D R E A M S

Last night at around 2:00 am I finally had another House of Leaves-based dream. I remember very little action. I was in a house, looking for something. I realized it was in the back of a kitchen. I started walking toward it, pointing, saying, "there it is," when the kitchen began morphing, transforming, elongating, just like the house in House of Leaves. It freaked me out, but I'm so pleased I had the dream because prior to that I'd only imagined what that morphing of space would have looked like, but my dream presented it flawlessly. I ran out of the kitchen, only to find myself near the stairs at the top of my bedroom loft. As I started to descend them, they too elongated. The shock of this woke me up with a start.

Brian posted at 10:51 AM.

I live in a world where we all enter it first by dying. The logistics are foggy, but people spend an inordinate amount of time in public watery spaces. Particularly, I was in an office building that was flooded. A fully grown, middle-aged man gestates from somewhere in the water and I don't know if I'm officially some sort of mid-wife, but the man appears from the murky depths spouting not gibberish, as one might expect from one newly-alive, but just sort of talking animatedly about how he's just died. He and I begin playing in the water, which I'm feeling is a dying rite-of-passage, a sort of way to familiarize oneself with life. We play tag, do acrobatic underwater stunts, it gets mildly erotic, but perhaps only for me. His family is there, as well. His son (how he has a son before even existing, I don't know) is rambunctious and even on land does lots of acrobatics. He does somersault after somersault down corridors and even masters somersaults while sitting in a school desk.

I wish I can remember more of this dream because it was pretty fascinating. The subject line of this post is a play on the phrase, "I wasn't born yesterday." In this world, again, the act of birth is called dying. People are born at a predetermined age. They are born with knowledge and the ability to talk. I got the sense that reincarnation was a given and people were automatically aware of their previous life, perhaps that's why a family was already in place for this newly-alive man. I don't say "newly dead," because although the people of this world call the act of birth "dying," they don't call the state of living "death." OK, anybody want to make some guesses on what the hell this one means?

Brian posted at 7:36 AM.

It started with me at school. I'd decided to go back. I'm about a quarter into the semester. I'm thinking a little bit about the sememster so far, sort of evaluating my performance and whatnot, when it strikes me that I seem to have forgotten about a literature course that I've enrolled in. I'm upset because I like literature. There's no reason why I should have been ditching it all semester.

It's Friday, so I just remind myself that I have to remember to find out where my literature class is as well as study during the weekend to catch up so that when I go back the professor (I think she's a woman) can't catch me off guard.

Well, it turns out to be a party weekend. I don't know what the occasion is but my friends and I party all weekend. I basically dream of a weekend-long party because suddenly it is Monday morning and I should be getting ready for school but instead I am trying to decide if I can get a couple hours of sleep. In the background, there has been a David Bowie Movie Marathon playing on TNT or something. In the one film to which I pay attention, Bowie is an alien (not surprisingly) who comes to earth to take a male lawyer as his concubine. Bowie becomes disillusioned with the lawyer (again, not surprisingly) but instead becomes fascinated with the character I have become inside the movie for the brief period I am watching it. The only scene I remember clearly is Bowie, the dead lawyer and I are near an outcropping on the ocean. The lawyer has somehow been completely emptied and is like a giant skin. Bowie has filled him with dirt. He is talking about how it isn't fair that he should be so disappointed with the lawyer, but now he is merely filled with dirt. My character asks him, "well, what did you expect? He's a lawyer." I fall into the water, I guess trying to get away from David, but he uses some sort of purple energy he shoots out of his hand to make me float out of the water.

[writing that scene just now sparked a memory of an earlier part of the dream. I was at a swimming pool. There was a group of girls trying to do underwater gymnastics routines. In particular, there was a group of four trying to do a linked underwater backward somersault into an upside down totem-pole-like stack. I remember thinking that they were doing it all wrong, that they needed to stay tucked til the last possible moment because the bottome girl would never have the strength to lift all those girls once they got through the surface of the water, but if they waited to come untucked, then she could pull her handstand first and, being locked, could then at least maintain the handstand possibly.]

Going back to the end of the other dream. I was thinking about going back to school. It was about 8 am. I think I probably had class around 11. My mother lay asleep in the adjacent living room. I'm sitting on the toilet, trying to be quiet so she doesn't wake up, but she stirs. She says something about remembering to "leave the bathroom out" for me and I look around me and realize that the actual toilet I'm sitting on is outside of the bathroom and become embarrassed but it is too late to do anything about it. Very soon after, I wake up.

Brian posted at 9:14 AM.