Dream Log: February 8, 2000

I'm running around some large, recreation area filled with children, mostly less than 12 years of age. Occasionally their parents are there too (a place very similar to, for example, Discovery Zone). They can see me, but take little notice, even though I know they should probably be afraid of me. I'm carrying with me, a variation of the razor blade gun from Unreal Tournament, and continue to have trouble getting the projectiles into the loading barrel without cutting my hands. The projectiles say "Nerf" on them, even though they are clearly razor sharp steel blades. I'm looking for someone, although I don't know, or can't remember, who it is. I wander a bit longer, until I find my brother, and his friend, climbing up a jungle like rope structure. I sit on a railing on top of the structure, and continue to try and load the projectiles into the weapon, while my brother and friend climb up the structure to meet me. I eventually get them all in the "gun", but...

• In a dream, describing to men what I had done in a dream long ago:
  Checking their lottery tickets. The lottery was new and all these people were coming from out of state who didn't have any idea how to do it. Some of them brought me the newspaper, the article about the lotto, and thought that was their ticket. I explained over and over. The ones who had bought tickets didn’t know how to read them. Sometimes they went catatonic and I could look down their blouses, up their skirts. Brief flashes of nipple.

  The men weren’t listening, bored, so I sidestepped them into another dream where I was lying on a broad flat couch with another woman. Brief dresses which hardly covered us. I writhed about slowly, offering the men glimpses of cleavage, my thonged ass, knowing that I was insulated from them, that they could never touch me, that no matter how badly they wanted me, I would only ever want her.

• looking at the building and thinking how nice it would be to live there, then realizing I used to. Thirteen long rectangular apartments built on top of each other with an elevator in the short arm of the L, nothing else. White stucco. I looked at the lights in the building and wondered if there was one empty, and if so, how soon could I get away from him and go back to living there.

• At a friend’s house we had all gotten so drunk, so much dizzy laughter. Archie left a ten-dollar bill on his dinner plate as we left. He won’t take it, I tried to say, but we were leaving . . . I came back in to thank Edith – she sat there defeated, without the communal noise, quiet and thin in her flowered housecoat.

• Slumber party? Or just all of us visiting a friend at once? It was all right for us to be naked with each other but when her mother came in we all shrieked and dove into the curtains. Somehow all our faces and long naked legs kept showing no matter how we tried to hide. She didn’t mind – she was wearing little herself – a huge, muscular black woman though her daughter was thin and white. There was an awkward moment when we didn’t think she quite believed the lie we threw together, but then she stripped off her top and walked from the room bare-breasted, singing something from “Hello, Dolly.” She was magnificent, all corded muscle down her torso, her breasts tight afterthoughts.

• First it was a book I was reading and xeroxing, then a movie I was watching and pulled into. The back cover said it was about a fat girl who meets someone 2 ½ times her weight and learns important things about acceptance etc. The movie starred that woman whose name I can never get and the one who played Jo on Facts of Life. There’s no way they could have been the same age at the same time but there they were. They were on the top level of a double-decker bus, touring something. I scanned the faces, thinking, which one is the fat girl? I realized it was the woman whose name I don’t know. But she wasn’t fat. Slim neck, delicate bones. This is Hollywood’s concept of fat? They had put her in a terrible wig made of yarn, and she had to munch on a hamburger the whole time, letting it spill out the corners of her mouth.

• He went into the enormous vault-ceilinged bathroom and came right back out. Are they going to watch me?

  They’re celebrating, I said, they are glad you have returned.

  He still didn’t understand why those four black beings were twenty feet up in the air, dancing slowly in the arched windows.

  Haven’t you ever been so happy that someone had come back, that your heart had to create something outside your body?

  But I’m just shaving, he said.

  Yes, you are shaving, you have come home, everyone is glad.

  
  

• Going through the bins until I found a slight purple top. A cord to wrap around my waist, thin stretchy fabric that I knew would reveal my nipples clearly.

• Come on out, Angel, she said softly.