Last night I had this dream: I am standing outside in my yard, where fresh snow has fallen. We’ve just come from robbing someone’s house, going through their attic where the creature is hiding.
Archive for the ‘dreams’ Category
Last night I had something akin to a nightmare; I was getting married. To whom is irrelevant. Either way, one morning I awoke, and I knew it was my wedding day. I was already wearing a beautiful dress. It fit well and fell down to the floor in folds of smooth silk.
As I went about eating breakfast like I normally would, something kept nagging at the back of my mind. What was I forgetting?
It dawned on me in a cold wave, crashing over me: today was my wedding day. And I had done… nothing. There was no venue reserved, no flowers picked out, no food or cake, no music. Nothing. There was, however, a guest list, and the first guests were to be arriving sometime in the early afternoon, which gave me four hours to put everything together.
Naturally, I panicked, and began sending out my brothers and family members to find things, anything, for this event. I drove out myself to a flower boutique, although I became more and more panicked as the minutes ticked by. I was driving with my brother, who took a wrong turn. The road turned to gravel and then to debris; we were driving into the underbelly of the city.
I yelled at him to stop so we could find our bearings. Opening the sliding door of the van, I stepped out barefoot onto the garbage. It looked as though we had stopped under a broken overpass, the ground littered with rusty wires, broken concrete, and garbage.
Great, I thought. This wedding will never happen now.
Last night in my dream, I burst out of school to be greeted by the cold. I can see my breath coming out in short clouds of vapor. My brothers and I begin the long trek out to the shore, padding through the snow and avoiding hidden patches of ice.
At some point I look up and realize that there are cold, tall mountains that stand out starkly against the blue sky. Next to them, one half of the range has been blasted and carved down to be faces, snow-capped, like the mountains. I try to take a picture of all of these, but somehow the earth seems to rotate in the opposite direction. Even as I crane up and over the things in my way–the trees, some people walking back and forth, the power lines–the mountains seem to recede furhter into the horizon.
Disappointed, I hop down and continue my trek to the beach, where my parents are vacationing for the day. As we draw nearer to the ocean, the snow begins to turn into something more akin to sand, light and fluffy.
There are wooden bunkers lining the path now. They are constructed from logs with long slits in between each one, and while they are a fairly decent shelter from the sun, they are not sheltered from the wind and water.
I can hear the ocean as the waves crash down on shore. The tide is coming in. Looking out through the holes in the bunker, I can see the waves curling over themselves and smashing down onto shore. The water is coming closer; it leaks into the cracks in the walls and floods the bunker. Bracing myself, I wait for the shock of the icy water, but it never comes. I’m all right for now.
Look, says my step mom. She puts her arm through the hole in the wall and points out at the sea. There’s a man out there.
He is caught in the tide. He struggles to stay on his board, but we watch as the water drags him under, tumbles him around like a doll and then throws him up on shore. Each time, he manages to regain consciousness enough to drag himself forward a little on the sand, but each time the encroaching waves catch his board and drags him back under. It’s exhausting even watching him, and after the third time he is dragged back in, I can’t stand it anymore.
Vaulting out of the shelter, I run to him the next time he is flung ashore. He’s face down and starting to stir, but the strength has gone out of him.
I pick up his board before the water gets to it. Even though the water pools up around and underneath him, he is able to stand and together we stagger into a secluded area and he falls down. Thank you, he says, for saving me. Despite the slightly blue tinge to his skin and the way his hair is crusted over with sand and salt and frozen from the cold, he is attractive, half-naked, and the temptation is high. He’s giving me that longing look people get when they’re about to take you.
And then I realize that he looks horribly familiar. That he’s one of my ex’s friends, and that this is wrong, all wrong. I’m repulsed and horrified and absolutely baffled. I back away. No, I say, I can’t. You’re welcome, but I need to go, and I run out of there as fast as I can.
My brain ruins everything.
Night before last, I dream that cousin and I are going to class. We drive for a while in the dark and arrive on the top of a hillside, buildings luminous at dusk. The tallest building is where our class is, and we begin to wind up the parking garage to park.
We come to a ledge. This is not it, I tell him. You’ve parked in the wrong garage. I point a few buildings over, where we want to be.
“Shit!” he says, pressing the accelerator.
But we are not on the ground. We’re ten or fifteen stories up. The car plummets over the edge of the garage. I feel the familiar swooping in my stomach as we start to fall. At least it’ll be over fast, I console myself, thinking that the force of impact combined with the fact that we’re in a car that will certainly crumple in on itself may spare us long and grueling deaths.
But I live, bouncing out of the wreckage and simply breaking both legs. Somehow. I get up and stagger away, throwing up in the grass.
Last night, I don’t remember much from my dreams. I had vivid ones though, and have repressed most of them, as they featured a certain person I’d like to obliterate from my thoughts entirely. But the dream progresses and I’m inside an elevator. The ground floor is 3, and instead of going down, I accidentally press 7. Embarrassed when the rest of the people complain (for they too, wanted to go to floor 3), I just get out at floor 7 and run down the stairs.
When I run outside, I realize I’ve been wearing my glasses. But things are blurry, and so I take them off. I’m standing in an open square, the nearest building very distant. There are no trees to clutter the skyline, as though we’re on top of a mountain. We may be. And as I remove my glasses and clear my vision, I realize for the first time I can see clearly, sharply, intently. The sky is open above me and stars burst into view, spinning galaxies and nebula and all manner of beautiful things.
They were interesting dreams. The first one was especially odd because I’ve never thrown up in a dream before. I wonder what it means.
I think playing Fallout before I go to sleep gives me bad dreams. A few nights ago I woke after seeing my dream self run screaming hysterically out of a room, away from some perpetrator. Two nights ago I had a dream that just left me feeling bitter and resentful when I woke up, and last night I dreamed that my house was the only one–in the middle of a family dinner, no less–that was swept up by a series of tornados that came through the area. I lived in a wooden/corrugated metal shack, which was then destroyed against a brick building. The last part of the dream had my father gasping in the driver’s seat of a car, unable to breathe, while shouted for my cousin to take the wheel (we were in the back seat, petting his dog).
I didn’t think I’d have anything to really blog about, but it appears that I do.
A couple of books for the rest of November. I should finish over Thanksgiving, a much-needed four day break.
1. Diary – Chuck Palahniuk
2. The Borgia Bride – Jeanne Kalogridis
3. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
4. Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana – Anne Rice
5. Until I Find You – John Irving
I finished The Borgia Bride on Saturday night, and it was an appropriately fluffy story with a decent mix of sex, violence, betrayal, jealousy, blah blah blah. Slightly less fun than a Philippa Gregory book, but interesting and quick.
I’m interested in The Road to Cana because it’s written by Anne Rice, who wrote the (beloved) Vampire Chronicles. I’d never thought that she was particularly religious, but I suppose in my mind I can see how vampirism and religion may go together. She received a lot of crap from people about her sudden switch from vampire novels into books on Jesus’ life, and so I’ll try one. Well, it’s the second in the series. I don’t think I’ll have missed too much (and it was the only one my library had). Oh, and the other reason I want to read it is because it seems to coincide with the rekindling of my roommate’s faith, which I find highly ironic given his flagrant bigotry and intolerance of others different from himself. Actually he’s Catholic, so maybe that makes perfect sense. Either way, apparently I’m not allowed to proclaim my atheism or make fun of religion anymore in my house because it’s too offensive (I politely asked, then, if my roommates would stop making fun of gay people and my own ethnicity in front of me, at the very least, since I find that offensive, and was met with something akin to sarcastic disregard. Wonderful!).
Anyway, John Irving is always a favorite, and I happened to be wandering through that aisle when I suddenly remembered that I liked an author whose last name begins with i. So there. A good way to end the month, before I start reading Harry Potter again (agonizingly slow, I may add, as only three chapters a week or so, so I don’t get too far ahead of my friend, who is reading along).
In other news, NaNo is coming along fine. I hit the 38,000 word mark last night. Hopefully I can finish this weekend (as I should hit 44,000 words Friday night) and get it over and done with, to move on to other projects.
Actually, this is the first year that my story does not seem to be wrapping up very soon. Most of the stories I’ve written I’ve been able to wind down pretty quickly, or at least hit their halfway marks at around the same time as I hit 25,000. Am I just losing my touch? Do I suck so much that I’ve just drawn it out for thousands of words???
I guess we’ll see when I edit it (if I edit it).
This is a dream I had the other night:
I stand in a square diving pool inside a dark room. Light pours in from skylight, but so brightly that the sky appears white, the rest of the room darkened. The water below me seems a luminous blue, and as I look closer there are small tropical fish swimming by me in lazy circles.
I put my head under and can see clearly. Most of the fish are guppies and are male, with blue fins and greenish bodies.
The other fish in the small pool are larger. Angelfish, some clownfish, and lots of species I can’t name. One, a black fish with a nose like a needle comes towards me. His eyes are about as large as a walnut and he looks into mine. I’m suddenly scared and surface again.
A kid I knew from college comes up to me with diving gear. I’m thinking his wild gesturing means we’re going to buddy breathe. Excited for the opportunity to stay underwater as long as I can with the fish, we dive, only he won’t give up the regulator. There are a few desperate seconds in which I struggle for breath, try to control myself, and then reach for the regulator. He withdraws, and I know I’m going to drown, until I remember to stand up.