Dream Log: March 5, 2001

I couldn't get to sleep. I didn't get up yesterday morning until it wasn't morning anymore, but noon. I knew that even though Byzantine had come back from drill, even though I'd been cooking most of the early evening while talking to discofever on the phone from Tulsa, I was due for a long night. At first I tried to sleep. I gave up after an hour of turning and made some tea, read a few pages of a book I am reading called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers. I got online, talked to piq for a while, wrote an email to David Eggers telling him about E2, that for some reason he should check out the site. I tried to fall asleep again at 1 but likely didn't actually fall asleep until 2. The following took 3 hours.

I am at my parent's house, which has land all around it. Land broken up in the oddest ways, at the oddest angles. My parents, in real life, have never had a house, but in the dream, I am still living there; I never left in this version. I am younger, maybe a teenager, and so I am bumbling about more than I would now. My hair is long, as it was then but not now. It was late night or early morning, and a man had come calling about buying any of the property that my parents owned. The man was short and squat and had a small, fat mustache and thick glasses. I walked out there with him. At the back of the house there is an alley, above which there was a single streetlight that was not illuminated. I was outside (the man had not yet come out) when all of a sudden, the light came on. This light looked broken to me, so I asked the man how he did that, how he made the light come on. He said he hadn't done anything.

Outside there was a small, swollen and overgrown row of vegetables. Some trucks and tractors parked haphazardly in the dirt. Looked like a farm. When we walked back inside, the house was oddly illuminated by small dim florescent lights like the kind my mother actually had used in many of the apartment kitchens where I grew up fearing the dark. I was frantically trying to find a business card of my parents' that had a current phone number, but all I seemed to find were old ones bearing the Maryland numbers of all the failed businesses my father had in real life. The box where I was looking seemed to contain more slips of simple paper with numbers written in my mother's lazy hand than actual business cards. I was intent to find business cards. Then my father emerged from their bedroom, young and gaunt, the way he looked before he quit smoking when I was 9 or so. He seemed annoyed that the man was there so early, and I felt a sudden wave of shame that I hadn't been able to do a better job of showing him around, but at the same time my father seemed to know that this house was unfamiliar to me, that in truth I had never seen it before.

I was narrating a sad documentary about my own neighborhood, only it's not the one where I am currently living. I narrated in a hushed voice, like the boy in the movie Gummo. I said, "This is Alphabet City. It was once a busy place, with lots of things happening. Now, people don't talk. They fear that if they speak, hope will die and this will be how all places that were once bustling like this one will end up like this place." As I spoke, people were frozen in their activities: a man drinking from an aluminum can a Pepsi with a logo from the 80's. A bus still on the curve of an off ramp. I said, "None of these homes are paid for anymore, abandoned, but people still live here." The houses, all in rows, were like the shotgun apartments that were common in New Orleans even now. Everyone that was frozen in time was black. While I could hear my own whispering voice, I could not see myself in the dream. I was only a voice floating over the still frame of the scene, people stopped in mid motion. I was the only voice.

I woke with a start when my alarm went off at 5am, just a little while ago. I ate some raspberry granola with soy milk and then I spooned half a cup of apple apricot sauce. The time I spent sleeping seemed to fly. Part of me wanted to get back into the dream. Part of me wished I hadn't dreamt it. It was simply too real.

I'm in some strange dystopian future, where one's station is indicated by the colored robes one wears. Some random guy and I are stationed in a big, faceless building (which in retrospect looked an awful lot like New School University's Graduate Faculty building), looking at big round racks of green, gold, and pink robes. If we get pink robes, we can have access to...something. I don't remember what, but it was important.

Then we're in a little car. The random guy is driving, I'm in the passenger seat. We're both in the pink robes. A third rebel, who happens to be Stephen Malkmus, is hiding in the back because we couldn't find a robe that would fit him. There's an explosion behind us.

Then I'm back in the pseudo-GF building. I walk through a big metal detector sort of device, nervous that I'll get caught. I'm not. In fact, I'm mistaken for some high-ranking official, and appointed coroner. I'm led into a morgue and I poke at corpses. Under one sheet is just a severed foot, which I pick up a piece of and start chewing on, like slimy, sticky chewing gum.

I wake up and am grossed the fuck out.

Fell asleep listening to Richard D James' Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Those of you who have heard the masterpiece that is said album, you know that this could lead to some interesting dreams.

Floating in a collumn of dark blue liquid. It's so blue, but I can see through it, all around me a blue world. Purple orbs float lethargicly upwards, always upwards. The green cones float down, this is their sole duty, their only function. The pace increases, things are going faster now. Specks of ruby are introduced to the system, contrasting all that the world stands for. At first they are small, so small that I can't even see them but I know they are there. They grow bigger, like beautiful gems of pure crimson. They bleed out, polluting the wonderful blue dream liquid. The cylinder is ensconsed in red.

Down through a small rusty grate go me and the red substance. In a barren white room, serile and lonely. Winds born of hades wip around the non-landscape, rasping my naked flesh but it is of no matter, I feel nothing. I watch as these hellish winds tear away at the nothingness, revealing new horror.

A broken wasteland, a broken man my only guide. Still the winds blow, still they absolve me of my feelings. The beauty of the first dillusion is lost to me, all I know is this place. A cube of nothingness walks by in the way one would imagine a cube would walk. It glares at me with it's blank white faces, moving slowly into the void on my right. Strange, but still it fails to arouse me. Then he comes, subtly and with violence unmatched. A lanky freak, his limbs more than five feet in length crawling towards me and away at the same time. His body is covered in tribal tattoos, his face twisted and showing the futility of his struggle. Ripped asunder by dislogic, a gigantic baby replaces the disgusting man. It wails unmatched, silenced only by a tiny mother, clad all in black, demanding that it shut up. This is a land of great hatred, but I can only love it for it is of my own creation.

The world slowly comes to an end, time twisting and convulsing until it is no more. A brief vision of blue engulfs my field of vision, just before I am awakened.

Funny dream: This African-American guy shows up at my house and wants to use my tape recorder to make a mix tape. He's a real fast talker so I am somehow persuaded. He's rushing around with all these tapes and a pair of headphones, singing a little bit to himself.

He says he's the president's chauffeur, but the limo is in the shop for cleaning, because he spilled butter in it. To illustrate he drops all these little restaurant butter packages on the ground. He complains about his bad luck and how he didn't even have a sandwich he was trying to put the butter on, he just spilled it, for no good reason.