D R E A M S

So, all I remember from my dream last night was that I was a gay African American Father who was a musician and into Wicca. I had a teenage son who was into goth music and my lover was telling me I was in a great position because I could understand what my son was going through.

Ummm, weird.

Brian posted at 8:31 AM.

I lived in a world that was segregated for some reason. I'm not sure why, but some people got to wear normal clothes and some people had to wear white robes over their clothes and it was the law. There were a few people who had to wear half white robes that were sewn over their normal clothes.

There was a school dance and people were dancing together. I was a white robe person, I think. A cop had come to the dance to make sure that people were wearing their robes. They all were so he left. I said something polite to him as he got in his car, but as he drove away, I threw a chair through the squad car window and said something that my dream self thought was witty, but I don't remember what it was.

I hid for a while then went back to the dance and I was looking for someone to dance with, presumably someone in particular, since it seemed like my dream self was looking for a specific face, but I don't know who I was looking for. It was a little sad. At least the cop didn't come back.


________________________


Earlier, I had a dream that I was in a rauncy sex club, but that I was on a mission of finding little one-inch buttons that bands sell at concerts. There were straight people at this club and a guy who was there with a this girl (they were just sitting at a little table having a drink) gave me like three buttons and I was very thankful. That's all I really remember except for some vague sexual things in which I was not a participant - it was just going on around me as I was looking for the buttons.

Brian posted at 9:54 AM.

I was on a flight to Nice, France. It was a domestic flight or at least, not transatlantic, because it was a smaller plane. There was also something weird about the front of the plane, because I could look out the front the way you can in a bus or a car. Like there was a big windshield. I don't remember much about the flight, except that as we were landing I looked out the windshield and there was construction on the tarmac with workers waving us to not land, so about 50 feet from the ground, the pilot pulled up suddenly and we started to turn around 180 degrees almost right away, much faster than a normal plane would. As we made the turn, I saw this sort of giant garage/hangar that was multiple stories. It looked like a plane could fly into each bay for landing. Somehow, my dream self knew these hangars to be for lesser-class flights, but our airline was allowed to land on the tarmac. Also, the floors of these hangars was sloped upward, I guess to slow the planes down right away as they landed because the hangars were impossibly shallow. After we turn the full 180 degrees, I see a row of very French-looking buildings just beyond the airport.

Just after we land (we being Claude, me and one of our friends whom I can't recall), I get a call on my cellphone. It is a past lover, Jeff, calling to tell me that he is in London. I say I am in Nice. He says he's calling from his friends cellphone. I say I am answering on my own cellphone. I don't remember much else of the conversation, but meanwhile, Claude and our companion have raced ahead of me. I start walking through the airport without really knowing which direction I should be going.

After a while, I start getting nervous that I'm going the wrong way. I am about to call Claude to ask him if I'm going the right way when I get to the lobby of the hotel that connects directly to the airport. My dream self recognizes the lobby and realizes I've been here before. There's tons of wood panelling everyhwhere. Now I know that the reason I'm here is for an annual convention (though I don't know what it's a convention for). A woman whom I met at the last convention and I bump into one another. It is like a reunion. We hug and say how good the other looks. She has medium length black hair. I realize that she is a shoe designer. She is here with her other friends who design other types of clothing. I realize that they all make their designs to go with each other's designs like a little club or something and it just happens to be a big hit with the public, which makes all of them very successful. They all dress a little weird, but I don't remember how. I can remember that the shoe designer has designed some blue suede women's slippers with little curlicue flowers on them in darker blue stitching. I remember a merchandise-style moment of seeing all of their different clothing items on a wall. We bid our goodbyes and I go meet Claude by the front desk.

Somehow, it is instantly later. The shoe-designer girl tries to call me on my cellphone, but I don't answer it in time. Then, she tries to call me on my other phone, which I have for some reason. I miss that call too because I'm calling the voicemail on the first phone. As I'm listening to her voicemail, she walks right past me, saying her message into my other voicemail box. It's a weird deja vu kind of moment, but I hang up my phone and walk with her to her table (still in the lobby) and we all hang out.

There was more, but I don't remember it.

Brian posted at 2:44 PM.

Last night I think I was in a school type situation when this kid showed up, interrupting our class. He apparently had been raped, someone said, but was now reluctant to admit it. It was my job to use a "rape kit" to determine whether or not he had been raped. He was lying on an examining table, obviously in pain, taking labored breaths. Now since I've never seen a rape kit, but have heard of it sooooo many times on Law and Order: SVU, my subconscious mind created one for me. It consisted of three small items all the same shape. They were of three different materials and all shaped like little half spear-heads. Two of them were a kind of thick paper and one was a sand paper. I had to swab the inside of this guy's butt. He was in his twenties, dark short hair. I don't remember seeing him naked, but I still somehow had access to his bum to swab. I remember that the swabs were wet after each swipe (though I couldn't actually see myself making the swipe).

Later, we are investigating the rape ("we" consists of a group of my schoolmates, none of whom I know in conscious life) in a loft apartment building. The ugly mean "hack" from Oz, the woman who has sex with all the inmates and gets pregnant, lives there. Her apartment is connected to an art gallery, for some reason and my dream self is really surprised, and thinks maybe it's just a coincidence and that she doesn't really have anything to do with the gallery.

Brian posted at 9:27 AM.

Maybe I was just protecting myself because he was so good looking and I didn't want to get hurt in the long run. But at first I didn't even really see that he was attractive. He was really begging me, but I said no. I was driving a mini-van for some reason, pulled to the side of the road, and this guy was standing outside of it. He was a construction worker, shirtless and wearing tight faded blue jeans. He wanted me to get into the back of the van and just look at him from there. The windows were tinted, so I could see out, but he couldn't see in. Something happened when I finally, reluctantly agreed to the little experiment. It was like I was seeing him for the first time. He had an impossibly long torso from which he'd shaven all but a thin layer of hair. Perfect muscles. He wasn't wearing a belt and his pants were unbuttoned at the top. He was looking into the windows of the van, trying to guess where I'd be positioned. He was wrong, of course, looking in the middle section and I was in the very back. All he was doing was posturing outside the van, but something about the voyeurism of it really turned my dream self on and I was suddenly very attracted to him.

The dream moves forward and I am at a party. He is not here. His girlfriend is, though. She is small and either Indian or Arabic, something dark and exotic. She likes me. We are talking about him and suddenly we are making out. Her clothes are off. I trail down her torso and as soon as I get close to her womanhood I panic and my throat tightens and I'm nauseous. I tell her that part may have to come later. She shows her accord by shivering in mock disgust and saying "yuk, never."

The party is in a high-rise, about twenty stories up. It feels like one of the housing complexes from Loyola University, on the north side of Chicago. I can almost recognize the view.

The only other thing I remember from this dream is that my glasses broke at some point. I don't actually remember when it happened in the sequence of my dream, but when I was getting up this morning and went to put on my glasses, I remembered them breaking, but they weren't broken.

Brian posted at 9:08 AM.

Early in the evening, all I remember was that I was in an optical shop trying on glasses. My hair was similar except instead of magenta, there was blue. I tried on a pair of thick translucent blue frames that looked the color of blue raspberry soda. The girl who worked there looked like Chuck's ex-girlfriend Nikki when she had shoulder length black hair. She was flirting with me big time.

The optometrist in the store, who was middle-aged and a woman as well with shortish red-brown hair, had an interesting archaic-looking device which she used for tracing frames for cutting lenses. It was basically a clamp that held the frames in place while a narrow pipe coming from somewhere above us that held a small marking device was guided by the woman's hand around the perimeter of the frames. Somehow, this was exact enough for a lab to manufacture lenses with the resultant tracing. A third woman in the store - a customer - remarked how ingenious the machine was.

Later, and this is the dream I awoke with still churning with prose - I think I was a woman with a genetic disorder that affected my legs. My shins, to be exact. I was seeking some sort of genetic therapy from a specialist. I think my consciousness or, really, my point-of-view, flew from character to character in this dream, because I was privvy to the thoughts and feelings of her and these other people in the dream, but never simultaneously. Anyway, she gets the therapy done, but it is a quick-fix, not a permanent solution, as far as she knows. She goes jogging and jogs fine. But then my p.o.v. shifts to inside a surveillance van (FBI, maybe?) and I am inside monitoring her movements. I think it is a pity she does not know that she will soon explode as a result of her "genetic therapy."

Suddenly, the dream flashes backward to before the procedure has taken place. The woman is in the doctor's office and she is asking him about a selection of books she is thinking about reading. This is about the time I'm skirting between consciousness and sleepy-time, because instead of experiencing the dream, I start hearing it more as prose within my head. It went something like this:

"He takes the list from her hands feigning interest. In truth he hadn't read a single thing since his wife died 2 years ago. In his profession, that would be pretty much suicide, but he's learned to make ends meet by working on the "special projects" in conjunction with the government. He says in his best sing-song, reassuring voice, "ah yes, this one I think you'll find exceptionally well-written and very insightful," about one of the titles of which the authors name is a least recognized. Actually was a fellow Harvard graduate, if memory served."

And then I heard the scampering from the roof. Look on my home site for the same date if you don't know what I'm talking about with the scampering.

Brian posted at 11:15 AM.

This morning when I woke up, I fell back to sleep and dreamt that I began recounting to Claude the dream I had before I woke up the first time:

I was on a high school field trip, but, once again, my friend Liz, whom I'd met in France 6 years later, was with me. It was an all-day trip and had an itinerary starting with something downtown in the Loop. I don't remember what I did for this segment, but when it was over, we were filing back into the buses (there were two of them) and I let this sort of nerdy kid plug his headphones into a dual jack adapter in my iPod (which did not exist in '93). At first, I got onto one bus and decided against it, so started to get off and go to the other one, where I noticed that the nerdy kid was still plugged into my iPod and going into the other bus. So I go into that bus. It turns out that only about 6 people out of the two buses full have decided to go on the rest of the field trip. I was astounded that everyone was so blatantly ditching the rest of the trip and I immediately wanted to get off the bus with my friend Liz, who had now morphed with a girl I dated in 7th grade, Laurie, and go do something else, but since the bus was already moving, I said, "well, I kind of like science, anyway," which was not true in high school. I deplored science and got a D in physics my senior year. Weird how things change. I also said, "you want to go to the new lightening exhibit?" Liz/Laurie said, "maybe."

As I was telling Claude about this dream, the dogs were jumping on the bed. I thought about asking Claude if he would bring me the laptop so I wouldn't leave the bed and forget my dream. The door to the house opened downstairs and I heard the voice of our cleaning lady, Luba, in her familiar Polish timbre, "Helooo." Curiously, the dogs did not go nuts when she got there, like they usually do.

And then I woke up, and realized that I had just dreamt that I woke up and thought about that dream. The dogs were laying beside me in bed. Claude said I had to walk them cuz he was leaving for work.

"Ok," I said.

____________


Yesterday I dreamt that I was spending the weekend at someone's house. I was younger in this dream, too, but not quite high-school-age. It was a celebration of some sort, perhaps a birthday, but not my own. Whoever's house it was, it was pretty big, so they were rich.

I don't remember much from the beginning of the dream, but toward the middle, it turned out that the house I was staying at turned into a restaurant, and I would be working there. It was fine dining. I used to wait tables in a fine dining environment, so I thought I would be able to handle it.

Very early on, I was flustered, and it was only quickly compounded because both the customers and the other members of the wait staff were very unforgiving with their eyes and their under-the-breath comments. Mostly, I remember going to the wine cellar and not being able to find the right wines. The first table that seated was a table of 6 or 8 and while I looked for the wine our sort of sommolier (wine expert) poured wine for them, for which I was grateful, but would have appreciated him telling me, so I hadn't wasted a bunch of time looking for the wine.

The rest of the evening was a series of small disasters and I honestly don't remember actually dealing with any table, just getting the feeling that everyone was talking about me and feeling completely inept and that everything was escaping my grasp and out of control. It was a slightly familiar feeling from when I actually did wait tables and ended up in the weeds, but it was grossly misproportional.

The night wound down and all the tables were almost gone. One table, where a girl with long straight brown hair dined alone on a plate of crudites, was among the few I remember clearly.

Suddenly, I remembered that this place was actually a house and that the owners, the parents or authority figures, were about to get home. It was suddenly early morning. I was exhausted, but felt like I had to clean up. Like a teenager that had a party while the parents were out of town, except I didn't plan the party and really didn't even know who lived there or why I was there.

I remember cleaning when the doors opened and I vaguely remember someone coming home and seeing the place still in shambles when I woke up.

Brian posted at 7:20 AM.

All I remember from my dream this morning was that it was about me having a conversation with someone regarding vegetarianism.

It probably stemmed from a conversation I had with Dawn recently about my shifting toward a more vegetarian diet. I will probably post on my regular blog soon some details regarding this conversation.

Brian posted at 1:27 PM.

Last night, I was in my old home in Burbank. My sister was there too, even though she never lived there. I was supposed to take out the garbage. I tried pulling the bag out of the can, and the bag was stretching and breaking. Finally, I pulled it out all the way, but as I did so, lots of rotten food and maggots were pouring out of the holes. I quickly tried to tie the bag shut, but my fingers were getting stuck in the knot I was tying and maggots started crawling up my hand. I finished tying the bag and shook my fingers and then woke up.

This morning, I was in line for a nightclub, but the line was indoors. I think the nightclub might have been Berlin, in Chicago. Just behind me in line was this black hetero couple, and the guy had a GIANT dog with hiim. It was about 4 feet tall and looked a bit like Marmaduke, but Brown. The man apparently owned a clothing store, perhaps Morris & Sons, but something vaguely familiar. The woman was talking about the coats he sells and asked if I had one. I told her no, but that I've always wanted one since I was little, which is not true in conscious life (how could it be if I'm not even sure what brand I'm talking about, right?).

The dog comes from the book Voice of the Fire, by Alan Moore, which I just finished reading last night. In the book, there is a recurring image of a black dog-like creature called a Shagfoal, that supposedly has been a recurrent sort of phantasm in the history of Northampton, where the book takes place.

Brian posted at 7:41 AM.