hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

My once-forgotten dreams are getting memorable again. Beautiful and haunting. It's part of why I've been feeling the urge to write, to verbalize myself, talk into the void in the hopes that the truth comes spilling from my mouth like Athena from the head of Zeus. I need to start recording them and sifting through them for the patterns again to see what I'm trying to tell myself.

July 22nd I dreamt that Erin was my mother, and she was knocking at the front door, so I got out of bed to let her in. And when I opened the front door I realized that I was actually awake and at the open front door and had gotten out of bed in some sort of hynogogic state. At least I fell back asleep after? And I'm noticing a weird pattern of twos in the dates of the memorable dreams.

July 2nd I had a long magical realism dream of traveling through the faerie markets with a group of friends. We kept losing our map, and being really hungry because you can't eat in faerie even though everything smells good, and buying things like candles in stores for ornaments for holidays that didn't exist anymore, or maybe didn't exist yet? Blue bought a new name off an old friend he met out there.

June 22nd I have the strangest dreams when I’m in pain in my sleep. Magical realism. I was a boy in love with one of the drowning Fae, and my school took a trip I didn't want to go on to a museum of history and art and magic, and I climbed into one of the displays and found a bottle of half-drunk wedding wine on the roof.
I kept trying to tell my friends who I was in love with but the words wouldn’t come out. So I went home and laid on the couch in the back bedroom, the coldest room in the house, where the window is always open a crack, and listened to the children play in the river behind the house, where I had once seen another child die. The whole dream was like drowning, very very slowly.

In my life, when there is shit going down that my conscious mind is not acknowledging, it comes out in my dreams. My dreams try to tell mt waking self what I don't want to look at, like the time when I had recurring dreams about killing a friend of mine that I was no longer in unrequited love with. Those took forever to parse the dream logic of, but were basically me telling myself to stop obsessing before the measures I had taken to turn off that section of my personality failed and feelings came back and shit went down. Dream logic does not tell stories directly, not in my brain. It tells them mirrored and inside out or upside down or in strange emotional reversals that make dream-logic but not so much waking logic.

And if I never have another dream where I wake up in David Lowery's coffin with his dead body that would be nice. I still have shuddery hella feels from that.

Just woke from a dream where I had apahsia, and could not talk. I could sing, hum, and whistle, but as soon as I tried to listen to words or say them, nothing would work. Maybe 'nightmare' is a better descriptor. At least my headache is gone!

So, since I'm having some scaring-myself headspace, I thought I'd entertain you all with more stories of the crazy I used to be, and maybe finish up today's post with some new crazy I'm trying on.

( Crazy I Used To Be )

In other news I'm trying to back off of the internet usage the way I currently use it and change it up. To what, I'm not sure. But I spent so much time reading this spring, and I think I'm going to get a second job this fall. I'll be living 100 yards from a Starbucks. The logical way to keep from bankrupting myself is to be working there. Thoughts?

Okay, the true meaning of that dream has finally emerged, ( and it's a weirdie. )

When I have dreams that are trying to tell me something, they are hyper-real. Every color is rich, every edge is sharp, every person has depth and autonomy. It's quite nice that I dream mostly in fantasy/sci-fi. What's not nice? Is that I have hyper-real dreams that are calculated to upset me using a wide variety of weaknesses, of which fear is the least part. If the dream bothers me, I'll be more likely to remember it. Yay for the ruthless logic of the unconscious mind.

Last night's dream featured me sneaking into the underground base of a lunatic who's breeding giant snakes that he can train to destroy cities, myself intent on stealing the regulator box of the catalyst/device that makes the scent hormones he uses to control the snakes. Without control of the animals, all I have to do is collapse the entrance, and the rest of the problems will take care of themselves. :j

The interesting twist this time is that I'm stuck in an ouroboros loop, because even in my dreams the plans never go smooth. I'm tense and sneaking around in the pre-dawn quiet, and it takes about five minutes to get from the compound wall to the tiny entrance. When your senses are that stretched out, five minutes is a long time to be sneaking around patrols and ducking behind things based on the sound of quiet footsteps. When I get into the entrance to the tunnels, time loops back to the beginning. And every time it loops, things are a little different. Patrols are in different places, or going different directions, or I have a cut that's leaking blood, and the patrols dogs can smell me, and they sound restless. Every time I get to the carved stone entrance and slip inside the tiny 4' by 4' aperture, stone slick and cool beneath my palms, it all restarts. Eventually I woke up, but my shoulders were so tense that they still ache, because of something I thought I was doing in my sleep.

Now I just get to figure out what it means.

So I've been having those dreams again, and I'm deeply ambivalent about that. You get to hear all about it, ( lucky you. )

Not all of my dreams are hyper-real, but the ones that are are pretty memorable. One of my favorites is a dream in which I am a seraph, a mighty angel, flying in low over the waves toward the city of L.A.


I pull up, straining against the heavy air, and my wings beat in the dirty sky to gain altitude. And I look out over the city, this lovable den of iniquity, so quiet now that it's been evacuated. There's a large meteor coming to L.A. and everyone has left. People, wildlife, even insects seem to have rushed away from the coming impact, and the only movement is the warm breath of the wind moving steadily seaward. It's beautiful. Still. A serene moment of perfect harmony over a city whose time has come. I remember the odd jumble of geometry, the buildings clashing and vying with no prevailing theme. I remember the smell of hot salt, exhaust, and the human, organic smell of thousands of people trying to leave this place that draws them in without mercy.


The sweep of my wings is loud in my memory, all else is hushed. The sky is beautiful and clear so far above the city, the air so dry. I draw my sword, flames licking out from the edges. I hold it balanced over the city, poised on the knife edge between duty and joy. No warning of the imminent destruction until it's HERE, and I swing the sword like a baseball bat, cracking the meteor out of the atmosphere like a stellar home run. In fierce joy I now take up the duty of the destroyer. With a flaming sword I gleefully smash the pretty city into it's own pavement, The iron frames of buildings shiver and crumble at each blow, and with bolts of heavenly fire I raze L.A. until it lies level and quiescent, a sea of glass.


*


Sometimes my dreams are so amazing that I wake to my life a stranger here, no sense of belonging more to this world than to that. I resent the beauty of my dreams for making so much difference, so marked a contrast to this life. I am not satisfied here in this world, and maybe if I had the same dreams you have I would never have to know it.