I haven't slept a whole lot this week. Part of it might have been that Dimetapp/Nyquil chaser I had last night, or maybe the fact that I had to get up every few minutes to cough up sputum.

But that's not the point.
I did get to sleep, and when I slept, I dreamed a dream...

I'm climbing a mountain. Rupert is there, on a scooter in a hotel lobby. This normally isn't odd, except for the fact that it's a hotel lobby in the middle of a Tibetan mountain. I, of course, am not in the nice hotel lobby inside the mountain. Instead, I am outside, on the slope of the mountain, avoiding large snakes and alligators and tadpoles. I reach the top. There's a large waterfall. I get to ride back down the mountain in a slightly modified waterslide. It's only slightly modified.

It has no edges.

Dream fragment:

Some kind of boy band (maybe 98 Degrees or whatever--I'm working for a company that does Cosmogirl, so go figure), is standing against a flat background, as though at a photoshoot. I'm watching them from the point-of-view of the photographer. I don't have a physical form though. I feel weightless.

The stylists finish prepping them for the shoot and they stand there, expectantly. Then assistants come up and begin putting lines of cocaine on their shirts, running up-down, and somehow miraculously staying affixed to the shirts, even though gravity and air currents would tend to scatter the lines everywhere.

They start doing lines furiously, while some kind of Dead Kennedys instrumental goes in the background, and cheesy lights are flashing everywhere. It looks like a video from circa 1982. Then they strip off their shirts, totally high, and assistants give them razor blades. They use the razor blades to cut vertical slashes in their chests, shoulders and stomachs--then the assistants come and put coke in the cuts.

The 98 Degree guys start to look really messed up. I wake up.

Falling...

into...

dreams...

I'm at a party in a small, sparsely decorated apartment. There's about ten people sitting on a two sofas facing each other, motioning emphatically with their hands and talking -- but there's no sound. Everything is tinted lightly red, like I'm wearing some rosy colored glasses. It makes me uneasy. I notice that my uncle Ken is at the party and greet him.

He extends to me a fistful of sticky, fuzzy, emerald colored marijuana in one hand and a clear plastic baggy of mixed pills in the other. I'm excited by the gift, but a bit bothered that he's so open about our transaction. I move closer to him and try to use my body to block the view of the other people in the room, but at this point I notice they've all ceased their silent dialog and have turned to stare at us in expressionless silence.

I feel very uncomfortable and I try to put the drugs in my pocket, out of sight. Another uncle of mine present at the party, Dave, is alarmed by the transaction and confronts Ken and I about the drugs. He's protective of me and angry at Ken for encouraging my habit. Again, the confrontation is silent and everything is communicated in thoughts rather then words. He expresses to me that he wants me to surrender my drugs. Afraid he's going to take them away, I open the bag of pills and stuff a handful in my mouth. He's not going to get them from me! Suddenly, I realize that it wasn't really the brightest idea to put a handful of unknown pills in my mouth, so I drop both the bag of pills and the weed, make a muffled, guttural sound and race off to the bathroom to spit them out into the sink.

When I return, Ken conveys to me that Dave took the drugs and left the apartment, so we head out the door in pursuit. Outside it's dark, but the sky is illuminated in a deep reddish-orange color. Looking down the street, I see Dave's truck peeling out at a stop sign. As he's accelerating, his truck starts to fishtail and begins to spin around, veering into the left lane of oncoming traffic, where a speeding 18 wheeler smashes into him at full speed, obliterating his truck and sending flaming debris skidding down the road back towards me.

Oh shit!

The sound of my choked sobbing is the first and only sound I hear in the dream.

Dave was only trying to help me and now he's dead.

This is my first time contributing to the communal dream log. I had a very vivid dream last night and wanted to write it down before it was eroded by "normal" consciousness. I think it was in part inspired by a really bad movie I half-watched on cable TV last night at 1am starring Lorenzo Lamas.

My father, who looked more like Albert Finney than my real father, was crippled or wounded or in some way dying. My mother had died many years before, and there was some lingering mystery there - not about her death, but rather about her life. In the dream, my childhood was spent in a crowded tenement building in a poor area of New York City. My father worked very hard at several factory or manual labor jobs to support us, and was rarely at home. As children, my siblings and I didn't spend much time in the house. We were either at school, out playing in the neighborhood, or scavenging around looking for scrap metal we could sell to the junkman.

Somehow, it was an accepted fact that my mother had led another life. We all knew it, though none of us talked about it. Many people came and left our apartment during the daytime, many of them people of some considerable degree of importance. We didn't know what went on up there. My mother died when she was relatively young, and we moved away. Not far, but far enough - to some rural area in Pennsylvania, perhaps. Now I was in my mid-twenties, and my father was dying. He told me that my mother had kept a journal or diary of some sort, and he wanted me to find it so that he could read it before he died.

My mother was not a prostitute. I don't know how I knew this, but somehow I did. She was an advisor of some sort, perhaps, giving personal or professional guidance to dignitaries, diplomats, politicians and other public figures. I also knew somehow that she was interred with her journal, and that I would have to have her exhumed to retrieve it. That word seemed to hang in my consciousness throughout the dream: exhume.

I assured my father that I would have her journal for him in less than a week. I left him and traveled to New York. The journey was not featured in my dream. Suddenly I stood before the entrance to a gloomy cemetery. The rusty gates were unlocked, though it was dusk, and they creaked as I pushed them open and entered. The middle of the cemetery was dominated by a large mausoleum, which was quite out of place, its shiny institutional walls a stark contrast to the artistic headstones that surrounded it, worn with time.

I entered the building, and the inside was like a corporate headquarters of some women's magazine, decorated in pink and other lively colors. A cheerful receptionist listened to me attentively, then directed me to another woman. I told her my story, and she smiled, saying that my mother had paid the cemetery a handsome sum of money to have the book removed from her coffin before burial and published secretly in another name. She led me to a back room full of what looked like safety deposit boxes, and she withdrew an old handwritten manuscript and a sealed letter to my father. She also handed me a copy of a very famous book that had been published years ago. It had since become a literary icon of sorts, and was the memoirs of a woman who had secretly advised many famous public figures, instilling in them some sense of compassion and humanity. I was flooded with pride to know that this had been my mother, and I took the manuscript and letter back to my father. What remained of the dream was devoted to a montage of the events depicted in the book, my mother meeting with presidents and celebrities. It was, all in all, a pleasant dream.

Listening to The Mitosis Waltz with Mika Clark. Maybe I'm using it to seduce her. We are on a tropical island, so seduction would be in order, but what an odd choice of a song. I guess that's just what happens when you're in too many science classes with the same cute girl.


I packed my clothes in a squarish box instead of my regular suitcase, and went to meet Mom. She makes everything better, so I don't have to worry any more about math homework that never gets done. Snowboarding or kayaking or something relaxing. Finally I understand the concept of vacation.

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