Dream Log: October 6, 2001

Three dreams. In the first one, I had conjured a time machine. On the phone with my boyfriend, I also procured this clone of him and held it up to the time machine. The time machine, as long as you weren't in the room while it completed the process would only change the person attached to the machine, not the environment. So Ben changed into a one year-old. I cradled him in my arms for a while and then I decided I wanted to see him play baseball (this is kind of weird) and asked him how old I would have to turn him to see that. So, not listening, I turned him into a 3 or 4 year-old. After this, I asked him what he needed to be in the baseball game and he told me about this uniform of his and that he always took a bath before a game. So I held him up and said, "Okay Ben, I'm going to let you take a shower," and we both laughed because everyone knows 3 year-old kids can't take showers.

I turned on the tap and let water fill up the bath tub and I took off his clothes and looked down at his body, sitting in my lap. He couldn't talk--or at least he didn't say anything. He still kind of looked like a baby. Older Ben, on the phone still, told me he would send his mom after his uniform and had to get off the phone.

So I left baby Ben unattended and headed off towards his house, knowing that there were other parts to the uniform aside from the actual jersey and pants. So I picked up a pair of boxers and some socks and stuffed them into a juice can.

Finally his mom showed up at my school and handed me the uniform. I dressed baby Ben up in an oversized uniform and held him up before me. He smiled. This entire time, we were in my bathroom. I kept having problems with the time machine, and it accidently turned on while I was still in the room.

We visited this trailer full of men and women. Some were talking about how they just went down to Walmart. No one knew I was there. They just looked straight through me.

I came back and someone told me I could see my future, but thinking I would die in a couple of years or so, I didn't want to take advantage of this. But I somehow saw another me hold the machine to her chin and look at herself as she was 18 (which is less than a year from now). She didn't look any different. I kept thinking 18 was a long time from now. The problem with the 18-year-old Aimee was her heart. It had an irregular heart beat and I could hear it from five feet away.

I decided I would go back in time with myself and I went back to the night I was born. I was back at that trailer again with all the men and women, only this time there was a baby there. A woman was holding the baby up and laughing. She asked someone holding a video camera, "You're not filming all of this, right?" The man holding the camera responded, "No," to which she said, "Good, because I want this to be interesting."

I decided to leave then.

When I came back, I stopped bothering the time machine. The baby Ben was gone.

The second dream involved an airplane.

I was going on a plane to Japan. While boarding on the plane, the flight attendent told us about all the important people on the flight. When I turned around, I saw a nun and a bunch of children. Then I did soomething completely unlike me, I began to look for Arabs on the plane. I thought I saw one. I was worried because there were so many important people on this plane. The plane had to ascend higher than domestic flights for some reason. It was on an almost vertical slope.

We eventually got to Japan, but we had to switch pilots and I was chosen as one. Only I didn't know enough about piloting to do it so I stepped out and they told me the flight was cancelled just because they were now missing a third pilot. Everyone was angry at me. I woke up.

Now my third dream. A Simpsons dream. Homer and Bart. Bart keeps referring to his genitalia as something like "grubs and nuts" or something. He sits in the shower exposing his genitals, only he is concerned because he thinks this lacks masculinity. Homer comes in and talks to him about it. So he begins to call the genitals something else. Only I don't know what, but he spraypainted it on a road sign. I woke up.

Dreamed I was taking two humanities courses the same semester (must have been next Spring), and going over the material with some girl, probably Indrani.

Then I'm at my Mom's house, and it's her birthday. I am delighted to be home so soon, not just because of the computer-related housekeeping I want to do. We're all getting ready to go out to dinner. Sara is being a little shit about it. Gary and I sit in the back seat and we start down the driveway. Immediately, Mom is talking out the car window to a friend of hers who was visiting. He is a tall, thin man with black hair, in a blue car with his family. (A dopplegänger? A chiropractor? No.) She makes me feel bad about tuition, and I reject the idea of dropping out completely after only two years, and going into business, but I suggest dropping to part time while living in a shack, eating canned food and reading 1966-1976 science fiction.

We pass the derelict tennis courts in time to see the dog escaping from them. It is an anatolian shepherd, male in the dream, but I think we only have a female anymore in real life. I suppose Gary let it out. He and I scramble to lock it back up, which is nearly impossible considering that anatolian shepherds move faster than the speed of light and tennis court doors cannot be moved by mere humans. Working together, we manage to force the dog(s?) inside the fence, but some chickens escape. We don't actually keep chickens in the tennis court (we keep them in the chicken coop), but chickens escaping makes for good visuals.

Returning to the car, I see it is now a one-horse open sleigh with four rows of seats. The driver sits in the front, Sara the second row, Mom and Ron in the back, and Gary scrambles in the back with them while I get in the third row and put my arm over the seat back.
I: I thought Sara wasn't coming.
Mom: She is. She's getting a tattoo for my birthday. How come you never got a tattoo for me?

So we get to the tattoo parlor, turns out it's across from the christmas tree farm just down the bend from our house on Summit Road. Sara is getting a tattoo of a bucky ball, they say, but when the tattoo artist gets out the model, it is clearly two bucky balls connected to each other by a stick (not like C₇₀, but C_120+ε. Really it looks more like N₂.) I consider mentioning that I've been thinking of getting a tattoo of a heart that says null set, only I'd rather retain the ability to give blood and take drugs immediately afterwards, but I don't think it would go over too well. In the mean time, the artist's buxom blonde daughter has started flirting with me. She is dressed like a cat. I give her a backrub. Over her shoulder, I see my sister screaming as the artist inserts the needle-tipped pegs into the holes in the model which is now stuck to her arm. This scares me awake, and I realize that that is not the way to apply a tattoo.

The house, or no, i think it was an apartment, was in an old and funky building. There were old, dark, dusty hardwood floors, a kitchen with little tiny white knobs on the cupboards covered with many years' worth of paint, strange little corridors between bedrooms, and a bathroom. There was a bathroom in the place, and maybe it had a clawfoot bathtub. The floor plan was strangely convoluted and centered on a hallway in the kitchen, on the edge. The building was probably in the Bay Area. I lived with Joyquality, my friend Heather Applegate, my mother, and P_I.

The rodent was small and white and very fuzzy, with long long hair. It would run around and skitter past your feet and under the chair, and was very unnerving. We didn't want it in the house, but we didn't know what to do with it. See, annoying and scary and probably diseased as it was, it was kinda cute. We couldn't just kill it. I decided to do something about our problem, and we chased the rodent from room to room. I ran it through the crazy dusty maze that was our home, slamming doors behind me to trap the thing in one room. Finally i had it trapped in Pseudo_Intellectual's room. P_I wasn't home, and we felt a little bad about sticking the rodent to wreak havoc in his room without him there, but then decided it was the only option, as we were so sick of the rodent.

We could have thrown things at it to crush it, but we didn't really want to kill the rodent ourselves. We thought about sending the cat in to eat it. The cat had a double-wide tail, which was stiff and had two lines of bones. I pet the cat and realized it had two spines, too. It was a double cat. We didn't send the cat in.

Rowan came home, and didn't make any comment on the rodent. He, Kelly, and i took a walk through the neighborhood. We met an old friend of his along the way. He had converted to a bizarre cultish Americanized version of some Indian (Subcontinent) religion, and was dressed in white robes and a turban. He had a wife and four sons. They were all very tan and very skinny, with bones poking up through brown skin. They all wore the same clothing. The kids were brainwashed and very dumb. We sat down in the street and the kids argued. One of them thought that Miami was right next to Los Angeles. The parents stood on the parking strip and smiled vacantly.

(There was a lot more, but this is the part I remember most.)

Focus character was a big anthro tiger, but the hero was an Icarus who looked like Kid Icarus without the 'kid'.

They were behind the house, just going out to fly around. Suddenly Icarus's wings disappeared, but yon tiger caught him and held him up until he could get them again.

They flew around to the front of yon house, and Icarus's wings disappeared again, but the tiger didn't have time to catch him, and he crashed into the ground, near a smashed turtle.

And Icarus felt terrible about it. This was always happening to him, he was always falling and smashing turtles, and he wished he'd never even played around with losing his wings when he was younger because he should have had every minute while he could. He was sobbing pretty unhappily and the tiger was trying to console him.

Then a turtle crawled out of a hole in the ground next to him. It was followed by another, larger one, and a couple more in different colors, and another big one... they were all marching on to the west (which was to your right as you faced the house). They watched them cross the driveway and join an even larger line of animals travelling that way, the line curving to the south. There were rabbits and deer and birds and all other sorts, kind of like a Noah's ark line without number limits.

(Background music: that song from Gladiator, leading into something by Lebo M.)

Yon tiger and Icarus followed the line and watched them. Then, the tiger got up and joined the line. As he flew down it, I saw he had six wings, white and opalescent.

Icarus took up his courage and followed after him on six wings infallible.

I was restless as I was leaving work, filled with a burning sense to DO something but not knowing what. Walking quickly, the sound of my heels clicked loudly echoing off the sidewalk.

I turn a corner to find a group of college students discussing the ills of today's society. I watch briefly but do not join in, merely hovering about the edges a moment. I pass them, climbing the steps behind them and enter the school. One indicates with his head to another to follow me. He nods and follows. He is behind me, hand on back guiding me to class.

Once there, I relax, no longer filled with the deep sense of urgency.

---

I am laying on my stomach outside in the grass with a friend. She is laughing at me as I try to photograph individual blades.

"It's the carpet that's important, the mass as a group. You should picture the whole."

"No" I argue "if not for the single, there would be no whole. The one is the building block upon which the whole stands, therefore IT is what is important"

Other students mill about walking barefoot in the grass.

Something tickles my leg, a bubble. I shake it off not looking back. More bubbles alight on my skin, then laughter. Someone licks from my ankle to my knee.

"Sweet candy bubbles"

A kiss is pressed into my palm, then the unseen person is gone

---

A girl is in a glass box. She is sick, but refuses her medicine. She will only take it from me. I feed her antibiotics with an eyedropper through a small hole. She watches me with unblinking eyes through the glass as she sucks the mixture from the tube. She ignores the others in the room. They are not there.

What does she see in me?