Tag Archives: dream state

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.

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.

My Father Was Dead.

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My father was dead. Or he was just out wandering somewhere. Maybe he was still alive. I didn’t know. But my mother had decided to take the tiny house at the top of the hill with a remarkable view of the bay and live in a giant bed with a lesbian much younger than her but with ratty hair. Their bed was positioned at a picture window and my mother wouldn’t get up. She was trying make me uncomfortable but I wasn’t.

I mean, I had just been caught masturbating by a group of strangers and I had shit smudged on my ass and legs. I still had to go to the bathroom, and so that’s where I went, through a maze of rooms, all of the bathrooms full or broken, until I was out and flying like I used to have done, under electrical towers, skimming over the water, getting too high, on a plane that would never take off and then it did and I was surrounded by the nightmarish staring-faced people that would never stop until I was dead. And so I woke myself up.

The Back Stairs

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I am always dreaming of escaping down the back stairs of my childhood home. I can’t find my way out and get attacked by a massive dog sent down by my father. I punch and punch at it and yell for my father.

He sends me to school where I’m failing because I never listen. I run away from class, escaping out a twisting hallway and get stuck in a sewer that begins to flood.