beautiful, funny, sad & true

This morning, I had a dream that I kept waking out of (thank you, alarm clock!) and going right back into every time I hit the ‘snooze’ button (thank you, brain!).

* * * * * *

My friend Andrea, one of her female friends and I are hanging out and walking around downtown Portland somewhere, late at night. We walk into a mall, which is closed. There is a huge, lighted fountain in one section of the mall, and there is a grand piano in the section that is located behind the fountain.

We walk to the piano, and Andrea starts to play something totally random and cool, with lots of banging and dissonance mixed with beauty (in A minor!). Then she steps on one of the pedals, and it repeats the phrase that she ended with. She stands up and smiles, and her friend and I start laughing and clapping. The piano is still making sound, and I sit down and play octave A’s up high, kinda slowly and rhythmically around Andrea’s loop. Then the loop fades out, and I morph the piece into a little something in A minor, and then change it into 7/8 time. I have a little cello exercise I made up, and it was based on that exercise.

After I finish, the sound of the fountain sounds like a crowd of people clapping, so I laugh, stand up from the bench, face the fountain and say, “Thank you! Everyone! Thank you!” The three of us laugh, and then turn away and walk out of the mall.

The setting for the dream changes, and we are now standing in a short line of people waiting to get into a movie theater. Once we walk through the door, however, we realize that it is actually a movie set. It is a large, wooden room, with bright lights in the ceiling. The filmmaker (who, incidentally is DrummerScotty, who I play with in IrishBand in real life) is shooting a scene involving a guy and girl making out on a chaise longue. The two are doing their thing valiantly, and Andrea seems exasperated with the whole thing. She says something like, “I hate acting. It seems like anybody could just be making out with anybody else.”

This morning, I had a gruesome dream that started out nicely enough.

* * * *

I’m in my apartment building. (This is not anywhere I’ve lived in real life.) The interior is very modern; black walls with red and silver trim, and those little tiny halogen track lights hanging from the ceiling everywhere. The building is fourteen stories tall. I live on the second floor, and my brother lives on the thirteenth floor. Each apartment is accessible only by elevator, and each separate elevator stop is for each separate apartment. In other words, when you step off of the elevator, you’re in the front room of an apartment.

My brother has three cats in this dream; one large white one and two kittens, one white and one orange. I’m in my apartment doing something, and all of a sudden the elevator door opens, and the three cats come spilling out. I like them, but I’m getting ready to leave, so I herd them back into the elevator. (It seems that herding cats IS possible, but only in dreams!)

I step inside the elevator, hit the ’13’ button and then the ‘close doors’ button, and quickly step out. The doors begin to close, and just as they are about to close completely, the little orange kitten makes a dash for the door. He doesn’t make it. The door closes on him, and he is crushed.

I try to pull the doors apart, and hit the stop button, or do anything I can, but it’s too late. The dream’s location changes, and now I’m on the thirteenth floor, waiting for the elevator to arrive. When it does, the orange kitten’s limp, bloody paw is hanging outside the elevator door. The door opens, and I’ll spare you the details of what I saw. Suffice it to say that it was completely gruesome. The other two cats come running out, and I kneel beside the crushed kitten, sobbing.

* * * *

There are two realities in this dream; one in the ‘real’ world, and one that exists and looks the same, except that you access it by typing a password into a text-based Invitation screen on a very old PC, hidden in the back corner of the office building in which I work. (No, I’ve never played Second Life or any of that avatar nonsense.) There are a few people in this dream who I either know or have met in real life, but the majority of them are not.

* * * * *

The dream starts in the ‘real’ world. My supervisor is Indian (a nice guy who I met once when he was doing some training at my workplace in real life), and it’s my first day at a new job. He gets me set up with my own desk and computer. I look around the large room. It’s sort of a lounge area, dimly but warmly lit, with a handful of sofas, wooden end tables with modern lamps, and Oriental rugs. I can see some large super-computers and network cabinets just beyond the edges of the room; this seems to be a computer company. There are a bunch of people my own age and younger, male and female , who are sitting on (or standing near) the sofas, talking and laughing with each other. They seem very friendly, and before long, I find myself invited into their circle to make their acquaintance. They ask if this is my first day. I say yes. One of the women asks if I’d like to go to dinner with all of them. Apparently this is a common occurrence.

My supervisor is still there setting things up at my desk, and when I go back over to my desk, he says something like, “I have another place for you too. Come this way.” We walk clear around to the other side of the building, where the light is fluorescent and bright. Instead of desks, there are light gray cubicles. No one else is in the room but myself and my supervisor. This does not feel uncomfortable, it’s just where we both happen to be.

Periodically, I go back to my other desk, and when I do, it seems that quite a bit of time has passed. It feels like only a half hour to me, but my new friends seem to have been working for hours, and making plans for the evening, or for the next day. I check on my computer, and find that I have 693 unread e-mails, many of which are ongoing conversations that I’ve missed between my friends. I’m included in these e-mails as well, with people asking me things and explaining a few of the inside jokes. I see a message from one of the women that says, ‘Ouch. . .that remark. :(‘ I don’t remember saying anything, and I certainly haven’t written anything either. I don’t even know anyone, so I decide to ask around to find out who this person is, and what she thinks I said.

I see Charles (with whom I work in real life) sitting at a desk, and I ask him if he knows who she is. He does not. I walk back to the group in the lounge area, and they don’t know who she is either. They take me to the corner of the room, where an ancient PC terminal is sitting around the corner from the main room, out of view of everything. It asks for a password, which I instinctively know and type on the keyboard.

I find myself in the ‘other’ world. CollegeGirlfriend is there with me. We are walking in some sort of hospital, and I’m carrying a large box of computer equipment. Charles is walking down the hall in the opposite direction, and does not acknowledge us. A nurse appears, hands us a clipboard, and asks us to sign in. We do, and she takes us through a long, dark corridor and into another lounge room, in another computer company. We make new friends with everyone there, but we’re not there to work in this place. Something about these interactions feels different, and I am a bit unnerved. CollegeGirlfriend is talking to someone, but I need to put my box of computer parts somewhere, so I leave her and go back out into the corridor to find another room. I find one and enter it. The lights are off, and the only thing in the room is another ancient PC with the same password screen on it. I type the password.

I’m now standing in the real world, in the warm-colored lounge office. My friends are there, but now that I’ve had this experience, I want to find out more about how it all works. I ask a couple of them to show me the old computer again, but they say that they’re unable to, because it appears in a different location each time. It’s up to me to find it for myself, and what’s more, it’s in a different place for each person. I decide to search for it, and after a while of rummaging through a few dark offices, I find it, on a desk in the hallway, next to the drinking fountain. There is some sort of colorful program running on the screen, and it doesn’t look the same as the other screens have. I pull up the rolling metal chair and sit at the desk, wondering what I should do. A voice says, “Just enter the password, like you normally do.” The colorful program stops running, and a password box appears on the screen. I type in the password.

I’m in the other world now. CollegeGirlfriend is standing there. I start to tell her about this experience. She seems skeptical about it. I decide to show her. I grab her hand and start to walk. She pulls her hand away, but continues to walk a step behind me. “What are you looking for?” she asks. We walk into the large corridor, without anyone stopping us or asking for us to sign in. We stop when we find our friends, but they all seem agitated about something. I tell her to wait for me, and I start running through lots of hallways, looking for my friend Blaine. It occurs to me that he works at this company, and that he may know the answers to some of my questions.

I come to a metal door, and when I open it, I poke my head out to see a small room painted completely white, with a large, vertically sliding metal door that is slid up to reveal daylight, and a street. Cars are driving by on the street, and Blaine is standing outside, being interrogated by three men in suits, navy blue, charcoal gray, and light green, respectively. I pull my head back inside and shut the door behind me, thinking that the three men will think this is a movie set. I lock the door with my thumb and sit down against the wall. I can feel the thin wall shaking as the men are now banging on it and trying the door handle in an attempt to get inside. I sit for a long minute and then decide that I should go and check on everyone else. I run back to the room where they are, and I see them hurriedly packing their things, and leaving with whatever they can carry.

I started to drift off to sleep, and a female voice said, “Do you want to learn? I can show you how.” I somehow knew she was telling me she would teach me how to lucid-dream. I rolled my eyes in an attempt to mimic the REM cycle and hopefully enter the dream state. In response to the voice, I thought, “What do I do?” I turned over into a more comfortable position, and in the instant before I drifted off to sleep, the same voice said, “I’ll be there,” meaning that once I fell asleep, she’d be there waiting to guide me.

Then my alarm went off.

I pushed the button and went back to the same position I’d been lying in. I started to drift off once again, and had the same almost-lucid feeling. The voice told me gently, “Now do something.” I started to reach my arm out into the darkness in my dream. The alarm went off. I hit the button and turned back onto my other side and rolled my eyes again. As I finally drifted off, the alarm went off a third time, and I had to get up.

So incredibly beautiful, and so frustrating at the same time. I wish I could have stayed in bed for a few more hours, because I’m certain that I would finally have learned how to lucid-dream.

OneYearAgo

I’m in Yakima, walking on Browne Avenue, about a block away my old apartment. Two guys, approximately ten years older than I, are standing next to the wall of an industrial-looking building that does not really exist in that location. One guy is high. He’s got his ten-speed bicycle leaning against his hip. The other guy is waiting for someone to walk by, and this time that someone is me.

“Hey, man,” he says, walking toward me. “I want to give you something.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“No, man, yeah I do.” He puts his entire wallet in my hand. It looks like the black leather one I have in real life, except his is much more beat up, and is even more stuffed full of receipts, bills, and cash. Even though the wallet is in my hand, I leave my hand flat, to show that I have no intention of taking it.

“Really, that’s okay. You need your wallet.”

“Look at this,” he says, a bit incredulously. He shows me a wad of fake-looking cash that he pulls from behind his real wad of cash. “You’re crazy.”

“You need your money, I’m doing okay.” I turn to walk away.

He pulls out a six-hundred-dollar bill, and holds it in front of my face. “Then just take this.” He puts it in my hand, but again I leave my palm open. Our hands are pressed together with the bill between them.

“Really, I don’t need it. You keep it.”

Now he thinks he’s being clever. As if to entice me to stop him from doing something bad with it, he says, “I’m just gonna go buy a piece with it.” I know he’s lying.

“Keep your money. See you around.” I walk away quickly. He becomes angry, but drops his wallet at taht moment, so he can’t do anything to chase me. High Guy tries to get onto his bike to come after me, but he isn’t capable of walking, so the bike tips over, and the guy falls on his face. When he looks up after me and tries to yell something, his face is bloody on one side.

There is a woman walking past all of us, giving us wide berth as she walks quickly to her black four-door Audi and gets in. I walk down to my apartment, but I go in the side entrance, just in case the guys are still watching me, which I don’t think they are. When I get inside, I see a large group of children filing past my window, screaming loudly. My blond wife (not someone I know in real life, and I’m not married) enters the room and starts to loudly sing a nonsensical song. She looks very strange, and her face actually changes shape and become slightly disfigured as I stand there looking at her. I try to get her to stop singing by kissing her, which works somewhat, but she still continues humming while we’re kissing.

That’s when my alarm went off and I woke up.

I never felt threatened, or out of control of the situation. I was very calm, and somehow knew just the right way to interact with this guy.

Very strange morning for dreams. I was only asleep for 45 minutes, but during that time I had an uncountable number of short dreams of all types. Some were ads, for a refrigerator, and for some sort of new Google service (?), and for a couple of other things that are eluding me at the moment. Two were extremely fast-paced cartoons, one of which was about a little Peruvian donkey named Mayaya. (It makes me laugh just to write that sentence, because I know how weird it must sound.) I don’t remember the other cartoon. Out of all those dreams, the only one that had any kind of narrative that I could write out was the one about the two guys and the humming wife.

OneYearAgo