With classmates in what appears to be a crowded warehouse, waiting out a storm and watching TV. A bizarre movie is playing where giant bugs terrorize the cast which includes Anthony Hopkins. In one scene, a praying mantis (colored and patterned like a moth1) climbs onto a flying contraption that looks like a large broom stick and zips away over the woods, chasing someone. I look down and see a pair of spiders embedded in the crook of my right forefinger. I casually pluck one out but one is larger and very detailed – black and yellow with orange eyes. Its head and upper body stick out with the legs inside and I tug at it but it doesn’t budge. This has occurred in more than one dream and I have no idea what it means, but now my hands are driving me crazy.
Staying with Momma and [Liz] in a hotel room. We get in late and find two teenage girls have crashed the place. One’s caught rummaging through a bag and tries to play it off while the other is napping under the covers. All our lights have been shut off, and Momma rushes us to throw whatever we can into the car. We start out with luggage and once that’s full we start stuffing things into white trash bags. Books, stuffed animals (I remember Pooh Bear, Chip, a Sonic doll, possibly my Cabbage Patch doll), and a lot of broken plastic toys. We assumed once we’d done that we’d throw away all the trash. A man is arguing with someone outside the window of our room and [Liz] and I crouch low to the floor as we work. Momma suddenly bursts in and grabs hold of [Liz], dragging her out and shouting for us to go. I hurriedly ask my sister if everything else has been stowed in the car and she says yes. I grab the bag nearest me and [Liz] holds on to the one she has as we race outside. I fall into the passenger seat but [Liz] can’t open her door and begins screaming as I fumble with it over the seat as a car pulls in beside us and tries to cut us off. Panicked, Momma tells us to scream to get his attention to lure him around to our side of the car so she can gun it, and we do as she says. The man – skinny with glasses and a goatee and a resemblance to Jeffrey Dahmer, may have been wearing a plaid shirt – stumbles to our right and starts throwing rocks at the windshield. One cracks it, but by now Momma’s backing down the driveway (we’re now fleeing a house on a dark street). She murmurs she can’t see out the back for all the bags and the car feels like it’s moving slower and slower. The man hesitates then heads around the front of his car.
I wake up in a cold sweat. As dry as my eyes are, my right eye won’t stop weeping. I hear the Shawshank Redemption credits kick in as I step into the hall …
Two dreams, one featuring a collie dog, black, brown and white, with apparent cigarette burns on the white spots on her muzzle. The other involved me walking through a building off Main Street (I recall going in and out the front door several times, and there may have been a bookshop). I wind up in a small dining room where someone is sprawled on the floor and a couple are eating at a table. The woman remarks, “Is that a homosexual leg?” She repeats herself and I snap, “It’s a human leg.” This rattles her, and she asks if I’d like some wine before hurtling a full wine glass at my head. I knock it back at her with my left arm, breaking the glass and dousing her as well as my shirt. She stands and I grab a fork, knocking her multiple times on the head with it. She just screams and keeps walking towards me. I slap it over her left eye but it doesn’t do any damage. I grab her left arm and mock stabbing her when I see her husband stand up. I hit her again, push her down, and run through several doors where all the locks (all chains) have either been removed or have had the knob at the end of the chain broken off. She catches up to me and I slam her fingers in the door before taking off again. I end up climbing out of what I think was a bathroom window onto the street in an alleyway.
Late at night, walking down the road past houses that we’re looking to buy (one I like is in Tupelo next door to Molly, but it’s downtown – near Wendy’s – I think of getting a loan and buying it myself as it’s only $65,000). I wind up on a stretch of rural road alongside the woods which are rising with swamp water. A large crowd is walking behind me, but I keep losing sight of them and have to wait for them to catch up. I’m singing a song under my breath from a children’s movie and twice I step on the DVD in the flooded road (it has a blue baby monster on the cover). Some girls from school in the crowd catch up to me and are having a conversation, oblivious that I’m there. Everyone’s muddy and scratched up. For the duration of the walk, a light shines in my immediate front for about five feet like a headlight or flashlight, though I don’t carry one, and whenever I look over my shoulder for the group they are always surrounded by fading light.
Outside, telling stories and fairy tales when the story of Robin Hood comes up and a couple of child-sized bunnies introduce themselves. A kid runs by screaming that we missed the first bell. Everyone runs for school, but the bell rings for homeroom and most of us aren’t even inside yet. Inside, there’s a meeting of some sort being held in the auditorium and they’re playing NIN over the loudspeakers. A bunch of us wind up on the stairs (which spiral, with a set above and below where you’re standing) and Katherine Heigl is above me and a young black girl is below me. Katherine is crying. Apparently, we’re being stalked by someone who wants us dead, and to avoid them we keep dropping from the ledge and onto the landing below, all together so that we’re swapping places. At one point, a door behind Heigl opens but no one’s there, and a door at the end of one landing slams shut. The girl below me has a gray-haired Kathy Bates suddenly appear behind her and Heigl shoots Bates in the head . . .
It’s no secret that I love sleep. As someone who has suffered from seemingly random bouts of insomnia for sixteen years, I love when I can get some sleep. Just hate the process. I stare at the ceiling for half an hour, arguing with myself over whether or not to count back from a hundred before deciding it would be silly (which takes well over a hundred seconds to decide), making out patterns in the plaster – I see a fish and what could be a squirrel, could be a terrier. I try to meditate. I fail because there are too many images running laps round my head. I get an earworm, usually something I haven’t heard in months, then half an hour later realize it’s still on loop. At this point, I’ll roll over, my face now pressed into my dog’s haunches as he chews at his leg like it’s a drumstick. He’s asleep before I am, but by the time I’ve noticed (almost another hour) I’m beginning to drift off. If my legs don’t start violently kicking on their own, I’ll be out and on my way.
The reason I love sleep is the surreal dreams I always have. The summer heat, amplified by my having to pull the blanket up over my ears (never just a sheet, too exposed), only makes for weirder, often times uncomfortable, imagery.
These posts will be largely unedited. I think the writing showcases in some small part the state of mind I was in when recording what I could remember from my brief stint in dreamland. I’ve found that the more rattled I am, the more details I recall. This also happens with recurring dreams and when I’ve experienced a sense of deja vu. This is what I hurriedly wrote one year ago today:
Night, cloudy, trying to take photo of a massive (twice the size of the moon) blue ball spinning in the sky. My camera won’t fire, and I get frustrated. Eventually, Momma points out that the planets are aligning? specifically Venus, and I try again to no avail. Later, I manage to snap a shot of one of them “crashing” down ala a shooting star, but the flash “freezes” everything and the crash simultaneously rattles the house. Suddenly, we’re at a vet’s office where all the people have been blended with their animals – there are dogs walking around with human heads, etc. Lucy and Peanut, who have switched colors, are yelping as they pick glass out of their bloody paws. Kris Allen is saying something, but I don’t recall what, only that he was placed on the body of a smallish dalmation/Harlequin Great Dane. Even later, [Lizzy] and I are inside what looks like a diner and I still have my camera. I refuse to sit near a window because I’m convinced something mutated will slam into it and freak us out, or that something else bizarre will appear in the sky.
– July 26, 2009
I wish I could describe just what this looked like, with the planets lining up over the horizon and how incredibly bright everything was so late at night. It was beautiful. If the sky really looked like this, I would move into a tent on a mountainside.
Close enough.
Lucy and Peanut were two of our neighbors’ dogs who disappeared in October of last year. Not together, but within three weeks or so of each other. We were told they must have been snatched off the street but we didn’t buy it. Their owners are more than a little sketchy and have always given us bad vibes, and this had happened (and has happened since) more than once. Their appearance didn’t strike me as odd at the time, but reading it back makes me sad. I miss those two goofballs. Now the talking Kris Allen head, that was fucked up and still creeps me out. I don’t know what he was doing there. I’d rather not know.
And there’s more where that came from. Anyone care to interpret?
![Fork Goodness Sake [ royal bitch ]](http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3251/2419180638_e8e2cd0f11_z.jpg)
