dreams

Seems this morning was my weekly dream dump.

I have a bunch of sleep disorders. The sleep doctor, as you might recall, was grinning at the readout of my night in hell, hooked up to all the electrodes. The deal seems to be that I don't get enough Phase IV and REM sleep, but that they just overtake me when I'm too deprived. Sometimes it's a nap taking me so fast I barely have time to get to my bed, and sometimes it's tacked on to the end of my night's sleep. That's when I dream so much and so hard I can't climb up out of it, and when I get a big chance to sort through my Zen issues.

The first one, the one that I was determined to remember and kept trying to wake up to remember was me living in a beautiful old house with a young paraplegic man and a beautiful young lady something like the naked legs girl image I've posted here a couple times. I would spend mornings on the front porch with the man. We'd be in heavy consultation about everything, but he would have to leave for work and I would have to get up and move part way down the stairs so he could get his wheelchair turned around and then move back up behind him a little as he drove his wheelchair down the long steep stairs to go to work. It was amazing. He had very strong arms and would be clutching these hand brakes to perform the maneuver every morning. His most outstanding feature was that he was incredibly industrious, a tireless worker, indefatigable, but grievously handicapped.

After he'd gone one morning, I went back inside and upstairs toward my room, thinking I was alone, and talking aloud to 86's ghost about all the little bits of his stuff he'd left all over the house, when the girl popped out of her room to ask me why I still carried a torch for 86. I apologized for forgetting she was there, and started in trying to explain to her that I do not carry a torch for him, do not want him back, but trying also at the same time to consider if there were any truth to her notion. I told her he was a big part of my past, of me, and not really something I can just cut out, so I talk to him sometimes, not as in yearning for him, but simply addressing what exists of him, the 86 who can't drink himself to death, who can't be here or gone, and this dream cut off about here. I recall the sharp determination to remember it, and partially awoke several times amid the mad tumble of dream images, still with that determination.

Then I was back in the paradise where I lived in Mendocino for so long. The fat, pathetic, passive-aggressive human beer keg who lived out there too was busy driving all over the property in a little truck, and prospering in his own disheveled way. He greeted me, after all these years away and said there was a message for me on the work bench in his wood shop, and then the phone rang and it was his drippy, asthmatic, passive-aggressive sister wanting legal help, and I somehow, fantastically, agreed to take on the project for her, despite my complete loss of patience for either of them.

This placed me some miles down the coast in the village of Albion and I'd driven somewhat up Albion Ridge Road from the town to take in the view, go for a hike, but also with the objective of making a call for the asthmatic twit's legal problem. There was a hippie parked where I was parking and rummaging about in the back of an old Volvo wagon for artsy craftsy things across the street from a tiny new store. I went over to the store to check it out and found myself talking to an Asian man about my age who was a geologist and regularly hiked all over the area, and stopped to fill his maps with ground-truthed data. He was frankly and avidly coming on to me, and as he was doing so, another much older Asian man began doing the same. I wasn't exactly responding but was globally willing, and didn't want to commit myself to either or both and wanted both and neither left open also. Still there arose this pressure to choose, and I devised this way to seem to choose without choosing. I told the geologist to write down my phone number and this seemed to settle the question of my choice in his mind, and the much older Asian stepped back a bit. I did not write the number, but gave it out loudly so that the much older Asian got it too, except I kept messing up the number and we were running out of paper to write it down on. Every new time stating my phone number for them to hear came with a mixup of some vexing sort or other, and even when I absolutely gave it correctly, it was written down wrong. Finally, I blurted it out perfectly correctly a bunch of times, didn't check to see what got written down, exclaimed about having to see to the twit's legal need and fled.

Many more partial emergences from the wild dreamscapes later, I got up with these two intact. Now I'm going to be considering them for a while, and maybe writing about what I made of them, or what might be made of them, and maybe there will be more right here, or maybe a link to where I've done it, and maybe not. I don't know yet.