monk222 | Entries tagged with dreams

Another dream of mother. It was particularly strange, though. She needed to go to another town. I offered to help. I don't have a car or a driver's license, but I can fly a towel. Think of it as a poor man's magic carpet. It's a big towel, maybe a beach towel. I get her where she needs to be, but then I am a little frightened. I am not so confident that I will be able to fly it back home. Apparently my mastery over the towel is kind of hit and miss.

Yeah, I cannot even begin an interpretation of this one. I am tempted to make something of the fact that I am dreaming of my dead mother more often now. I have been struggling harder lately over how much longer I can hang on in this world, and I wonder if this is why my subconscious seems to be more focused on her.

A dream of mother, when she was young and had her dark, black hair kind of quasi-permed, straight out of the picture of her that I keep, from the family photos that were snapped when I was about eight. In this dream, she was like a loving mother to me, too, like I was not just an afterthought to Jack. Jack wasn't even in the dream. In this happier dream world, maybe I am an only child.

She and Pop got DVD movies, horror show type stuff, and not very good: big themes, cheap productions, a bit too indy.

I argued, "Why pay for DVDs when you pay two-hundred dollars a month for TV?" But before I even finished my rhetorical question, I realized that, unlike Pop, she doesn't get the kind of movies that play on HBO or Showtime. So, there is some sense in it, but it is like my hunting for porn movies in the era before the Internet: a lot more miss than hit, a thousand to one.

Leaving aside this business about the movies, and instead focusing on her, she was like a silly girl. That little education and modest intelligence, though, is kind of cute for a young woman - charm and fun counting for more.

I was my aging self in the dream, I think, and it felt as though I were more like an older brother to her than a son, or maybe even more like her boyfriend. But to me, as always, she was just an annoying mother.

This leads me to consider, if there were no Jack and no Arthudo (Jack never being born and Arthudo dead of a heart attack) and she had his money, this might have been a much better life for me. Undistracted by Jack, she would have wanted to 'make happy' with me, her only child, and she would not have played me so hard on the money, would not, for instance, be inclined to give me only her used stuff. Yet, one cannot be sure how her mental illness might have played in this scenario. She might have finished us off a lot sooner, perhaps still killing herself, or at least bankrupting us, and I might never have seen my fifties, such as they are.

I was looking through the fence to see how the neighbor dog is doing, and I could hardly believe the wonderful scene. There were little kids there, and they were playing joyfully with the dog. They were chasing each other, and they would hug the dog passionately. It was so beautiful to see that dog so happy, finally, finally getting the taste of the life it always should have known. I never saw those kids before, but I hope this is a permanent thing.

But then I woke up. It was just a dream. A heavenly dream, but just something in my head. And now I can hear the dog moaning its loneliness and pain, probably short-leashed on the bricked ground without food or water, much less someone who loves him or is at least willing to take the least decent care of him.

One of those dreams in which I meet with Dr. G. We are at a cafeteria. We are finishing up our meal. He suggests that what I have been doing to my life is kind of neat. I am skeptical about his sincerity, but I answer straightforwardly, "It has its advantages. ... And it has its disadvantages. I am getting very old, and I have no security." I get up to put away my dishes. Picking up a fallen napkin, he says, "You are still putting down all your thoughts on paper, aren't you?" as if this must be like money in the bank. I am now sure that he is just mocking me, and I just ignore him in disgust and walk away.

I must be more worried about the air-conditioner this summer than I thought. I had a bad dream about it. But mother was in it.

It's a hot day, and it's definitely time to put on the a-c. But it won't come on. Pop just trots away. Mother tells me that it must be broken. I know this is bullshit. My temper and emotions quickly escalate into the red zone. I am demanding the air-conditioner. She leads me to one set of controls behind a wall that I never knew existed. But this doesn't do anything. Mother and I go at it again, and then she leads me to another set of controls that are hidden beneath the floor. And I start to work on those.

I am not sure if these controls work either, because that is when I wake up. But I am doubtful that my dream resolves itself happily. It brilliantly recaptures some of the humiliations of my life under mother and pop. I felt like I was thirty again. Pop isn't that bad, or rather he wasn't that game-sy about it, not possessing that sort of devilish cleverness. That was almost all mother. With that bit of mean-spiritedness that she liked to let go on me.

"The weather hasn't been that hot."

Hmm? Oh, no, it hasn't. Under this little rain-system, it has even been a bit cool, a rather dreamy April, to tell you the truth.

I think the dream was inspired by Pop's adventure last night with Dish Network. We had lost our Showtime and Starz channels. Pop was ready to lose some channels, but there was some confusion between them on the deal that Pop was trying to make. The experience brought home to me that we might be in some serious trouble, that maybe Pop has finally reached the end of his magical credit line that had seemed to know no end. And, of course, the situation with the air-conditioner, especially in April and May, is always near and dear to my heart.

A peculiar dream?

"Are there any other kind?"

Probably not so I'd remember. I got caught in the cross-hairs of the next-door neighbor again.

"About that dog again? Stealing his affections?"

The dog was a factor, but he wasn't even the main issue. It actually started when I was watering our back yard. I was by the fence, and I noticed that the neighbor's tree roots were bone dry, sticking out of the ground. I decided to water them, and I somehow ended up in their yard doing a more extensive watering, and that's when the wife or matron came out angrily and accosted me as I tried to hastily make it back to my side of the fence.

"You didn't make it, did you?"

No, but something more wondrous strange occurred. My mother came out of the house. She took a seat on the ground, in our yard, in a lotus position, to oversee what was happening. She was her younger self, thin, and very alert. She was my protector.

"Oooh, a battle of the house matrons! I like it. So, what happened with the neighbor?"

We, too, sat on the ground facing each other, in her yard. Then - and here is an odd and striking turn - she started accusing me of being dirty-minded. I was taken aback, feeling hurt, and I was confused: was this because I was friendly toward their dog? I didn't understand.

"Did your mother step in?"

No. That was where the dream ended. It was later when I considered that my dream-conscience mixed in my porn issues with my neighbor-dog issues.

"What do you make of that?"

I haven't been able to come up with anything. Mostly, what I think makes the dream interesting, is the surprising appearance of my mother. She looked good. And she had my back. That was not so true toward the end of her life.

I think she had given up on me. And who could blame her? I had given up on myself, after all.

A couple of cat dreams last night.

First, I am out front, and one of the cats is with me. (I'm not really sure whether it's Ash or Sammy). There's a tree nearby, and it is heavily laden with snakes, about a dozen of them, hanging on the branches. My cat cannot resist a tree, though. Despite going up to the trunk of the tree, the cat is able to rush back out, as a couple of snakes snap at him missing their target. I rush up to the cat and pick him up in my arms and rush back toward the house, witih the snakes slithering after us. Things get odd here. There is a distinct borderline, like a tape or string, and once I have crossed it with the cat, I know we are safe, as the snakes turn back toward the tree. Mother is nearby, and I ask here, "What is it about that line that keeps the snakes back?" She comes to us and is glad to see that we are okay, but she only shakes her head at the question and turns away.

Coco is in the second dream. I have let the two gray cats out. When I see Coco, I hurriedly let her out, so that she can catch up to them, and she rushes out of the yard. I step out back myself, and I see that Ash and Sammy are actually still in the back yard. They were out of sight in the cat-bin. I try to rush them along, so that they can catch up with Coco. When I turn, I see that Coco has come back into the yard, and all the cats are together - perhaps more than the three! Coco is at the front standing tall and stretching upward. She is happy, and that makes me happy. That's what I wanted so badly. You want your loved ones to be happy.

I cannot help thinking that I gave the best of my life to a couple of dogs and a few cats. I don't see how I can be proud of that. I suppose I must be satisfied that at least I loved in some way. Nobody was really interested in anything I had to offer.

M:

I think I had my first Coco dream last night. I hear her meow, and I sit up in bed, and I see her running through the room and into the kitchen toward the door. Obviously she wants to be let out. As I watch her disappear into the kitchen, I realize that something is weird, because I am aware that Coco is dead, and I shake it off as a sort of wishful mirage. Due to the nature of the dream, I am not sure if this was an actual event rather than a dream. It was fueled in part by the fact that Ash had decided to stay indoors for a good part of the night, and I was half-expecting her to want to go back out sometime during the night.

V:

Was Coco your favorite cat? I don't know if that is a fair question, but I have been wondering.

M:

I love all my pets. I love Ash and Sammy to death. If one of them comes in tonight with a mangled paw, crying in pain, looking to me for help that I don't have to give, it will be torture for me. If one of them were to stop eating, and I had to watch another cat die so soon after Coco, I might snap. I'd fall to pieces. Yet, I think it's fair to say that I felt something extra for Coco. Remember, it was a calico kitten that first moved me to feed and care for cats. We had Mother Grey and her kittens squatting behind our shed. Pop asked me if we should feed them, and I said no, no way. I didn't want to begin any kind of commitment to those cats. I didn't even like cats. However, one day, I went to take a close look, and I saw that gorgeous calico kitten, and my destiny was sealed. I started feeding them. And you know what they say about your first love. You just feel an extra-special bond there. I love all my cats, but Coco was one of my reasons for getting out of bed in the morning.

Quite a dream. Mother's here. Bo is not actually seen, but his presence is assumed. It must be the 90s. We're having a bit of a family fight, mostly mom and me with Pop in the background. It has something to do with how poorly she is keeping up the housecleaning. She mocks me. At one points, she makes herself go cross-eyed - her left eye going down. She is mocking my wonky eye, smiling so blissfully over her son's handicap. I'm innocent of it at the moment, merely saying, "You can do that with your eye?" Later, I go out for a little walk. It is dark evening. I am not more than half a block away from the house, when a somewhat oddly shaped helicopter hovers overhead, and it lands in our back yard. I have to come back to see what this is about. When I get to the front of house, there seems to be a wild celebration going on. I'm standing off to the side trying to make sense of what is going on, when Pop sees me and calls me, waving me over to him. When I reach him, he says he won something. He holds out a notice, and he says, "See my name on it?" I do, and I feel some deflation in it. He has his arm around me and is holding me tight, wanting me there as part of the trophy, it would seem - he's the big man. It turns out that he won a month-long vacation trip. Mother relates that Jack will be going with me. This news deflates me further, as I cannot care for the idea of Jack being more his main son, instead of his real son, but I don't care that much. But there is more news. Mother is playing around. She says that we are all going. This news doesn't make me happier. I say that I don't want to go. I'll take care of the dogs. She and Pop can appreciate the value of that, and I am happy that I will have a month to myself - maybe I am the biggest winner of all. However, the dream then has a last part that's a big turn-around. A guest has come and used my bathroom. Yes, we're living her on Hill Street rather than at Bay Horse. The neighbor somehow shit all over the bathroom, and it is obvious that I am going to have to be the one to clean it up, if I want it clean again. I hunker down for the job, muttering to myself, "It looks like I am going to be spending some quality time with my bathroom. And that's the end. Thinking about the last part of the dream, I wonder if it's possible to smell in a dream, but I apparently couldn't smell anything.

I had been running dry on dreams for a long time and was hoping to get one, and now I have - somewhat interesting, too. I was romantically paired with an old LJ pal, an unlikely one: Better Red, one of those Blurty friends, the theater girl, the anti-children super-atheist. In real life, or maybe I should say in our e-life, we never really reached the flirtation stage. However, she posted a picture or two, and was kind of hot, and we talked, and it was friendly.

I said that we were romantically paired, but that is putting it rather blithely. It's pretty clear that we were not sexual. I didn't touch her. On the other hand, it was as though we were married, or at least we were a very close couple in that kind of way - she was with me, and I was with her, living together, committed. It was clear that the relationship wasn't working, aside from the lack of sex. She seemed to be looking to make it in the music world rather than the theater world, and I confessed that I didn't really make it in her scene. She laughed, agreed, "If only you could at least like the music!" There wasn't anything holding the relationship together, except for my desire for her and my neediness, and apparently that is not enough. Though, we were friendly and talked easily with each other, with a fond note of intimacy, like that of a couple. Apparently, she had a history of just leaving her lovers and flying the coop without notice. I asked her for one favor: to at least let me know if, and when, she is leaving, not to just disappear on me. She agreed, kind of, smiling, laughing a little, saying that she would at least write to me.

I had an unsettling dream, kind of involved too, more than a scrap or two. In this dream world, I am comfortable about using my laptop for what it is for - portability. I am outside, somewhere out in the neighborhood, perhaps the duck pond. I have the laptop with me, and I am just sitting there really enjoying the blissfulness of the outdoors, the sky, the trees. However, at one point, I look down and I realize that my laptop is gone. It's no longer on my lap.

A tranny man, made up and in a wig, is sitting next to me, smiling at me like the cat that swallowed the canary. (I think she is the tranny character in the John Cusack movie "Adult World".) She admits to taking the laptop. Why? It's not about simple theft. She says, "I want to humiliate you." I guess that means being able to go through my porn searches, though it could include a lot of my journal entries as well. There are a lot of things here that a wiser man would have kept offline. I am very nervous. Later in the dream, I am at home, and I am hoping that this was just a bad dream, but when I look over for my laptop, it is gone. This is not a dream. This is a little funny, because when I wake up, just to be 100% sure, I look over to see if my laptop is still here. Of course, it is.

I had a Miley Cyrus dream a couple of night ago. I haven't been obsessing about her or her music lately, but the subconscious often does not run in clear parallel with one's conscious interests of the daytime. We seemed to be like college kids, or maybe even high-school kids. When she came up to me I went for a hug and she did not resist, and I got my squeeze of her tight body. She did not seem happy or overjoyed by my intimacy, but she readily accepted it. She said that we can meet up later after church. We seem to be kind of together. I have no idea where the church idea comes from, but I guess it only made the little dream more interesting.

Pop and Kay left for Shiner for the Memorial Day picnic and family reunion. I have had the house to myself for most of the day, but it's amazing how time just runs past me. Part of the reason for that, no doubt, is the fact that they did not leave till it was about lunch time, and I had my big steak dinner to cook. Then, after that, I was feeling terribly randy and had a 90-minute wank session, just me and my laptop going at it. After my nap, I followed through on my chess afternoon, which I liked. Focusing on chess gives a healthy variety to my day, I think - to move from reading to spatial exercises.

My main motivation for opening this page, though, was to capture an interesting turn in my dream life: a happy variation on the old school dream in which I have a finals examination without having even attended the class and being completely unprepared. In this one, I am not alone. I am with a few friends, or dorm mates, including at least one very attractive woman, a brunette. We have the same class and are in the same boat. We haven't even looked at the book. In fact, we only open it up now for what might be the first time. It's math, and none of us can make heads or tails out of it. There was something oddly reassuring about this dream in being a part of a group, among friends, suffering together in likely disaster and failure, even though it is still a dream of failing.

Another dream of Pop and I. A curious one. First it's just me at a store, and I am looking at machine guns. I am apparently giving one a test-drive, and I am firing away with some gusto and good cinematic form, with knees bent, Rambo in the jungle just blazing away at Third Worlders. Then Pop comes into the store, and I get him to look at these babies. Interestingly, Pop is not receiving the same courteous service that I am enjoying. This is kind of the opposite of what happens in real life. After all, he is the one with the money and credit cards, while I am standing there dressed in rags and in need of a shave and a haircut. In this dream, the storekeepers seem to regard him as a sort of inferior, as irrelevant, while I am regarded like a regular big spender.

I am not exulting in the dream world over this relative neglect of Pop. I really want him to share in my excitement for this machine gun, and I effectively serve as a store representative and salesman getting Pop to try out the gun. He then proceeds to handle the gun very lackadaisically and dangerously, slinging it around on his shoulder, recklessly pointing it at people and frightening them. I try to instruct Pop on the right way to handle arms, but I catch myself also sometimes being inadvertently reckless. When Pop tries to fire the gun, it fails to work. I then take the gun and fire off a few rounds, but I am no longer like Mr. Movie Star as I fire it, as if some of Pop's maladroitness has rubbed off on me, as I seem to become more my father's son. And that's the end of the dream. It seems ... incomplete, missing something. The whole thing, as it is, doesn't readily make clear sense to me, but it is too suggestive to ignore it, and this gun theme is one of the recurrent themes in my dreams, or it used to be when I dreamed much more than I do now.

A couple of interesting scraps of dreaming ... The first one seems to have me back in college. I am in a crowded hallway with other young students. I have been staring at an attractive short-haired brunette. She gets annoyed. I cannot put together what we said, but it dealt directly with my ability to connect, especially with a lovely girl. Perhaps she was saying that there was no reason for me to be so weird, that I could just interact normally with her. I told her, with some passion and desperation, that she is saying that because the room is poorly lighted and dark, so that she is not seeing just how ugly I really am. This makes an impression on her. She seems to become my girlfriend. The scene jumps outside, and we are still together. The grounds are fairly crowded with students, as I seem to be walking her to her dorm. She says that she will be leaving for a few days, but that I shouldn't worry: we'll be getting back together. However, looking back on the dream, it is striking, perhaps telling, that we never really make contact, not even to hold hands, much less give each other a goodbye kiss at the end. It's like she is only acting as my girlfriend, but nothing is ever really going to happen, though my first impression of the dream was a good feeling.

In the second dream, Pop and I are eating at a restaurant. I seem to be eating roast beef. I am having a lot of trouble cutting the meat, and I end up cutting the fatty pad on one of my fingertips. I apply a napkin to the cut, keeping pressure on it, hoping that the cut is not deep enough that I will need to do more. I'm okay. Then the scene shifts, but in apparent continuation (just like the dream above, in seeming to have two distinctly separate parts but in continuation). We seem to have arrived home from our dinner. Pop tells me that he will be leaving in a few minutes to pick up mother from work, and he asks if I would like to go with him. I do. I am even a little eager. Maybe we will do something fun together. And that is the end of this dream.

The last dream presents an interesting family dynamic. Jack does not seem to be living with us, and mother, pop, and I seem to be enjoying a very good family life, like we are more than just family but also good friends who really like each other and like to do things together. With mother working, that would seem to mean more money to play with, too. One might note that I still don't seem to have a job of my own, but it is a dream, not a nightmare.

* * *

Next day.

Another more cutting interpretation of the second dream comes to mind. Mother is not here and working a job. She is dead, and Pop is saying that he is going to die soon and join her in one sense or another. He is asking me if I really want to kill myself and die too.

Another dream to note. Oddly, like the previous night's dream, it is about prostitutes. But it is not as nice as the other one. It's not the college scene. Exactly where it's at, I have no idea. I might not even be young in it. The prostitutes are white in this one, and there are some lovely ones, even lovely blondes, but I am not able to connect with any of these lovelies. I find myself, instead, dealing with a tranny, or maybe he is just a cross-dresser, not even having the artificial tits. He is trying to pass himself off to me as a woman, but I point out that his facial hair is getting a bit out of control - a little too rough and shaggy for this game. He gets upset, as things don't work out between us, and that is the end of this dream. In this case, I am perhaps saved by the bell. That makes two dreams about prostitutes two nights in a row. I have no idea what to make of that, besides the fact that I am perhaps feeling more desperate in my advancing old age, like being hungry and dreaming of food, or needing to use the bathroom and dreaming of looking for a toilet. I do not like the idea that I cannot have white girls even in my dreams anymore. I hope this is not a new law in my dreamlife.

It got colder overnight than I anticipated. I was surprised when I got up for a bathroom run at around five and realized that I needed to put on the heater. There is no threat of a freeze, but the temperature did drop into the forties, the high-forties.

Is the colder weather better for dreams? The last one was weeks ago, and I think that one came after a long drought of dreamless sleep. I had a doozy last night. I was back in my college days. I was out on the town, perhaps 6th Street, at a bar, with a group of chums. The place seemed to have a host, an early middle-age white man. He was very cordial with us. One of our group suggested that we were kind of interested in some special service. The host understood, and he sent a few girls our way, latinas, not too bad-looking. One was actually quite attractive, and I was fervently chatting her up, trying to quickly see what exactly is on tap, though no one wants to be quick to explicitly mention prostitution. The cute girl gets our drift. She says that we can have a lot of fun, still refraining from talking about sex directly, at least until she says, "You have to wear a condom." That was it: game on! But that's the end of the dream, or at least my memory of it.

I got a dream message, one of those dreams in which a particular phrase comes out that seems to stand out in stark relief, rather oracular. It has been a long time, a number of years, since I have woken up with such a message. It said, "Fear the light!" It was one of those dreams that seem like a television show. Some people got busted for running drugs. Fear the light. The phrase didn't come from a character, but from a narrative voice, or maybe it was another part of my subconscious that supplied the message.

Am I little nervous about Motherless porn? I don't know. In truth, these oracular dreams never really seem to bear any real significance in my waking life. They just stand out so sharply and seem so pointed in meaning and significance. Perhaps I should regard these dreams as being like fortune cookies - more intriguing than fulfilling.

A nasty little dream ... My subconscious seems to be counteracting my recent bout of sentimentality toward mother. She, Jack, and I are in bed, perhaps watching TV. Mother tries to push me off the bed. At one point, I tricked her and positioned myself so that she missed me and ended up falling off the bed herself. Then Jack took over trying his best to kick me off the bed, but although I was taking some pretty hard thumps through the bedding, I found it more amusing than anything else. Mother was not laughing, though. Her mood got ugly, even sinister, and she made one of those evil threats, something like she was going to break my bones to a powder, and speaking quite seriously in a low, menacing tone.

Funny, that this should come back to me now. It captures so well and fully the deepest, darkest, dankest depths of our malignant triangle: mother, half-brother, and me. I was rather hoping that this toxic emotional history was behind me. It has been a long time. If anything, I was hoping that my dreams and reflections might start capturing the better turns of our lives together, from when Jack and I were children and he loved me. Now this dream comes up, making me feel naive and stupid. There are a lot of poisonous weeds and evil serpents among those old memories. My life just never really had a lot going for it. I don't have a lot to look to with fond smiling affection, not unless it had four legs and answered to 'Bo'.

A dream, a very mixed up dream ... It began well enough. I was out back, a nice sunny day. The neighbor dog comes to the fence. I have the cheese. Amazingly, Bo is there, too. He also wants some cheese, and I happily oblige him as well, and then he runs off. I have a little difficulty feeding the neighbor dog, as this part of the dream becomes cartoonishly comic. At one point, he has the piece of cheese on top of his snout, and he sort of whips his head a bit so that the cheese will fall off and he can catch it. Since this rather elaborate routine requires some time, the neighbor catches us, catches me feeding their dog. She calls me over.

The neighbor is an attractive white woman, late twenties or thirties, brunette. She clearly is not happy with me, and she leads me to the menfolk. The main guy is also white, with a blond beard and mustache, with a scarf or cloth wrapped around the top of his head, like a cap or hat, looking rather pirate-like, or like a member of a biker gang. He also is not happy with me, but this no longer has anything to do with feeding their dog. Josh is missing. A boy? I don't know. But they think I have something to do with it, and Pirate Guy is going to do something about it. The dream then takes a strange turn, becoming rather like a network television show, in that it wants to show some sickeningly violent torture but cannot do so explicitly. It becomes an animation and highly abstract, something that would not be out of place during Family Hour but which the mature viewer can understand what is being represented. And that is the end of the dream, or at least of my memory of it.

I finally get to see Bo again in a dream, and as my luck would have it, this dream has to take this Horror Film twist. But at least I saw him, albeit briefly. I had pretty much given up on the hope of being able to be with my best friend in my dreams. He just won't come to me. As for Josh, I thought the name might have come from the fact that I have been bingeing hard on "The West Wing", in which Josh Lyman gets a lot of play. However, I think the dream actually filled that out and said it was Joss Whedon. Until I googled him just now, I thought his first name was Josh. Is Joss even a real name, or was it a typo on the birth certificate that they decided to keep, as being more distinctive and not so bad euphoniously? He is not a big frontline celebrity, being sort of a behind-the-scenes guy, as a writer, show-creator, and director, mostly in the TV universe. The thing is, I am familiar with his reputation of being a very pro-feminist guy. He does shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", and women are goddesses to him. You definitely don't grope and rape women in his world. This makes some sense in the context of the dream, in that my porn-fantasy life could be thought of as being very anti-Joss Whedon. This is a stretch, but it is hard to figure how his name otherwise makes it into my dream. He has not come up in my reading, TV-watching, or in my thought for a long time, maybe a couple of years, and I have never watched his shows. Moving on to another note, it is also off-putting that the dream changed the race of the neighbors, going from latino to anglo. It is tempting to dismiss the dream as being merely one of those random, senseless concoctions, but it was kind of elaborate and seemed to hint at something more meaningful.