I have been having a lot of long, memorable dreams lately.

I am in my school's library (one of two in the dream) with some friends. I am sitting at a table with a few friends, particulary next to Ben, who happens to be reading a book about artwork in Angola. I am discussing artistic concepts with him (Supposedly, Manet was more famous in China for his Fauvist works, despite that Fauvism wasn't even popular in his time?) only my voice seems to be fluctuating in tone and volume and the librarian, a woman that neither of us is fond of, sitting at a table nearby, becomes angry with me and tells me to shut up.

Suddenly, I speak up and tell her that if I were talking any lower, Ben would not be able to hear me, so therefore, I will not shut up. Her facial expression in reaction to this was priceless.

"I can't believe you're actually saying this to me," she said.

So in bitter irony (or perhaps not), I staged a rebellion of silence. I seemed more angry at Ben than anyone else though, and I'm not sure why.

"What do you think you're doing?" she asked me.

"Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm," I replied in a series of close-mouthed mumbles.

I walked out of the library in anger, and as I did, the theme song from the cancelled Nickelodeon television series, Guts, began to play. It was cruel and embarrassing to me, because I knew the music was only mocking my anger by overdramatizing my ire.

I look in the window of the library for some time, hoping Ben or any of my friends will follow me out, but it appears that they are staying. Ben yawns finally, and the entire group of people (friends unfamiliar to me) follow him out. In my mind, I believe that I am responsible for this and that I have really influenced their opinions about the stupid library policy.

Now, Ben and I are walking near the school in this new area that has been built, some sort of residential development and a friend of mine is there trying to persuade me into buying a house from him. But I'm ignoring him and speaking with Ben. We're talking about what happened in the library. He occasionally gives me a quirky look that denotes he is confused about the discussion.

We go into another library that is in the exact same location as the other library only it has all these rocking chairs in it and is sans bitchy librarian. We sit down in a couple of rocking chairs in a middle row, but the girl in front of us turns and leers at us and I notice this little icon in the bottom right corner of my dream-o-vision (as if my dream were being viewed on a television screen) that looks like a coat of arms and I know that we are on gang territory and I suggest we move to the next row of rocking chairs. I think we are both moving up, but then I turn around and he is still in the row behind me, only now he has two girls with him, one on each arm.

One is a girl he has confessed to being attracted to (in "real" life) and the other is the same black girl who had just threatened us with her gang coat of arms. He is Ben the Player in the dream, and has this annoying chauvanist view on the female sex that involves him making these loud, stocky laughs and the girls having this dainty sexual nature to them. They looked as if they may just crumble if he squeeze them any harder. In fact, with the expression on his face, I was expecting to see a monacle and a stovepipe hat.

I stormed out of the library in anger (again!) only this time he followed me. He managed to grab my hand as I exited and stopped me. I brooded. Everything he said incensed me more. Then he said something that just took me by surprise.

"Rebekah is just there for the sex. Why, I've knocked her up four times already and I don't have to pay child support because she's too stupid to ask! With that lack of responsibility, who could resist the urge?!" or something like that.

I turned to run again. He kissed me and then tripped me. I said, "What a jerk," as I stood up and ran again. He pulled me back again, blindfolded me and threw me in his car (something he only had in the dream) which was this large decorative van owned by a pawn shop near the city with a bunch of faux oversized jewelery cemented onto it. He kissed me again. Only somehow this was different and I got over the library incident and the dream ended.

My 13-year-old brother, David, and I were riding in the back of a red pickup truck driven by our 17-year-old brother. We were going slowly down the highway near our house and were about to turn into our driveway when an identical red truck came up behind us. The passenger in this truck was a man with shaggy yellow-blonde hair, about shoulder-length but layered, and a rough face as if he had gotten too much exposure to the elements. He started yelling some sort of threat, like "I'm going to get you" and I think he threatened David specifically by name.

My other brother saw this and floored the gas, and I was clinging to the truck and to David, screaming "I love you, David" over and over again. We were going faster and faster, and then the man jumped out of the truck and began to run behind us. He was almost at us, and I knew that it was supernatural to be able to run that fast, but I kept clinging to my brother and screaming "I love you, David" and the man was making fun of me and threatening my brother.

Suddenly it was my other brother behind us, standing still and quickly left helplessly in the distance, and I turned and looked in the cab of the truck and it was the shaggy-haired man. He turned around and laughed and began tormenting us again. The truck turned and started going the opposite direction, and we passed going a string of red trucks just like ours and then a string of identical tan old-person cars with identical old ladies behind the wheel headed the opposite way. The yellow-haired man was sitting facing backward, not driving, but the truck did not crash.

I was screaming my brother's name when I woke up. He was sleeping next to me and my scream that woke me up woke him up, too. He asked me why I had gotten into bed with him, and I was confused because it was my bed, not his. There were strange people sleeping on the couch where David had been sleeping (due to remodeling my bed was in the living room and he was sleeping on the couch there). We all woke up and went to sit on a small, waiting-room type sofa to sit facing the door, which had a screen asking for a password and scrolled the message "no sneaking out."

I started to tell David about my dream, but was interrupted by the guy at the other end of the couch saying "and then..." and beginning to give details that were not a part of my dream. I told him to be quiet or he would confuse me and I wouldn't remember my dream. He said that I should be quiet so *he* wouldn't forget *his* dream, and I was very pissed off because I didn't know who he was, didn't see why he could matter in my house, and didn't see how his dream could possibly be as significant as mine. Then David got up and left the room, and I was going to follow him when I woke up for real.


I am assuming this stemmed from my contemplation earlier of the scene in The Truth Machine where a five-year-old sees his three-year-old brother carried off by a man. I had been thinking what I would do if someone was taking my brother, thinking that waiting for 911 people would take too long. I thought of running out with a gun, but I don't know how to shoot, and the guy could shield his body with my brother's. Finally, I wondered whether I could volunteer to go in my brother's place, and just pray that he would accept the trade-in and spare my brother. I hadn't thought of this extensively, but I suppose the thoughts came back to haunt me in the form of a dream.

I dream my friend S and I are in Europe, traveling atop something that is sometimes a huge carriage like something out of Harry Potter, sometimes like a train. It is night. It moves under its own power and most of the time I am not paying attention to it. S and I have become separated from the other people we were with - there were about 6 of us at various other parts of the dream, her boyfriend, other people, the only one with a speaking role was fuzzy and blue, who was helping us try to blend in. I assume we were blending in because we couldn't return to the US or were hiding from the US government, unsure of getting political asylum. Regardless, our goal was to disappear in Europe. We were somewhere along the border of France and Germany, and fuzzy and blue told us we should practice speaking Dutch, since passing for Netherlanders would be easier than anything else. When I'm awake, I know about one word in Dutch, kut, which means cunt. I vaguely know a few other words and phrases, mostly obscene, but kut is the only one I can produce reliably. Anyway, point is, when she told me to practice speaking Dutch, I called her a cancerous whore, and I remember saying it several times and thinking about the syllables and how they moved in my mouth. Now that I'm awake, I have no idea how to say cancerous whore and can't remember the sounds involved at all.

Water Spiders

  • With Tish and August, we're skimming along the surface of a wilderness lake riding atop a small platform about the size of a small surfboard. The edges of the lake blur into marsh and the platform seems to follow a submerged track which stays in the shallows near shore. Tish tells me that the lake is 120 feet deep in the middle. Soon we arrive at a delapidated shack of a house, built on floatation rafts and attached to the shore. Our automatic people mover brings us alongside the dock and we climb up onto the creaky platform. Tish's father used to live here many years ago but it's been uninhabited for some time. We three are thinking about moving in. The interior is not as run-down as the exterior--the carpet is even fine. A portrait of Tish's dad hangs on the wall: a brawny fellow, built like an ox, with a somber face that's only sketched in. When I walk to the door that leads out onto the deck overlooking the lake, it's hanging slightly ajar and there is a huge swarm of big black spiders jumping all around there. I yell to the others as the spiders begin to leap frog towards me. Suddenly, Tish's dad appears, looking exactly like the portrait with a sketched-in face, and blocks the spiders while we run out of the house.

I can remember being in an airport. It was busy, full of bustling people who pushed at me from all directions. I spot my mother up ahead of me in the crowd. I call out to her, but she doesn't hear me or doesn't pay attention. I try to catch up with her, but she keeps further and further away. She disappears.

Suddenly, I start finding pennies on the ground and I scramble around picking them up. There aren't many people in the hallways now. Occaisionally I find a nickel or dime. I even find a pair of Red Lobster gift certificates...$30 each.

Now I am walking down the hallway again. It's full of people and they all funnel into a large auditorium-like room. The ceiling is silver. There's a movie screen in the front. I find a seat on the right hand side of the room. I look around for people that I know, but don't see anyone. We all watch a movie...

And then I woke up.

I dream I was away from school on tuesday. I need to get my dad to sign a sick note. I draft something for him to sign over and over and over, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated with all sorts of calligraphy, but I always make a small error and have to start again. Finally, I succeed by listing the alphabet in a long column in the lefthand margin, and then composing the note. I get dad to sign and then forget I did, forging his signature above his real signature. I figure one way or another, the secretary will accept it. At the bottom of the note, I try to fill in my tuesday schedule of classes so the secretary will be able to process it. I rack my brains, but can only come up with Biology in Block B. I realize that it's my only course, and I don't have it on tuesdays, so the note was pointless. I realize after this that it's my only course and it's in college, so I wouldn't need a sick note anyhow. I am in class. We are having a surprise quiz, the day before the midterm. We're all pissed. I try to find a seat, but they're all taken except for one row at the back, which is all tangled up. I toss aside one desk after another, one with a wobbly chair, one without a top. Finally I look up, and everyone has vacated a row of perfectly good desks. Oh. I sit down, and start the quiz, ten minutes late. It's really unpleasantly arranged - duplicate numbers, material no one studied, and questions about KOH in the intermediate stages of the Krebs cycle, which was beyond the scope of the course. I'm mad, mad, mad. I ask the prof is this is a joke, if the horrible, vague, unclear questions can be clarified somehow. He says no. I throw my quiz in the garbage (I miss; the crumpled paper sits on the floor.) The prof looks at me oddly. I say "Look, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to disrupt your class. I know it's a melodramatic thing to do. I'm just very frustrated!" Class continues. I'm too angry to take notes. I wander the hallways, looking for my locker.

that one was kind of boring. the next one was weirder.

After reading an adventure book by l. frank baum in a long series, I look over a list of his publications at the back. In the series of 30, I am missing at least 10! I make a note of their titles to order online. I see some gaps in the series are missing and have been filled in after his death by other authors. I'm not sure I want to read those. After the list for this action-filled series (I hear a documentary voice in my head noting how the titles are often misleading. One depressing sounding title is actually about a humourous jail-break; one silly title is about a bleak trek across a blasted wasteland to establish commerce with the scattered peoples there to revive the dying economies of the journeyers' homeland. I haven't read that one, but I read the previous one in the series.), is the list of his oz books. I scoff. I don't need to order any, I've read them all (even the lame last one: Glinda in Oz) when I was younger. Besides, they're for pansies.

I am a small boy, Dsomething, in one of his fictional works. It feels like I'm confusing him with Lewis Carroll, I think this several times in the dream. In actuality it doesn't seem anything like either. There are two companions with me; Jamesie and a girl. Our real names are long and formal and enclose our actual names, but I don't remember them now. (Jamesie is really Hedebrejames or something.) We've been abducted in to some surreal and somewhat sinister fantasy land, I think for the unstated purpose of reproducing. The abduction involved KOH, which in the dream was a kind of chloroform. There are several weird, tall figures. One has black black hair and black black drapy clothes. He's very sketchy. We're let out occasionally to play in a labyrinth or in to grey rooms to play with strange toys. Jamesie and the girl seem oblivious to the strange beings, but I have somehow caught on, and there's an implicit threat: if I don't co-operate, if I tell the other children what is going on, they will be put in physical danger. I reluctantly comply. I know too that if any of us turn out to be infertile, we'll be sent back, never to return, which is somehow also very undesirable.

One day in the weird grey playroom, the black black one, who seems to be the spokesman, comes in and shoos the other children out with pleasant excuses. He has brought in a strange apparatus which he claims is a toy; I know it's surgical equipment. He asks me offhand if I know if the KOH cannister has anything left in it. I don't say anything; I'm too scared or numb to get out the words. He walks over and picks it up off the window seat and shakes it. Still good. It's a bright safety orange jug, like for kerosene or gas. He screws it on to his apparatus, and gently puts a cloth over my mouth. I'm relieved; I don't really want to witness whatever comes next.

I have hazy foggy images of some vital essence of me being sampled, removed, and used to fertilize three holes or troughs in something of unclear shape. As they are touched by my whatever, they turn different colours: red, yellow, blue. More fog.

I wake up. I know the girl, all of seven, will carry my child. I furrow my eyebrows; I can't quite understand it.

I wake up for real a few times in here and I think I dreamed more, but checking what time it is on the alarm clock has made me forget what.

Ah! This is ridiculous, I had another dream about you last night. This one was happy though, instead of tragic. You were on a road trip and came bearing presents. You were travelling with a tall slightly silly girl named Zoelle. I gave the two of you a tour of the house pointing out good things. Then gifts. In my room you pulled out a string of large bright pink christmas lights with a pink cord and holders. Next came a two-dimensional candle which was made of construction paper, it was cut out and glued together in the semblance of a candle. You folded the base of the candle, and Zoelle taped it to the wall and lit it. Later there was something about a gas station named 'safe/astride'.

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