First Dreams

I have fallen off the dream wagon.

How much of it is February blues? The uncomfortable reminder of Valentine's Day? Combine these with ratings woes. Nobody reads? Why do I write? Hey. It's my blog. I'll cry if I want to.

Besides, I've answered that question somewhere else.

I've dreamed, although not so clearly as when I decided to start writing about them. I dreamed last night, unclear jumbles that I allowed to become more vague as the day became less new so that I only remember one snippet of me and my dad and his friend buying popcorn from some people who were famous.

So instead about writing what I've let myself not remember, I'll take this moment to write about the first dreams I can remember.

I was regularly displaced from my surroundings growing up and thanks to that can remember how old I was (or about) just by remembering the house I lived in. This house in this dream was in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia on a dead-end street. That would put me somewhere between five and nine years old. There are two specific dreams I remember from dreaming in this house as a child; one of them recurred sort of regularly and the other one might have.

In one, the less-interesting of the two, I am the child that was me, walking along a rock wall on Windmill Road. There is a Hall along that road where once in real-life I played guitar and sang as very young boy. It was near here, this wall in the dream.

I walked because I couldn't run. I wanted to run so badly and so I tried so hard. I tried and I tried and I tried but I couldn't get my legs to move fast enough. Somehow, it was very important that I run. But I also had my eyes closed and I couldn't open them. Blind and mired in the dream, I walked across the top of a stone wall until finally, near the end of the dream as I remember it, I was able to burst into a run ... filled with both relief and fear; relief in that I was finally able to run, fear in that I might fall from the top of the wall because I still could not open my eyes.

In my other dream, the one I had at least twice and maybe more, my house fell over.

Our house on that Dartmouth dead-end street had a hallway stretching down to the room an the end. I shared this room with my brother, me on the upper bunk, him on the lower. In later years our bedroom would be moved down into the basement and the bunk beds were separated and set on the floor, but at the time of the dream

(dreams)

we were still up on the main floor. The hallway had rooms off it to the left (bathroom and master bedroom) and the right (guest bedroom where my grandmother stayed) but take it to the end and that's where my brother and I slept.

Standing in this hallway, I could feel the house rocking to and fro. The family ran to the front door and down the path and the steps to the sidewalk and the road where we turned back to watch as the house leaned toward us and then leaned away, lean and retreat until finally it tipped toward us and kept going, not collapsing so much as falling on its face like a drunk.

Fragments Only

I was walking up a path, one of two parallel ruts that formed an alley amongst the trees, a gravel driveway to a small cottage in the  forest. The leaves on the trees were bright green shot with a brighter electric yellow. I walked up the path.

The girl next to me was crazy. Outside of the dream I would not have known her but inside it we were both lying on the floor next to her bed. She really wanted to fuck me because it had been a long time. She was telling me about her collection of masks which were stacked next to my head on a bottom shelf of her bedside table. The looked like Venetian carnival masks, some the kind with the long noses, stacked one on top of each other to fit together like paper cups. The mask she'd wear depended on her mood. I'm not sure if this was said or intuited. Lying on her back, she raised her legs over head, presenting me with her ass and her mons and I kissed them through the fabric of her jeans which really needed to be removed, I decided. I reached and hooked my fingers inside her waistband.

 

2 February 2010 - Evan, Nic and Foul Play

Confession time.

I wouldn't have thought that so many of my dreams so far would be about sex. But part of what was interesting about the idea of doing this was the aspect of self-discovery. The other part of doing this that I thought would be interesting and challenging was ... well let's say, being honest with the source material. So when the dream was vulgar, write it vulgar. When the dream was sexy, write it sexy. When the dream was horrific, do that. That was the theory. I found after I wrote the last entry that I felt a little uncomfortable in the lunch room at work, self-conscious that someone could have already read that risque entry (even though it included what was really only a very tame sex scene). I have written more graphic scenes - you can find them easy enough - but in all of those stories, it wasn't my cock I was writing about. This seemed to me, sitting in the lunch room, a significant difference.

The other thing is that I have an inventory of past dreams, some even from when I was a kid, which I figured I'd add in on nights when I didn't dream or didn't remember them. But so far, ever since I decided to do this, I've dreamt every night. I wouldn't have thought I dreamt so frequently.

Last nights dreams were about frustration, loss and anger.

I was curling and it was a very competitive game. Not the Brier but some sort of elite 'spiel. I was skip. The stone from the other team was on its way and as it entered the house, one of my players kicked a dead stone into the rings where it stopped the moving rock. We stood there in shock. What...?!?!? Why had he done that? The other team's skip was quick to come in and announced that his stone would have hit the stone in the front of the house and split it off, the shooter going this way and the other stone going that way, both stones out-counting mine on the wings and therefore counting three. He arranged the house accordingly. Stunned, I started up the ice to throw my stone and the shock gave way to anger. I turned back and started demanding to know who had the best view of what happened. Would that rock really have hit the other one just so, just exactly that way? Where the hell was the official? I wanted an official. I was pissed.

I was in a house. There were a few of us combing through this place, I'm not sure why. At the top of a landing I noticed a space in the boards where I knew there had once been a set of stairs down to a space below. I could see through the space a piece of broken glass, sort of like a horizontal window that had been covered. No not covered, hidden. I peeled away the board and dropped down into the space below. It was brighter down there - big airy rooms with an old-fashioned feel to it, knickknacks, old settees, armchairs and plants. On a table was a book with a two photographs. The man in the photographs was Evan Hunter and I looked at these pictures a long time, coming to understand that these pictures were taken not many minutes after he'd died. Presently me and my group were confronted by a man, some authority figure, tall and very angry. We were oh so wrong for being down here and I patiently (and vainly, I knew) explained about the piece of wood and the gap through which I could see the broken glass.

Fighting broke out. Guns, pistols, explosions. Nic Cage stood on the top of a moving deuce-and-a-half whose roof was like the top of a tin metal shed. He popped the pin from a grenade and lobbed it under the canopy (roof) into the back of the truck where the enemy troops sat. This turned out to be completely ineffective as suddenly everyone who had been in the back of the truck was suddenly gathered around him on the roof.

1 February 2010 - My Love Doesn't Lead to the Freeway

Another strange, fucking dream.

There was more than what I wrote here, maybe a lot more; the dream ended significantly with a woman (a different woman, not any of the ones described her) saying something to me. I don't remember who she was or what she said. There seem to be large pieces of this unremembered.

What I remember can be clustered into four parts.

The Freeway
A red suitcase again, the second time in a week I dreamed about a red suitcase. I bought two new red suitcases recently and while the other one described in this blog earlier doesn't match up with what I own, this one did.

I was on my way home and carrying two suitcases, the large red one and and even larger straw or wicker coloured one. As big as they were they were easy to carry. I don't know where I was and I don't know how I was supposed to get home, but I was next to a highway thinking about how I might get one of the cars to stop and give me a lift. The highway was slightly elevated from where I looked at it. Cars went past from right to left. I watched a woman in a van who seemed to be moving and yet remaining directly in front of me. I wondered how this could be and sort of ran along to the left a little, staying even with the van until the driver saw me looking at her, threw me a look and accelerated the van away. I thought this was all very strange. I videotaped the cars going past. After a while as I realzed I was running out of tape, I wondered what kind of movie I was going to be able to edit with the same kinds of shots, all these cars going past. (There was maybe more to this. The idea of other events dances around the edge of my awareness but not into it.)

The Bench
I was with a woman I know. We sat on a bench and talked about things while I was ... disassembling a handgun? Pieces of it fell to the ground. I looked in the dirt for the parts that had fallen and saw a lot of short, shiny, silver finishing nails that I scooped up and a single bullet, a small fat one, a 9mm calibre. The woman and I went inside to her house, the daylight streaming in through the windows. We sat next to each other and talked some more. Through an accident of her body position, she leaned up next to me as if to be kissed. Or maybe it hadn't been an accident. We stood and I hugged her, keeping my face looking very disinterested and neutral and chaste lest one of her neighbours spy us. She's married, this woman I know. It was a very nice embrace and I leaned my head forward (only a little; she was tall and blonde and lithe) and, now standing behind her, I kissed her lightly on her neck. I sensed my own arousal I pressed myself more against her. I sensed her arousal by the touch of her fingertips which moved lightly across the underside of my cock. I was naked now (and looking very thin), not giving a damn about what the neighbours might see though the windows.

Mud and Brown Water
Then I was back outside (no longer naked), back in front of the bench where she and I had sat together, rooting in the ground for the pieces I'd dropped. More shiny finishing nails that were only about a quarter inch long, and the one bullet that had gobs of brownish grey mud on it. Everything on the ground was covered in mud. I got it all over my hands. I went through a door that was barely on its frame and around the corner into a sort of public washroom that was under repair. On the right as I entered, there was a fire hose laying on the floor of an open shower stall. Brown water poured out from the drain. It seemed maybe the hose was there to help pump out the water. I went to the sink, turned it on and more brown water came out. I was concerned not that the water was bad, but that it might overflow the sink. I put my hands under the water but this didn't seem to get any of the mud off which had dried to grey. My hands didn't even feel wet. I turned and pulled a length of paper towel from a roll by the sink and tried to scrub the mud from my hands. Not much, if any, of the mud came off. Angry, I left the bathroom to find that the building door was completely off it's hinges now, just leaning against the frame. I grabbed the door by its two sides, slid it out of the way and left the building.

31 January 2010 - The Massage

There were a bunch of us around the till, maybe a dozen or so, all of us waiting. The lady by the cash register was a matronly sort, a solidly built woman, confident and cool in spite of the crush of people around her.

The space was small and green with plants or paint or both; it was somehow like where you'd exit from a mom and pop diner. The cash register was on the corner of a short counter. As I saw it in the dream, we were gathered at the counter on the left. The cash register was on the right. At the far right past the till, you could turn the corner and proceed farther back and enter into the larger space which looked like a workout room. THAT room seemed empty and so it should have because as one finds out later, all the action happens in small rooms connecting off the large room.

We waited.

It was a long wait.

I can't remember what we were all doing during the wait. Waiting, maybe. There was one thing: I found a small, dark marble which I kept it in my hand.

More waiting. I couldn't tell you how long it was, this wait.

I said to the lady at the cash, "I'll pay now," and somehow, finally, that moved me to the front of the line or near to it. I paid for my massage and noticed the slight, small, black woman, a pretty girl with long, straight black hair. She was maybe not much more than five feet tall and she stood at the end of the counter in the space connecting this anteroom and the larger room in the back. She was one of the masseuses, quiet, with a narrow face, waiting patiently. When I paid, this was the signal apparently for her to get to work. She turned her back on us and moved into the larger workout space to get towels or something. Beginning to prepare for the massage. I tried to follow but there was something in the way. Between the end of the counter and the wall, mostly blocking the entrance to the larger room was ... well, it was either a very large statue of a sitting dalmation or a skeleton. I spent an amount of time sorting it out, moving it so I could get through, finally making a space big enough. Then I spent some more time putting it back where I found it. Except that after I put it back, it was still blocking my way (oddly, it seems I didn't go through the space I cleared although I thought I did).

I sort of forced my way past the dalmation (skeleton) to follow the pretty black girl into the room. I hung over her shoulder as she gathered supplies, waiting to be told which room to go in. I said to her, "I'm very on the ball today," in some sort of foreign accent and showed her the marble which sat in the center of my outstretched palm and then had to repeat it because she didn't get this bit of wit the first time. She chuckled quietly. I felt very confident.

I was shown to Room One. I was dressed for business in a shirt and tie, slacks and dark shoes. I started taking off my clothes. I couldn't tell you exactly what I was wearing, except for my underwear which was very clear in the dream: I was wearing my pair of black briefs with the brand name "Report" on the waistband. I was going to be naked for my massage and maybe both of us - me and the girl - would enjoy this.

There were other people in the room. Two women, each on a massage table with sheets to their necks. There were no other masseusses in the room. I became aware of this and yet it mattered not at all. Wearing only underwear and black socks, I sat on the edge of the massage table and partly pulled the sheet over me to cover my hips. I would take the rest of my clothes off from under the sheet. I got one sock off when the young pretty black girl was there to tell me, "Here, I'll help you with that," implying it was part of her job to take my socks off for me. But I was already taking off the second sock, "No, that's all right, I got this." I said this with an air of vague amusement that she would want to take of my socks.

I lay down on the table, got my legs under the sheet and began to lower my underwear. Somehow I got stuck in the sheet. I got my briefs down to mid thigh ("Report") and my legs were all caught up in the sheet. Thinking back to the dalmation (skeleton) I said to the girl as I struggled gently to get myself unstuck, "Everything seems to be an impediment today."

Two other staff members had appeared, a woman and a man. The woman just stood by the table with her hands by her side (or behind her back). The man seemed like the prototypical male nurse, a big happy looking fellow who reached under the sheet to get my legs freed and get me properly situated on the table. My briefs were still at mid-thigh and the guy hadn't noticed I was in the process of removing them. His next task was to turn me so that my head was pointing in some specific direction. There was a purpose to this that he knew and I didn't. He asked me which way I wanted to be. I was by now very much looking forward to being naked and getting this massage on the go and I said with a wry smile, "I'm certain it doesn't matter to me."

The alarm went off.

30 Jan 2010 - The Disjointed City

Walking and driving, changing to whatever seemed to best serve the narrative.

There was an odd group of people with a large white sign advertising a BBQ. They were dressed in ... outfits that resembled white burkas; they looked like tall limestone monuments. I couldn't quite see their faces. I don't think I was invited to whatever they were doing.

The area near Agricola and Gottingen was under construction. I hadn't been there for a long time and an incomplete building stood on the corner, it's metal girders describing a several story building-in-progress. I knew there were other new buildings in area that were in various stages of completion and thought it was pretty cool, what they were doing to this part of town. Indeed, where I was walking looked clean and bright and modern.

There was a young man on the street who, while handsome enough, had about him an air of panic and desperation. My own anxiety went up as he approached me. But all he wanted to know how to get to (unintelligible). I didn't know what he was saying, I didn't know where that was. Inspired, I took out my BlackBerry. Maybe the GPS application could help. The BlackBerry showed us a map of what looked like the city, maybe from around the mouth of harbour, McNabb's island, but it was zoomed in too close to tell for sure and panning over and over couldn't quite show us what we wanted to see. There was a second man that had shown up and I was fearful of the two of them robbing me of my BlackBerry.

I drove in the dark. To the right in a copse of trees was a white sign, the same one I'd seen with the monument people, advertising the BBQ. I stopped the car and noticed what look like heaps of grey and white ash from leftover fires. Approaching closer, I realized the white was the monument people lying in the road among the ash. Grateful that I'd seen them before I'd run them over, I moved slowly, walking through them, careful not to step on anyone.

I found myself inside a dark room where I wondered how I'd fit in this case that looked like a speaker, the kind you'd plug in your electric guitar. I lifted it and unsuccessfully tried to fit my body under it, wondering how I'd done it before since this was the speaker/amp that had protected me from the nuclear blast. I fretted over how much time this was taking and how I couldn't make it fit over me again, wondering if the robe next to me was maybe specially treated to protect the parts of me that couldn't get under the speaker....

27 January 2010 - Away Game

Where did this dream begin?

Inside? Outside? Is there more I've forgotten that precedes what follows? Probably. There was a jumble of things and I know for sure the last part was last but...

Let's say it was the girl.

I was inside but there were screened windows all around that barely kept the outside out. It was sunny and vaguely tropical. I was looking at a computer screen, maybe a tablet or pad with a message from a girl. An e-mail? An IM? A web page? This girl was young and not necessarily pretty but pleasant enough. How did I have her picture? Was it on the screen or only in my memory? She was familiar. I had been in touch with her, but now she was mad; I hadn't replied to her in quite a while. I searched my memory and remembered that yes, I had had sex with her, although the memory of it was dim. It was once, fairly recent and maybe only unremarkable. I peered intently at the message on the screen. There were also pictures that she herself had drawn and included: crudely made shapes, green and blue of the outside, grey or brown like logs or sticks. These were somehow cluttered around her words. She was unhappy she hadn't heard from me, I guess she thought I was an asshole and a jerk, but "whatever" ... she was moving on. This was a sense of things rather than the literal message because as much as I tried - and I was trying very hard to identify individual words - I couldn't quite read what she had written and ...

... looking up from the tablet I was outside regarding a vista of red buildings, stretching in a line in front of me to the right, set some distance away at the edge a precipice, all covered in snow. The buildings might have been constructed from the same red rock of Sedona, because that was their colour and the snow clung to the fronts of them in puffy white pouches. The sun had come up and reached across the precipice (and I remember now there are trees on the left, a dark and vaguely mysterious forest which gave shadow to the building fronts for most of the first part of the day). Now the sun has risen to where it's put the sides of the buildings in warmer light. I looked closer because something caught my eye. A disappearing act. A puff of snow that was there but then ... not there? I looked closer, looking at the shapes the snow made, looking to see if I could see the shapes change, but, no. Was it a trick of perspective? One puff of snow in front of another puff of snow so that when I moved the angle between the two of them made the space suddenly appear?

Nothing changed as I watched.

Then suddenly, extraordinarily, like a great event missing only a chorus of angels, all the sun-lit snow melted from the red stone buildings. They disappeared ... not so much as clouds of steam, more like the barely visible waves of the heat mirages that collect on the surface of distant asphalt. The buildings shook with the energy of the collapsing snow and from these thermoplasmic waves. I watched the buildings tremble as the snow fell and then evaporated from their facades. And still they shook. There was someone next to me and I said, "That must be scary inside, almost like an earthquake." The person replied, "No. Actually, you don't even notice it."

The dream shifted and I was inside a professional sports arena, somewhere new where I'd bought tickets for a game, some sport I'd never seen before. Not basketball, not hockey. I can't remember what now.

I was alone.

The arena was beautiful, a modern marvel full of light and glass and rich with colours in the air. Over the PA came a woman's voice that carried a message for the person in Section L please return to Gate 9 to sign for your ticket and I clearly understood it was for me. I'd not signed my credit card receipt. (I remembered that I'd forgot.) Perhaps I'd also left my MasterCard there. My seat was in Section L at the end of the arena, just past the curve and I had a look through the wide arch through to Section L, impressed with the location. The seats were grey and modern and comfortable-looking and mostly empty; all the people were still milling about through the concourse. I proceeded to find the way out and back to the ticket window. I walked through bright white, along moving walkways, through high, curving arches. It was beautiful. I never quite had the sense of being lost or panicked or frustrated about not being able to find the exit. I just kept moving through the arena.

And I did find the way out. I went through an industrial door and found myself in an airlock of a loading bay. I went down a couple of concrete steps and looked back to where there was a beautiful girl with long blonde hair in a very pretty dress standing behind the rail. I resolved to tell her how pretty she was even though she was very young indeed, maybe only a teenager (17? 18? 19 maybe?), but the air was alive with possibility. She would have sex with me if I pressed my advantage. She was looking past my shoulder and so I turned and saw the second woman, also smartly dressed, much older than either of us, her face rounder, plain and aged. I realized this was the girl's mother. I turned my back, abandoning the daughter and walked past the mother, continuing my trek to the ticket window. I pushed open the bay doors and went out into sunlight.

29 January 2010 - The Snow Covered Hill

Winter driving and my son was in the back seat. Before me was the largest hill I've ever seen, covered in snow and in front of me another car brave enough to attempt the climb. I thought, "I'm going to be all right, the car has snow tires on."

We went up and up.

Niggles of doubt played in my stomach as the car slipped and then slipped again, but each time only slightly, only ever enough to keep an edge of anxiety in my stomach. It seemed a long way to come only to have to turn and go back down if it turned out that the challenge was as steep as the snow covered hill. The farther I went, the steeper it got and the more the snow caused the car to tires to slip. But the car would only skid slightly and I kept a deft touch on the steering wheel and accelerator, coaxing the car ever higher to the top of the hill.

I was going to make it ... inside a long building with which I used to be familiar ... where the passageways were almost like avenues and I was headed here, slightly to the left where I would continue around the corner to who-knows-where, pushing a hard-shelled red suitcase before me, rolling on its little wheels to the counter which was blocked. But familiar as I was to this place and it to me, I went under the yellow tape and behind the counter because it led to where I was going, only to find the way blocked by ... a white wall? Concrete? A young man in his twenties who stood behind the counter (an employee) told me that the way had changed and I couldn't get through this was any more. So pushing the suitcase in front of me, I retreated back the way I came, frustrated over this waste of time to a door which opened on a long set of downward facing stairs.

Art by Susan Kurts

First

You're awake.

I didn't used to be.

While asleep last night I had a dream. It was a very vivid dream full of colours and intensity. I often have dreams like this. The plots and characters change except for me. Sometimes themes or whole stories re-occur or at least seem to. These dreams are very cinematic, sometimes pleasant and sometimes not. I think if I were to guess, I'd say the latter outnumber the former, but we'll see now as I begin to document the ones I remember.

How well will I be able to translate such a cinematic experience with mere words? Especially cinema viewed without eyes?

A man named Hughlings Jackson suggested dreams are for removing junk from the brain; they are to remove unnecessary memories and connections (according to Wikipedia). Maybe that’s why the unpleasant ones seem to outnumber the pleasant ones.

Maybe I’m just disturbed.

Oh, but a man named Sigmund Freud said that a man is not responsible for his dreams; at least that's what I learned from an episode of Star Trek.

You can judge me. I've decided I'm okay with that.

You might have had to navigate through a content warning because I'm planning to write these dreams out exactly as I remember them, without regard to consequence or what opinions might be formed about me, the dreamer.

But we'll see, won't we.