The dream began on a playground. A
friend and I were traversing the higher levels, moving by bridge from the top
of one pillar to the next.
We were trying not to get killed,
yet somehow the anxiety from previous dreams was markedly absent.
At some points, we were playing hide-and-go-seek.
At
another, I found myself in a treehouse, hiding. Memories of it now evoke a
habitual tension that I recallnow as a depressive neurosis.
The dream changed to a video game.We
were predominantly on ground, in a battlefield. What set it apart this time was
threefold: We had recognized that the game was not a platformer but a
wargame. We stopped moving frojm level to level. We began to fight.
Using
monsters as our allies, we gained an advantage and then a victory in battle.The
game involved a good deal of r Running about and gliding across water to
reach outcropping islands from high ledges.
Part of the dream was set in a mall,I got to see the mall at
night-time, andthen again during the bustling daylight hours. I began there at
night time. I visited the pizza parlour,but
did not have money because I had left my wallet,
I must have spent the night therem
though I am uncertain.
During daytime, I might have seen
the Modest Mouse record on display in a window,I wanted to get it,but my
purchase was interrupted by a riot that spread throughout the store, Some
people with machine guns were laying siege to it.They were working for the
malevolent head of a corporation. I fled, with my friend, yet we got separated.
I took one elevator, where Maria
took another.
The episode culminated in a Battle
on the higher floors.I fled,descending onto the first floor, and ran into the
parking lot.
The mall mayhave had seven floors.
The white van wherein my companions were supposed to pick
me up was nowhere.I had to drive a car. It was terrifying. Regardless, I
managed to get far away from the conflict. I escaped into a countryside, as a
fugitive.
I spent some time pacing the
meadows. I admired acrest of yellow grass running through the greens with
unprecedented delight.
Yet word in the town hadspread. I
saw someone there I recognized from the mall. He saw me.
I ran for it. I sought the flimsy
shelter of a giant slop overgrown with brush.
It
was night-time.I emerged at a fence. Crawling underneath it,I found myself at
the high school.
I followed the high school routine fairly faithfully over
the following few months.I was in
an Art class,but I dropped out
after missingmanyclasses either leisurely or because of other commitments.There
was also ascience class that,true to form, I did not recognize I had on my
schedule until a shock towards the end.
There was a physicaleducation
class, and I used it to oogle the girls. I would go on runs and wind up in strange places.Every-time this happened,I
found myself in the midst of a story that was a dramatic dep-art ure and
even a
Liberating Escape from my daily concerns.
One
time I was at the cliff of a trench on a dark night that seemed regardless to
have been lit by a glow that seemed as though it would never go out. The place
was a skate-park, yet it was also a mine field.
Another time,I was walking along
Carmel Mountain plaza, yet the shopfronts to my right were from Encinitas.
The remainder of the high school
activities were fairly standard.There was croquet in the fields. Somehow, the
croquet fuelds from Rancho Bernardo Park appeared on our campus. We used
mallets that were magenta and a light-grayiosh violet ( like Taro–flavoured
slushie at Thai-go, in Actual Life).
We
also went on fieldtrips and missions. One of mine was to usea flying apparatus
to traverse the (Mojave?)desert and get to the Sierra Nevadas. I began at
daytime, and I was instructedto return before nightfall,yet I always – with the
exception of a few times that went unnoticed – failed to do so. Each night,the
dangers of the dark were a surpassingly greater threat to my mind than fear of
eventual reproof.
The
mission always involved finding these dirigibles,each the size of my craft(
probably no wider than [twice] my armspan) hovering in a cloister amidst the
mountains.What I was supposed to have done afterwards invariably escaped me, yet Finding them was ‘important’.
One night, I crash-landed.I
encountered several people investigating a murder.I accompanied them along a
mountain road, at daybreak, in search of Clues.
I
found a yellow,glowing item that was a Clue, and then again a woman in the
desert, very old, who glowed green. Yet the puzzle was lost to me, and I feared
being found by the mountain lion.I returned to my companions, but they had
already solved the mystery. Not telling
me what it was, they had me accompany them, in cars,to a suburban
neighbourhood.I did not have to drive this time.We got out and Walked to a
nearby city.There were people I knew from the Palomar theatre program at a
playhouse whose entrance faced the street inexplicably. We watched the play,
but as we were watching, a zombie
apocalypse broke out without our knowledge.
We fled.
I
lost everyone at the suburbs.
Things were getting apocalyptic. I
managed to find refuge in a parking lot full of buses, come night fall.The one
I stowed aboard was occupied by none other than the Rancho Bernardo High School
Royal Regiment Marching Band. They greeted me as an old – if incompetent – team
mate.
Promptly,
the bus took us far away from the tuined city. A gentle light, like the yellow
of a hard-boiled egg when one scratches away the sulfur, penetrated the fog as
our bus rode away to a tournament.
The epilogue of the dream had no
conceivable transition portending its episode.My grandfather hadcome to
visit,as in Actual Life. He arrived this morning, in Actuality, yet I have not yet set eyes on him.
He was a womanizer and had
pretensions towards being a performance artist.The whole aspect of the dream
was set inexplicably in one of Jeff Carter’s
favourite films.*
* For the record, Jeff Loved ‘Sideways’.
The house wasa guest house shared by many women.He cast my motherasa kind of servanr, to her
politely unspoken but profound dissatisfaction.
He then cast the most sexually
attractive woman as his love interest,
to frustrate everyone else even more. He cast a man that he dislike as the Devil.
Everyone,or almost everyone, recognized the absurdity of what he was doing, but they humoured him
because he and they were Old.
I began to masturbate to the
childhood fantasy of Alessandra Ambrosioin the bath.I thought of Andrew’s
advice, and noted that the sexual zeal Was enlivened by the infantile Anima
projection. Yet I feltguilty.
I had to go to work. Joann had been
remodeled again.The store could be described as nothing less than a dusty
emporium that felt cripplingly nostalgic at the back but that intensified in
anxiety, though never to an intolerable degree, the closer that one got towards
the Magistrate’s Table that wasthe checkout stand, lining the front of the
store like the seats of the Supreme Court. Thr lights at the back of the store
and its other nooks and crannies were a mellow, Natural, accidental light that
ex posed its gorgeous grays intermingled with Amber,
In contrast, the sterile White Lights overlooking the uniform horizontal rows p
arallel to the checkout counter made
the dust bunnies appear as though they
were deemed unworthy pests.
I made my way to the front and took
Drew’s place at the register.
As father drove me home, we passed
through an almost childlike,convoluted, serpentine labyrinth if high-ways, like
a roller-coaster in the impending, apathetic twilight.
We returned home to find the start
of the rehearsal.Tempted again, I withdrew into the laundry room to
masturbate.It was atthistime that a SWAT team broke into our house, Military
personnel were in search of the woman of my grandpa’s eyes.I imagined what
would have happened to me if they’d found me having sex with her.
dm.A.A.
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