Dream Log: November 3, 2000

During my usual four and a half hour nap this afternoon, I had another bad dream.

Must be all the prozac.

I was walking down Douglas, right before the place where it splits into Lakewood and Ottawa Beach. Accidents were happening everywhere around me. I actually watched one woman get run over. I went to help, and was scared by all the blood. Someone behind me said it was sad she never knew her ears would burst under too much pressure.

--shift--

I was going on a hike in the woods with some friends. We were in some sort of danger while packing to go, so we brought extra spoons. One of our parents gave us a metal spatula to bring along.

We made it to the lodge on the mountain. There was a high deck where we were supposed to sleep. We dragged all our bags up the countless steps, and settled down on the full sized mattresses each of us somehow managed to carry along. My hooded sweatshirt fell off the deck between the railings, but they wouldn’t let me get it. There were dwarves, they said. Killer dwarves. I told them not to worry; we had plenty of silverware.

--shift--

I was on a huge school bus, with aisles that went on towards the horizon without ending.

It was empty except for me. The green seats and dirty windows were my only company. I decided to head out the emergency exit, but when I opened it, there was nothing outside besides black emptiness. Staying inside seemed the safest thing to do. I turned back around, and who did I see standing in the aisle not three feet away? Jonathan Davis and Bill Clinton. I could see someone’s feet sticking into the aisle from a seat farther up – it must have been a woman, she was wearing sky blue high heels and nylons. Clinton was wearing a suit with a red tie, while Jonathan had on a kilt and nothing else. No one said anything, but that was normal. We stood in silence for what seemed like forever.

Sometimes my brain does things in my dreams that I don't readily understand.

I'm sitting in a room, and across from me is a faceless man, about my age, but more clean cut. It seems like we stare at each other in that grey, autumn, it's-raining-outside-and-it's-almost-night-time-anyways nonlight for hours. I can't see his eyes but I know he can see mine.

Eventually I can see blurry movement from his hands. I hear a small rattling noise and then the strike of a match. I can smell sulphur as the match burns, and the sudden light makes me squint, so that I still can't see his face.

The match burns down to his fingers and extinguishes. He drops the spent stick, opens the matchbox, strikes another match, lets it burn down, drops it, repeat. I could see the number on the side of the matchbox, it said five hundred, and I started counting.

I didn't get to see his face until 499. He lit the match and this time held it right by his left temple. I looked into his eyes and saw that it was me. I was lighting matches and letting them burn down in some grotesque mockery of old bad dreams I knew I used to have. The 500th match that the other me lit ended up not burning down at all, just igniting and sort of hanging in the air. This is where things got weird.

I was still staring at myself from across this room, but this time when I made eye contact, I really was staring at myself, looking into my own eyes in a mirror in a bathroom that had kept the same lighting as the empty room myself and I were previously in.

I was crying, and I noticed that my tears were black. I wiped one away, and then the smell hit me.

Oil. I was crying oil.

I tried to wipe the rest of the tears away but my hands wouldn't open up anymore, so I just kept hitting myself in the face. When I grabbed my right hand with my left so I wouldn't knock myself out, the skin started to slough off. I saw bits of machinery, robotics, metal and gears. I panicked and started clawing at the skin, on both arms now, until from the elbow down my arms were laid bare of it. Arms like machines, crying slow, oily tears, I couldn't take it anymore.

I started slamming my rusty, metal arms on the sink, trying to break them off. After three strikes my left arm splintered and sent a spinning jagged cog into my cheek. I picked it out with my right hand and saw that I was bleeding oil. The skin on my face started to slacken, and I saw I gears and bladders clicking and inflating under my skin. I looked animatronic. I punched the mirror in the middle of a scream. I really ended up punching the other me, back in the room, still with skinless arms and a mechanical face.

I blacked out. I woke up.

• Goofy War: I was some kind of soldier. Actually, I think I was George Clooney (as in Three Kings). Anyway, everyone was having a hard time telling who was the enemy and who wasn't, so every time a fight broke out, I basically hid to see what happened. Finally, I figured out what was going on, and attacked a foxhole by myself. I stuck a grenade under one guy, and held him down on top of it, and he exploded. Another guy I threw out of the foxhole, and shot down with his own mounted machinegun. It was a rather violent dream. But I got a medal of honor of some kind, because the next thing I knew, I was in some formal office, waiting to meet with some big muckymuck. While waiting in the office, I segued into another dream.
  
• Nothing like a little high-school trauma: I have a lot of dreams about high school. Unlike most of my peers, I decided not to graduate. I didn't like the hurdles, and thought the whole thing was stupid. So I dropped out at the end of my senior year and got my GED as a form of protest. Anyway, I have a lot of anxious dreams about being back in high school. Usually, they're about one teacher in particular; my favorite teacher, who wasn't responsible in any way for me ditching the system. As usual, she wanted to speak to me after class, although this time I think it was because I wrote something brilliant for once. Probably this means that I never got closure on that horrible chapter of my life. Or maybe I feel guilty about ditching this one teacher, who really did educate me, unlike most of the others.
  
• Don't ask, Don't tell, Ya cute soldier: Yeah, ok, I had to have an erotic dream as well. So while I'm waiting in the office to talk to the muckymuck (after seguing back from the high school dream), a cute soldier gave me a blowjob while I was playing the piano. I dunno. Didn't make much sense to me, either, but I got woken up too soon to figure out much more about it.

Preface: I don't usually do dream log nodding... infact, this is my first... perhaps that is because so often, I have these wild dreams, or so the people who are awake around me at the time claim, based on the moans, groans, and screams of extasy that I emit during the night, but I don't remember them when I wake up. But this night was different... so very different.

---

I'm not sure how it all started.. all I know was I had an intense sense of fear, as if my life was in danger... but it wasn't myself I was fearful for, it was this girl. She was young, maybe 19, tops, her hair was brown and wavy, he features almost asian in nature... she spoke but once the entire dream, and then I wish'd she hadn't. I don't know what her name was, I don't know where she came from, but she was there, and she needed help.

There was a band of us at her aide: myself, an older, scrawny gentleman, who during the course of my dream lost his arms to some strange leprosy type affliction (they literly wilted away, like twigs, smaller each time I gazed apon them), an old best friend I haven't seen in probably five years, and, in a very strange twist of reality, an ex-girlfriend of mine, and her younger sister. A motley crew of heros if ever there was one. I don't think any of us really knew what we were saving the girl from, only that it/them had wanted her, and we musn't let it/them get her. Infact, I think that was the first thing the man with withering arms said to me:
"Don't let them get her!"

And so my dream went, us running from place to place in my past, always dragging the girl with us, trying hard to stay one step ahead of the unknown fates chasing her... from the library of my middle-school, where we partook of some fine marijuanna, and alcohol while sharing stories of old, always looking timidly over our shoulders, as if the fate we were trying to outrun would spring on us from one of the bookshelves... eventually ending up back at my old home, a townhouse that I haven't lived at in five years, that has actually now been torn down, to make way for a park, or some other public place of fun and frolic. Strange thing, the entire house was just as we had left it, empty and void of anything except dust. Yet there was music playing from somewhere in the house, not just a trickle either, but a full blown party soundtrack. The six of us danced, drank, and relaxed, for here we felt safe...

At some point we decided to lounge on the porch, watching the stars, when out from the living room came a loud crash, followed by a soul-wrenching scream from the girl who until now, had not spoken. I ran back inside, to find the music was gone, the ceilingfan hanging broken near the floor, and the closet door busted in, as if something horrible and tormented had escaped from it, and where the girl had previously sat, was left only a pool of blood, and my dusty old stuffed Winnie The Pooh. I walked towards the closet to inspect it closer, and there was another crash, and a terrifying noise, unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

Thankfully, I awoke.

This is what I get for letting my songlist play on repeat while napping.

Are you still...still breathing...

Overidentification with Graham from 'But I'm a Cheerleader'...I'm sitting in the coffee house, trying to discern whether the song playing is diegetic or not, when I'm taken from both sides in a sensory assault. On my left, my parents are dressed in sunday clothes, all starched and stiff. They wear looks of stark disapproval on their faces. On the right, Wayne. Wayne, with his animated gestures and casual wit, making fun of a gothic grrl reciting her lame suicide poetry on the stage. Daddy is dressing me down for dropping my advanced Spanish course, and I can't focus on what he's saying when Wayne's hand rests on my arm.

"Are you listening to me? We're concerned about your future!"

"So am I," I whisper, looking to my right.

So maybe I'm just a horizon you run to when she has left you there

Wayne is dumping me. The dream shifts so abruptly, but I know what's happening. Getting dumped has a tangible aura of pretense, and I can read it in his every expression.

"Angela is having second thoughts about the divorce."

A part of me shudders, bursts into fire knowing that this was inevitable, but wishing it had waited. For what, exactly, I can't say.

I am folded and unfolded and unfolding...