3 May 2012 - A Gun in One Hand and A Cell Phone in The Other

I’m moving through a mall which seems to have four levels. It’s a crowded mall and I’m threading my way through people while on my bicycle, looking for my son who’s with my z-wife. I’m trying to make my best guess as to where I might find them, but logic is always so slippery in dreams. I know – because maybe I’ve already visited them – that each floor in this mall is not only a different place, but a different time. The first floor is some sort of beachscape next to the ocean in what might even be a pre-historic era. I remember how I had been the only one around when I was there the last time and I deduce that Ann and Ian went there; they should know it would be the easiest place for me to find them.

I ride through a dark part of the mall, like it's a pub or something, and there's what looks like an old, closed-up service elevator. There's a button to call it, but it's obvious from looking that it's broken; broken in some way that people can still get off this elevator, but they can't get on. I'm going to have to look for a different one.

Except this guy stops me.

He's a huge guy with shaggy black hair and a beard, like a biker dude. He's wearing red t-shirt that stretches tight across a massive chest and he has a gun that he presses against my heart. He doesn't say anything. I start to calculate my options - play it cool? Funny? Scared? Submissive? What do I do?

The guy gets down on his knees pulls down his zipper (or it might have been mine) and I decide I’m not doing that. He’s put the gun down to pull down his zipper. I pick it up. It’s a huge black handgun, an automatic with heft. I bash him in the head with it and he goes down, unconscious.  

There’s a short moment where I don’t know what to do next.

Then (slippery) logic reasserts itself. With my left hand, I reach in to my pocket to pull out my cell phone. I dial 911 with my thumb. A female operator answers and I tell her it's an emergency, I need the police. A man has tried to sexually assault me.

She begins to laugh.

She laughs and laughs and laughs. I’m horrified. I ask her, Do you think I’m joking? Do you want to hear the gun? And so I raise the gun to 45 degrees and pull the trigger. The gun goes off, not as loud as I would have thought ... or liked, for the sake of the operator ... but as the bullet fires I recall when considering my options I thought maybe there's a chance the gun's not loaded. But it fires when I pull the trigger for the operator and I realize it could have killed me.

The operator continues to laugh.

There are patrons around me. They too can hear the operator and are confused by her reaction. Empowered by the support I feel from them, I start swearing at her. “Do you think I’m fucking kidding here? I was being fucking sexually assaulted! Get me the fucking police!” She keeps laughing and I begin to berate her. She keeps laughing until suddenly it's silent in the phone and I realize she’s hung up on me. I'm envelopped in wonder and fury.

I try again to call the police.

The man I cold-cocked stirs but now he's a cat. A sleepy, fat, black cat. I consider killing it by bashing its skull onto the concrete hearth of the pub's fireplace. I have it by it's neck and knock it's head to the floor, but just once, only to keep it unconscious.

I make more futile attempts to call the police. Frustration and wonder and fury. The perpetrator is now a blue jay. It revives and flies off before any one can catch it. I realize, now even if I am able to get through to the police, there’s no one here to arrest.



Back to School

Do I need to tell you I didn't sleep in my own bed last night? I didn't, you see. Does that make any difference to the kinds of dreams I have? I dunno. It didn't seem to. I woke up in the middle of the night and it took me a while to figure out where the hell I was. It was cold. The duvet had fallen off in the night and I had snuggled under the remaining blankets to stay warm enough, but my face was very cold. The bed was unfamiliar and the GPS part of my brain floated around in scanner mode testing and rejecting locations until after a free-falling amount of time I finally landed on the right location: I was at my parents' house in the downstairs single bed.

The dream I'd had wasn't a recurring dream, but the theme was familiar. I've had several flying dreams and a couple of dying dreams and quite a few elevators dreams and this was a back-at-school dream.

I had the same thought on waking as I've had for about a week now, "How the hell am I going to write this one up?" And then on the heels of that another recurring thought, "Oh, we'll just skip this one."

But here I am, writing for me and we'll find out together (me and me) how exactly I'm going to write this up. I guess it'll be like this:

On an airplane ...

(This isn't part of the dream yet, not exactly, I'm setting the stage here, a thought that has just occured to me as my brain runs ahead of my typing fingers....)

On an airplane the black box records the last thirty minutes of cockpit conversation. Chuck Palahniuk wrote a book called "Survivor" where the hero was supposedly narrating the last 30 minutes of his life on a cockpit voice recorder (and the chapters and pages all run backwards which is a pretty cool touch). I wonder at the moment of writing this entry if dreams are like this; I always know when I start to write up from what I can remember that there was more, dammit. I know there was extra stuff that happened earlier than the stuff I'm writing about, but I can't remember what exactly it was. Maybe the "dream recorder" has only a certain amount of space and so the new stuff records over the old stuff.

Except now that I've finished writing this piece and I'm circling back to edit, I feel like there was more at the end of this dream too but maybe that also evaporated.

So remember, I'm at my parent's place having this dream. Is it significant that I'm at my parents having a back to school dream? Who knows.

I'm back at college, military college. And I know there's been more to the dream because I'm walking down a corrider in a dormitory with my room key and I've been to my room already, but now I'm having a hard time finding it again. I can't recognize my room from the placement of the doors. It's like the floor of a hotel where you can mark your room by how far away it is from the elevator waiting area. So in this building there's no elevator, but this same sorts of gap in the wall is what I'm looking for to help identify where my room is, but all the gaps seem to be gone.

I'm lugging a bunch of stuff with me. It's not clear what I'm carrying.

It's a military college. I don't know which one ... actually it's neither of the ones I attended based on the unfamiliarity of the setting, but there's no name to the college unlike the dream I had earlier in the week when I told Ian we were at Royal Roads.

After going up and down the corridor a few times, vainly looking for my room, I finally look at the key I'm holding and the room number is engraved on that. After this, I find my room without significant effort.

I enter the room and close the door. There are other people in the hallway that I can see through the windows. The thing is, when I was roaming the hallways looking for the door, there was only the blank facades of doors and walls. Now that I'm inside the room, suddenly there's windows. There's a guy peering in at me. I don't recognize him from real life, dark-haired, young and handsome in a mean sort of way. I know this guy and I don't like him. I'm happy to close the blinds on him. He looks at me as I roll the blinds closed with a knowing expression on his face. I can see by the look of him that he expects I'm going to start jerking off as soon as I shut the blinds. He is mistaken, but I don't give a fuck what he's thinking. There's a shade I also pull down over a smaller window. The room goes darker. There's a couple of buttons by the door and I push them causing lights to go out in the hallway making it darker still. I accept that people in the hallway might not appreciate losing their light, but again, I don't care.

The room is dim, not dark. The very large windows opposite from the door I came in through look out on what I remember as a sea-green metropolis. It's like looking at a modern cirty through aquarium glass.

There's another guy in my room. I'm disappointed not to have this space completely to myself but I accept that he's supposed to be there. I don't know him either. He's bigger than the guy in the hallway and lighter complected, lighter hair. Heavier. And there's a girl too. She's blonde and heavy and not particularly pretty. The three of us don't share a single word of conversation. I fell like I ignored them the best that I could. There are three separate bedrooms and a bathroom in this place. I think I busied myself in the bathroom with something (not masturbation) but I can't remember now what it was. I think from there I lie down on my single bed and try to sleep.

Escape and Attack

At times I felt like I was in some sort of co-operative video game. There were the bad guys all dressed as soldiers with faces painted the same charcoal grey as their steel helmets, and there was us, the good guys with a set of supernatural powers ... and playing cards. The reason why the bad guys were after us was because we belonged to them. I guess we were some sort of Charles Xavier's School for the Gifted except that instead of a school we were in a prison.

But no, not a prison, a laboratory.

My first earliest recalled visual from the dream is standing at an observation window looking out on what might be a combination storage bay, or factory floor. The huge space on the other side of the window is dark and dim seemingly lit only by the colour of flames and underwater lights. It may have once been a huge tank of water with pumps and pipes and industrial machines. On far side of this factory floor are four kennels which at first all seem each to hold a single dolphin. (Was that room all under water?) But when one breaks from his cage and rushes the window it's an orange-coloured gibbon, not a dolphin. He's hit the window so hard it has cracked. The window is a security widow, one of those reinforced glass things with wire webbing and so when the window cracks almost to shattering, it's startling. The cracks are in the shape of a punch. On the other side of the window, the gibbon does not jabber, it speaks. Its strength and its ability not only to have escaped its cage but to speak (!!!) are indications of how far these experiments have gone.

I listened hard to gibbon as it spoke but I can't remember what it said. The sense of it was: Let's get the fuck out of here. Right now. All of us.

It galvanized our group; it's the beginning of our escape, our flight to freedom. The group of us (are we five? Seven?) ... we adopted our fight pose, a particular way of standing as we fought that seemed like some sort a comic book pose when I thought about it after waking. Until this very moment of writing it down, I couldn't exactly put my finger on what it reminded me of ... but I just got it. It was from Iron Man , the first movie. Iron Man standing flatfooted with bent knees, chest jutting toward the enemy, raising and pointing his palms at the bad guys and then blasting them with his repulsors.

That's exactly how we engaged the bad guys. We didn't have repulsors in our palms, we just blasted them with the force of our psychic abilities.

This is how we broke out to the street.

It was night. The bad guys swarmed us, identical clones with charcoal Kevlar and guns, shadows in the dark of night.

They didn't have a chance.

I remember studying one of the unconscious ones after he'd been blasted, taking some moments to really appreciate and marvel how his face was painted the same colour as his helmet and wondering who this individual was. I remember vaguely thinking, "How are we going to keep score?" Who was keeping any kind of tally of the bad guys we put down? How many for me? How many for all the rest of them? Had any of our own been knocked down yet?

One of the last sequences I remember was being mentored by an older, more experienced member of our group. I had a deck of cards, big cards, each a little larger than the size of my hand. There was something funny about the deck and I realized that some cards were taped together. The tape did not wrap around the cards, a loop of tape was stuck to the middle of the card so that a second card could be attached, hiding the tape. There were a few other "sets" of cards similarly joined. I took the one out I had noticed first, three cards taped so that all the edges still lined up perfectly, the ace and queen of spades and the four of clubs. My mentor explained to me the special ability that came from attacking with these specific cards held between my palms. I spent the rest of the dream pulling these three cards apart and practicing perfectly putting them together again, their edges all lining up just so.

Fun in the Sun

Sometime in the early, empty hours of this morning I realized I was awake, having just had an epic dream. It had been grand in scale and grand in scope and it was almost completely gone. I mentally grasped at the wispy, smoky remains of memory but they all slipped away. I had to coax myself from trying harder to remember. It was very early and if I let my mind gear up I would be awake until the alarm went off which might be a long time. I let it go and the dream was lost. Two nights in a row, I remember thinking. I've lost the dream.

I fell back asleep.

And dreamed again.

I was walking amongst a long, undisiplined line of people. There was an uncounted crowd of us happily gaggling and trudging our way up a green hill. The hillside fell away to our right into a stand of trees. There were many children in this procession, in fact I think it was mostly children ... except for the pretty girl I was with (or next to). We crested the hill and a series of stairs and slides led the long way down the slope to an inlet connected to some tropical sea. The coast was alternately lined with red rocks and white, sandy beaches and the view stretched out for miles and miles and miles. We all made our way down the wooden steps and it seemed that our procession was being watched by a great collection of adults who were massed on the hillside. These must have been the parents of that throng of kids that walked with us. It was great fun, navigating through steps and ladders and wooden beams, descending the cliffs down to the inlet. Finally at the bottom I remember looking up into the clear blue sky at the noise overhead. It didn't seem so much to be a plane but a toy plane, yellow with red trim along the wings and fuselage. It could have been a Mattel version of a plane from some Dr. Seuss book. It looked like a cartoon or a drawing and, in fact, it had a picture of the Cat in the Hat on it. Just his happy, smiling face under his hat.

"That must be the Dragonfly!" I said to the group and sure enough, written on the fuselage near the tail was:

Dragon-
fly

We merrily slopped through the shallow water of the lagoon and continued our parade line into and through someone's house. It was bright and clean with white walls and archways instead of doors. The girl and I made our way to some remoter part of the house where I kissed her. One button of her blouse was open just above her belly button and I slipped my hand through the gap to feel her breast. I bent my head down. Her breast had come free from the satin white cup of her bra, half-revealed to her nipple which I took in my mouth until an approaching noise made us separate. It was someone, a man, some mysterious stranger who invited us back to be with the rest of the group.

Being with the kids was fun and all, but she and I decided that we really needed to find our own beach where we could enjoy each other privately and uninterupted. We hung back from the group. I could picture the coast in my mind's eye, how it moved off to our left, here it was rocky, here it was sandy and at the extreme end of my knowledge of the coast was a secluded sandy beach and a waterfall. We set out for it, just the two of us, swimming through the amazingly clear, warm water. We weren't in a rush. I swam happily, lazily on my back, the coast to my right and a collection of little islands off to our left. These piqued my curiosity. How long would it take to swim there? Would they have sandy beaches? They were surely private. We'd surely be completely alone at any one of these little islands. In the end, we kept going to find the farther-away sandy beach until the man appeared again and stopped us. He gave me a pair of shorts to put on. They weren't mine, but they were nice enough. Different from the ones I must have taken off. I noted with no alarm or embarrassment that I was swimming naked in the water, natural enough, after all, with this beautiful girl in this tropical clime. So if he was going to ask me to put the shorts on I would. I think actually there were even two pairs I put on.

He was some sort of agent. And whatever "side" I'd been on before he showed up again, he brought me back to the other side, the right side, the good guy's side. I was happy to be back on the good guy's side. The girl and I were in a bright kitchen and after my reconditioning the agent served us oatmeal for breakfast. It was not the instant Quaker kind that I usually have, it was the from-scratch, oats-boiled-in-water kind and it tasted not quite as good, but good enough.

Shue

I have dreamed of being with famous people before and I have dreamed of acting with famous people before. In the case of Mick Jagger, we died
together:

Mick was in the passenger seat of a black van and I was in the seat behind him. I don't know who the driver was. We drove down the length of a dock toward the harbour and were unable to stop, going over the edge. As the van sank under the water, I calmed myself, figuring that the van would settle on the bottom and we would all get out through the windows. Alarm and panic overwhelmed me as I realized that the van was sinking much deeper than I ever would have expected, much deeper now than we could ever hope to get back to the surface and the shock of death as it approached made the dream go black.

I had a dream about being with Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes and we
were on the set of some Star Trek show where I was either an extra or a bit
player and at some point in the dream, reality shifted such that I was no longer
doing a movie, but was on the USS Enterprise with Picard and Riker,
participating in some thrilling space adventure.

Last night's dream had that same kind of reality shift.

The hiss and splash of tires moving along the rainy streets outside my window
woke me up this morning well before the alarm went off. Part of the drawback of
this blog is that as soon as I'm awake my mind kicks into high gear to grab the
memory of the dream before it fades. Sometimes I get it all (I think).
Sometimes, like last night, there are parts of it that are tantalizingly close
to the edge of memory but which refuse to be drawn back. I lie awake (mostly)
trying to coax those missing pieces back, feeling them slip through my fingers,
so close.

The part I remember is doing a scene with Elizabeth Shue.

The set-up was simple. I was the guy, hopelessly fallen for her and she was the beautiful girl, oblivious to the effect of her charm. She smiled and leaned her head close, looking down and away at something and I was captivated by her, playing the part subtly; I was so in love with her and everyone in the world knew it except her. I leaned ever so slightly toward her as she looked off. This was our scene. Then reality shifted and it became life, not acting. She was my friend and I ached for her. She smiled and cocked her head. I signalled an update of my intentions by taking her earlobe into my mouth.

Little Blue Pills

Jason Bourne and Jake Gyllenhaal were both in this dream and maybe they were all the “me” character of the dream. It was a bit confused. At one point, from “offstage” of what was happening in the dream I heard someone say, “I’m Jason Bourne. And I’m not sure if that’s even my real name.” I think maybe, as some of my other dreams have gone, I started watching the dream where Jake Gyllenhaal was somehow the protagonist and by the end of the dream it was me. Somewhere in the middle, the two of us, the watcher and the watched, became the same person.

It was a caper, an investigation. It had the amped up feel of a thriller that was (ultimately) to have absolutely no payoff. I started in one place (or Jake did), the dark entryway of a bar (maybe) and a dead body (maybe) and a plastic bag full of pills.

There were three different kinds of pills. There were white pills that looked like elongated grains of rice, there were white pills that looked like aspirins and there were blue pills.

It was the blue pills that were the concern.

These pills were capsules, like Advil liquid gels only a royal blue. I was in a bedroom with this bag of blue pills and behind me was my grandmother and I commenced to separating the blue pills from all the rest of the pills. This sounds like a simple task but it occupied almost the rest of the dream. I was picking out the blue ones two or three at a time before I found that shaking the container a certain way would release the blue ones to the top and I could separate more of them faster, occasionally pushing the rogue white ones to the side. As I laboured over the pills, it occurred to me that when I was done I would need a bottle to put them in. This was only a vague concern, in fact, concern is an overstatement; I was confident I could find a bottle or that my grandmother could get me one. Two blue pills came out in a blister pack and I used my teeth to open the blister pack and free the capsules.

I bit into one of the blue pills by accident and it squirted bitterly in my mouth.

I stopped what I was doing immediately. I didn’t know what these pills were only that they were Bad. I went into the bathroom, careful not to swallow, and I spat into the sink. I pushed my head under the tap and rinsed my mouth with water, spitting again into the basin. I was ultra-sensitive to any new feeling in my mouth or in my body, on guard for something to happen to me, anxious about how much of what was inside the pill might have been absorbed through the dermis of my mouth and tongue and wondering if such a small amount might be enough of a dose to seriously harm me.

I was alarmed but calm.

The real life clock hit 5:50 and my BlackBerry sounded the real alarm.

Picture from Illusive Mind

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It went like this. Completely separate from the rest of the dream(s):

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The Breakup

I walked with my girlfriend into an old house with high ceilings and old wood and windows, the old style, rectangular with a semi-circle on top. The front door opened on a entrance foyer and then to the right, a dining room. There was a lot of angry activity going on. My brother-in-law John arrived and seemed very surprised to see me there. His daughter was with him, but not his real-life daughter. This girl had dark scraggly hair and a pointed chin, looking almost crone-ish in a young girl way. I was speaking on the phone to John’s sister, my ex-wife. The girlfriend also seemed to be my ex-wife. My ex-wife on the phone and I were trying to negotiate a timing where she wanted me to be available to take care of something and I was describing to her how, due to someone else being sick and unable to mind Ian, I wasn’t able to do it (whatever it was). I felt very self-satisfied in the strength of my alibi. My girlfriend/ ex-wife in the house was arguing with her mother (my mother-in-law) over getting supper ready. I had a round casserole dish in my hand, about four inches in diameter. It had some treat in it with cheese and rice on top. I offered it to her to temporarily try to make some peace out of this situation. She whirled on me and said, “Shut up!” Her mother said something to her and was told the same thing, “Shut up.”

I had a clear moment of, “Fuck this.” I could walk out the front door with no explanation and just be gone. This would be the perfect break-up. Besides, I had another girlfriend, so really, who needed this one?

And so that’s exactly what I did. Without a word to anyone I walked out the front door into a beautiful sunny summer day, where, on the raised land at the top of the wall next to the sidewalk, Phil Mickelson was practicing driving golf balls.

Connections

I was walking through some sort of mega mall: multi-level, spacious, bright. This was at least my second time around the complex. I knew that there was a shorter route to take because I'd taken it, but I'd previously gone this way around too, the longer way, circling sort of to the outer edge of the complex and one floor down, heading to this very slick set of escalators to get me up to the floor I wanted to go.

The girl behind me put her hand on my ass. It felt very good.

I knew it was a girl, one of two girls actually that I'd seen before. I wasn't sure which one of the two girls she was. One had been a really nice looking girl, the other not-as-nice looking. Whoever she was was keeping her hand on my ass underneath the long, dark coat I was wearing. In the dream I felt absolutely no guilt over hoping that the one with her hand on my ass was the really good looking girl. But I didn't turn around to find out. If it wasn't the good looking girl with her hand on my ass, I could be okay with that, because, boy, it felt nice.

Finally at the top of the steps, I turned to see. It WAS the good-looking girl who had her hand on my ass. I walked to find more steps to climb.

This wasn't a mall. It was an airport and we discovered we were both there to catch the same plane. I savoured the implications of this.

At the gate were her parents and Ian. As Ian played on the top of an eight foot high dark cube and the parents were out of site closer to the gate, we began to kiss surreptitiously. And then a lot.

I still didn't know her name.

By either spoken or unspoken agreement, the two of us decided that we really, really needed to have sex. And there wasn't much time. The plane was due to arrive. There was the issue of the parents and of Ian, all of these things compounding the urgency each of us was feeling.

I had a key to my upstairs hotel room. A key on a large, beige and red-trimmed rectangular fob. Right there in my pocket.

I gathered up my shirt and brown tweed jacket from the floor (things must have been progressing nicely) and began to move off to the elevator, fishing for the room key in my pocket.

From here, I believe I had a brief encounter with her parents (shirtless?) before the dream skipped WAY forward and I finally discovered her name from an e-mail she'd sent. Her nickname was Day. Her first name was somethingday ... I can't remember the first part, except that it wasn't a day of the week.

Dangerous Rain

There was me, my mom and dad plus a few others and we were all together after the bomb went off.

I didn't recognize the other people (there were at least two of them) but I seemed to know them in the dream.

The bomb was nuclear.

In my dream I had the sense that I'd witnessed the explosion, or in fact had NOT witnessed it, having turned my head and closed my eyes, but this was more of a memory within the dream than an "actual experience".

We were in a house, a one story house with a large window looking out on a grey suburban/industrial landscape. My dad was in PJs and a housecoat. The rest of us seemed to be dressed. There was a feeling of anxiety that was almost panic. I had to get these people out of here before the radiation got us. One of the people I didn't know rushed outside and got into the white van that was collectively ours. She was resolute and leaving. It wasn't that she was leaving that alarmed me, it was that she was planning not to wait for anybody. I followed her out and pleaded with her as she got in the van. It was raining. The rain left a sheen on the side of the white van like the rainbow colours you'd see in an oil spill only fainter. It was ominous, a sign of poison in the rain and I was standing out in it. Despite my pleas, she drove off, leaving the rest of us behind. But there was another car, a smaller red Toyota. We would have to use that.

Back in the house, Dad didn't want to go anywhere.

I argued with him as I got myself ready to go, brushing my teeth and thinking maybe the water I was using was already poisoned. I ruminated over all the changes that were likely to come; things as simple as teeth brushing were already fundamentally altered. Things that had always been routine and safe were suddenly, shockingly dangerous.

I insisted that we had to go. Dad claimed that the glass window would keep the radiation out. I knew this was wrong but couldn't convince him. He said that the people in Gagetown had been declared safe. I said, "Dad! Gagetown is an 8-hour drive away!" (Before this I thought we were somewhere in Europe.)

He would not be moved.

So Mom and I, a small dog and one other person, we all made our way out through the rain to the red car. We got in and drove away leaving Dad behind.

Hockey Tech

It started with curling.

Somewhere in the hazy back corner of this particular dream room was a sequence about curling. I remember nothing about the game in the dream, only that as I jotted notes of remembered dream-things, I suddenly recalled something about curling and the curling had come before all the rest of it and it was as vague as that.

It was a sunny outdoors day and I was driving. It felt like I was repeating some steps from previously in the dream. I was going to get a ticket for an NHL game, just like before, at some place I’d already been, but the second time, this time, it didn’t seem quite the same as it had the first time. And it left me feeling vaguely puzzled, a common emotion in my dreams.

But first I had something to buy. It was very clear and specific in the dream but after waking up I couldn’t quite remember what it was. It fit in my hand, well, slightly bigger than my hand. A tablet? Some sort of electronics? I paid $80 for it. Four twenty dollar bills.

The moment I left the store I realized, hey wait a minute, I don’t really need this. I went back inside to return it. The guy behind the counter was stoic and cooperative and returned to my hand four twenty dollar bills. I can use this to buy the hockey ticket, I realized. There was a game and it was likely to be mostly sold out, but I only needed one ticket, just for me, so I figured the odds were good that there would be a single seat somewhere. I left the store and was driving in the car.

A sunny day. I remember this. It was very clear and sunny. It felt like I was in the United States somewhere, sunny and warm and unfamiliar. In front of me the road was blocked off. In my notes after I woke up I wrote "road construction" and maybe there was some of that but mostly I remember the road being blocked off because of people in the street. A Flea Market, or a street festival. I had to detour around them to the left. They looked like they were having fun. I ended up heading toward a highway or interstate that I didn’t want or need to get on so I turned right onto the grass, eventually up a gravel driveway and parking near a sports field where a group of young men were playing … was it soccer? I was careful as I parked not to run over any of them. Ian was in the passenger seat, making his only appearance in the dream. I told him this is where I went to college and even though the geography was all wrong and the views were completely unfamiliar (a sports field beneath large shady trees of brilliant green, single level office buildings to the left and behind it), I told him this was Royal Roads.

I got out of the car and went alone into the building on the left to get my ticket. This was the repeated part of the dream but the office was a little different and there was a tent card sitting on the counter advertising the tickets with inked letters. I thought the tent card looked like it had been moved from where it was supposed to be, that is, where I had seen it last time. At the far left of the counter was a basket with 8 ½ by 11 envelopes stacked on their sides. They had names of the upcoming games written on the front. I leafed through the envelopes looking for "Montreal versus New York Rangers", but I couldn’t find it. Was it sold out? Really? Not one ticket? I saw "Montreal versus Ottawa", but that wasn't the game I wanted.

I realized that the reason I couldn’t find it was because it was a Rangers/Toronto game ... being played in Montreal. Ah. That’s probably why. I asked the people in the office if I could use their computer to do a search and make sure I had the facts right.

This was the weirdest part of the dream, the part that came next.

I spent the rest of the dream trying to Google the information. I got to the Google homepage which had a small, strangely warped, squished and elongated “Google” graphic. The computer wasn't anything I would have recognized outside of the dream. I fumbled around trying to operate it. There was a white button that had to be pushed in; it reminded me of the Choke on an outboard engine, but it was more of a protruding, plastic rectangle, about the size of my thumb. I pushed it a few times (the button, not my thumb). There was also a board with a set of geometric shapes or crystals that glowed with their inner light when you touched them. By either trial and error or intuition, I touched a brown sideways diamond and the computer went to the page I wanted. The monitor was some kind of 4x4 inch screen in a mirror set on a cantilevered arm. It looked a bit like the top mechanism on an overhead projector. I struggled to peer into its mirrored screen while I tried to figure out the keyboard: a white rectangularish box, pearl white, curved on the top with raised keys, about 6x4 inches and looked like a fat Palm Pilot. Eventually (with relief) I noticed the Qwerty keyboard within a greater collection of keys whose symbols I could not understand. All of the keys were a luminescent white and slightly larger than the ones on my BlackBerry.

I had an inspiration to adjust my seat higher. It seemed like a smart idea but only resulted in me having to hunch down to peer into the monitor. From this new angle, the image reflected badly in the mirror. I struggled and struggled to type something into the search box. I was successful in entering “NHL” but the rest of what I tried only resulted in frustration and gibberish that eventually faded into wakefulness.

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.