Dream Log: December 19, 2000

I was taking a bus on my way home, and I saw outside a storefront catching fire. It's a clothing store, the kind of store your folks would go to embarrass you in the school shopping days. I ran out of the bus, and I took out my phone. to call 911. It's useless -- people were calling 911 and I can hear it through the phone.

In all of this chaos, I've forgotten one thing: I've forgotten to take my bags! I ran for the bus, and it's past three or four blocks away from where I was. Still, I ran out until it turned right between two blocks filled with homes. The bus vanished, but a van filled with little children stopped in its place. I looked through the window of the van, and I saw my bag. I opened the side door, grabbed my bag in front of all these fire-year-olds, and I walked off.

quickly, before i forget the visions of the previous night:
in any town's downtown where i've never been
or perhaps will never chance to see--
it's one of those conglomerations of
things seen and things hoped for, i believe--
a forested path with stoned steps leading down
into a grove slightly resembling a parking lot.
what business a parking lot had
in the middle of the woods, i have no clue,
but as i mentioned, this was downtown,
and anything goes down there.

there was a crowd gathered, though staying back
a little ways, as if there was some danger within.
i could emphathize somewhat, as the day
was tiring and the light was starting to hide,
but i couldn't feel any presence of danger where i stood;
so i walked on past the crazen crowd to see what i could.
i think i was in a car, though, gazing back through foggy memory,
i'm not certain; whatever my mode of transportion,
it made me glide by bright things and look twice on things shadowed--
a prophetic car it might have been, then,
because it revealed only what was relevant to the dream's progression.

to get back to the scene (quickly, wasn't that what i said?),
spotlighted by absent lightpoles and posed on
makeshift podiums were some kind of ethereal exhibitionists.
not one could lay claim to hair
or could be cursed with natural height.
i think most people thought them monsters, creatures to be feared,
but i called them gnostics, because they had appeared
to shaken off the world's warped perception of reality
and created their own--greater, more marvelous in every respect.

one was clothed in bright gold, though most were in black.
they all seemed to dance to an unheard rythym,
and one's rhythym, above all the rest,
appealed to me the most. he noticed my interest,
leaned forward and streatched out his gargantuan hands,
looked me in the eye. i don't remember what i think,
and i've no idea what i was supposed to think.
it was just a moment shared by a stranger and an onlooker.
what he saw in me and i in him was no doubt just the
peculair trappings of a life not his own.

someday i'd like to find a downtown not entirely
unlike this one i dreamt and live a life unknown to me.
and i'd like to touch one's hand that's held out
just to see what skin feels like on a different body.
whatever wisdom i've gained from a night's good rest
is not divined from some subconscious wish,
but realized in my surroundings. dreams come more than once,
insurance in case you lose them.

We were living under opression, B and I. Kept under the heel of our landlady, her son, and her mother.

I don't know what they did. It wasn't important. We had to end their reign of tyranny.

In a living room, my living room, two worn couches face eachother. Their backs to opposing walls. The darkened room is lit only by the orange glow of a single shadeless lamp.

Behind B on one couch the landlady is lying dead. Behind me, on the other couch lie her mother and son. We talk in subdued voices, it seems to be appropriate considering what we've just done.

"That unpleasantness is done with, time to get on with life," I think to myself.

For B it was not to be so.

I was injured during the skirmish, so B tells me to sit down. I collapse between the two bodies on the couch behind me. B starts arranging the room, righting planters that have been knocked over, arranging cushions on chairs. The entire time he's calling me by his nickname for me, telling me it'll all be Ok.

Then he shoots me.

B shot me in the chest. I was too shocked to say anything, too shocked to think anything. All I can do is watch him sit down on the couch and say "Oops, I shot you with the bullet meant for me, I didn't plan for you to get hurt."

B picks up my rifle and shoots himself in the forehead.

The next thing I recall is being in my mother's house in Nelson. It wasn't Nelson though, everything was happening in the city of my dream. I feel remarkably mobile for someone who was recently shot in the chest.

C had just got back into town. No one told her yet. I didn't know, and didn't exactly break the news in the most gentle way.

"B's dead?" she asks incredulously.

"Oh no," I say getting up to hug her. I press my face to hers and whisper, "I wish I'd known he was hurting that badly. I would've tried to stop him. I wouldn't have let him have a gun."

"Can I see him?" she asks.

I take her to my mother's basement. The cold cement floor is a shock to my bare feet. The bodys are here, wrapped in blankets. I'm not sure which is B but I have a feeling. While she's looking around I walk over to one and pull the blanket back to reveal the face.

B looks like a puppet. His face, made of powdery white plaster, has no colour in it except
the blood from his wound.

It's not a crusty dried dark blood, the blood looks like acrylic paint. B really looks like any mask that could've been made in a theatre's workshop.

I cover B's face and we go back upstairs. Standing in the kitchen, we hug, but don't speak.
Anything that needs being said is communicated through our embrace.

She's very warm.

My brother wakes up, thinner than I remember him, and drags his blankets into the living room. After dumping them on the floor by the coffee table he comes into the kitchen and demands breakfast.

My mother tells him to clean up his mess in the living room.

"No, make me breakfast. I JUST HAD SEX," he screams.

He didn't. He was only 12, it was just his excuse. It was also the non-sequitur that ended my
dream.

---

To avoid associating B and C with such an odd dream I've done the Warholian thing and used letters of the alphabet to identify them. I would be 'A' if I my name was ever used in the dream, and my brother would've been called 'D' etc.

Although this is a sad dream, I wouldn't call it a nightmare. During the dream I was never angry at B for shooting me. Even though I only got six hours of sleep, I woke up from this dream better rested than I have for a long time. I blame the Turkish coffee I drank last night for it's strangeness.

Clumsy Games

• It's a sci-fi game of life or death inside a building-sized sphere. With two or three of my friends, we are trapped inside this thing, a puzzle to be solved suspended at the edge of a cliff hundreds of feet above the moon-lit waters of a pounding ocean. Glowing lights of various colors light up the interior faintly. The transparent walls of the sphere let in the stark, black images of the surf as well as the crashing sound of waves against rock.

• With my friend Allen and others, we return to our on-campus apartment after a day's classes. A few guys sit out on the porch while Allen and I enter the kitchen. I carry a water pitcher towards the front door but spill a lot of it on the floor. As I lay down a towel, Allen tells me it's cool and See how much water he spilled too?

• Later on I'm back in a class, working on a multimedia web project. Other students in the class are people from my past: Radha, Meghann, Chris Freem, Lisa Harman, et al. My workstation locks up and so I switch to the one next to me. When I can't figure out why my files don't look right, Lisa points out to me that my workstation is logged in as someone else. I apologize to the guy (Chris) whose station it was, and undo all my work.