Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Dreams for the Crazy

So cheers to all, I’ve been ill yet again. I’m on my second round of antibiotics for the month, which, secondo me, is just horrific. But there is one good thing to come of all the recovery time: bizarre dreams. Be it a combination of medicines, isolation from the living world, sickness itself, whatever, dreams seem stranger this week.

And I’m guessing nobody wants to hear other people’s dreams, so stop reading now if you like.

This first one, I’m not sure I had while actually sick. It may have been the night before I took to bed, hm. Anyway, my dog, some dog, my dream dog had been licking my arm in the dream. Big, extravagant licks. And my cat, my dream cat, came along and insisted on smelling where the dog had licked me. “But why do you like that?” I asked the cat. “What does it smell like?”

“It smells like curtains,” the cat told me.

Dream number 2.
A drunk man lives on my roof. He is homeless, typically in a ratty sleeping bag, with his hair matted. I have just discovered he lives there, and I’m not sure how not to offend him while not being sure if I can feel safe around him. So I hike back downstairs with him shouting things after me, very uncomfortable and frightened.

Downstairs, there seems to be an informal dinner party thrown by my parents, while two of my lovers are wandering the apartment. “Look! This brownie mix shows you how to make pot brownies!” one of them says. “Ha ha ha!” my father laughs, while my mother wonders aloud if pot and brownies are the only two ingredients in pot brownies. “We’ll be staying over,” one lover declares, while the other flips her long blond hair and makes off with the mix.

Dream number 3.
There is a birthday party or some such party for a childhood friend with my same name happening in some basement somewhere. I have not seen her for years, but she has asked me to make a final toast to her later in the night. I seem to drift off to sleep, and when I awake, I am hazy, everything is fuzzy looking and dark, and I think to myself, I must need some espresso. I declare this to fellow partygoers, and I head upstairs to make the coffee.

It is the kitchen of an ex’s parents, a fancy one on Park Avenue. I root around for their cafetiere, one of the huge ones. I find my own ground coffee in a small compartment that is mine in the wall, and I begin to wash and fill the cafetiere. Oops, I realize that I have filled the wrong section with the grounds. So I wash that out and I fill the right bit. No, that is still wrong. By now, I have spilled grounds all over this fancy kitchen—on the table top and drying dishes and the silverware in the slightly open drawers, and any minute now I must head back downstairs to toast my namesake. In the meantime, the only part of the toast I can finalize is that I will make a joke that when this woman was recently offered a raw egg white to eat, she not only ate it, but asked if she may have another one. One final time and it seems I fill the thing correctly, only to not assemble it back together and put it on to heat in pieces.

The dream goes on in circles from there. While I never give up on making the coffee, I do attempt to clean up the grinds and hurry to make it for the toast. Telling it this way gives it a very Andy Warhol-film feeling. Repetitive, quiet action. Then again, maybe there is a hilarity to it, Marx Brothers, but with anxiety.

1 Comments:

At 11:58 AM, Blogger TK said...

f, it's funny, because i read your blog and thought back to this post and saying that. and i agree with you. it's in the telling, one hopes.

 

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