beautiful, funny, sad & true

I just woke from a dream, the story of which wasn’t interesting, but there were some details that were very interesting.

I was at a dinner party in a large hotel suite, and since the friend I was meeting there hadn’t arrived yet, I didn’t really know anyone.  There were a couple of people I’d seen once or twice before, at previous gatherings, but there was a lot of awkward conversation as more and more people entered the room.  I was sitting next to a young woman who was one of the people I’d met previously, and when her older sister arrived, she introduced me as William.  I shook her hand and said, “Todd; nice to meet you.”  The sister sat on my other side, and we chatted easily and got along very well, until some people on the other end of the table kept asking her things, seemingly to keep her from talking to me.  I decided to pull out my ‘Face Book’, which was an enormous coffee table book full of peoples’ pictures and updates.

I flipped through it for a few minutes, and then decided to put it down on the floor.  I turned around and leaned it vertically against the wall behind my chair, and that’s when my new friend turned to me and asked if she could take a look too.  I grabbed it and handed it to her, and she took it and turned completely away from me to read it.   I decided to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I stood up, I noticed that I was wearing a police uniform.

I wanted to be a little less conspicuous, so I unhooked my name badge and slipped it into my pocket just before entering the mens’ room.  As I pushed the door open, I noticed a disheveled guy sitting next to the door, slightly sprawled out with his back against the wall.  I turned my head to the left, and saw two guys entering the building through the side entrance.  I turned back and entered the restroom.

I felt I should pay attention to what everyone else in the room was doing.  As I was urinating, the two guys entered the mens’ room also, and went into a darkened side room for a minute.  When they came out, one of them tried to turn the light switch off (even though the room they’d just left was dark already) and he seemed to have great difficulty doing so, as if he was extremely drunk.  I thought to myself, ‘Someone ought to report him.  I should tell the guy next to me, who’s urinating also, but he’ll probably think I’m a cop since I’m wearing this stupid uniform.’

I continued to urinate, and in fact woke up as I was doing that.  Quite a strange sensation, by the way, to dream that you’re urinating and then wake up to find that you’re not urinating anymore.  Once again, I’m grateful for dopamine, so that our bodies don’t act out our dreams.

I know, I know.  I haven’t written about all of the recording sessions I’ve been doing lately, and I haven’t posted any of the pictures from the day trip RockShowGirl and I took on Thursday.  I’ll get to all that.

In other news, I think I’m catching a summer cold.  This blows.  My throat’s killing me, and I’m coughing all over the place, but I’m NOT going to miss the Butterfly Boucher/Emilie Simon concert on Monday night.  They’re two of my favorites, and no lame-o summer cold is gonna stop me from seeing them.

The good news is that I did have a lovely dream this morning, and here it is.

* * * * *

I’m with a bunch of my friends, and we’re standing in a semi-circle, talking, in a beautiful, grassy park.  It’s a sunny day, and we’re all talking excitedly, and laughing, and having a great time.  We are quite the melting pot of ethnicities, including an older black man in his sixties, a young Japanese guy in his twenties, myself, two white married couples in their early thirties, and an Egyptian woman in her fifties.

I walk away from the group to refill my empty water bottle, and as I walk back, I pass a black couple in their fourties.  The woman gently puts her hand on my shoulder in order to catch my attention.  “I’m really impressed with your circle of friends,” she says.  “You all seem to be having such a lovely time.  Have you known each other long?”

“Actually, we haven’t,” I reply, and smile.  I gesture toward each member of the group in turn, and explain to her how I met each of them, or what I know about them, starting with the older black guy.  “He’s a musician I’ve played with, he’s a student and a writer, I just met them today, they used to live in my old apartment building, and she was in the coffee shop yesterday.”

The woman I’m talking with laughs, and says, “Wow, that’s quite a group.  I’d better let you get back to it.”

“Thanks,” I say.  “I hope to see you again sometime.”

“I’d like that,” she says, “very much.”

We do a sort of one-armed hug, and my hand gets caught in her purse, which is sort of perched on top of her shoulder.  A few things almost fall out, but I catch them.  “Oops,” I say.  “Do you want me to fix that stuff so it won’t fall out?”  She shrugs her shoulder, and everything settles.  “Oh.  Okay.  It looks like everything’s back to normal now.  See you around!”  I shake her husband’s hand and say, “Have a great day.”

I look over to see that my group of friends is starting to walk away and disperse, so I jog over to rejoin them.  We walk out of the park and up an old residential street, where the black man, the Japanese guy and one of the couples go their separate ways.  We all wave goodbye to each other.  The remaining couple, the Egyptian woman, and I walk a bit further up the street, until we come to a hundred-year-old apartment building.  I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never been inside.  It is made up of a handful of units, all in a row, each of which is funky and unusual.  The outside of the building is painted white with dark brown trim, and there are a couple of doors at street level.  The place is old and not particularly clean, but clearly it is well-loved by the people who live there.  It appears to be a kind of collective.  I peer into one of them, and see an open space with high ceilings, dark red wood floors, and a few chairs scattered around.  It looks like a dance studio, only without all the mirrors.  I notice that there’s a loft area for a bedroom, and stairs that go down in the corner, presumably for a living area.  “Wow, this place looks amazing,” I say to the couple.  “Are the other apartments this cool?”

“Yeah,” the wife says.  “They’re all different, though.  Ours is only one story.  This one’s three, and the others are either one or two.”  She points to a hand-drawn map on the wall that is a layout of the building that shows how to get to the door of each unit.   There is a hand-written list of “things to do” (recycling, weeding, touch-up painting, etc.) next to that, with a tenant’s name after each of the tasks.

“I applied for an apartment here a few years ago, actually,” I say, “but I found a cheaper place.  I always wanted to see the inside.”  I look back and forth between the couple and the woman, smiling mischievously.  “Any chance I could see your places?  No pressure.”  The Egyptian woman says, “Sure you can, in a few minutes.”  The wife also agrees, but they want a chance to clean up their place first.  I turn and gesture toward the coffee shop next door.  I ask the Egyptian woman, “Shall we?” and we walk together into the shop.

The inside of the coffee shop is as funky and cool as the apartment building.  Wood floors, dark brown leather chairs, bookshelves, and a battered upright piano decorate the place.  I walk over to the piano and play a few chords, very lightly, with my right hand.  The piano isn’t as sturdy as it looks, and it sways back and forth.  It seems to be there just for show, and isn’t really playable anymore.  I lean it a bit to the side, and the leaning dampens the strings, so the music stops.  I walk away from the piano to the counter, serve myself a cup of coffee from the drip machine, and then go over to sit across from the Egyptian woman in one of the comfortable chairs.

Suddenly some scratchy orchestral music starts to play, from what sounds like an antique phonograph.  I look across the room and see the black woman I’d met in the park, with a very interesting contraption on the table next to her.   I stand up, walk over to her and say, “What a pleasant surprise!  And what an interesting machine!  What is it?”

She gestures toward it and waves her hand in a motion for me to have a closer look.  I move my head down near it, and see that it is, in fact, very similar to a phonograph.  Instead of the big horn speaker, however, it has a beautiful wooden box with the speakers built into the sides, and it has a record-like mechanism that spins, with a needle in the record to create the background orchestra score, but there’s an intricate mechanism on top of the spinning record, made of gold, that plays a small grooved piece of wood (a tongue depressor or popsicle stick) by sliding it back and forth like a violin bow across an electrical pickup or some such thing, in order to create a violin sound.  “That’s absolutely ingenious,” I tell the woman, “and so fragile-looking.”

“I’ve had this since I was a little girl, but it’s older than I am,” she says.  “It belonged to my mother, and she got it when she was a little girl.”

“It’s beautiful; I love it,” I say.  “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

I straighten up and walk back to where the Egyptian woman is sitting.  “Well, are you ready?”  I ask her.  “Thanks so much for letting me see your place.  I really appreciate it.”  She stands up, and we walk out the door together, back into the warm sun.  We turn to go inside, and that’s when I wake up.

I had a dream last night in which someone told me, “If you loved your body, you wouldn’t poison it.”

Interesting.

I had a really amazing dream just now (I think you’ll agree), and I had to get up and write it out for posterity.

* * * * *

RockShowGirl and I join a game.  It’s a game that you only play when you’re asleep, and it manipulates your neural pathways to control your movements in the game.  She is asleep on the sofa; I am leaning on my arms on the front of an upright piano.  We shudder as we feel the game move inside us, starting with the paralysis of our muscles, the same way that the brain does when we are asleep.   I feel the game make its way through my arms, then my shoulders, and finally my brain.  A voice says, “Extend your primary finger.”

“Which one is that?”  I ask.

“The cute one,” RockShowGirl says.  I raise my first finger.

We are swirled through a kind of blackness, and then we’re in.

I am in college, studying music.  I’m on a break between classes, and I’m looking for a bathroom.  I don’t need to use it, but I just want to know where it’s located.   I walk all through the main buildings, and along the way I peek into two different teachers’ lounges, the main one upstairs and the smaller ancillary one in the basement.  I am surprised to see that there are magnum-sized bottles of wine alongside the coffee and soda machines in the main lounge, and a box of wine downstairs.

After I’m done with a class, I walk down the stairway from the upper level to ground level, and a volleyball comes bouncing down the stairs from behind me.  “Kick it,” a voice says.  I don’t, so a red-haired guy appears on the stairs in front of me, saying, “KickitkickitkickitkickitKICKITKICKIT.”  He multiplies his image many times, right before my eyes, and I realize he is a hallucination.  He is the creator of the game.   Careful not to speak out loud and attract attention to myself, since there are other students on the stairs as well, I think to him, “I’m not in the game right now.  This is life.”

“This is the game.  My game.  If you don’t like it, you can make your own.”  All of the images of him disappear, which leaves me and a handful of students at the bottom of the stairs.  The ball has disappeared as well.  I am beginning to be afraid.

I go to my next class.  There are two girls who stand and talk loudly to each other, telling stories and laughing, throughout the entire class period.  The professor sees them but goes on as if nothing is happening.  Many of us are annoyed.  After class is over, I walk with one of my friends, an attractive black woman who I’ve known from our years together in the music program.  “Wow, what was all that about?”  I ask her.

She laughs.  “I know.  Those two could have gotten away with murder in there, and the teacher wouldn’t have said a thing.  She’d probably have used them as characters for her next lecture.”

We walk down the stairs, which are suddenly completely filled with multiple visages of a single person.  He is taller than the red-haired man, and better-looking.  He’s extremely well-dressed, wearing a dark gray suit and paisley tie.  He seems to be the character that the game’s creator uses as a spokesperson.  He gives us an instruction, which we ignore and continue to talk with each other.  I can see by my friend’s facial expression that she has heard the voice too.  The creator appears, takes control of our bodies, and walks us like marionettes up and down the stairs a couple of times, very quickly, telling us that he can make us go wherever he wants us to go, and that we are powerless to do anything about it.  He smiles a Cheshire cat smile, and starts to disappear out of the top of my vision, at which point I woke up, lying on my stomach in the same position I’d been in at the piano in the beginning of the dream.

* * * * *

I was awake now, and I could see traces of the smile in the top corner of my eyes for two or three seconds after I woke up.  I rolled over to get the blood flowing in my arm, which had become a bit numb from lying in that strange position, and went back to sleep.

* * * * *

I am with my friend again.  We are in a music class this time, listening to Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in order to analyze it.  The professor is talking about how it’s the most difficult piece in the piano’s repertoire, and that Rachmaninoff was the only one who was technically proficient enough to play it, and that Rachmaninoff toured Europe for the last two decades of his life in order to play that demanding and theatrical piece.

After the class is over, we are talking and walking out the door of the music department and into the hallway, at the end of which a young guy passes us in the opposite direction, playing a French horn silently.  We smile to each other and comment on how serious the guy is about the French horn.  “That was really weird,” she says.  “Why does he even need to carry it around if he’s just going to practice fingerings?”

“Yeah, he could’ve done that in the air,” I reply.

My friend suddenly comes to an abrupt halt.  “Wait a minute,” she says, looking intently at a particular point in the corner of the stairway, which I know means that she is talking to the creator.  There are other students around us, and they are giving us strange looks.  The thought crosses my mind that these other students may be nothing more than projections made by the creator to make us feel like we’re a little bit crazy for communicating with him directly and breaking the illusion of the game.  My friend points back upstairs toward where we’d seen the guy playing the French horn.  “There was music, wasn’t there?  Just now.  You took it away, didn’t you?”   It seems that music makes the game players impervious to the demands of the creator, and my friend has realized it.

The face of the contemptuous spokesperson appears above us.  He gestures at the other students.  “Do you REALLY want to be one of these pathetic people all around you, who spend their time thinking about nothing but their trivial little thoughts?  And songs?”

“Yes,” both of us reply, “that’s exactly what we want.  We want to be ourselves.  We want to be human beings.  We want out of this game.”

The face of the spokesperson becomes the face of the creator.  “Tell that to the millions of people who are already here.  They’ve given up their lives in that world so that they can join me here in this one.  We’ve all seen enough anime to know that your spirit doesn’t need a body in order to stay alive.  Life is better here.”

I take my friend’s hand and lead her away, saying, “We’re happy as we are, thank you.”

This infuriates the creator, and his incarnations start to appear all around us.  The wind swirls and howls, and debris from buildings is launched into the air.  Parked cars slide a few inches along the pavement, and the ones that are moving are blown slightly off course by the gusts of wind.

We smile and walk obliviously, humming the melody from the Rachmaninoff piano concerto as we walk through it all, completely unaffected by the chaos.  We have won the game.

Last night was an absolute jumble of dreams, so much so that I can’t even begin to tell where one ended and another began, or which scene went with which dream.  What I do remember is that they were full of chaos.  Lots of driving around looking for someone or someplace and not getting there, walking around with friends at an outdoor event (with big stacks of boxes of potato chips and water bottles everywhere) and talking on the phone with various people at the same time.

One of the dreams involved JapaneseFriendOfIrishBand who called to ask me where the gig was.  I didn’t remember, but I kept walking with a guitar until I ended up at a wedding, and it turned out that we were playing at the reception.  We arrived very late, just after the ceremony had finished, and the string quartet players were packing up and leaving.  The cellist woman and I had a brief interaction and kind of smiled at each other.

That’s what the dreams were like.  Random and fairly chaotic, but I wouldn’t say they were especially interesting.  At least they were numerous.

In another, I was driving around in my ancient Toyota Celica (best car I’ve ever had, by the way) along a forested highway.  I had to find a certain place, but I didn’t know where I was going, and had no map.  I turned around in someone’s driveway, and there was another of the same type of Celica sitting there.  You hardly ever see those old ones anymore, so I saw the lady putting her yard tools away in her garage and asked her if I could look at it.  She agreed, and we poked around each others’ cars a little bit.  Really a pointless dream, as far as that goes, but only interesting to me because I got to drive around in my Celica again.

I could sure use another visit from Christine, though.  Someone very much like her was in a dream a week or so ago, but it wasn’t her.  Le Sigh.  She’ll be back.