Dream Log: January 22, 2001

I was in the kitchen and told Pseudo_Intellectual my guilty secret. He reacted well but was clearly a bit betrayed and angry. He filled a saucepan about a third full of water and poured it down my neck. Fair enough. I'd do that too.

I assured him that I had never used it for evil purposes, and had never set out to deceive him.

The only reason you can stop opposite a bus stop is to check your brake fluid. There was a demonstration of a car doing this, pulling over; although it was in a country lane, the bay opposite the bus stop was marked out. It was like an old training film or newsreel, perhaps 1950s. I don't remember much narration though: for that kind of thing it was eerily silent. Checking brake fluid does not require getting out of the car.

Then a motorcyclist demonstrated the only reason you are allowed to take your hand off the handlebars while riding beside a train is to... I was a bit unclear about this, he seemed to be adjusting his cuffs, holding up his arms quite ostentatiously to demonstrate it, as you might hold out an arm to indicate a turning.

It seemed awfully dangerous to me, as he was quite close to the speeding train, and he had long chains dangling from his sleeves, which I thought must surely get entangled in the wheels.

A lorry also had chains hanging from it, but in this case they had taken the trouble to loop some out of the way on the hooks for that purpose; and they very cleverly had the hooks in the cabin ceiling at an oblique angle so that they could fit an entire board inside, slung diagonally. There were two men in the lorry and a dog, something like a collie.

As I want to learn to drive, I think I should pay attention to these safety tips and learn the rules of the road.

We were at a kind of border station, a bit Mitteleuropa or toytown, waiting for a bus, my boss (Cockney Wanker) and I.

I took a pad to write down this dream -- actually I only remembered the part about P_I at this stage, but thought it would make a good write-up for E2. The earlier pages were coming loose; I selected a blank page about four in. A couple of pages later was hidden a map of, I forget now, either Witch Island or Elephant Island, in red pen.

I dream that I'm waking up, and the first thing I worry about is that my mother will come in and see that I'm not wearing anything. I try to hide under the covers, frantically scrambling for my t-shirt and my boxers. Were I at home, this would actually be a worry, because we're not encouraged to sleep naked. Or to do anything without clothing, for that matter. But, luckily, I'm not, and I've been doing a whole lot of things I wouldn't have done at home.

I had a horrible sleep last night, waking up many times, but as a result remembered many many dreams.

I am in a strange love triangle (octagon?) that I can't quite keep track of. I try to keep lists of the names of everyone involved, but by the time I write them down, the list is obsolete and the participants have changed. This is very frustrating, since I'm in charge of registering us with the department of vital statistics.

I have four sets of siamese twins. I keep them planted in big pots by the window. sometimes they sprout leaves and look like grapefruit trees. (I think my unconscious mind has a photosynthesis fetish.)

I am at a tennis match! Joe is refereeing VERY ENTHUSIASTICALLY. Everyone is using basketballs instead of tennis balls. I'm very confused.

My parents and sister live in my apartment. I don't know where they sleep, but they're there when I wake up. We walk to work and I am late, late, late.

I visited my friend at college. We played ping-pong and I won. Unfortunately, I had to leave quickly to catch a plane back to my school. Apparently my school had had a whole-school field trip to my friend's school.

The people from my school all got on the airplane, which had big couches for seats and big panoramic windows like on the Boston commuter rail. We flew for quite a while, over plains and then over mountains. Suddenly we hit turbulence, and our plane scraped against the side of a mountain, causing the wing to fall off. However, we were still moving fast, and the captain was apparently trying to steer the plane to make a landing. We first hit a cliff with a gradual slope and our speed slowed. I jumped out of my seat and was beginning to go towards the right window to jump out of it, when the plane, which had not stopped completely, rolled off another cliff.

After that the pilot tried to steer the plane once again. This time we were pretty much done for. The pilot aimed the plane for a shallow lake. We were going almost straight down. I remember seeing the lake approaching through the left-side window. I thought to myself that I must survive. As we hit the lake, I went flying towards the window at high speed, as I was not wearing a seat belt. There was a sort of a yellow blur before my eyes and then everything was black. Still, my mind was aware and I thought, oh no, I must have blacked out, and I felt sleepier and sleepier but I told myself that I could not go to sleep because if I did I would never wake up because my body was still in the lake in the mountains somewhere. It felt good though, death would just be going to sleep. I screamed at myself "Don't die, I don't want to die!"

That is where I woke up

I am standing in the banjo room (of course there is such a thing). I am looking at banjos with Attache, they have multicolored strings and neat notes. Attache’s dad is there, sitting on a bench. He gives me a strange look out of the corner of his eye, Attache says, “He wanted you to be his daughter-in-law.”

He asks me if I loved him. Yes, I tell him, all shades.

In my dreams, we went to Venice.

It was only after we got off the gondola, and began to walk the cobblestone paths that I realized that every street, every road and ever house was the same as Ottawa’s. The same restaurants, the same bookstores, the same sculptures.

Even as I ran, my legs burning and my lungs raw, everything remained the same.

I dreamt about a commercial. It was for a set of egg-shaped bean-bags, the first of which looked like a cowboy chicken, with a hat and a plastic beak, but the most pronounced feature was the six-shooter with a laser tag lens sticking out of his belly. The other three I couldn't see very well, one was supposed to be a guy, but the others could have been more farm animals. The three targets were arranged in a triangle with the guy in front, and the chicken was placed a distance away.

They activated the chicken and it started bobbing back and forth as if from the recoil. The two targets toward the back fell over, simulating death. The chicken fired another round of bullets but the guy jumped out of the way. Pretty strange for a bean-bag, but by this time through dream-dynamics both he and the chicken had turned into real people. The shooter fired some more rounds at the guy but he (the guy) kept dodging and escaping death. The word "bomb" then appeared and disappeared in a fancy manner. A bomb was thrown in the guy's general direction but he took cover and survived. Then the word "chair" appeared and disappeared in the same fancy manner. The shooter then threw a chair at the guy, and the guy asked, "What kind of chair was that?!"

"The most embarrassing chair of all," said the shooter, "a billy-chair!"

And that's how it ended.

Dreamt that I was an Asian woman living in New York; that a marriage had been more or less arranged with some white man. In spite of his agreement with the arrangement, he went away, living his life, until one day when he was struck by the fact that he had never even met me.

I saw myself in the dream as if it was not me, but simply a kind of movie I was watching. The woman (me) was pale, emotionally dead as far as the man was concerned, and though he wanted to make some sort of nice feelings about the whole thing (mainly from a distorted sense of guilt on his part) I was not interested at all, no matter what this meant for my future.

I was a violin string. All I wanted was to make music. I lived to be played, to sing, to shake with vibrance and tone.

I hated being in the case but I loved my master, the violinist.

I woke up wondering if this is how I see myself and my muse.