1.
Last night’s dream may not require a record of
it, it may endure in memory throughout my life-time.
In place of the Hager’s residence on my
street there is now a house I might have visited several times before. All
though this seems unlikely given the content of other recent dreams, by the
time that I arrived at this home it had all ready become familiar to me as the
residence of Kresten’s extended family.
Perhaps in fact I first encountered this
setting last night but can only, as it has been observed, recall the last few
episodes.
Much like the land surveyor in Kafka’s The
Castle, I was assigned to this destination – I think by Kresten – perhaps to
pet-sit. Yet just like in the Kafka
tale I had trouble gaining admittance and then acceptance. I think I was
accompanied by a friend – if not Andrew then probably a reference to him, for
the Dreamer of Dreams has all ready cast Andrew as a personification of the
Shadow – when I first[/last?] tried gaining admittance to the House. The woman
who answered, presumably Kresten’s graunt – but on second thought all most
certainly his dead, demented grand-mother – asked first and in a clipped and
near-silent Soviet voice if I believed in God. It might have been in this
interrogative form: What is your religion? Awkwardly but without hesitation or
stutter I replied that I did not have a religion because my parents
never followed one in particular. She said no more to me, but passed out from
sight, advancing I think towards the front of the house. I was left uncertain
as to whether or not I was well come. A part of me wants to believe that I turned
to Andrew at that instant and that he shrugged in mutual confusion.
The House must surely have been the House
of the Dead. At any rate, it was the House of the Dying. Yet what Watts had
said about how we treat our dying – with denial – seemed endemic. In truth, a
number of its occupants there were of middle-age, and I wondered what they were
doing there. A man occupied a cot upon my right upon entry to the bleak blue
room. I recall an arbitrary riddle that I was asked to solve, or other-wise it
was one that I had believed my self to have solved adequately and wanted to
brag about.* I was met with feeble glares of incredulity like the one that the
old man at the Zen monastery had fixed me in before the other old fuck there
said of my intellectualism and philosophical curiosity that he did not know why
I could not ‘relate to [with] people’** and that I needed medication (in the patronizing
interrogative form: ‘Are you taking [on] any medication?’***
*This is all most certainly a reference to
my attempts to talk people through Depression.
** Salinger incarnate. I am Seymour Glass.
*** This episode at the Zen Monastery was
Actual.
2.
At one point later in the dream I had left the
house, which never seemed to change internally. I left my home in a bath-robe.
I passed by the Wookey’s open garage, where Scott’s perpetually hot sister
Michelle, who might have been dressed in a salmon-magenta robe, was packing
things into a car. In fact it might have been that the garage, like the Hagers’
garage had been in Actuality and as it was now. In Dream, was still cluttered
as though Scott had never ‘grown up’. I asked her when he would return. She
hesitated to answer and I thought first that may be she had not heard me and
then secondly that she was ignoring me, though it’s possible that these two thoughts
had occurred in the obverse order. It was like seeing the woman at the Che café
and being disappointed to find that she was not in fact the INFP-looking buxom
blonde who had worked at Barnes & Noble. [Another Actual Instant.] She
finally replied, probably without looking at me. I cannot immediately recall,
but it seems that Scott would be gone indefinitely, for her response left me
with little to nothing to look forward to.
As I continued down in the street, I was
met with an angry glare from a female stranger in her
twenties-to-thirties-or-early-forties, wearing a night-robe that might have
been like my mother’s. I was unnerved. I thought: She is wearing a robe. Why
would mine, (which felt like it had belonged to my father, in retrospect, and
might in fact have been either borrowed or inherited) offend her? I looked down
and realized that I was not only wearing that robe, but dress pants and my
favourite cobalt-blue business shirt over it, too.
3.
Finally, I decided to perform upon [I think one
of] a series of truly grand (though not formally Grand) pianos at Kresten’s Christian
convent. I was told, luke-warmly, that while my music was basically good I
could use some lessons. I began to explain, again with the same Zen-off-the-bat
immediacy, that those cost a lot of money and that all of my favourite artists
were self-taught. It was like the time in Actuality that I had told Mitchell
that all of my favourite authors were dead, except that that time the reply was
delightfully a positive relief:
‘Then you are like me,’ he had said with
the same Dr. Pepper immediacy.
dm.A.A.
No comments:
Post a Comment