Dream Log: January 19, 2001

I walked into the supermarket and, displayed with the brochures and christian, literature was a folded A4, photocopied flyer.

There was a photo of me walking down the street in the middle of the front.

"See Trina going through her everyday life" it screamed.
"Watch her as she goes through her day-to-day chores. See her clean her teeth. Snigger as she looses her keys AGAIN."

"And if you can spot the exact moment her boyfriend dumps her, win $1,000"

I picked a flyer up and looked at it.

It was definitely about me.

I took it over to the cashier, a woman who has known me for years, and held it out to her

"Look at this!" I was upset.

"Oh how lucky you are! You are in your own video!"

No one understood how upset I was.

Everyone was delighted for me.

I wandered away feeling deep deep sadness and confusion.

I sit on a cold hard set of bleachers in a classroom with other students. We are watching a movie about grasshoppers. We are all naked, sitting far apart. Our clothes are strewn about the floor. The cold light of a streetlamp flickers on outside the room.

Suddenly the light is obscured. There is a sound upon the window pane. Our teacher stops the movie. The sound grows louder, a deafening hum that leads to smacking against the glass. The glass breaks and grasshoppers seem to be flying into the room.

"Locusts! Run!", the teacher shouts.
We grab our clothes and flee. No time for shoes, I throw on my jeans and zip-up sweatshirt, zipping as I run. All the others have disappeared and I am alone in an empty hall searching for a way out. My bare feet silently padding along the cold hard floor.

I finally see some stairs and as I run down, I see people lying on the steps, pressed together one on top of the other. They have sores all over them and chewed up holy clothes.

"Why aren't you running?", I cry, "Move!"
But, they only stay and point to the door. "The next wave is coming, prepare yourself!"
The door is open and I see a black humming cloud spread over the sky. I see it cover the moon and feel fear.

I turn and notice on another set of stairs higher up is a boy lying alone. He too is covered in wounds, but over more of his body than the rest. He is silent, but his eyes are watching the group. They are filled with longing.

The locust cloud is deafening now. The people in the group grab my legs and tell me to stay with them where it will be safe. I only see the boy. I yank myself free and run to him. I spread my body over his, tuck his face against my chest and make sure no parts of him are exposed. I unzip my sweatshirt and tuck the open edges around him. We slide against the edge of the stairwell and I hold on as the ravenous force sets down upon us.

I hear the screams of the others before I feel the attack on me. Piercing stabs of pain fill me as my feet are set upon. I feel hundreds of sparks of pain yet I don't cry out. My clothes are no protection and soon they too are filled with holes and blood. Still I hold my stance. The boy starts sobbing against me.

"Where are they getting you? Tell me and I will move to stop it!" I say.
"No that isn't it", he cries,"They are not touching me. But you, you cared enough. When the others tossed me aside, you didn't ask why. You just came to me because you cared. You care"

The locusts move on as quickly as they come. I roll off the boy and lie on my back. The pain is gone, yet I am still bleeding. I look at the boy and he is like new. No wounds or torn clothes. I look on in wonder. My eyes turn to the group of people, they are all dead. I wonder that I am still alive, I look out the door and see the moon. It is watching me. Waiting. It calls to me. My blood is flowing down the stairs and I know that I am dying. There is no pain, only relief.

The boy comes to me with tears in his eyes. He strokes my hair. "I must be going now." He kisses my brow, then walks up the stairs until he is out of sight.

I am left alone bleeding for the moon.

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I had this dream (or some variant) almost every night for a few weeks. I'm a firm believer in dreams as being the mind's way of sorting out the junk of life. Once I wrote it down and looked at it carefully, I was able to figure out what it meant to me. It doesn't scare me anymore. I know why I've been dreaming it.

I'm in a grocery cart, being wheeled around by Adam Duritz. He's humming Private Archipelago.

He buys a shrimp cocktail party platter.

He KNOWS I'm allergic to shellfish.

I jump out and land in the chair I'm sitting in now. I hear my cat, from the bathroom.

I walk into the bathroom, and I realize that the cat has taken the nastiest shit possible for a 6 month old cat. It makes me want to stab myself in the face.

Adam shows up, shrimp in hand, to make amends.

I lock his melodramatic ass in the bathroom with the stench that could singe the nosehairs off a dead nun.

My best friend Justin and I are prisoners of some evil, quite deranged character (without a name that's ever said) with plans to take over the world and torture everyone, etc. Most of these plans to take over and torture involve the use of his new submarine that he's just created and is launching today. Justin and I decide that for the good of humanity and also to get our asses out of there, we're going to steal the submarine and make our getaway.

The entire complex is situated on an atoll, the inside shore of which is where the prisoners are kept (we're not the only ones, but we can't exactly take everyone with us, can we?) and at one point of which is a large building where the bad guy's troops and so forth live (well, you can't take over the world without troops, can you?). So anyhow, Justin and I manage to sneak our way into the building and up the elevator to the heighest floor where the troop's bunks are. We walk in like we own the place and start getting fitted up with all the other troops in whatever wetsuits and life preservers we can find.

The problem is that the bad guy has, by this point, figured out that we are gone, and apparently what we're planning to do, so he instruct all of his troops (and now this doesn't make any sense) to put on karate uniforms instead (so as to better spot us, of course). Justin and I are smarter than that, though, we quickly run back into the lockers and steal uniforms from two unsuspecting troopers and run quickly back to wait for the elevator which is going to take us down to the submarine...

Waiting there, however, is the bad guy himself. Instead of shooting us, for example, he instead engages in a little chat with us until the elevator down arrives, at which point we incapacitate him (a punch to the gut or something) and run into the elevator, managing to take it all the way down to the submarine bay. We hop into the submarine (which is filled with water, which strikes me as odd at first, until I realize that I'm breathing at the same time, so it must be that highly oxegenated water, like from The Abyss.) And Justin and I blast out of there, saving humanity for all time (or so we think, until the submarine is sunk with us in it a few hours later... but that's a different story).

Remembered fragments:

My boyfriend and I are holed up in this house somewhere...not an unusual house, but it was winter, and cold, and although there had been lots of other people around originally, they had all gone out.

We turn on this heating unit, like a huge furnace, and fall asleep or stop paying attention.

The others come back; apparently we had used the furnace wrongly, and it had blown out some vent in a vicious, vision-distorting belch of heat. "You could have died," they tell us.

I'm playing a computer game, and it's an older version than one I've seen my friends playing. Only, instead of just playing it, I'm in it. It's sort of a Sims-style game, and my task is to convince these dogs (I think there's a person, too) to fall asleep.

The room is dark, most of them are asleep, but there's one sitting in a rocking chair (it's one of those little gray, wiry dogs with a beard). I crawl/sneak up to it and my my chin on its lap. I try to talk it into sleeping, it talks to me, another dog speaks up from behind me.

It's like we've changed positions.

The dreams themselves weren't so strange, but I woke up feeling tired and disturbed by them. I haven't been very happy lately, and they seemed to only reiterate that.