Dream Journal – Entry 6

1.

I am walking on the freeway to school (college). It’s one of the most exhilarating experiences I have in dreams: traveling on the freeway by foot.

There are a bunch of us walking on the freeway, actually. No cars. It’s as if there are no cars in this world and the freeways had been built as huge walking paths on which progress is made as quickly as if by automobile. I pass a couple girls I recognize as neighbors but haven’t spoken to before. All girls in dreams are pretty. I walk in front of them and don’t say anything but hope they notice me.

I walk with my eyes closed. I don’t care if I get where I’m going. My mind is on the girls behind me and I’m indifferent as to whether I reach my nominal destination. Eventually I open my eyes and discover I have indeed gone off path and am in a field of grass. The two girls are still a few paces behind me. I say that I hope they haven’t been following me because I haven’t been paying attention to where I’ve been going. They cheerfully admit that they have been following me, as unconcerned as I am that we are lost. I say we better head back then and figure out where we went off path. We travel downhill, scaling down short cliffs and finally through muddy terrain. Suddenly we are inside a building I never saw the outside of. It is a student game room, with pool tables and arcade games. One of the girls asks if I play pool. I select a pool stick off the wall, insert quarters into the table and try to rack the balls. There is a problem. I realize the entire room is tilted about 30 degrees from level. The balls won’t stay in the center of the table, but roll to the side and back into the holes. Determined that the game must go forward, I align all the balls along the side of the table where they won’t roll anymore and proudly announce that this is a new, cool way to rack the balls. Unfortunately some strange dude appears, grabs the cue ball and “breaks”. Where have the girls wandered off to?

2.

I am at an old friend’s house. He now lives in a mansion. Must be fifty rooms, on an immense estate. He is getting married. The bride is in her wedding dress, sitting in one of the living rooms with her mother. I have known her for as long as I have known this friend (they are drawn from real life). Suddenly it occurs to me that they got married years ago – I was at the wedding. Why are they getting married again?, I ask her. She explains with some sadness that they hadn’t managed to stay married. He had gotten into a bad business deal, investing in a restaurant that failed. They had gotten divorced in order to somehow protect her half of the money. But now they wanted to get married again. The estate was crawling with people I didn’t know, there for the wedding. It was turning into evening and all the guys wanted to go in town – we were in the country, apparently – for a bachelors party. The wedding would be tomorrow. I had no interest in this, yet tagged along until we reached the first stop, a gas station in some tiny town. I snuck away, not wanting to hang out with the party…

3.

I am suddenly in an office talking to one of the girls from part 1. The blond who wanted to play pool. I liked the other girl better but I liked them both so I was happy to be back talking to this one. However, instead of flirting, we are talking about a business deal. It sounds like a good plan and we are going to make a lot of money but there is one hitch: it will require doing business in Iran. (This seemed much less of a problem in the dream than it would in waking life.)

Now I am in the office of a company I used to work for, talking to an old coworker (whom I had seen in the crowd at the wedding in part 2 but didn’t speak to.) I want his opinion on the business deal. The problem, however, is that I can’t remember the details of it.  He tells me to get back to him if I can ever remember the details.

4.

I am back in high-school. I am outside on the track, running a mile in what might be record time for the school. I don’t know where my energy came from, but the faster I run the better my legs feel. I am also using my hands to run, reaching out in front of me, clawing the track in order to pull myself faster along, more like a dog running than a human. I can even see the claw marks I have made in the track, which look like the nail marks of an animal in mud. And then I am running with my eyes closed, much like I was walking with my eyes closed in part 1. I am on the last lap but afraid I’m going to miss the last turn because my eyes are closed. Why can’t I open my eyes? I finish the mile – I think — and wonder what my time is. I never find out.

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Dream Journal — Entry 5

I go to a park on the outskirts of town. It is evening and I meet a beautiful, skinny black woman lying in the grass on the bank of the river. We flirt and I lie next to her. In the distance, people play beneath lights on a concrete basketball court. The girl rolls on top of me and asks if I will take her home with me.  I want to but realize I am still in the situation I was in in Entry 3: I am staying at my parents house, which is teaming with relatives. I remember that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Having a strange girl wake up with me around all my relatives might be awkward. But I think: “I’ll take her to my place and let my relatives worry about where I am tomorrow.  It’s worth it.” We walk toward my car and suddenly her elderly parents, who happen to be white — which doesn’t surprise me at the time — accompany us and talk about what a lovely evening it is. They appear to like me. We reach my car and it is midnight and and the drive home will take about half an hour. I am excited but also concerned that something will go wrong before I get her in bed.

Dream Journal – Entry 4

I am working at a restaurant. The owner is apparently a friend, although not a friend drawn from waking life. The restaurant isn’t doing well and the place doesn’t look good. The carpet is old and dirty, potted plants are dying, only two or three customers seem willing to tolerate the service.  A consultant has been brought in to help and he advises that installing a swinging door at the exit to the kitchen will turn the business around. A tall and muscular waiter, a man with considerable experience, apparently,  objects. “A swinging door will never work here. You’re crazy.” I ask my friend the owner what is so crazy about a swinging door.  He explains that the waiter is right, that there is no room for a swinging door in this place. He would have to remodel the entire building to accommodate a swinging door, and he isn’t able to make that sort of investment.

Suddenly the restaurant is not merely a restaurant but a basketball court. To be sure, we are in the same building, but the building has made one of those unnoticed transformations available only to buildings in dreams. Not only is it a basketball court, but a game is going on and I am apparently on the team. The coach puts me in with only 30 seconds left on the clock and I don’t touch the ball but we win and there is a big celebration after, a dinner celebration in the same room, the same restaurant. I am feeling good because we won the game and because I am the new player on the team and have high hopes for my future.  It is unclear what level of team we are. We aren’t an NBA team, but it isn’t a school team either. There is a team president, a decrepit man who looks like John Rockefeller. I have taken a seat at the back of an absurdly large, round dining table. The president spies me sitting in the very back by myself, approaches and suggests I’d be more comfortable if I sat somewhere nearer the others. I tell him I’m fine where I am. Another man, the general manager, approaches me, laughs nervously and tells me lightheartedly that I shouldn’t say “no” to the old man.  The face of this general manager was the most startling part of the dream. It was the ordinary face of a forty-something man with bushy, brown hair, yet, upon awaking, I was troubled by the appearance this face, as I always am such faces in dreams. Because this face was not drawn from anyone I know in real life yet it was as vividly constructed as any as I might see on the street. In waking life I don’t have the visual imagination to close my eyes and imagine a face I have never seen, yet in dreams such things happen. It is enough to give at least momentary credence to mystics who maintain that all the details of the waking world are dreamed also.

It ended as a nightmare. It was the conversation with the general manager. It was a nightmare which resembles everyday life more than most: a nightmare of mediocrity. As this man advised me that I shouldn’t say “no” to the president, he put his hand on my shoulder, laughed and launched into an anecdote about how once he had made the mistake of saying no to the old man and what the repercussions had been. Looking into this face, the one my unconscious had effortlessly brought into being out of the void, I stopped listening to his anecdote and instead thought how he reminded me of so many managers I’d had over the years. I neither trusted nor distrusted this face. We weren’t having a real conversation.  He was only playing his role as the general manager.  He was on auto-pilot. He was saying what he was supposed to say, smiling when he was supposed to smile.

I then questioned my own behavior. Why had I been so foolish as to not move seats when the old man requested me to? Was it not his right as president of the team to tell me to move? Or, at least, was it not appropriate for me to honor his suggestion? He hadn’t asked me if I was comfortable; he had told me to move. I had responded as if I had been asked a question and as if the purpose were to be truthful. Why hadn’t I realized that the point was to be sociable not truthful? I wasn’t standing on some high principle by remaining in the first seat I had chosen, yet I felt as if I were. I felt as if there were some slippery slope of obedience at stake, that if I changed seats at the request of the president now there would be no end to changing seats at the requests of others, no end to doing things as a social end and not simply holding my ground and saying how I really felt.  The general manager was still talking to me, still telling his story of how he had once made a similar faux pas, as I thought these things.  I looked into this mediocre yet not unpleasant face and thought how he had been successful in life and how soon, perhaps, he would replace the old man, who must have been a hundred years old by now. Yet I didn’t want to be this man. I didn’t want to wait in line behind him. I wouldn’t change seats, come what may. I sensed that further horrors of mediocrity awaited.

Dream Journal – Entry 3

There is a large gathering of relatives at my parents’ house. I am staying over, although I don’t live there. I take a late afternoon nap in my old room in order to escape the madness of the others and awake around eleven, after everyone else has gone to bed. Remnants of a large party are visible in the kitchen: empty beer cans, etc. I decide to retrieve a beer from the refrigerator and take it back to my room to drink. I finish it quickly and consider having a few more, but back at the refrigerator I decide to venture out instead: the night is young. I drive a couple blocks and there are police cars and ambulances racing down the street. I make a left turn (I was going to turn right) in order to escape from where I think they are coming. I realize I am headed to buy some beer but not sure where. I find myself on the front porch of the house on 10th street where I used to live and sit on the swing in front. It is dark inside, and I wonder if the current residents are in. What I really want to do is go buy some beer and come back, sit on the porch and drink all night, here where it is comfortable and quiet. Suddenly there is a car in the driveway, an old convertible sedan of some sort,  and a couple — clearly the residents of the house — trying to start it without success. I approach them and ask if they need help. It is like starting an old lawnmower, with a priming button, a throttle, a cord to yank again and again.  For some reason the cord is on the outside of the driver’s side of the car, near the front wheel. I pull it as the couple in the car step on the gas and prime it. Eventually it starts and suddenly I feel awkward for appearing on their front lawn so late at night, a stranger. I explain that I used to live here, which doesn’t make the situation any more comfortable. We exchange awkward goodbyes and I head down the sidewalk on foot. The sun is rising. I am worried about having to explain to my relatives where I was all night.

Dream Journal – Entry 2

One of those dreams where you can never get to your destination. Ran into a girl I dated 4 years ago, and she agreed to have sex. We were to take separate cars back to my place. On the way for some reason I decided to buy some tacos (I must have been hungry) at a restaurant her dad happened to own. When I reached the cash register he told me that my meal cost one million dollars. I pointed to the menu to show that the tacos were only $6.50.  He pulled me aside and said that the one million dollars also included services previously rendered. I managed to escape the restaurant and get home where the girl awaited. She said we needed condoms. I went on foot in search of a convenience store — which I thought was next door — and became lost in the city never to return.

Dream Journal – First Entry

This blog is going to take another sharp left, and from now on I’m just going to describe my dreams from the night before.

Last night I dreamed I was the guitar player in a band in Norway. I don’t know what sort of music we played. The four of us boarded a small boat and we traveled a short ways and got out and the leader announced we needed to kidnap people and sell them into slavery in order to make money. I asked why we didn’t just play gigs to make money and was told that in Norway everyone plays in bands, nobody sees them.

Daily Negations

I’m not going to give it all I have.

I will not be enthusiastic.

I will be spontaneous but not in a fun way. ME: Hey, you know what would be great to do right now? Leave. Bye.

I will not try new things unless it is specifically to avoid an old thing.

I will not try to have a good time.

I will not dance.

I will not make small talk with anyone.

I will not play anything cool.

I will not pretend to be interested.

I will not pretend to understand.

I will not travel anywhere unless it is to run from the law.

I will say no to everyone until the phone stops ringing.

I will not try to try to try to try to not try. I will not try.

I will not go with my gut.

I will take nobody’s advice.

I will not think for myself.

I will listen but I won’t believe.

I will see to it that it all looks the same.

I will not open my eyes. They hurt.

I will not dream of anything.

I will not seize the day.

I will not swim against the current.

I will drop like a rock.

I will not pretend as if I am one of them.

I will run with the pack but only to trip some of them.

I will not be true to myself or anyone else.

I will not rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I will grant importance to nothing but the trivial thoughts which assume massive proportions in my wayward mind.