More light, said Goethe

Wish I could remember all of this one,but what I do remember starts here:
I'm in a shadowy alley talking to three other men. In the near distance there is a group of other people separated from us, and sitting in a lighted area. I'm trying to convince the three men that I should be part of their project? conspiracy? group? I have committed some crime, nature now unknown, that will qualify me to be admitted. I'm explaing that I can't go back to my job as a bookseller. I quote a few lines of some classic poem to illustrate my position. I can't remember the poem, although it was something about how can one go on doing x when y has happened. I do remember that in the dream while I quoted the poem I could see it written on a page, not as in a book of poems, but within the lines/ like this / broken by slashes / the way a poem is sometimes quoted in a text.

I don't know how they received my plea, but I found myself going outside of the shadowy area. I paused at a gate to adjust my belt? zipper? and looked back down the shadowy hallway. I see a young woman approaching,but she sees me fiddling with belt or whatever and turns away. I realize that she may have interpreted my gesture as sexual.

I leave the building, now for some reason carrying a change of clothes in one of those plastic dry cleaning bags over a hanger. I cross a green, well manicured lawn and see that a piece of plastic detritus has caught on the plastic of the clothes bag. I scrape it off with my foot.

I leave the lawn area and head down the street. I see large buildings in the near distance and I think that I'm in London. It happily occurs to me that I could visit some art museums. With that I look up and see that I'm entering a public park. It is crowded with ornate lightposts. But at the top of each one, instead of a simple light fixture, there is a a brilliant yellow plastic tulip, enormous in size. Though it isn't lit (it is midday) the sunlight is making the tulips glow against an intense blue sky.

.....

Amid the clunky clashing of sexual symbols, a transcendant light leads me forward. This is becoming common in my dreams.

In my father's house...

I'm in the top story of a two story house. Night. A few lights are burning in the kitchen. I try to turn on another light but it doesn't work. I try another, same thing. Because the night is stormy I conclude that a fuse has blown and only one circuit is still working--coincidentally the one that the lights I was using was on. I decide to go downstairs, where my father lives (he rents the upper story to me), and find the fusebox. I go into the bedroom to get warmer clothes and find the bed there occupied by a mysterious figure wrapped in the blankets. This is unexpected and a little scary. I touch the blankets at the foot of the bed as the first step to pulling the blankets gently off the figure so I can see who it is. When I do, the figure erupts out of the blankets, feet kicking out and nearly hitting my face. I see that it is myself, violent with fear.

I turn to the closet and find a sweatshirt by touch (the sweatshirts are softer and thicker than the tshirts). Returning to the front of the house I find that all the lights are now out, though I can still more or less see in the gloom. The front door opens and my father enters. He seems in a cheerful frame of mind. I tell him that I was just about to go looking for him so that he could show me where the fusebox is located. He walks over to the kitchen table, which is a picnic table, and sits down. I join him there, but before we can talk I see another figure moving toward the front door. He's hard to make out in the shadows, but seems to be an old man. I walk toward him and see that he is also my father, but a shadowy dangerous version. I'm afraid as I approach that he will shoot me in the stomach with a gun. He doesn't, and I return to the table. The shadow father also comes to the table, so that the three of us--me, father, shadow father--are sitting together. The shadow father is silent, but my father says he wants to talk to me about the aloofness between us. There is the sense that he wants to overcome it. I don't know what to say and I turn to the windows where I see that dawn is breaking and light is now streaming into the room. I wake.

Id as B movie

As in a movie...
We see a heavy car in the middle distance speeding down a winding mountain road. It abruptly veers off onto a cleared dirt area below a rocky cliff. Dust flys and the doors jerk open. Three people get out and quickly set up a chair, where one of them sits. He looks like an actor being prepared for a role as demented preacher in a zombie movie. His hair is thick and curly, afro-like, mushrooming out from his head but it is heavy enough to leave a part in the middle. His clothes are ragged and disarrayed. It is clear that he's being made up to fool someone, someone criminal. As part of the disguise he can make candles appear from spots on his body, as though miraculously. One spot is above his forehead in the part of his hair. When he presses a small device in his hand, secretly, an absurdly phallic candle grows from his head. Less grotesquely, but more interestingly, at the same time three small candles grow from his heart. There is much conversation between the people there about whether the disguise will be effective.

No noose is good noose...

In my house at night. I enter the bathroom and notice that the shower curtains are disarrayed. With a sense of dread I pull them back and see an Indian man hanging from a noose above the bathtub. His skin is sallow and he is thin, almost emaciated, but his face is peaceful. He has dark hair and a small moustache. I recoil in shock, and stagger backwards. Then I see that there is a small Indian boy behind him, that in fact the boy is hoisting the man by the noose, holding him up in the air. His face is gleaming and cheerful. The man opens his eyes and explains to me that everything is ok, that this is surprizingly stimulating and makes him feel more at peace. The small boy is, in fact, his son helping him out. There is an erotic aura about the scene, and in the dream I think about people who get off on being asphyxiated.

Then I realise that there is another bathtub on the other side of the bathroom, also with shower curtains. They open and my own father emerges from the tub, uncharacteristically happy. He hasn't seen what's going on in the other tub. "Did I miss anything," he asks.

I stumble out of the bathroom and back to the bedroom where I get back in bed with Sandy. I wake up confused and in distress, get out of bed and go to the bathroom. No one there but me.

Where did THAT come from?

Pay more attention to the trees in your dreams

I'm in Houston or Chicago, driving along a broad tree-lined street. The street is actually two streets separated by a narrow paved area, and both sides have dark complex oak trees on each side, so that there are four lines of trees. There is little traffic. For some reason I decide to drive across the paved area and switch to the left road. I can see patches of white light shining through the branches in the near distance. I think, in the dream, that I've been here before.

Later I'm in a high school, where I am a new teacher. The halls are dark and students jostle each other. At the intersection of two locker-lined halls there is a massive pile of winter coats on the floor. I go outside, where I stand in an area outside the doors that is overhung by the branches of a large oak tree. Someone, another teacher perhaps, is walking up. He is smirking and making a joke about the coats, something about the school having been 'coated'.

Lois M comes out of the doors. In waking life I haven't seen her in 20 years, and she was never a close friend. I had heard a decade ago that she was suffering from a brain tumor (since recovered). In this dream, she is still young and dark-haired, but obviously ill. Her face is strained and she is sweating. I ask her what she's doing there--teaching?--but she doesn't reply. Concerned, I ask her if she's alright. She indicates that I should follow her to the roots of the oak tree, but she wanders off.

I can't remember now if this part was before or after that scene, but I am in the school gymnasium incongruously camped out in one corner. The gym is full of students preparing for a ball--the prom? I get up from the bed where I've been sleeping, which is in full view of everyone, and look around for my clothes. I find the clothes but realise that my wallet is missing. I see a golden credit card lying nearby and pick it up. It's one of mine but nothing else from the wallet is there. From a sitting position on the floor (the bed is a mattress on the floor) I see two or three women approach. One is large and moving in a stately determined sweep. She is elaborately dressed in a red gown. When she gets near she dramatically opens the gown, which splits apart down the front, to reveal blazing white lingerie.

Sprucing up the tree of life

I'm in a tree, medium high off the ground. It's some kind of pine tree, I think, and I'm busily removing small dead branches where they join the trunk. The tree needles are a light green yellow and everywhere around me there is bright white light. I can only see the tree. I'm aware that this is a spiritual tree, perhaps the tree of life.

In the rubble, but...

I'm in a large house that is half destroyed. There is debris everywhere on the floors, little furniture, and the walls seem distant and in shadow. I have fragmented conversations with my brother and sister. Then I am standing with my father looking down at the trash, unhappy at the state of affairs here. I'm saying something to my father, but instead of replying to my words he reaches to my forehead and gently wipes at its center. It is a gesture of love and comfort that moves me to tears.

Shuttles and cannons and leaping grandmothers

Dream one:
I'm in a car speeding along an busy interstate highway. Bright daylight. I'm not sure if I'm driving or riding. I hear something on the roof and look out the window to my left. I see a thin naked elderly woman with short gray hair, a spry grandmother type, leaping from the top of my car to the top of the car in the next lane. It is apparent that she's surfing her way down the road by jumping from one car to another. There is a manic grin on her face.

I arrive at what seems to be an open market area. I'm standing in the middle of it and now I'm without clothes. There are many people all around, but the area is so large that no one is very close by. I have considerable anxiety about being naked and I try to puzzle out how this has happened and what I could do about it. I think that I must have left my clothes in the hotel room which is at one side of the plaza. I struggle with recalling what happened and how I can get back into the room which I believe to be locked.

Overhead, in the very blue sky, a small white plane flies erratically by. It is almost fluttering, more like a moth than a bird, and it is unusually delicate in structure. Someone says that it is the precursor (the trailing flight?) to the shuttle launch, and it's appearance means that the shuttle is about to go up. I look down at the far horizon where I see an enormous gridwork platform, which I understand to be the shuttle launching platform. From this distance I can't see the shuttle, but something there explodes and a large dark smoke cloud rises from the platform. The shuttle has exploded on takeoff.


Dream Two:
I'm in a castle that is a historical artifact of some kind, the sort of thing that tourists would visit. I'm on the top. There is a street that cuts through the castle, and on the other side I see large open doorways and other people. For some reason they want me to shoot a cannon ball in that direction. I aim the small cannon that is nearby and they frantically indicate that I should aim at the doorway, so that the shot will fall on the cobblestones below it and not hurt anyone. I shoot the cannon but the cannonball falls a few feet short. However, there are other cannons and other doorways, and I proceed to aim those other guns in their direction and fire off rounds.

Vicksburg hills

Sandy and I are driving through the hills around Vicksburg, where we lived for five years. In reality these gently rolling hills are covered with nondescript pines and scrappy hardwoods where they're not plowed for fields. In the dream, though, they are exquisitely beautiful--irregular, peaked, plentiful, covered with thick vegetation that is shaded every variety of green. They have the grace of a Chinese landscape painting. We drive through them, getting a panaromic view as we crest the highest. The light is warm and ennobling.

The scene shifts to the city itself, where I walk through a middle-class neighborhood. I see a lion in the near distance outside someone's house. It is tawny and large, imposing as it paces below a window. The door to the house opens and someone comes out on to the porch. They see the lion and go back in.

I'm in a second story apartment, where Sandy and I apparently live. I look down into the back yard and see the lion that I saw earlier, which is female, as well as another one, male with a hugh mane, both pacing around the small backyard. I'm a little uneasy but not too nervous.

Now I'm in a coffee shop in downtown Vicksburg. I sit down at a table where DB is sitting. I haven't, in reality, spoken to him in several years. His normally long red hair has been cut to a near crewcut length. He has his chin on his hand and seems distraught. I ask about his wife. He works in her art and framing shop. He says that they're not doing well, that she has been giving him bad work evaluations. He weeps.

We are in his apartment. His wife is there, as well as a little girl who I learn is his adopted daughter. She is playing with some kind of unusual toy--a tablet of some sort. His wife is filming her with a videocamera. She and DB don't speak directly to each other.

The giant mouse and France.

First dream.
A mouse is making noise beneath our bed. I finally get up and poke around under there, finding a very large mouse hole in the wall. I can see the mouse inside, much larger than a nomral mouse, looking calmly back at me. Tiny black eyes. I want to find something to smush him with, so I leave the house. Somewhere I pick up a large plank, something like a 2"x10"x12' made of pine, and hurry back to the house. There I see various people running about in a state of emergency. Sharon is there, grinning. The house has become a different structure--a factory, maybe, or a ruin of one. The roof is missing in some rooms, and the windows are broken out. A sense of urgency prevails. I run through the building carrying the plank like a lance (I know, I know...). I get to the bedroom, which is now very large. In fact, the mouse hole has gotten larger and the mouse as well. I see it still stitting calmly inside the hole, but it is now a foot and a half tall. I gallop towards it, planning to impale it with the plank. As I do I hear the mouse say, or think, this sentence: "That Mr. Faust is a very bad man." I plunge the plank through the hole and smash the mouse on his left arm. He stares at it. I hold the plank in place for a moment, then approach the hole. The mouse lies dead or stunned on the floor. He is enormous. Enormouse.

Second dream.
Sandy, Jan, Zack, and I are touring Europe. We are in England, crossing a bridge on a tourist bus. We slowly enter an extremely dense cityscape. The buildings are elaborately, magnificently, decorated. Every window--and there are thousands--has its own frame, each a different color than the contrasting background. Everything is bright and sunny. The buildings are without number, every street and alleyway revealing another crowded cluster. We are delighted with the view.

Now we're in France. We go inside something--a museum?--and find ourselves in a mall-like area. We walk into a long hallway where Sandy and I are having a heated discussion--an argument?--and Sandy runs away down the hall. She says something about cancer. I go after her and we return. As we do we pass a dark-haired young woman drinking at a water fountain. She is crying. Apparently she speaks English, we realise, and has heard the conversation about cancer. Either she has cancer herself, or is distraught at hearing us discuss it. Sandy goes to her and comforts her.

Where's my car?

I'm downtown in Austin, on Congress Ave--the main street. The dream finds me waking in a clothing store on a corner. The place is small, nearly bare, with a simple counter at the back and a few racks of clothes near the front. It may be a women's clothing store, or it may be a shop for secondhand clothes--or maybe both. I have apparently been sleeping on the floor behind the counter. I stumble around for a few moments trying to wake up. A woman I don't know enters the store and looks at the clothes on one of the racks. I leave but feel uncertain about it; perhaps I should be staying because no one in charge is around. Do I have a key? Should I leave the door unlocked? I decide to leave anyway.

Outside I look across the street and I see the sun is near the horizon. The sky is lit up with an energetic glow. But I can't tell if the sun is setting or rising. Did I wake up in the morning or did I sleep all night and all day? This makes me more anxious, and I set out around the corner away from Congress Ave. and walk uphill. The sky is now darkening and I think that it is evening and not morning.

I search for my car, which I know I parked somewhere downtown, but I can't remember where. Anxiety increases more as I scan every car and concentrate on remembering. I come to the next street, which runs parallel to Congress and pass a black man on the corner. I feel some nervousness at the encounter. Looking across the street I see that there is a ruined building, almost a shard of a building, lit by a last ray of sun. It is brilliantly decorated with colorful grafitti covering every brick. I walk down this street for a block, then turn back towards Congress Ave. At the next intersection I notice that the block is full of brightly colored classic cars parked next to each other and filling all the spaces. They are blue and pink, and parked so that the colors alternate. I 'remember' that there is a classic car convention in town. I walk on and as I get closer to the main street I find myself amid a line of boats being pulled by cars--it is a parade of vehicles, part of the convention. I have to step nimbly to avoid being run over.

When I get back to Congress Ave. the light is increasing again, as though it is in fact dawn. I look around for a telephone so that I can call Sandy to come pick me up and help me look for the car. The only one I see has been vandalized so that the handset is missing from the cord, which dangles down. I'm going over in my mind what I want to say to her, which is that she should meet me at the old library.

Unaccountably, I find myself waking up again. This time Sandy is with me and we are in a small hotel room overlooking the main street. There are two strange men in the room as well, talking to each other and ignoring us. One of them reminds me of P, a gay man I once worked with. I think that it has been many years since I saw him and wonder if he has gotten as fat as I have. I suspect he hasn't if he continued to swim daily.

Then it comes to me with an aha sensation--how could I have been so dumb?--that stories are obviously hardwired into our brains because our unconscious dreams in stories.

I wake up.

Things that go boom in the night

Sandy and I are watching TV in a room on the second story of our house. A large window is on the right of the TV, and from my angle I can see only pale blue sky through it. There is a booming noise outside and I look at the window where I see a small dark blue compact car flying through the air. I leap to the window and see a puff of white smoke rising from the trees and houses in the near distance. Looking back at the car I notice that it is continuing on through the sky, its initial arc flattened into a smooth trajectory so that it seems to be flying rather than shot out like a cannon ball. It passes out of my vision to the right, but now I notice another strange event. In the middle distance there is a large white factory, something like an oil refinery but cleaner. It is set among neighborhoods and trees, but dwarfs them. In the far distance is a line of low dark hills, and above everything the sky is now a brilliant deep blue. The factory is exploding. White smoke, then yellow flames, wash out of it. I give a glancing thought to the people who live in the nearby houses and then turn to Sandy. "We've got to turn off the gas!" I cry, and rush down the stairs to the basement. There I see a gas powered water heater that is knocking and hissing like a cartoon boiler. I search frantically for a moment, then find the on/off switch and turn it.
I wake.

Tigers and wolves, oh my

Sandy and I are standing below two fenced areas that extend from the wall to our right. The lower one is larger than the top one and is suspended below it. A wooden stairway connects the floor where we stand and the two enclosures. The lower one holds an enormous tiger, which is mostly white but with various warm colors on its back. It pads softly around the area. Above it, in the other cage, two adult wolves and a cub pace back and forth. They are giant wolves, the size of small horses.

The stairs somehow open to us and we ascend--but as we do the wolf cub zips down the stairs and escapes. We hurry up the stairs and find that there is a third level where we may stand. Spread out beyond us is revealed a magical landscape of hill and forest. The trees are brightly colored with rust and ochres, something like a fall landscape. The light is clear and brilliant. Seeing the view is exhilirating.

But as we admire the view we are also aware of the animals now below us. The wolves in the area immediately below seem angry and distraught, possibly because the cub is missing. One wolf in particular keeps poking its snout into our area and snarling. The head is enormous. I can see its yellow teeth and sense it malevolence, but am somehow also jazzed by the beauty of its pelt.

We decide to leave and the stairs suddenly fold into a slide, which carries us quickly down past the animals. The dream ends.

Gov Perdue meets the snowman

At a high school, outdoors, talking with Sandy. I take a can of whipped cream or shaving cream and spray it over all the grass in the immediate vicinity. The plan is to make it look like snow. I go inside, where Gov Sonny Perdue is the principal of the school, and try to convince him that this could be a great fundraising activity for the school--Christmas in July or something like that. Sandy cautions me to be careful and warns that the Gov is tough and bossy, with a low voice.

My friend Oeddie...

3:00am. I wake from a dream in which I am being swept by a large body of clear cool water towards the lip of a dam. The dam stretches widely to either side of me under blue sky. As I get near the lip of the dam I see that my mother is there with a young boy. They are both about to be swept over the top, but the boy is trying to hold her there. They thrash about in the water and teeter on the brink. I approach and yell to the boy to hold her. I get there before they go over and grab my mother to fling her back from the brink. That was where the dream stopped and I woke.

I stayed awake for two hours, though I didn't feel any special anxiety--just couldn't go back to sleep. Finally I did get to sleep again and dreamed that I was in a big car on a city street. The street was very wide, ridiculously so, and was grassed over instead of being paved. The driver of the car was a black man, fairly young, and I sat in the passenger seat. We were at the top of long hill, so that we could see the street dropping before us across a series of rolling hills until it came to the bottom. There was some body of water there, and another vista stretching beyond it. The sky was golden with sunrise or sunset, and the colors were everywhere bright.

I looked down the road and thought that it would be fun to just zoom down the hill in the car as though it were a carnival ride, maybe flying into the air as I crested the descending hills. This thought made me so happy that I reached to my left and grabbed the steering wheel from the driver, and used my left foot to step on the gas. The driver was irritated by this hijacking, and I was afraid that he might think I was a racist, that I thought he couldn't handle the driving.

We went down quickly, picking up speed. It was thrilling to fly along and I turned the wheel this way and that to make the car playfully swerve. But halfway down we were going too fast and I began to brake. By the time we reached the bottom of the hill I was pushing the brake pedal as hard as I could, so that we barely were able to stop before running into a car at the crossroad there. We turned and drove on to my apartment(?).

I enter the apartment by myself. The rooms are dark and no one is there. I hear some noises from the bedroom in the back of the house and for some reason interpret them to be from Sharon, a woman I once lived with. I make my way to the bedroom, but find that the sounds were from Sandy's grandmother, deceased for several years now. She is crawling around the large bed there, crying out in distress. The bed is Georgia earth colored, as large as four beds, and there are old gravestones scattered across it. Sandy's grandmother is crawling around among them, wailing for her own stone. "Where is my gravestone?" She picks at one stone after another searching for it. I notice that some of the markers are very worn, hardly more than small rough stones without letters. Finally she does find it. "Look what they've done to it!" she cries. It is smaller than a loaf of bread, pitted and worn. She holds it in her hands and thrusts it into my face.

I leave the bedroom and turn down the hall that leads back to the living room. As I pass the door to the kitchen I'm confronted by my own mother, dead now for several years, looming from the doorway. She is younger than when she died, and she fills the doorway. I stagger back screaming in shock and nearly collapse to the floor. She enters the hallway, not especially in a threatening manner, and tells me that reports of her death were greatly exaggerated. In waking life I would not have expected her to quote Twain.

Then she stumbles or somehow starts to fall. Her body is rigid and she falls like a tree coming down, almost in slow motion. I leap to her and catch her to break her fall. It works but I end up almost on top of her on the carpet. I feel compelled to tell her that I love her very much: "I love you so much," I cry out. But the moment is decidedly erotic and I throw myself off of her immediately in guilt. I wake with heart pounding.

The search goes on.

Vicksburg. I'm walking down a city street. I find my way to a new mall area and descend a flight of steps inside that take me to a lower level. The steps are small and wooden, each one rickety and difficult to walk on--despite the relatively new mall. I come to the lower floor and go into a shop, which is the Attic Gallery. There I find Daniel, who I knew when I lived in Vicksburg. There are several people behind a counter waiting on people who need artwork framed. Daniel tells me that I've come at a bad time, because he and his wife Leslie have just divorced. I leave the area but cannot now find the steps, and I'm forced to clamber out of the lower level through a window. Potted plants partially block my way.

I return home (my home in Athens) and it is night. As I pull up to our long driveway I see that there is a police car parked by the mailbox. Its blue lights are on and flashing. I drive past it and go down the driveway. The house, when I enter, is lit up but no one seems home. I look around for Sandy. In the kitchen, which is very brightly lit, I discover that the back door is open and that the dining table is missing. Cold air is pouring in through the open door, which I close.

I enter the bathroom and first see what I think to be Sandy sitting on the closed toilet. I'm shocked, because her head seems to be missing. But it's not her, or anyone. Instead, it is her clothes stuffed with something so that they vaguely resemble a scarecrow. Up close it's clear that the job has been done casually, and no once could mistake the thing for a real person. I glance over at the bathtub and see Sandy under the water in the tub. I'm struck with fear because she looks dead, but I see a small bubble of air escape her mouth. I reach into the bath and pull her up out of the water by her shoulder. Once out, she stands and peers around with an expression both dazed and haughty. She seems not like herself. I wake gasping and shaking.

A train and a haircut

Two dreams.

I'm under a train, riding the rails, my face only an inch or two from the ground. I'm trying to get a message(?) to someone. Is it about myself? Will it get me off the train? I don't know. This message can't be delivered in any normal way, but has to be sneaked in. Somehow I have disguised it as a sack of garbage, or several sacks of garbage. As the train slows down I throw the sack from beneath the train. It slides into a pile of other garbage bags and people standing nearby notice this event and register that something unusual is going on.

This first part I see from my perspective below the train, but when the garbage hits the perspective shifts so that I see the scene from above--dark bag sliding across the ground and colliding with other bags, the train slow or stopped on the tracks. Then the viewpoint shifts again and I swoop down beside the train. I'm able to see my body hanging there. The expression on my face is not a happy one--am I asleep? unconscious? dead?

Second dream. I'm in a large public room, a restaurant I think. There are many people sitting at tables with white tablecloths. The place is also a barber shop. A small woman with neatly cut dark hair is the barber. There is a line of 15 or 20 people, all standing, waiting for her attentions. After she finishes them all I approach her and ask for a haircut. I tell her that I just had one earlier that day with someone else but I'm not satisfied, and I ask her not to tell that other barber that I'm coming for a second one--I don't want to hurt her feelings.

The woman, who seems cheerful and competent, tells me that she has always liked long hair, with the implied suggestion that I should let mine grow longer. I explain that my hair is thinning out and doesn't look good long, but as we talk I see myself in a large mirror. My hair, which is in reality gray and indeed thinning, appears in the mirror to be thick, glossy, and black. It's combed straight back.

Deja voom

Short dream. Back in Austin. I'm wandering around the west campus area where I once lived. The houses are single story older family homes now overrun by students. The sun is bright with that clear Texas sunlight but I'm not hot. There is a festival or a block party going on in the streets. The sidewalks are crowded with young people, about half of them naked. No one seems to notice. I'm dressed in only jeans.

I'm pushing a heavy bicycle down the sidewalk, a task made more difficult by a long metal chain(?) attached to its back. The metal is not actually in links like a chain, but more like a whip. It is stiff and refractory, so that as it drags the bicycle is slowed down. I keep trying to bend it up so that it doesn't drag, but without success.

As the dream ends I am struggling with the metal piece while an older heavyset man watches me from nearby. He is seated on something like an apple crate and seems vaguely familiar.

Nuclear fears

Tough night. Woke at the dread hour of 4:30 again, tossed round and round trying to get comfortable though my shoulders ached in half the positions. Slipped in and out of doze. At some point I began explaining to someone else what I thought about when I lay awake. I thought: sex, work, art, death, love, god, etc. Then I imagined making a special pair of dice. On one of those octohedral or whatever game dice I would put those words describing the basic existential knots, one word on each facet. Then a companion di would have various approaches to those ideas on each facet. For instance, laughter, despair, irony, sadness, etc. I couldn't decide if the dice would then be rolled and discussed as some kind of therapeutic and/or spiritual activity or if they were the prelude to some complex game.

Then deeper dreaming as I finally got to sleep about 6:00. I'm riding with Sandy in the van downtown, where she drops me off for some meeting. I wander across the university and to the museum, where many people are milling around in the parking lot. One of them, a former supervisor, is oddly dressed. She has one breast exposed and the the dress she's wearing is multicolored and thin. She has dyed her hair some bright color. She looks distracted as she idles around the parking lot. This is surprizing since she is or was a very conservative dresser and is roughly my age. After a bit we enter the museum and sit around a large table, where I see that I was mistaken--that woman wasn't who I thought. Instead, the real one is there looking twenty years older than in actuality. Her hair is long and solidly gray. She seems distraught. Someone reveals to me that she has an incurable disease.

I leave and go back downtown, only to find that the van is missing. Despite the fact that I was dropped off earlier in it, I now expect to find it parked. It isn't. I go inside a restaurant and try to call Sandy. The woman behind the counter there knows me and we start talking about some job search. I call Sandy but some other employee there answers. He says he won't get Sandy because--well, something catastrophic has happened to the country. Perhaps a nuclear event. He says Sandy has chosen to stay and work because most of the other employees have fled. He talks very very slowly, so that it is maddening to try to get information from him. I wake distraught.

A series of short dreams...

A series of dreams.
On a train with several people who are apparently friends. We're riding in one of the cars near the end of the train. Another train, or vehicle of some kind, is following behind us on the tracks. One of my companions, a young man, suggests that we uncouple some of the train cars so that they will crash into the followers. His face has a kind of mischevious or even mean-spirited expression. The cars are uncoupled and they crash into the following cars.

In a restaurant/night club. Low lighting, rough walls, many small round tables, some people. With a group of people I have entered the room, walking down a short flight of wooden steps. One of the people I'm with tells the group that the Rolling Stones first played together in this club. We are all thrilled and look around in vain to see if they might drop in tonight.

In a hospital. I've got an incurable disease and the doctors have decided to put me out of my misery. I'm being led down a green hall, wearing a hospital gown, to a small room where the mercy killing will take place. I'm reluctant to enter and feel great sadness that my life is about to be over.

In the museum. I walk down a hallway, which is dark and narrow. Doors open from the hallway and people talk in the doorways and sometimes crowd the hall. Everyone seems taller than me. I walk to another corridor which is separate from the rest of the building and enter. It contains a tall set of wooden steps that lead to my office. There are two or three college age people coming and going in the corridor, and one man, older than the rest, walks through a doorway to return to the other corridor. He is very tall, mostly bald. He bumps his head on the lintel without seeming to notice. I start up the stairs but they get rickety as I climb. Near the top I see that in order to get to my office I will have to leap across an empty space and twist around to land in my office. I feel dizzy and the stairs start to come loose from their moorings in the wall. I'm too frightened to leap. One of the students at the foot of the stairs, a young woman with short dark hair, looks up at me and asks if I'm still disoriented. She is apparently referring to some earlier problem I'd had. I wake in distress.

Calling Dr. Freud...

I'm in the van and just pulling into a gas station, rising on a little mound at the edge of the station, when the car runs out of gas. So close! Another foot further and the car could have coasted down to the gas pumps. I start rocking the car back and forth with a hip movement and it just barely scoots over the mound and I coast to the pumps. Hmm...

schools are dreams and dreams are schools

Maybe because I've been keeping this dream journal, everything in my life more and more resembles a dream. The gate between waking and sleeping, once opened, allows traffic in both directions. And as I think about school and how my life has been spent in classrooms, that too is becoming dreamlike.

But who is the dreamer?

I remember edges of conversations and blurred faces in the dream that is school. Never content. Never content. Other students loom against chalkboards, their tiny hands gripping pieces of chalk and writing mysterious symbols across the green fields. I remember walls covered with vapid images of totemic animals, white teeth bursting from demonic grins, who exhort me to behave in obscure and difficult ways.

And there is a secret current that flows through the rooms, alive as wind and thick as water, that jerks a drone from the mouths of teachers and shocks the other students to madness.

Do we dream each other?

Easy enough to say that America has dreamed us, that history has dreamed us, that we are the spectral doppelgangers of our grandparents desire for knowledge, that in the even light of classrooms we are sleepwalkers in the ideas of other people.

I remember a muscle in a neck, watching milk droplets parachute down through clear water in a cafeteria drinking glass in slow motion, running across half bare fields, runny noses, and dull crayons with their wrappers stripped off. I don't remember the name of the third president or the way to solve a quadratic equation.

I call all the people who ever shared a classroom with me to meet together in the open air, in bright light, so that we can look each other in the eyes and wonder.

It's all mysterious...

Night before last had erotic dream about Condeleesa Rice. Her silly hair do was replaced by short dreadlocks.

Last night dreamed I had a suspicious lump under left armpit. Creepy.

anxiety dream #4

I'm in a very large room, bigger than a football field, dimly lit, high-ceilinged, cavernous. The only thing in it is a semi truck, which is oddly narrow, and parked near one end of the room. The room has a door at the far end, away from me. There is another person as well, the driver of the truck, who is there to show me how to operate it. We are first standing beside it, then we climb inside and he points out some kind of dial on the dashboard that more or less makes sense but I can't remember its function.

We exit the cab and walk around the truck, inspecting tires etc. Two things then happen. One is that someone enters the building by the distant door, I think in another vehicle. Whoever they are, they make the driver and myself uncomfortable. Maybe we shouldn't be there? The other is that the driver points out to me that there are two bodies stored in the back of the truck above the rear wheels, one on each side. The area above the wheels is semi-transparent and it's possible to see the small chambers there, though they are shadowed and difficult to make out. Inside each is a body wrapped in dirty rags, something like a loosely wrapped mummy. The bodies are clearly dead. I can see a foot and part of a leg, a body part here and there poking through. Their skin is pale and waxy, stretched tightly over the bones. Anxiety mounts. I can now see that one of the bodies' faces is visible, and the mouth is contorted into a gaping scream. I have the growing sense that the bodies are my parents.

I wake suddenly, distraught and scared. It takes a long time to get back to sleep, and I don't really rest for the remainder of the night.

Who tells the dream?

In high school, I search through crowded hallway for my first class of the day. When I enter I realise that it's the wrong one. I leave and try to remember which one is really on the schedule but can't sort it out. Anxiously I roam the halls.

There is a transition to a downtown scene. I'm in an office building at street level. It is a busy office and I'm there to transact some kind of business. Through the open door and large windows I can see that there is something happening across the street. There are press photographers hanging out the windows of the building there in profusion, almost comically so, with cameras at every face. In the middle of the street swat teams in full battle gear are arrayed in a loose semi-circle in front of the building. I keep peeking around the edge of the door to see what's happening. The people inside the office building with me are upset. After some time the swat teams apparently succeed in capturing whoever is causing the brouhaha. They lead someone away, but I can't see who it is. I hear one of the swat guys say, "Alright, doctor, let's go."

The normal street activity begins again, but the cars take on a cartoon aspect. One car in particular is six times the size of a normal car. It has smooth curves and small windows a bit like a thirties gangster car. Then the street becomes a river flowing with blue water. A boat glides along, looking like a gangster car that has become a whale. It is light blue, very large, would look completely at home in a Disney cartoon.

I return inside the office and follow one of the women who are working there into a back room to finish whatever business I had come for. On the back of a door there I see that the office workers have put up a large handwritten chart with the names of customers annotated with a few remarks about how they are as customers. By my name is written 'big tease'. I'm absurdly glad that I wasn't characterized more negatively and I leave the office happy.

There was much more, some involving a visit to my house by a young woman who was going to help me figure out something about a school project because I couldn't remember who my other project team members were supposed to be. Lots of flirtation and kissing.

Who tells the dream?
Dream story is narrated (dream discourse), then the daily mind narrates the dream by remembering it, then puts it in yet another discourse by recording it. Where does this ladder begin and end?

Jaded...

Dreamt that I was in a room with four or five other folks. There was some kind of tablet notebook or computer device that we were trying to program to be a chess board. We were bored and waiting for our supervisor to return with a job evaluation. At one point the notebook turned into a large, folio size art book, about two inches in depth. It had stiff covers of dark cardboard, and the first few pages inside were translucent and embossed with the title, etc. It had the feel of a very expensive corporate report. The other pages were filled with glossy images of colorful nature patterns--could have been an art student's portfolio who wanted to be a graphic designer for an upper scale wallpaper design firm. Some of the images were abstract, often green and ochre in color. Others were closer to actual nature patterns--leaves, rocks, etc.

One page in particular showed a closeup of a very large leaf rendered like a jade sculpture. It was knobbly in texture, dark green with translucent yellow-green highlights where the surface was raised. There was something both attractive and repulsive about it.

One of the other people waiting with me was a woman who was very taken with the image, and when she saw it she began to rant about jade, about how it was addictive and compelling. There were scars on the side of her face. She said something like: "When something finds you, you should hold on to it." I understood her to be talking about finding some compelling obsession in life, and how important it is to embrace it.

The evaluator never returned. I woke.

Yesterday dream

Last night's dream: wandering through neighborhood of well-to-do apartments in Austin with Sandy, looking for the house of someone we know who lives there. She was a friend many years ago, and I thought about her yesterday. We find the apartment but not the person. Her son is there playing the drums in a rock band for the crowd gathered at a party. I talk to some young man with dark hair.

latest culture news

Last week saw Angels in America, The Manchurian Candidate, Clockwork Orange.
Read Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrel.
Slept too well last night to remember my dreams.

Attack of the evil twins

Middle part of a longer dream which is now back under the water. I'm in the aisle of a brightly lit grocery store. I'm with someone else unidentified, but I know he is close to me. He is lying on the floor. I don't know why. I move to lie with my head on his shoulder, a gesture of love and comfort. Then a door opens at the end of the aisle and the devil strides in--a double devil, since he is identical twins. Both are lean, dark haired, implacably menacing. They advance to where my companion and I are lying. I can't move and the devils bend over us. They are saying something but all I remember is one of them saying that his time was near, which I took to mean that he would die or become one with his twin. He didn't seem upset by the prospect. One of them commands me to look at my friend and I turn my head with difficulty to see that his head is squashed to the floor. He looks dead. Two white hard shapes ane now somehow projecting upwards from the floor and skewering us. They are irregularly shaped, something like a cactus or coral or set of antlers.

The pain from this wakes me. It is 4:00am and I turn on the light to write this report.

TR=dad?

Last night dreamed a colleague was explaining to me that his wife was having an affair with another man.

Then, somewhat later in the dream carousel, found myself traveling with my father, who in the dream was Theodore Roosevelt. I was going with him through Germany where everyone unaccountably spoke French. Very positive feeling throughout.

storm of correspondences...

This morning I sat about writing a little story related to some high school events. Not long after I got a telephone call from a company that was putting together an alumni book for my high school. Hmmm... (I declined to participate. Ultimately the hs experience is a granfalloon.)

anxiety dream #4

In this dream I was in bed when Sandy came in the bedroom and tried to get into the attic via the pull-down stairs. She reached up and pulled them down. I told her to be careful because she has shoulder problems. Then, inexplicably, the entrance remained open but the stairs themselves disappeared. She produced a short stool from somewhere and stood on it, then leaped to the hole in the ceiling. I cried out because it looked very dangerous, and sure enough she was unable to completely make the leap. She clutched the attic floor with her upper body but slipped down and landed with a horrible cry on the floor of the bedroom. Her head took a serious blow. I tried to get out of the bed and get to her but my legs were paralyzed. Using my elbows I dragged my body to the edge of the bed. She was lying on the floor, where I could see that the back of her head was smashed up. I desperately called her name to no effect.

I woke with anxiety.

post dream

Today we planted that fig tree. Myself, Sandy, and Zack. We named it Christy's Fig after the person who gave it to us, and performed a little mock-sacred rite to honor the event, dancing around and singing a birthday song. It was moving despite the silliness.

Every act has roots in the past and branches in the future.

anxiety dream #3

My brother and mother want to build a large greenhouse on my property. I am somehow made to believe that I owe this to them. My wife is opposed. She and I walk around the backyard discussing the possibility. The backyard is a dream rhyme for the backyard of the house I lived in when I was 13 years old. And now, as I write this at 3am, I think of the fig tree that we were given by a friend a few days ago and the fig tree that grew in that early backyard. My chest feels heavy with anxiety and guilt.

anxiety dream #2

Only parts of last night's dreams remain:

My father, dead for 25 years, is visiting me as he looks for his father. He is gray, thin. Later in the same dream my brother will try to remove a porcupine that has gotten in the house. This animal is small, dark, and covered with so many spines that we at first think they are fur. As we corner him near the door he shoots out the spines in profusion so that his body is revealed to be much smaller than we thought. We keep our distance but some of the spines hit me, without being painful. One sticks in my belt at the small of my back.

From another dream, same night:

Being kissed by a blonde haired young woman with soft cheeks and lips--she is trying to persuade me to take her photo in the play she is about to be in. A bit later she has become a black woman, and still later I realise she is actually a cat. I can't find my camera and there is some tension because the play is about to start. I travel with my wife and son back to our house to get it. Somewhere along the way I am watching dozens of bugs crawl across a wodden floor.

anxiety dream #1

I'm in the house, the living room. Sandy is nearby. Without knocking, a man enters the room from outside. He is in his early thirties, with long unkempt blonde hair. At first I think he is my ex-brother-in-law and I'm shocked to see him. My niece has been on my mind lately.

But it isn't him. He has a faint air of menace. He leaves without speaking. I follow him outside to a bright sunny day, where I find a group of musicians setting up. Looks like a bluegrass band but the bass is odd, like a skeleton of a bass.

More people appear, and more, all relatively young and there is the air of a concert. Everyone seems vaguely hostile, as though they were extras in a biker movie. No one speaks to me though I try to talk with several people.

I return inside, which is now crowded, and the house has become huge, a kind of delapidated Meditteranean villa with multi-colored paint peeling from stucco walls.

I wander through the house, growing increasingly anxious and tense. I yell at people and start herding them outside. No one speaks to me, though they grudgingly mill to the door. I continue chasing people out until the house is almost empty. I walk upstairs to the roof. Someone is standing at the edge of the roof at the corner. There is a blue colored stripe of paint near the edge as a warning marker. I lie down and crawl to the edge. The person standing at the corner is leaning forward as though he might jump. I say something admonitory to him and I look over to see that the house is now surrounded by a dark lake which comes directly to the base of the house. I'm surprized by this because it wasn't there when I went outside earlier.

No one else is down there but I see a wooded island not far away. Somehow I know or over hear voices saying that everyone has gone there.

There is an overwhelming sense of anxiety and I wake panting and full of dread.

the simplest answer

Last night my son asked me about Occam's Razor, because he has come across the name on a website. Today the first answer in the Time's crossword was Occam. Hmmm...