Head Cold Trips

So many dreams have gone un-transcribed due to a much appreciated break from computer usage.  I'll start with what I remember - the two most recent dreams I've had while suffering from a dizzying cold and unruly temperature.

Wow, Everyone Hates Me

While quite frankly delirious in the music room of our friends' house in Seattle, I dreamed that I was struggling with recalling names.  Working with little children, this was not a strong point, and yet I looked with horror at all of the people around me knowing that I couldn't for the life of me remember what to call any of them.  My co-teachers and the parents shook their heads as I struggled to cover for my lapse of memory, saying, "we heard that sometimes you are on the ball, but sometimes you are completely, utterly worthless.  We have to agree."

I abandoned my work, escaping for the airport.  The dream spiraled off into a million little subplots, wrought with their own interruptions and chaos, but the part I remember the most was seeing in a mirror that behind me stood my old best friend.  We do not talk anymore, due to growing apart as much as anything, but there is something negative there.  In my dream that "something negative" was colossal.  She was planning to stab me to death.  Great.

Long time no see, Shell-Shock

I dreamed last night, still sick but recovering well, that I saw my old friend Corey, someone else that I don't speak with anymore.  I know that he is married now, and in my dream he and his wife had a small daughter.  But when I encountered them, things were not going well at all.  Corey had been sent to Iraq as a soldier, and had suffered the rigors of war as well as the grisly deaths of many close comrades close-up.  He told me all about men dying in his arms, covered in blood, and him breaking down from the pointlessness of the killing and the emptiness of war.  He couldn't hold down a job nor hold together his family.  He had repetitive nightmares and relentless flashbacks.  When I woke, I wrote to him to warn him not to go to war.  It seemed imperative that I tell him something of this, though I can't tell why.  I feel like it's a very basic, obvious picture I should be painting for ACTUAL soldiers, after all.  You have to be kidding yourself to believe there is any glory in war.

Psychic Readings

In bed very early last night with a migraine, my dreams were plentiful and scrambled and very little remained at the surface like cream to skim off into the internet-dimension when dawn broke.  I was at some kind of an event that I can't help but feel involved a play.  At the event was a man who was capable of conducting psychic readings on a person, using palms, natal charts, interviews, auric readings, all of it, and deducing the type of "soul" the person had.  Everyone who participated was given a thick book that contained all of the types - there were several per "age group," of which there were close to a dozen.  I ended up in the age group that was second to oldest, aptly titled "Wrinkles."  The chapter on who was therein had something to do with being silly, of all things, being playful and entertaining.  This surprises me upon waking, but in the subconscious realms it didn't surprise me at all.

A calendar-type-thing graced the first page of each chapter, and in certain squares, symbolizing certain things; certain symbols were stamped into the relevant squares that possessed certain meanings.  Out of 30 squares or so, I maybe had 7 stamped - special spots that were unique to the type of soul I was marked in ways unique to that type that elucidated exactly what I brought to the table and in what ways.  It was the most personalized, detailed reading imaginable.  The esoteric little stamps were invisible, no less, to all but the wearer of some magical glasses that were issued with the book (this was to protect the intense privacy of the soul - after all, if it wanted to be revealed in plain words clear as crystal, it wouldn't be hiding, invisible, subjective and mysterious, itself).

I became under the impression that a man leaving the event had a very similar read-out to mine, or that he could help me significantly in understanding my path.  I stalked after his car as it drove away very slowly, so slowly that I was able to follow just by running.  However, stopping suddenly at a light, I crashed into his car head-first, and was knocked unconscious.  When I came to, he and his wife seemed concerned that I had been following him.  I demanded to know what his book revealed about him, but he guarded the information intensely.  So I pulled out a long pool stick, and challenged him to a duel.  He did the same, and the next thing I knew we were in a bar, a pool table being set up, and him ready to blow me out of the water.  Which he would; I was chewing my lips thinking, "why did I choose pool?  I can't play this game."

I ended up wandering off and away from this scene through a series of convoluted events.  I ended up alone in Boston in June, waiting for Ian to get out of his conference so that we could explore together.  In the mean time, I was having an incredible time by myself.  Possibly in direct contrast to waking reality, everyone I met was nice.  I was near a large university campus, but couldn't for the life of me figure out what school it was.  Riding around on the bus, I was meeting many students, but older students, closer to my age, and very, very intelligent and interesting.  When Ian finally arrived, I was thrilled to tell him that I'd been having a wonderful time, writing in the sunny lawn of the school and talking to welcoming strangers.

Again, a tangle of events.  The last thing I remember is being with Paul McCartney when he was a bit younger and his hair was impossibly poorly styled.  I was under the impression that even though Paul McCartney was still alive, I was in fact speaking with a ghost - the ghost of mulleted Wings-era Paul McCartney.  He told me to not worry about my creative abilities so much.  He told me that (vaguely referring to the soul-book I'd received many dream months earlier) I should be able to learn from my past lives and my obsession with death to not worry - to produce freely rather than to wash my hands of producing anything, knowing full well that, from a fatalistic standpoint, it didn't matter.  He told me in these words, "if you wrote a song in your past life, you would have judged it and torn your hair out over how bad it was.  Every time you would have heard it after that or had to play it, you would have cringed.  You would have been haunted by it.  But, given that now that would have been a past life, you would be free from caring now, and that song would be free as well of its worst critic and judge.  Now that song would be the same for everyone that heard it: just a bittersweet, sad, sentimental song.  No one's worst nightmare.  That's the real difference that death makes on art."  He had me know that I should feel obligated to write my story, if for no other reason that to give it a full life after I am dead, condemnation and all.  As he spoke, I couldn't resist playing with the fluffy top of his amazing mullet.

Bombs, Kittens, Palaces

I remember so little of last night's dream that I almost didn't write it, but it keeps flitting about in my brain as though something about it is meaningful, so . . .

I was in a wildly hilly Olympia, where a mall was dug into a hillside, spiraling down like the one in Miraflores behind the pleasant, open, rainy façade of brick buildings and wide streets atop steep slopes.  I wandered all over this town, talking to various people, as though on some search.  I went into a warehouse where some kind of event was.  I encountered people from my past, again vague acquaintances from high school.  At the mall, I ran into my old friend Cori with her mother.  I was, of course, nervous and shy, but for some reason couldn't stop talking with her, and it seemed she was under the same spell.  So we talked on and on and on.  In the back of my head, I figured that this was because she was an Aquarius.  

At one point, a massive rocket fired into the sky, loud and strangely slow, but raging.  I looked up gleefully, expecting it to be a space shuttle, but found instead that it was a jet carting bombs and bombs and bombs to some distant war zone.  I called it something under my breath, and Cori and her mother were shocked, thinking I'd called it something else, some word that only military generally use for such things.  Cori had been involved in the military, I remembered.

Things happened.  Who knows.  I wound up outside of some rather large pseudo-mansion, out near the gates of a vast, rolling, green estate.  Sitting on the ground with other people, none of whom associated with the property, Ian and I were shown a bag containing two newborn kittens.  Ian pulled them out gingerly, and handed them to me so that I could touch them as well.  They were so small and sleek and squirmy, blind and kind of seal-like in my hands.  Ian was going on and on about them, about their relationship with human fetuses or something along those lines.  He was treating them like magical charms or symbols or some esoteric thing.  They were so very little.

Creepy, man

I was moving a lot.  I had to draw upon distinct parts of my personality to relate to all of the people around me that I was encountering.  I wish I could remember more about these details, but it was all overshadowed by the fact that, at one point, a man requested that I help him die.  His chosen method: self-immolation.  Rather than burning to ash, though, he burned like hard, melting plastic, growing smaller and smaller but still communicating with me somehow, even when he was a warped, melted gray disk in my hand, begging me psychically to finish it for him, that the pain was excruciating.  I'm f*cking sure it was.  By the end I felt like a torturer and a murderer.

My mother was aware of this, and tried to console me on this matter.  With her, we wandered through a quintessentially southern bayou scene to a little shack where an old blind person - not the first blind person I'd encountered in this dream - a completely androgynous wise elder figure of ambiguous ethnic descent who told us some very interesting stories that I wasn't able to hear properly.  People began to show up, drowning out their voice with their own surfing adventure tales and complaints about their home life. I eventually drove off with some of these people, prompted by something having to do with water.

My moving finally came to a close in my second dream, in which I moved to a house in a Portland that came across much more like the Seattle of my dreams often does.  I had to climb great staircases alongside eerily silent freeways to get into my neighborhood.  The top was at Lombard, but Lombard backed against a thickly forested, steep hillside and no houses were to be seen.  For being four lanes wide, it was remarkably devoid of cars as well.  I turned around and went down one flight, realizing my mistake.

The house I was moving into was absolutely gorgeous.  It felt stable and strong and new and fresh (although, I'd been told, it had been built in 1908); it had a very polished, metropolitan aesthetic mixed with a log cabin kind of feel.  The rent was a bit much, but the place was so lovely that I was prepared to stay there forever.  The owners of the house were a 30-something couple, maybe with a baby and a dog, who were calm and peaceful and creative.  A girl around my age, or maybe a little younger, also lived there, possibly with her boyfriend - also a very stable, friendly person.  My room was the only one upstairs, in a peaked-ceiling attic loft space.  

Ian was staying the first few nights with me while I made myself comfortable. Just before going to bed, having sat around a warm fire and chatted with my new roommates for hours, they warned me as an afterthought that the house had a ghost, but that they rarely had to deal with it.  When Ian and I went up into my lovely room, a chill immediately became apparent.  As soon as we lay down under the soft sheets and I turned off the light, Ian said, "Oh, I see why they never have to deal with the ghost; it only lives in this room."  I could feel it descending upon us, falling over us like a quilt, a malicious, morose energy  reminiscent of a wailing banshee.  I tried to move to turn the light on or somehow escape, but I couldn't.  Initially horrified by the sleep-paralysis, and a little weirded out that it was happening so tangibly in the middle of my dream, I fought against it, only to give up thinking, "what's the worst that could happen?"  Which of course led me to fight it again.

When I finally broke the paralysis, I was awake in my real bedroom, staring at the window, for a full minute or so unable to comprehend where I was.  I had not expected to break back into my waking life at all.  I guess I was having a more classic version of sleep paralysis?  The kind where people claim demons lay on their chests and aliens abduct them and such?  Usually, my sleep paralysis is entirely conscious and banal; I know exactly where I am and what is around me - often I even know the time of day or night, and what the weather is like outside - I just can't move.  Nothing creepy but a fear of the unknown nature of comas in that case.  But ghosts descending on me - that is art, man.

Stubborn Time-Travel

I haven't been working on my story in ages, so when I fell asleep last night I requested a dream that would inspire me in that arena.  This is what I got:

Barbara and I, along with two of the same four guys from a dream I'd had months ago in which I crashed a car into a hole on the way to a cozy snowy cabin, took a train to "Eugene" or some such.  All of the guys in that dream were black and very tall.  We didn't get off in time, but were ushered off south of town and had to walk in ourselves in the dark.  We went to a late-night restaurant where some boys I went to high school with were - not ones I'd been friends with, and I'm not even sure if they recognized me at first.  Once they did, they (jokingly?) held me to some old stereotypes.  As I tried to prove them wrong, I unthinkingly grabbed a bite of their food and shoved it into my mouth, only to discover that it was bacon.  It took ages for me to get all of it and then it's residual flavor out of my mouth.  I felt like I'd polluted myself almost beyond recovery.

I left the restaurant with only one of the guys we'd come with on the train; Barbara and the other guy vanished around this time.  We found ourselves on a bluff overlooking a huge, beautiful stone bridge, on which another black guy was laying, writing and reciting poetry.  An earthquake was scheduled to happen around 3 in the morning, so one of the guys and I raced down to move this brother from the bridge.  It was a nerve-wracking experience to be on it, even though it wasn't so high above the water that we would die.  The poet was very hard to move.  He was almost like a sleep-walker, and very much in his creative groove, unwilling to break it. The water rushing below the bridge was inky and dark blue in the night; the scene was reminiscent of Arequipa.

Day time came, sunny early summer, and I was driving home on country roads with ripening fruit trees and twisting happy rivers.  I spent the remainder of a dream with a guy who was almost faceless - his presence was steady, but I can't for the life of me tell what he looked like or who he was supposed to be.  It was in his company that, driving into town through some loosely interpreted version of the historic neighborhood, I blinked us into the 1980's.  We were both totally aghast.  It was as though the world before my eyes had melted down into nothing but its colors, balls of color, and then reformed into an identical scene in another time.  We drove through the streets feeling out of place; our car was from the 90's, and we hoped no one would notice. Needless to say, my home town was not what it is in reality - it wasn't even anything from my dream-map - but it was much more beautiful and curious and inspired.  We pulled over at a store that isn't really there west of where the north co-op should be, on a densely green, tree-lined street.  We went inside to find a myriad of people fully immersed in the 80's, a clothing section that was fully stocked for the 80's, and food options that were woefully straight out of the 80's as well.

Outside of the store, we collided with a group of people (at least one of which I know in reality) from the present, and that broke the spell.  I tried to tell them what I had done, and they were fascinated.  The girl I do know told me candidly, "I have always known you have special powers; I don't, I am just the sort of hippie-dippy person who believes in them."  Her daughter was with us, and I had some personal interaction with the little girl that I wish I could remember better.  I attempted to do it again, but only succeeded at bringing us back to the 90's.  Still, that was quite the show.  We managed to stay in that decade for quite a while, wandering around town, until I got it in my head that we HAD to go back to the 80's so that I could go to my childhood home, so I could explore it again, so I would show the strange guy I was with all of the exact locations that I experienced paranormal phenomena in, so I could feel as an adult what the vibe there actually was.
  

We made our way to the neighborhood, but I was completely unable to push us back into the 80's again; we were kind of trapped behind a physical and metaphysical force-field about three houses up the street.  It was an earthy old house with a wide wooden deck in back.  From there we could see that there was a narrow cement bike path running behind the houses, and I could see that the back yard of my childhood home was unfenced and open to it.  I wanted so badly to just go back there, but the guy was very reluctant, and I found that his "no" was somewhat paralyzing. (This neighborhood was similar to the one with the huge street party in near Lake Washington in the dream where I ended up becoming immortal and taking off in a yacht to the San Juans, but couldn't convince anyone for my life to come along with me).

My life kind of fell back into a normal rhythm after that.  I had to return to work, with plants and the berry field, messing about with sandals and seedlings, my co-workers and being on time. Around this point, Ian and I traveled back down to that stone bridge from the beginning of the dream, and, also at night, he killed my favorite cat.  He had his reasons for doing it - ceremony, ritual, who knows?  I couldn't watch him do it.  I fled the woodsy place by the river and, sobbing as I wandered through the streets, came to terms with the fact that my cat's buoyant, fun energy would live on the in universe - it would be reincarnated in some way and we would not actually lose it.  Still, I was heart-broken and shaken.