Tag Archives: dream imagery

That Millenia-Old Myth

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My girlfriend saw her ex across the room and was insistent about talking to him alone. I could hear everything they were saying, and then I couldn’t. She was gone when I looked over again.

“She had to sort something out with him.” That was the waitress, a once lovely woman with too much mascara. “I hope you have a healthy relationship.”

“The lies of love and how this millennia-old myth has kept civilization barely afloat.” I finished both drinks and ordered again.

There was a graffitied phone booth in between the bathrooms, and the phone actually worked. She didn’t answer. But my mother did. She was disappointed in me and wanted to know where I was. Things just got worse from there.

The Tininess in My Head

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The island where I was born has untold manifestations in my head. It is tiny and vast, empty and overbuilt, extensions from every building, every building gone, the path across hills and prairies, leading to a barren rocky point that never was.

I’ve circumnavigated the island many times, down from a steep ridge, the water choked with ice, a canoe at the ready. I need to go back for a paddle and watch everyone leave. There’s a menagerie of animals in the water, fish and seal, cats and birds, and a miniature sheep that fits in my pocket. Half asleep, I do the breast stroke to the bottom.

A message from my realtor comes through; someone wants to buy the island. I’ve already left. That’s what I text. I don’t intend to return. I get a question mark back and reply with a meme of the sheep in my pocket.

Pink PickUp Truck

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The pink pickup truck was just ahead, a car and then the truck. I saw it when we turned, better to the left. It got further ahead, and I tried to keep up. What was that voice yelling in my head? Was it a workman on the street? A bad childhood memory?

The pickup glowed in the evening light, like an artificial starfish, the driver waving her arms back and forth in a steady beat. No, that was a dog’s tail. The dog jumped into the front seat. I picked out our family dog when I was a kid. “Not afraid of that one!” That’s what I said.

I needed to see the driver. I knew it was someone I should know. I changed lanes and then back again. I met a beautiful girl in my Feminist Film Theory class. She had heard stories about me and she still liked me. She said that laughing. I really thought it would work out.

The truck caught the light, and I couldn’t keep up. I remembered missing the bus. Shadows glided past as I navigated the curbs. I couldn’t find my phone and then couldn’t get it to work. I thought about that familiar frustration as I watched her go.

My Fever Dream About Fever Dreams

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My fever dream about fever dreams begins with a man rising out of the East River and approaching the shore like MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. He strides with certainty onto the island and into a hotel. He proceeds to rise up through the ceiling and crushes everything around until the space metamorphises into a ballroom.

The music blossoms – for this appears to be a music video fever dream – into a kind of Indian techno. The room is filled with spectacular light and joyous people. It pulls back to the dreamer – me – trying to embrace and share that vision with others, waking, wandering out into the night, telling others, old friends, strangers, students, even casting them, promising roles, searching out the exact location for each scene. Everyone is inspired and encouraging. This really could be something.

He – I – cannot use my phone and then pee into the front engine of a car, sure signs that this is still a dream, not as fevered, but soldier on, trying to remember all of the details of the genesis and come up through the layers, less feverish now, and awake, holding on to the key moments. This is the thing that will reach others, to you. You will understand me now. And so I write all of it down.

Pink Soda Dance

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Hands came over my face, a sharp young woman in sunglasses and nothing of a dress. She pretended it was an accident but demanded that I get out of the way so that she and her friends could post a video.

She feigned shock when I told her that she was being rude. They passed out the drinks, mostly pink soda, and danced, the last one in a blue head band, a feather tied to that, her face pressed close to a wall, near a screwed-down pipe.

I had to get a picture, especially with the ocean and trees in the distance, but was locked out of my phone and had to resort to AI.

Bequeathed Baby

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Winds came hard from the east, carrying my ex to the sands she loved and an urn, a bequeathment from her father, now chipped, his old apartment full of former students.

The water flooded up into a pool, the students playing and spitting, little to say, the phone – the phone again! – half burned in the muddy sand, unable to grip, to move back, even with the kids trying to throw rocks, thinking he might never come back, and then having to go to the bathroom, always that.

He was a baby. He wanted everything for himself and then none of it, vanishing into nothing. And not even that.

Needing to Wake

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Turning a playing card over and over, the same thing on both sides…unable to open your phone, the wrong password, wrong fingers too.

Opening the door, seeing your partner half dressed with a stranger, knowing it would be like that, feeling sick and afraid.

The climactic end to a film oozing down from the floors above, the passage getting narrower and narrower until you can’t find the right door and are on an elevator that twists sideways and stops on an impossibly high floor, everything glass all around.

The terror digs deep, and all you have to do is wake.

Half Asleep Brain Processes

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I think I’m awake but not, because I’m thinking things like I’m late for my aunt’s funeral and that I should learn to play piano. I need someone to roll down the window or a Christmas tree, something like that.

I’m bendable or half inflated, a combination of velvet and sticks. I can’t remember. I’m dropping stuff and spilling ice, hitting the call button on the broken PA, and then I’m writing out restaurant recs, and Marcus Aurelius comes to mind, a hose or at least parts of one.

I want to remind myself of the thing I need to remember. One of those new water bottles that everybody has. That’s what I need and how much that actually make sense. I’m processing what makes fashion. If it’s insanity, what then?

Id Bits to Something Else: Writing Process

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Half thoughts come to me as I waver between sleep and playing word games. I have been left alone. No one is coming to find me. I will stay like this.

These tiny bits percolate from my subconscious – or so I decide – unbaked nonsense. My foot twitches, a muscle in my left shoulder. I am still on the dock, the paint can hot in the sun. I am watching Maude and then a Japanese superhero show. The color goes in and out.

I am asleep for the briefest of moments and trying to remember. You’re jealous. You hate it. Phrases like that by an odd voice in my head. Who is that? It isn’t me. My thumb gets tired. I text badly like this. I am falling asleep again. I almost drop my phone and type that. I should do something. I really should.

Ghost Fish Dreams: Writing Process

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I dive in, immediately nervous, thinking of doing a hard turn back, but I force myself to drift, my nose just out of the water, and look down at my feet dangling into the murk. It is thick with sediment, shafts of light trying to break through and failing in the deep, deep brown.

White smudged lines appear, a birch tree that fell into the water last year, a nightmare place made worse by the fish that drift past. I pull my feet up and clamber onto the raft, and I am on it and then I’m not. It sinks and then shoots out to the side, breaking the surface like a shark, leaving me to sink back into that awful abyss.