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.