Dreaming
A couple of weeks ago, I had a really traumatic dream that I’m still depressed about and created a painting based on it that I’m almost finished with. But for now, I’ll talk about the others. There have been so many lately and I’m not sure why. I’m not even really sleeping more despite the fact that I am not working. I’ve been going out almost every night, coming back in late, and being awaken by lawnmowers, weedwackers, car alarms, children playing; the soundtrack of my neighborhood.
I’ll start with last night. Last night, I had a dream that I was an accomplice to stealing things from a university museum. I didn’t mean to be an accomplice. It just sort of happened I was stuck there for the night and I couldn’t get out. A group of kids came in. They were teenagers. And they ran to the exhibit with all of these bright red high heeled shoes and started cramming them in their purses. I asked them why they were taking them and one of them told me, “Don’t you see? They are really guns?” and I saw them being fired, right out of the heel. I ended up helping them leave the museum against my will and all the time, I was scared for the future because on the streets loose were all of these high healed shoes that were really guns in the hands of mere kids.
Friday night I had a dream that my Great Aunt Dot was in even though I haven’t thought of her or seen her in quite some time (she lives in Pennsylvania) I went into a locker room to take a shower and the maintenance man for my apt. building’s wife was there. She was speaking perfect English even though in real life she only knows Spanish. I turned on the shower and it was chocolate milk that came out instead of water. I walked out into this banquet hall and there was a table I sat at that was circular with circular table legs holding it up. (Instead of straight up and down sticks were large circles that spanned from the circular tabletop to the floor so that you sat against the table with your legs through a circle) I took one of the circular table legs out from under the circle and I started to eat through it. It was like foam that looked like wood. I bit through the foam so that there were, in effect, two separate circular table legs. But, of course, that made the table rather unstable and so I had to take it to the wood cutter’s. (This is the only part of the dream that makes sense because I just recently watched Hitchcock’s North by Northwest) The woodcutter was talking about making up an identity for a person that doesn’t really exist.
Sometime in the middle of last week, I had a dream that I was a high school teenage boy with AIDS and I was at my senior prom dance and a fight broke out. I had to warn everyone not to start a fight with me or the blood would go everywhere.
Thursday night I dreamt I was with my mother and we were riding the NYC subway into Chinatown. It was Chinese New Year even though it was hot as if it were still summer like now. All around us were these perfect images, an old man with a bright red parrot and everyone stopped to look and the subway even slowed down so I could take pictures of them. We arrived in this apartment and there was a box of photo paper. The only problem is, forgetting about the light and the need for absence of it, I opened up the box and the entirety of the photo paper was exposed to the light and therefore worthless. Then, somehow, my mom and I had to stuff sharks down the toilet. These were sharks that bite and hurt (you know, like sharks) and their greyish pinkish blubber was everywhere as we crammed their big bodies down. I don’t know the purpose and I can’t make any sense of it. I’m sure the sharks feel the same way.
This is what it is like to dream:
(now playing: Sleepy Jackson: Lovers)