing because whoever is on the other side is covering it up, or leaning against it and hurting. I ask who is it, what do they want. And I hear these animal like noises from the other side, like someone in pain or the straining sounds of a dog being trained to speak like a human being. I open the door, and once the door is cracked the thing pushes its way inside. It is like a man, but so tall he cannot stand fully upright in my studio. He wears nothing but a loincloth diaper and his unwieldy hands are larger than my head and he is lunging and grasping at me. In a strange way, he reminded me of Baby Huey. Man Child. The monstrosity looked to be more of baby fat than muscle. I try to get away, I try to communicate – but I cannot look into it’s eyes for his Neanderthal brow. He lumbers and grasps and continues to make these strained noises from his throat, chasing me around my tiny studio. I jump over the half-wall enclosing my bed to get away, but this only stops him momentarily. I try to fake one direction, then another, but he isn’t fooled and he is a lot quicker than I think and he finally gets me – gets his large hand on my shoulder and pulls me to him and then he gets the other forearm around me, pulling me in and then I wake up. Or I think I do. I believe I wake up in my bed where everything is black and there is the thumping at my door again. Only this time I don’t get up to go to the door; I lie there and try and shout who is it only now it is I who sound like an animal that cannot form words. Then I wake up for real, in a sweat, with a dry throat in mid-misshapen vowel formation. I think this is the only dream within a dream I’ve ever had: where you think you awake but don’t. My heart was racing. I had to get up and look out the peephole to be sure everything was okay outside.

Then, several years ago. It started so pleasant. It was the silvery blue of twilight, and M & I were staying in a seaside town. It looked European, with cobblestone steps everywhere and nautically themed shops that looked like they were constructed from old pilings and dressed in abandoned fishing nets. It was a charming place, and though we knew we had to get to dinner soon we were distracted by so many little novelty shops – we spent a lot of time in a well-lit haberdashery where there were so many shoppers that we were all shoulder to shoulder. We are packed like sardines, and we talk and joke with these people who just like us want to buy a hat or a scarf and move on. M & I finally make it back out to the walk-way, and we spy a little place that has windows into a basement restaurant where there are numerous white clothed tables with little lit candles – when we hear the screaming from far off. People begin running about, or just walking fast, in different directions. I lose track of M, and join a young bohemian couple and walk quickly with them, but they are just as curious about this as I am. Then we see the lights. Out over the water, there are long red beams that reach from the earth’s surface and up into the sky, too many to possibly count, and they slice through the water and the landscape as they move about in no discernible direction, cutting quickly and slowing darting about. They are everywhere, they are bright, and I turn to one of my new companions and they say this is probably the end. And I agree with them, but none of us feel urgent about it. We walk slowly down to a pier and find some large rocks that will serve as seats, and we’re a little sad, looking at each other’s pink-hued faces…but we’re also in awe of all the destruction going on about us. Somewhere far away the landscape is afire, and more people join us and just sit and watch but I do not see M again. It grows very quiet; the beams make no noise and a lone siren in the distance is drowned out by the waves hitting the rocks. There’s something magnificent about this ending, and I wake up.

Just a side not one dreams. I love the settings. It is often the most memorable thing about my dream. One time the entire dream took place in a wet world of grids. NOT like TRON. The entire world was on a grid barely wide enough to walk upon, but from nowhere water was flowing across and pouring down into the interstitial void. In another dream, all was tunnels. Large tunnels, like Subway sized – or like the NY dance club – but the walls were made of roots. Intertwined tree roots. Or the city I dwelled in for one night, where there were only parking garages. I was trapped out on the streets, and every entrance way – whether it was ground floor or 3 stories – was a parking garage door. Oddly, there were no flying cars in that dream.

Sigh. I miss dreaming.