First nightmare, a food safari, and single again

11:30pm bedtime.

“Alienation Nightmare” © 1996 by Sabu

3:45am – I am in bed watching an engrossing but creepy documentary. It begins mildly enough, but in the first few minutes it becomes apparent that this is not a pleasant video. There is cerebral violence and profound sadness here. I had put this DVD in to watch while following along with a manuscript, which I had in my hand, and in my own handwriting.

The details of the DVD are hazy now, but there is a lot of strong and dark emotion, and my notes, of course, coincide with that same dark theme. As the DVD plays and I read along intently, Teresa comes in, apparently having been talking to other loved ones outside about me. She is concerned about the content of the DVD and about my state of mind.

I point to a place in the manuscript of significant emotional anguish, and I tell her that I am not ready to let go of these feelings. Besides, I have no choice. It’s all here in the script. It’s all here in my life. I can’t escape it. I realize that the manuscript is my dream journal, and the DVD is a recording of my dreams.

This is a nightmare, the first recalled since I began writing my dream journal. I realize, too, that it is a movie I have seen played before in previous dreams. I am drawn to it. Morbidly riveted, actually.

I want to scream aloud to relieve my soul of the bottled feelings, but in doing so I know it will harm those around me, causing frightful confusion. They would never understand. Teresa leaves the room, sympathetic and understanding. She understands. She always understands. I release a huge silent scream of pain. My spine tingles with ice cold terror. This is a lonely journey, I realize. Sometimes terrifying.

[Major life changes are difficult, like divorce and leaving your children at an early age to be raised primarily by your ex and whomever she chooses to remarry. So much regret now that they are grown. This dream is a reflection of that regret, the fear of damage I have done, and for just being slow to commit to the hard work of transformation.]

I am now near a mall, walking on a sidewalk with shops to my right and a small thru-street to my left. I am rejuvinated, joyful, and happy. No weight of the world, no heaviness of heart, no feeling of deep sadness. I am carrying my dream journal.

Two dream characters, whom I am familiar with in real life [Ryan and his partner, David] pull up in their car. David is the passenger. I ask David if he would journal with me, so that I have someone to keep me motivated and accountable. Journaling is hard work, and it takes a great commitment to do it consistently and authentically.

“I would be delighted to write,” David said, “But my journal will be about politics.”

I am happy to hear that he will start to journal too. I am in such a great mood.

The car begins to pull away from the curb when I yell, “Stop!…”

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeech.

“…. in the name of love… before you break my heart….” They laugh and drive away as I sing and tap my fingers to the motown beat. [I know these dream characters in waking life from my involvement with community theatre, so breaking out in song is not necessarily an odd thing to do.]

I am walking around several stores inside the mall complex, the last is a cosmetic store with four glass walls. [Teresa works at a cosmetic store in waking life, so that’s why they have ended up in my dreams, no doubt.] After a few minutes of pacing from one side to the other, I realize I cannot find an exit door. I am starting to feel claustrophopic in this rectagular glass box. Then, the clerk behind the counter, noticing my anxiety, reaches over and slides the door open for me. I thank her and leave.

Teresa is here. I am so glad to see her. She tells me she wants to go to two stores, both of which are upstairs. The clerk of one, another cosmetic store, was rude to her on the phone and refused to let her speak to a manager. She wants to find the manager and talk in person.

Here’s the challenge. Both stores are upstairs, and the only way to get up there is to cross a huge river of vegetable casserole and scale a wall, upstream, through of cascading fall of grean bean and potato soup. I make it across the casseroles to the soup falls without getting my shoes dirty, but this is where Teresa must go alone. I am not as motivated to go with her upstairs now.

Teresa, is covered in food as she attempts to hoist herself, amidst the opposing force of falling chunks of creamy potato and herb-laden green beans. She is a real mess, but she doesn’t seem to mind. I just watch in wonder.

[In waking life, Teresa is all about enjoying the journey of life. I tend to hold back with tentative reserve, while she just dives in and enjoys the adventure.]

7am – I am walking in an alley with a dream character that I don’t know. [I think she is a hybrid of several single women I dated when my fiance lived in Los Angeles, most of whom had children from a previous relationship.] I put my arm on her shoulder and realize that this is the beginning of our relationship. Her daughter comes running up from behind us and holds my hand. I sense that this DC (dream character) girlfriend is shy and nervous.

We make it to DCGF’s house, and by this time I am holding her sleeping child in my arms. DCGF’s parents are there, lying on the floor, apparently waiting for us to get home. I ask if DCGF’s daughter needs a nap.

“You’re so old fashioned,” she answers. “Kids don’t nap anymore.”

There is also a massive manhunt in the neighborhood. Police sirens are sounding, and the neighborhood kids are all outside, shooting each other with airsoft gunfire. Apparently there are fugitives hiding in one of the nearby houses.

[My fiance and I have been discussing, in waking life, the option of either having children of our own or adopting. I had a vasectomy after having four children during my first marriage. My age and the length of time since my vasectomy are factors that will affect the likelihood of success. Teresa has never been pregnant, and we would like to try for a baby. I have been doing research on vasectomy reversals, which has given me some anxiety. This is probably the reason I still dream, from time to time, about the thought of marrying someone who already has children of their own. All in all, I have no apprehension about my decision to begin this stage of life with Teresa. I will go with her to the ends of the world.]

Dreamsign Catalogue:

1. Inner awareness (0/4)

2. Action (4/15)

• I had put this DVD in to watch while following along with a manuscript, which I had in my hand, and in my own handwriting.
• I release a huge silent scream of pain.
• After a few minutes of pacing from one side to the other, I realize I cannot find an exit door. I am starting to feel claustrophopic in this rectagular glass box.
• DCGF’s parents are there, lying on the floor, apparently waiting for us to get home.

3. Form (2/14)

• I realize that the manuscript is my dream journal, and the DVD is a recording of my dreams.
• …and the only way to get up there is to cross a huge river of vegetable casserole and scale a wall, upstream, through of cascading fall of grean bean and potato soup.

4. Context (0/12)

Spilled hashbrowns, a hero, and Etch-O-Google

The first of two dream sequences took place just before 3am last night.

Two lines of people trailed off through the entrance doors. Thankfully I had made it to the front where the cook prepared my plate. Oddly, my hashbrowns were served in a small rectangular tin, typically used for baking corn bread. The cook no more than placed the tin on my plate when my “hashbrown loaf” toppled over and landed in a steaming mess on the floor.

In full view of a gawking audience, I approached the cook and signaled for another order of potatoes. The cook looked at me like I purposefully maneuvered my plate in an unsafe manner, whereby forcing his precious spud cargo to take a mortal cliff dive. Once again, he replenished my plate with the same precariously packaged hashbrowns, and once again, they fell headlong onto the floor.

I made one final appeal to the cook, whereas he verbally smote my already bruised ego, saying, “Most people would have given up and walked away by now.”

I had a brief conversation with the restaurant owner, who was busy preparing loaves of bread in what looked to me like a wood chipper.

The next thing I remember was looking at a computer screen with groups of words and concepts clumped together. Each grouping were obvious contradictions, such as “bacon & eggs” might have been lumped together with “turpentine”. The obvious meaning of this was a premise I would like to consider further in my waking life: Don’t try to synthesize seeming contradictions in your life. Rather, hold each mutually exclusive notion and apply them in their proper place.

In other words, it is of no use to do away with either bacon & eggs or turpentine, but rather, employ them as they are relevant in your life. An applicable example would be pro-choice vs. pro-life. Rather than trying to synthesize the two concepts, which would be ludicrous, or attempting to eliminate one in favor of the other once and for all time, it is better to choose each according to context.

After jotting down my hashbrown tragedy (or comedy), I went back to sleep. The following sequence occurred after 3am.

I’m sitting in the front passenger side of a car with some other occupants. From my right side, I see a familiar face, a sportscaster in waking life. But in my dream he was a badass cop who plays by his own rules, a cross between Magnum P.I. and Caine from Kung Fu. He is talking to a group of thugs. I hear one of the them threatening to use a gun. Magnum Caine laughs and pulls out a Smith & Wesson military revolver with a two-inch barrel. I catch a glimpse of a cylinder full of bullets as he gives it a spin, flips the gun in his hand, and catches it by the barrel, handing it to the gang leader.

Magnum Caine then inexplicably turns and walks away. The next thing I see is that he is falling to the ground in slow motion. Although I hear no gunfire, he has been shot. As he is dropping to the ground, he is now dropping a boom stand with fuzzy microphone, which is attached to a small sound mixer attached to his belt. My 80s TV hero has just transformed into a media journalist. WTF?

Magnum Caine, my chameleon hero-turned-talking-head, gets up from the ground and limps to the front door to his house and hobbles in. Two bodyguards(?) pull up in an inconspicuous SUV, open the back passenger door, and Magnum Headroom runs from the house into the back seat.

I get a good look at the injured man through the window of the SUV. I ask my friends, “Is that Ben Larken [popular sportscaster in our waking life town]?” A friend answers, “No. That’s his brother.”

Next, I am holding a box about the size of Gump’s box of chocolates. Only it is pristine white and works like a cross between an Etch-O-Sketch and Google. I scribble a simple drawing on the face, turn it over, give it a little shake, and flip it back around to find that my simple shape has turned into a photograph and explanation. For instance, if I drew a triangle, I would shake it to get a Giza pyramid with a descriptive caption.

I drew several things, the last of which was a penis and balls.

The next dream I remember is my fiancé, Teresa, and I were at Kirk’s house. Kirk is an 84-year-old friend of ours in waking life. It was 3 o’clock in the morning, and I was watching some TV before going back to bed. Something interesting would be coming on later in the day, and I wanted to record it. The volume wouldn’t work properly and neither did the recording features. [In waking life, Kirk does not have recording capabilities.]

In my attempts at making the technology on the TV work, I knocked over a pile of garbage on Kirk’s shelf. A sundry of cigarette wrappers and trash dumped all over the top of the TV stand. I was just about to retire to the bedroom when, perhaps from the commotion, Teresa walked in. She went to the kitchen and grabbed a bag of Fritos.

Unraveling the already open bag, she took out a chip. She smelled it, then tasted it, and gave me a satisfied look. Game on. Then Kirk came in. I apologized for the noise and for the mess, and he dismissed it as no problem.

The next thing I remember is riding in my mom’s car with her and my step dad. My older brother, Daniel, was with us as well. We were having a pleasant conversation, when my step dad interrupted, turned to my mom and said, “It just dawned on me that you are partial to Daniel and I because we are conquerors. Healer and Donn [my younger brother] are …” I couldn’t make out the noun he chose to employ, but I have a feeling that it may have been an antonym of conqueror. “Loser” comes to mind.

My mother pulled up to the front entrance to Furr’s Cafeteria. She and my step dad got out and walked in. I deduced that that was my cue to park the car and join them, so I did. Once inside, I went to find a place to sit. Daniel took a seat at a table with three other people having lunch. A fourth plate of food was at Daniel’s place setting, so I assume that the person had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Daniel proceeded to take and eat onion rings off of the plate while chiding the others of the table, telling them to get their food and move to another area.

He gestured, saying, “Look how spread out your party is. Go sit with the rest of your friends.” And they did so, just as my conqueror brother demanded. What a dick, I thought. I went and sat with the offended party, and next to me was a baby girl. Across from me sat some kids of different races. They were orphans. I turned to the baby next to me, and we made funny faces at each other.

DREAMSIGN CATALOGUE:

1. Inner awareness (0/2)

2. Action (5/7)

• I had a brief conversation with the restaurant owner, who was busy preparing loaves of bread in what looked to me like a wood chipper.
• The next thing I see is that he is falling to the ground in slow motion.
• Although I hear no gunfire, he has been shot.
• …if I drew a triangle, I would shake it to get a Giza pyramid with a descriptive caption.
• The volume wouldn’t work properly and neither did the recording features.

3. Form (2/4)

• As he is dropping to the ground, he is now dropping a boom stand with fuzzy microphone, which is attached to a small sound mixer attached to his belt. My 80s TV hero has just transformed into a media journalist.
• Only it is pristine white and works like a cross between an Etch-O-Sketch and Google.

4. Context (1/6)

• But in my dream he was a badass cop who plays by his own rules, a cross between Magnum P.I. and Caine from Kung Fu.

OTHER NOTES:

My fiancé read this blog this afternoon. Unbeknownst to me, she ate the last of a bag of stale Frito’s with lunch (after I dreamed that she ate Frito’s, and check them for freshness). I wasn’t even consciously aware that we had Frito’s in the pantry.  This is either simple coincidence or an odd prediction of the future.