holiday 2004 dreams

11-21-4

Dinosaurs big and small are outside the Kingpin Bowling Alley. I go visit with Snoop Dogg. People are running late picking me up and I have to field questions until they arrive.

Can a woman conceive? Never again.

Mayan gods—Images of Mary, Latin stories of Amazing Medieval Doctors. Two volumes: K96-1875 and 1875—Before Space. Another “regular” Medic places call from taxi driver who doesn’t know how he’s gonna pay next bill. He’s in NY for a while. Only $$. K and I have to take a message. I’m supposed to not be there.

11-22-4

Snowflakes being naked at Putney. Dinosaurs come into “baby care” to ask him “why do you like out to play”. Books. Grandmotherly type character—Janaki.

How can you know someone in an hour?

“I’m keeping my hat on—blood type or no blood type.”

Me and my “sister” are sitting in meditation, when these two young boys come up.

“Are you Susie and Piven?”

“Yes” They obviously saw the book our dad left for us in the bathroom. Dad couldn’t come to the Island of Ginger with us—and island “spice” in the Caribbean. Me, my brother and Mom are vacationing there. The country house is deserted.

Some SIT students come into store and ask in another language (Spanish I think)… if I know where she can get cases for her glasses. I draw her a map to LensCrafters. Later I realized that Wal-Mart would have been the better place.

And I see a family on vacation. The brother hands his mom some singles to pay for something. She responds just like my mother would have.

Ann and Andrew were decorating the store with big fake snowflakes, to my horror, after all my work.

12-7-04

Dreamt about working at bookstore again…

12-9-4

Jesse and friends at a museum-thing that my friends and I are also attending. Justin’s also there. Lots of other high school pals (more people here than at my actual 10 year reunion). I catch up with both guys and try to make plans.

A used-to-be-close-female-friend wants me to go with her to OWL—a health spa in NV. I tell her I can’t afford to go to NV. She doesn’t offer help.

Also gazing at a burnt out building downtown (other side of Burrows Oil).

At some summer program I was a part of. At closing ceremonies, I was asked to please go up. Saw DB in audience as I was going up. It was supposed to be a huge event. Two buildings. Broadcast on National TV. I was only asked 15 minutes beforehand and so didn’t prepare anything. I kissed DB before I went up and I told him this.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll be fine anyway no matter what. You’ll be wonderful.”

Even though I had tested the mike beforehand, it was shorting out on me or I couldn’t tell if it was working so the whole time I was fidgeting with it. I decided to do a rambling monologue, starting off with, “I’ve never done anything like this before…” The audience was insulted.

There were people coming and going, talking and lots of empty seats. Basically, I stunk. Huge lapses of silence.

I tried, “What I remember about the summer…” and I could only remember one thing. Now more people were filing in and I said thanks for coming, make yourself comfortable, as if I were the MC or something instead of some act.

Finally one of the program guys came on stage and sat on a chair and asked me to sit down. He asked me to look over my right shoulder. I saw several eager guys there watching me, and not really understanding, I spoke into the mike—“Thank you,” and walked off, which I guess was exactly what I was meant to do—my 20 minutes wasn’t even up.

I walked back to DB, whose first words were, “What happened?” I shrugged. I hadn’t frozen exactly, I just had no idea of what to do.

“You should have,” he said, “talked to the head guy and asked him if there he had any suggestions.” Advice too late, and we walk off to a church where we meet his parents.

The summer program was mostly beachside. I remember strange ocean creatures and laying in the sand and having the warm water roll over me, naked as I was. That was what I was trying to describe this to the audience, but was at a loss for words.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said as we walked away. I love performing and being on stage. “Maybe,” I said, “I’m just better at being an MC and I am an entertainer.” But really (even though this was a dream) I think I was trying to rationalize the whole experience instead of admitting that I was unprepared for one of the biggest opportunities of my life. That’s the lesson.

12-20-4

Planets other science. The bookstore. Andrew chilling with friends. Being polite. I was so polite and charming in my dreams.

12-21-4

MK was crashing on the living room futon of my friends Chris and John. I sneak in late one night to crawl in with him. He takes me in. Struggles with himself a moment then kisses me a lover’s kiss. I think that I ought to try doing this when I can get away with it. I still need to be careful. DB’s somewhere…

So much more to my dreams—is that all I remember?

Peter is rumored to have snuck away from a German Army during some outdoor BBQ / picnic. He caught a balloon and floated out of sight. The Germans were a little indifferent—one less person to kill I guess.

12-23-4

Dream place was a cross between downtown and seaside, windswept beach town. Cross between community bustle and seduction place

12-25-04

Trying to get to a costly dinner before going to another place—with K + Chuck.

I’m at some mother’s circle, adoring the kids and being fed spiritually by them.

Spontaneous bus trip to Springfield. I ask them at terminal if there’s a fee for a tour. We wait—another woman also wants to take the tour. There’s a conference at her hotel. Soon she’s joined by other conference goers all women and we’re signing up for this tour. I have to make sure that I have enough money for thte trip back home. The TV in the lobby shows the beginning of the movie “The Black Stallion”.

12-26-4

One pill makes you a large maniacal giant bent on destruction. Only works on pairs. Two students (I was one student). It broke our friendship. Close friend of Monroe has publicity a lot.

That’s Ly’s house.
Books in country store
Film Fest
and all my boys
+ VT Bread working

Teeny hippo eat octopus at exotic pet store

12-27-04

Concepts in Time. Xmas dinner with Chris and Lise.

Working as a domestic in big mansion. I was caught going through Dr. Knoll’s stuff in his room. Was brought down to have talk with him and another resident doctor. They were reminded of my “grief” and suggested that I talk to doctors and / or go to church, except that the church we lived in was a boys’ school / church and I would be out of place—Petra is scheduled to move in during March. We try to convince them she is a girl, but they have a hard time conceiving it.

Lao convenience market. I am buying up so much produce. The car is a table that when parked in the wrong spot, someone puts a price tag on it to sell. They all [unreadabe] a try in the market as I am buying.

12-28-4

I am the successor to Bill Bryson, the headmaster about to retire from his post. This replacement was of the natural calendar, yet of a sudden, Mr. Bryson fell ill and into the hospital, where he remained. He therefore was unable to introduce me to or train me for the job.

I got on the PA system that next morning, as he had done every morning. I read the following speech to the children. He’s dictated it to his mother from his hospital bed. [these are the parts I can remember]

“Hello there. How old are you? You are between 9 + 12 years old. Tell me then, my child, what through your lens eye will still be here 15 to 20 years from now…? I have not become a york pork [unreadable] in the pork jelly contest. But I have followed my __ God (and he led me successively back to nature). I am a follower in the Natural World.

“(I encourage you wander thusly, to see what you find. Our hearts are tiny true gods)”

Start causing(?) tape recorder for these moments and college coeds.

I visited with someone I didn’t normally see. The interaction was useful and friendly.

I couldn’t control car I was driving. Esther was in car. I know we were climbing. I couldn’t break so had to drive right into the drift. DB said, “Don’t accelerate!” But I couldn’t help it. It was about healthy…

DB wrote an article on the storm started by the meteorite that we witnessed flaming through the sky as our car was going berserk. The opening line had the date. “worst storm in history.” So many people displaced that women were being called into the workforce, just like in WWII.

“Women didn’t swallow work. It swallowed them, and sometimes it swallowed a lit candle and a helpful tune.”

Portland = Porto = red “wood”. Indian Country.

Shanapahas

Viewed the video “Goodbye Girls” at the filmmaker’s house. I’d already seen it and wanted something else.

Who was it that I loved, then betrayed? I’m led into a house late one night where two members of my family stood with guns ready to kill—which they did. I turned my back on them that moment on—how could you, my gaze seemed to have said.

I was technically part of the sinister conspiracy at that moment. I turned, I regretted it. Father? Killer or killed? Mother? Brother? It was all familial. Or was this the part of some movie that I already saw?

I almost gave the filmmaker advice or tell him whatever we didn’t like about it before the group sat down to watch it.

12-29-4

Trust your gut. Verify facts.

12-30-4

Tornado crashing through the sky. Chases anyone with a cell phone which when thrown, is gobbled up by the tornado, delivering a power boost. It becomes much more terrifying…

An evil-doer know about it but didn’t help us. We’ve been cornered by them. We’ve set loose some gas to smoke them out. We’re trying not to breathe. They’re trying to get us to sip something—fighting. We do anyway. Nothing. Take breaths of air from open window behind us, still trying not to breathe the toxic gas. Trick’s on us. They are poisoning us from the outside.

1-3-05

Summary of dreams last night—my parents. Getting a ride from summer camp. Dexter a story character, a little like Clint Eastwood. A movie festival. Sully Other boys. DB frowning. Peeing, clogging up the toilet. Too many people in my dreams. Way too many.

1-4-05

Too much work—it’s overwhelming working with Marcel Hannah doesn’t show up. At camp we have to do dinner we learn too late. We were sitting around singing songs. Before that, somewhere where in the dark, mice. Chris + Lise are there + DB. We shut off the light, then hunt them with a flashlight + video cam. In another room I encounter a bigger, stronger creature, a large rodent. Call to them. It seems rabid. My friends handle it and convince me that it’s a neglected, malnourished dog, which of course, it is.

1-5-5

malacan macalan macalan

1-6-5

Jack Russell Terrier + sock monkey play catch swimming in a pool—on my back, doing laps. Exploring the garden. I’ve been here before, but a different part of it. All of this with DB.

1-7-5

At the park on Elliott Street. There’s a choir sing dress rehearsal. I am robed, but hadn’t been practicing with our choir so will not sing. Barbi Burrington’s premie baby is in a container on the bleachers. It already fell off once.

I lost the keys to apartment and hotel room and tried to sneak back up the Latchis Hotel to find them. Couldn’t.

Finding mastodon bones / crystals.

family vacations

8-31-5

I’m eating squash, corn and sticky rice with the family I live with. They’d come back after being away, when I could walk around the house naked.

I’m taking phone calls about something.

Dinner with Eskimo girl and her mom. Two female friends of mine come to visit.

My friends and I are still inside our clubhouse, talking. We’ve heard construction going on around us all day. But all of a sudden we feel as if we are moving. I poke my head out of one of the windows to see what is going on. The building is being lifted by a crane.

“Do you even know there are people in the house,” I shout down to the crane driver.

“Nope.” He keeps right on.

I’m in bed with my brother, who licks and kisses my ear ___ ____ then when I look down ran the ____ family have fallen out into bed. both ladies come to visit us once we’ve landed. I freak out about ____ and pick up everyone that’s talking which also includes ________ rat race fallen and I forgot about.

Man pushing three tablets up the mountain. It’s Moses. The caption to this B.C.-style cartoon: Suddenly it occurs to ___ that if God could read from the top of a mountain, he could read from anywhere.

9-1-5

Mom and I are vacationing and decide to adopt American names, to make it easier to introduce ourselves. I choose “Monroe”. She chose something like “Buchanan” or “Buckley”. Another Laotian friend goes by “Marie.”

9-2-5

Some friends are having a very exclusive, catered anniversary party. You have to be on the guest list to get in. My ex-boyfriend (their brother) invites me and a friend to attend, but we were non-committal. When we get there, we’re not on the list. My old English teacher is the bouncer checking the list. I have to hold our spot and run downstairs to tell someone who know that we’re not on the list.

“Is it OK to come in,” I ask.

“Of course.”

Later, a guy at the Holiday Inn is showing promotional photos of parties the company hosts, and I recognize myself in the photos. I’m wearing that same green organza dress. It finally dawns on me that it was from that anniversary party. It was one of their off-site catered parties. The hotel guys were lying just by not telling the whole truth.

9-3-5

Blood between both legs with a long-time friend of mine…

Bum in a truck cab in historic Brattleboro—why?

Kindergarteners. 11 a.m. kids are there ready to teach me. Teacher is returning into a building.

9-4-5

Advice to Tom Cruise: 13 bets. Give it two weeks in autumn, when problem is strong so they won’t die…

There’s a festival downtown. I find lots of boxed cards that my employer had bought ages ago that I’d never put out for sale, even though it’s already in its own display case and everything. My fault. I start creating displays in the back parking lot of some other stuff, including furniture. There are already a few tables set up in the parking lot, near the coffee shop.

One of the tables I’m very familiar with—I’ve sold on it before. And I hate to compromise that spot by putting all this there, BUT I need to. The tables would have made perfect writing spots and for a moment I fantasize about setting up my office at one of them. In all this search I find lots of books—I also find at least one note to me about my participation in the festival. Notes of thanks and fan mail. I am bummed that I didn’t receive them back when I just did the perfomance(s). It’s been so long. Stores were opening up. I didn’t get to read them all through.

9-5-5

decided
not to
write
down—
too grumpy

9-6-5

Family at the beach—a large woman with her kids. A girl like a retearded woman I knew back in high school. Red haired and slow. She askes me if I buy Coronas.

“Yes,” I said. She let me taste hers—vanilla flavored. I said I liked it.

“I’ll let you nip on it once in awhile then.”

I was there alone, checking E-mails at the shared computer labs on the shore. Actually while checking E-mails, I found one of those pop-up computer games called “Grow Your Own Trees”. I clicked on it, which brought up very lucious glen marsh with skinny small bamboo-like trees. Double click on a tree or group of trees and it grew rapidly before your eyes. In some instances the land shifted almost to replicate nature—but then I made one clump grow really fast, which shifted the shoreline and opened it up (kinda like the mouth at the bottom of the Big Dog Place).

I looked around and found myself in it and saw what devastating effect I was having on the environment and became afraid of the power that I had. So I went back to checking E-mails. I had gotten up at some point and found a way to move some of the huge boulders around. Some of them ended up shifting into the stream bed ocean floor and then I remember that it made it look more like natural erosion if the rocks also shifted with the land. But again, I took so much that the shore was crumbling. I stopped before it got worse. I could see both how it could look in the future and what it used to be in the past, and hear the lamentation of the destruction and was sad about it, so stopped. Went back to E-mails. That was when the family came. The mother, the retarded girl, the kids. They offered me beer and for a while I completely forgot what I’d been doing before they showed up.

I remember Daughter saying something like "if we weren’t here, we’d be home, hurling Ma’s food (because it’s so inedible) and Pa’s____." I realized mid-thought that I had to go back to E-mails. Mother smiled a little embarrassed at the truth of her daughter’s statement. She’d never graduated high school, but is currently finishing it up—it’s a big step for her. I excuse myself to go back to E-mails.

Before this, the computer lab was abuzz with other people. One was asking me if I knew about my little brother’s winning that writing contest..? I mumbled something. The guy nexct to me said I should help him do a profit and loss statement for the thing, see how much he made out, he meant.

“It was only a $5 prize, right,” he asks. “Figure in materials, et cetera…”

“Actually,” I say, “it’s just five dollar prize money. But they gave him $200 in goods and other things. So it was actually a big deal prize.” The room started clearing out.

9-7-5

woke with a poem in my head about something mundane—a bad poem. But I got up because of the phone. Now I can’t remember anything.

9-8-5

woke to alarm!

9-10-5

Picking salad greens from the garden—it’s big. Someone wants to buy it off us—my family runs it. I am brainstorming how to sell it to the others.

My Taiwanese friend is sick. I go to visit her. Other friends are already there. They’ve been there throughout the illness. I can’t make that commitment.

Mom accidentally leaves her peanuts on the plane when she’s getting off.

“Such a shame,” she says. “They were yummy.” There’s no point in going back for them—the stewardesses probably throw them away.

“That’s how they do it, you know.”

Many more dreams. I’m waking to the alarm.

9-11-5

Mary White is dead.

I am Godmother to a little girl.

But I forget the rest—slept past the point of remembering. Lots of people in my dreams.

9-12-5

There’s a museum that’s closing to the public. I join a series of classics—actually from Nature. I am modeling for an artist lover of mine. Going over topics I’ve modeled for.

“Snobbishness, snobbishness”—a girl-song in the vein of “Doo Run Run”.

9-13-5

I make an effort to be well-dressed even to do little things. Like walking down the street.

Book group meeting at Tea Lounge. We’re talking about poetry. Something about paying—running a tab/installments for some art.

ode to my yacht

Yesterday morning, I awoke with a few scant images from various dreams and a title of a poem, “ode to my yacht”. The notion—that I would have a yacht—was funny to me. I can’t see myself owning anything so considerable on my income. And well, a yacht, man, what a mark of exuberant luxury. I turned on the bedside lamp and wrote the poem. I groan to reading it now. I only write this horribly when I’m drunk or bleary-eyed. Here it is:

ode to my yacht

you, large creature
full in hull and spar and mast

divide the waters
we zipper through

it is salt in my lungs with you
and sun in my belly
it is fate with her hands through my hair

nothing there is nothing
like balancing on the spine of desire
as she charges, full power, into
the evening sun.

I told a friend of mine this recently. He laughed at my suggestion that this must mean that I’d acquire one some time in the future.

“I’ve had many dreams come true,” I said. Then I was tasked with telling of them. “A couple of them were break up ones,” I said. There were more, though I never got to tell of them, as the conversation went elsewhere.

There are those dreams in whose world you sink in so deep that when you awake from them a little bit of it has been brought back with you. It’s the fisherman’s hook sunk so deep that even when free, the barb remains as a reminder of the frightening exhilaration of being caught by the hands of destiny. The yacht dream, though fleeting and thin, had that essential quality to it.

These days, I am waking to dreams of this nature with more frequency. They involve tigers (one of my totem dream animals), my wedding day, the little plot of land that is mine, and the lesson that I am in control of my own destiny. These are all based on fairly recent dreams, and so they haven’t appeared in this blog yet.

Here I am living them, instead of writing them for you, or even writing about them for you. In the last three months, my life has fallen to the instructions of my dreams almost completely. I’ve bought a wedding dress, written several poems, worn the same freakin’ outfit for the duration of this time, pausing only to take it off to launder, then redressing in it. I have incorporated dream images into my collages, sketchbooks, and letters to friends.

There have been some mornings I wake up not wanting to transcribe a dream (like this morning, for example). So I lay about until I forget them. Then they’re gone. I’ve gone back and forth between wanting to keep a journal and giving up. But I’m always back between. And I realize now that I could never be an Anne Frank, James Kolchaka, Anais Nin, nor anyone else who kept a journal. I get bored of it and move onto something else for a while. It’s my Gemini nature coming forth. (I’m actually a Cancer, but I have a double Gemini influence so I feel half-Gemini) This sort of existential questioning and my inability to get to a computer that has BOTH a disk drive and Internet access has factored into the collapse of regularity here on Dreams After Thirty. For this I apologize. Mostly to myself. This was my 30th birthday present to myself—the blog. I have not maintained it well. Given that this would be more interesting with some real-life context to it, future posts will examine my relationship with my dream and waking states. The dated log will continue as often as possible. E-mail me with any comments.