monkeybottle

Warm

2011-12-30T15:04:00.000-06:00

...on a beach. The sand was tan and many other shades of light and dark browns. I skirted Derek and Belinda, who were lying near the water, and went behind a low dune. There was a scooped-out spot in the sand, and I crawled into it and sprawled out on my back for a sunny nap. The cold ocean wind whistled over me, but I was in a small, protected, sun-warmed depression. I stretched my arms and legs and enjoyed the warmth, immediately falling asleep.

2011-12-27T09:52:00.000-06:00

I was in O* for the job interview. I hadn't had a phone interview yet, and I wondered if they had forgotten that, or if this was just normal procedure for them.

Tara and Jennifer were with me, and we stood together on the top row of a smallish stadium full of library and university employees. The whole day was going to be a huge question/answer presentation in front of everyone. As things were getting under way, a dark-haired man in a red sweater handed Jennifer a bouquet of red roses and said, "I understand you were a drum major--that's the glue that makes the whole organization work! Congratulations to you." I looked over my shoulder at him and said with disgust, "She just wore the stupid uniform and pranced in front of us with a flag--she wasn't even in band." Another man climbed up a ladder at my feet soon after this. I looked down at him, and he looked up and said, "Well, that was the Director of the library--you just completely blew your chance here." I was disappointed and angry with myself, but I realized that I have been being pretty negative lately and needed to stop.

I was asked to step down onto a concrete platform so that people in the audience on the field could ask me questions. It was difficult to navigate the rows of seats, tunnels, and platforms, and it look me a long time to get down to where I was supposed to stand. I lost my shoes several times, first a pair of clogs, then a pair of sandals, and I had to backtrack and search. It occurred to me that I was under-dressed.

I finally made it to the platform, and I stood looking down at everyone, waiting for the questions to start. A young guy in a bellboy hat tapped me on the shoulder and told me that the place we had parked was being bulldozed and I should move my car. I was very flustered, and I hoped everyone understood what was happening and that it wasn't my fault. ThenI felt kind of resigned about all the difficulties and wondered if they were setting me up with little trials to test my composure. I walked back with him to the parking lot and dug change out of my pocket. I handed him handful after handful of change, but it didn't help anything.

I was told that the next part of the interview would be with a smaller group of people, and I made my way down to a tent in one of the stadium tunnels. Inside, there was a conference table with folding legs set up, and a group of librarians and staff milling around. They were dressed very casually and some of them sat on the backs of their chairs with their feet on the table. I had lost my shoes again. They ignored me and asked questions of each other, and they were very hostile and rude. I kind of liked it because it seemed like they might be a group of people who were so comfortable with each other that they could argue and fight and not hold a grudge.

No one seemed to want to talk to me, so I just observed. Two women who said they were PhDs didn't want to participate with the rest of the group and only talked to each other. One of them had dark, spiky hair and wore a shimmery, silver t-shirt and black sneakers. People started wandering away, and I didn't want it to be over, so I decided to try to ask them questions instead. I asked each of them to tell me an attribute that they thought would be important for a person in the position for which I was interviewing to have. Before we could get very far, I was asked by an older gray-haired, hippie man wearing a Hawaiian button-down shirt and flip-flops to come get in his car and go for a drive. I went with him. The car was filled with librarians, and I sat in the front passenger seat. They leaned over the seat and asked me personal questions and talked about astrology. We drove away from the campus, which was in a shallow bowl along the edge of an ocean, and up into the hills around town. I looked down at the pretty streets and the people surfing, and I decided I wanted this job even though everyone seemed crazy.

In the morning

2011-12-26T20:14:00.000-06:00

...was having sex with someone in an alcove at a football stadium. I had earlier complained at a help desk in a library that there were no study rooms available. I was kicked off of a computer in a small room meant for faculty, and from there, had gone to the alcove at the stadium. A stage mom was on her way and I was afraid to get caught, so I frantically put my cheerleader uniform back on and rolled the guy under a curtain. When the stage mom arrived, I demanded that the room be made private and neatened up. Instantly there were thick carpets, sparkly drapes, heavy wooden tables, and deep comfortable recliners.

2011-12-23T11:08:00.000-06:00

I was a man looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. I had dark eyes, short dark hair, and dark skin, and I was handsome. I repeatedly flicked cocaine at my face and then sniffled and rubbed my eyes and nose.

Then I watched the man from outside of my/himself as we shaved.

2011-12-12T08:01:00.000-06:00

.....had to retrieve various items from a timeless, space-like void. It was black and immense. I navigated through the space simply by putting my arms by my side and zooming straight down through the black until I saw an item. A lot of them were in silver boxes, arranged in a grid, but with enormous spaces between each thing. Specifically I had been sent to look for the sewing kit that had belonged to a friend's mother. Sometimes I zoomed too fast and went right past an object. Then I would slowly rise up again until it came into view. Occasionally there were shelves with a lot of objects placed together. I hovered there long enough to paw through them a little bit, then I zoomed down or sideways to the next thing.

....second night in a row that I've dreamed I was in love and loved by musicians. I think both times it was someone from Guided by Voices but didn't look like anyone familiar. I think it was a different person each night, but with the same dark hair and scruff.

2011-12-10T08:51:00.001-06:00

...in a strange house somewhere with many rooms. It was some sort of business having something to do with newspapers and magazines. It was in an ugly area--vaguely industrial with dirty sidewalks and ramshackle store fronts. There was a large open garage across the street. I saw a huge dog pacing in and out of the garage, looking bewildered. It cried and whined. I told someone in the house that it was an Irish Wolfhound and that it had been abandoned. I felt so sad for it, almost sick with pity. Another, smaller dog ran up and down the street, as well. He belonged to someone there with me in the house.

I looked down at my legs and was surprised and frightened to see that there were two long, thin, dirty-green tubes hanging out of my calf. I wondered how long they had been there, growing longer and longer without me noticing. There were actually several pairs on both legs. The tubes were heavy, as though filled with sand, and seemed alive. The weight of them tugged at my skin. I got a pair of scissors and cut them away close to the skin, then pulled them all the way out. They left sucking, round, red holes. I went to a dermatologist in the basement to ask what was wrong. She took me out to her truck, pulled down the tail gate, and we sat on it together and looked at my legs. I pointed to one of the holes and noticed a big, clear plastic tube jutting out of my shin. I remembered that I had had surgery some years ago and that the doctors must have left it in. I pulled it all the way out, and though it didn't hurt, it was a sickening feeling.

2011-12-09T13:22:00.002-06:00

I was at a party in the woods, in a dilapidated house with many rooms. Tara kept trying to introduce me to her cousin. He was a short, bald, Jewish man in his 40s. He offered me hot tea in a fancy golden cup with a metal straw shaped like a tiny snake and a plate of something that looked like pulled taffy but that I was pretty sure was chicken. I declined the taffy/chicken but sipped the tea, which was very sweet, through the cold straw. I left to go into another room and I overheard the man make a comment about me to his mother. He said, "She's got a step-father, so of course she's not a suitable bride."

I was sitting in the backseat of a car. There was a man in the driver's seat I didn't know, Tara was to my left, and a woman with light-colored hair who I also didn't know was to my right. Her name was Tannaquil. We sat close together, scrunched up against the back of the seat with our feet lifted off the floor. We all had long hair and wore white t-shirts. I felt very quiet and peaceful.

Tara pointed to a tank-like vehicle parked next to us. There were three Russian spies looking out its window at us. They also had on white t-shirts, had light-colored hair, and wore military-looking bandanas around their wrists and foreheads. They wanted Tannaquil--who I realized was some kind of a spy-colleague to them--to get back in their tank-thing. They gestured at her and looked impatiently at us. I hoped she would stay, because I was happy sandwiched between her and Tara, just all being quiet together.

Our driver started to drive away, and the spies got angry that Tannaquil wasn't with them. They drove right next to us as we moved faster and faster and started shooting at us. I realized right away that our car was obviously bullet-proof, because the bullets were sliding backwards off the glass like rain drops in a high wind. It was very beautiful and peaceful, and the three of us sat still and quiet, feeling snug as we sped along. The tank slowed down and pulled behind us. I was scared that the rear of the car wouldn't be bullet-proof and we would all be shot in the back, but it was just like with the windows. I could feel a gentle wind and hear a small hiss as each bullet struck the car, and the fabric on the seat rippled in tiny, bullet-sized circles.

We slowed down to drive into a neighborhood and passed another tank with its gun trained on us. I asked the driver if our car could withstand the tank's giant gun. He calmly pulled over and stopped, so I decided the answer was no. I was impressed that he wasn't afraid to stop, and I felt confident that things would continue to go well.

2011-11-21T09:58:00.001-06:00

I was Mozart in the 21st century. He/I was a lush with a stand-up act who liked to go into local businesses and sing with the people there. Everyone looked forward to his arrival because they knew they would be allowed to close the doors and have a party.

He/I drive down an interstate in a tight network of cars that I thought of with affection as my wolf pack. The road was shiny and slick with lots of curves, and we drove too fast, bunched into a small group. Sometimes I levitated my car so that I could fly above the others.

I drove to a city and walked up a set of marble stairs to an insurance office. Two women were sitting at desks, and when they saw me, they looked at each other, smiled, and brought out bottles of wine. One of them put on a red parka and tightened the hood around her face.

Then I was Mozart's wife. She/I was a sad ballerina , and she and Mozart frequently forgot about each other. She lived in a small apartment above a stage and sometimes came down to perform. The only audience for these performances would be the stage hands, and her costumes were always a little dusty.

2011-11-11T07:43:00.001-06:00

Two men sat on Adirondack chairs. Both of them held electric guitars upright between their knees and played a song together. They used metal wands to manipulate the strings. I loved the song they played.

I was on a raft, which was also a kind of flat-topped car, floating in the surf. There were 10 women with me, and the raft was dotted with barrels. We moved sideways, back and forth with the tide in about three feet of water. The raft was suddenly swamped by a wave, and one of us fell overboard, as well as a TV and some kind of small, empty cage. The woman who fell over couldn't swim, and even though the water was shallow, we all desperately searched for her, splashing through the foamy waves. The sand was light tan and there were small boulders here and there. I couldn't see her. A grandmother appeared to us, standing on a boulder farther out in the water. She told us that the woman who had fallen off was safe. She had staged her own drowning as a warning to the rest of us to stop arguing over cookies. I sat on the edge of the raft and wept with relief.

2011-11-07T06:32:00.002-06:00

I was in Texas, and I rode my bike to Heather W.'s house for a visit. She was married and living in a ranch-style house with a giant basement. She was practical as ever, no-nonsense, and comforting. I sat in a papa san chair and told her how much I hate my job. I cried a little. She was in the kitchen getting food ready for Richie when I looked out the window and saw five black tornadoes hanging like wriggling worms from a large cloud. We ran to a back bedroom, and I curled up in a corner next to a pile of stuffed animals. There was a window opposite me, and the shade wasn't pulled down all the way. I could see out only a little bit, and I repeatedly crawled over to see what the sky was doing. Maressa was there, too, and she and Heather sat on the bed and talked. I checked the sky again, and I saw people hanging out of the bottoms of the tornadoes, kicking their legs as they were carried toward us. Heather took me outside and tried to get me into a boat in her driveway. He house was at the top of a steep hill, and I looked behind us and saw that we were in the foothills of some mountains I didn't know were there. They were dusty and brown with squatty trees and brambles.

Then I was watching a lizard/bird animal crawling over the mountains blasted bare. The ground was blackened with red squares of magma every few feet. The lizard/bird crawled on its belly, looking at the dark spots on the ground. Then I was the bird and I saw my reflection in a shiny silver puddle.

2011-09-30T07:04:00.000-05:00

I stood on a sidewalk under trees looking up the wall of a skyscraper. I watched as Dr. Grey and Dr. Sloan climbed out of a window near the top and tipped over the edge. Then I was Dr. Grey, and I was happily falling down the side of the skyscraper. Ropes were tied to our feet, and we hit their ends somewhere in the trees. We swung back and forth, opposite of each other, making huge arcs across the sidewalk and into the trees and brush. We couldn't stop laughing.

I was in a small group of people, all of us sitting on folded chairs. There was a set of panels with images of snakes on them at my feet. An old man stood behind me and lectured about the panels and about archaeology. I was taking notes and doodling and thinking about other images I'd seen like the snakes. The man stopped talking, and it got very quiet. I knew he was staring at the back of my head waiting for me to turn around to see why he had stopped talking. He suspected that I wasn't paying attention to him. I continued to doodle and write and think. I was going to out-wait him. Then he tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to walk with him. We walked toward a cafeteria to eat pancakes. He told me that I was a terrible student, and I snapped back at him that he was vain and that I was the best student he was ever likely to see.

2011-09-24T08:36:00.002-05:00

It was dark, and I was running across a green meadow bounded on two sides by narrow, paved roads. A flash of white light in the sky caught my eye, and I stopped running to look up. I turned around as the white light passed over head, and I saw that it was the falling satellite. It was whole, not in pieces, and it rotated end over end with a whooshing sound. It hit the earth some miles beyond me and there was an enormous explosion. Satellite debris flew back up into the air and began to rain down.

I dodged the spinning, falling chunks and crawled under a bus parked on the road next to the meadow. The bus began to lower down over me, so I scrambled out. The man sitting in the driver's seat opened the door and beckoned for me to get in. I did, and then stood next to the door facing the driver as he drove away. There was a family in the front seats, and they sat quietly and watched me.

Soon I told the driver to stop and let me out. He told me he would not because I was destined to ride the bus with them forever. I grabbed the lever, opened the door, and started screaming "kidnapped!" "kidnapped!" I made the words come out of my mouth and write themselves on a large piece of cardboard that taped itself to the top of the bus. Then I jumped.

I wandered around a city that looked like NYC, but that I knew was New Orleans. I saw 25th street and thought I might be in Tara's neighborhood, so I turned down it and went to buy a slice of pizza. I waited for her on the front porch of her house.

2011-09-14T07:22:00.000-05:00

A small black bear hung from a fire escape on the second floor of a brick building. A woman lassoed him, then pulled herself up the rope next to him. She put her arm around him, and they slowly back-flipped down the rope side-by-side. I was waiting for them. I knelt on the ground in front of an apple-green blanket, on which lay three small dogs. They each had a silver water bowl. The bear climbed onto my lap, and the woman sat next to me.

2011-09-01T07:55:00.003-05:00

I sat in the dark in the living room. A small animal came in through the sliding glass door and walked across the carpet. I went over to shoo it back out into the yard. When I got it through the door, I saw that it was a small, light brown dog with curly fur. He wore a collar, and a twenty dollar bill and a hand-written note were wrapped around it. The note read, "I can't take care of the dog anymore."

2011-08-31T07:21:00.002-05:00

I was in an enormous building on a college campus, sitting on a bed, sorting IBM punch cards. It occurred to me that the building could use at least two book-return bins from the library. I was swept up into a fast-moving line of people snaking down a wide hallway. The line circled back on itself and cut through a bigger line of people in rows of three going in the opposite direction.

Love dream

2011-08-24T07:27:00.001-05:00

I was in love with someone who loved me as much back. He was my height with a lithe but strong build and red hair. He was younger.

I met him in a concrete courtyard outside the library. I had been at work all day, and it was near the beginning of the term. New students workers were in my department, and everyone was running around chaotically. I tried to organize work to do, but things kept falling apart. It was a happy feeling, though. Everyone was in a good, celebratory mood. I kept finding myself naked. I also sometimes had bags of blood attached to my head and covered by big, loose swatches of white gauze. I didn't make much of an effort to find clothes or explain myself. Once I ran across a meadow of flying white paper, but the pieces turned into biting butterflies made out of styrofoam. I crunched through them and they pierced my feet.

At the end of the day, I went out to the courtyard. A troupe of performers--acrobats, actors, jugglers, and ballerinas--were gathered in the grassy areas surrounded by the bowl of concrete. I sat and watched. This is when I met the redhead.

We sat on a bench together, and I saw how strong and competent he was. I knew he could do anything and that I could trust him. Everyone was being rowdy.

I can't describe what happened next. Later we were in bed together, and we started to have sex, but I stopped us because we didn't have a condom.

I introduced him to Mom, and he & I sat in the hall together at the top of a set of stairs. He was calm and confident. He showed her a video of us--how we met, when we kissed. Then the video stopped on a scene where he and the performers were brawling near the bench in the courtyard. Mom disapproved, but I didn't let her feelings change the way I felt. I knew the brawling was alright.

We rode a snowmobile together up a set of railroad tracks. I held his tiny green baby the size of my thumb made out of play-do. I had him wrapped in tissue against the snow. I kept thinking that I was killing him, and I would look at him very closely until he moved.

We stopped at a trail head and got off the snow mobile to sit in the snow and look back down the trail. A small group of men came up to us. They looked official and said they wanted to collect our excrement, which they were willing to pay for. They said they were from the Tea Party and were doing research. We told them we had just arrived, and didn't have any poop to sell them. One of them got angry and stomped on the ground near me. I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't feel threatened. I barely noticed him. I didn't think it was directed at me, but the redhead knew that it had been. He walked right up to the stomping man, gave him a warning look and stomped back, then walked backwards away from him. It sounds silly, but it was pretty great. It was like some secret male language that I didn't need to bother learning. It was nice that he had stood up for me when I hadn't even known I needed someone to.

2011-08-15T07:12:00.000-05:00

I was participating in a graduation ceremony. I stood in my black cap and gown in a long row of other graduates. Some of us were children. As our names were called, each person walked toward a tall, chain-link fence with a narrow gap cut out of it at waist-height. A row of people on the other side of the fence were there to watch, and a man on their side waited at the end of the line to hand a sealed envelope to each graduate through the gap in the fence. When my name was called, instead of taking my place at the end of the line by the fence, I walked straight ahead and squeezed my way into the line between two children. I saw Troy standing on the other side, and we acknowledged each other very solemnly. The man holding my envelope was waiting for me at the far end of the line. I nodded to him, and he walked over to me and handed me the envelope. It was heavier and thicker than the envelopes held by the children on either side of me. No one was opening their envelopes.

2011-08-12T07:10:00.001-05:00

I stood invisible and stared at a fire lookout tower. Shaped like the Eiffel Tower, it was anchored in the breakers of some ocean, and a man in a space suit stood at the very top, facing out to sea.

An enormous wave approached the tower and broke over its top. The man was carried down into the ocean. I watched him from within the wave, shooting downward through beautiful, calm, blue-green water. He was very still and tiny against all that water, holdings his arms by his side and his legs and feet relaxed. A current in the wave caught him and whirled him back up through the struts of the tower. He made it through the struts and to the top of tower, then got off and walked along the beach. Then I was him.

I walked away from the ocean and came to the edge of East Memphis. It was late at night. The area was full of narrow, multi-story, clapboard houses, all them on the verge of falling down, with sagging doors, windows, and porches. The sidewalks teamed with drunk men and women who lived in that neighborhood, unable to walk straight, talking and laughing loudly as they walked westward.

I went into one of the houses, and there were lots of tourists there. There was no furniture, and the wooden planks of the floor were dry, dusty, and warped. The doorways were high and narrow, and as I passed through them, going from tiny room to tiny room, I could see the edges of staircases and hear people upstairs. I wanted out, but there were so many doors and rooms, and every turn I took led me into another one. Finally I made it out the front door and into a vegetable garden. I tromped over the spinach and thick weeds, lifting my knees as high as could so I wouldn't trip in the dense weeds. I looked back at the house and realized it was slave quarters, and I was on a historic plantation.

A group of people from work spotted me, and called me over to them. They scolded me for being out by myself in that neighborhood. We walked together along a road, and I waited for an opportunity to hail a taxi.

2011-08-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

I saw two extremely large cockroaches crawl out of my bathroom. The first one was carrying a flower, and the other, slightly smaller one, was limping along behind the first. They went into the bedroom and disappeared underneath the bed. I scrambled out of the room, flailing my arms and screaming. Mom came over and removed the base board under the window. A weasel, a coyote, and a rabbit came inside.

2011-08-04T14:23:00.000-05:00

I was walking across a field, carrying a puppet in my arms. He was alive: a dessicated, floppy, elderly, scarecrow-like man-thing, and he was bitter, hateful, and mean. He kept trying to bite me.

2011-07-31T09:21:00.000-05:00

I went to visit Ravi in New York. I took a train to a bus stop and got off on a dusty, sepia-toned street corner as the sun was going down. His building was diagonally across the street. It was a huge, white brick building with a deeply recessed porch at the top of a short set of wide steps. I ran across the street, up the steps, and went into the lobby.

A high-speed escalator took me to the 2nd floor. The layout of the building was completely open, like a mall. Each floor had a different theme. The second floor had white walls and floors and high ceilings. A security guard asked to see my building ID. I told him I was just visiting a friend and would stay in the public areas of the building until I found him.

I rode the escalator up again. The floor I stopped on was yellowish, with a green net hanging down from the ceiling. It was supposed to represent the jungle in Autumn. This floor was also very open, with extremely wide hallways, and I walked along down the middle until I came to a high glass wall. I looked inside and saw a foggy park with tall, yellow-leaved trees and bushes and open space. I imagined that the children who lived on this floor played there after school.

I was in Ravi's apartment. Everything in it was white or metal--the furniture, appliances, the carpet, and the walls. I was sitting on a low cushion, and Ravi was standing near me in the kitchen. Suddenly he looked sick and weak and began to tremble. He sat down on my cushion and began rubbing his legs together like a grasshopper. Soon he looked like he felt better, but he had rubbed one of his legs bloody.

Admiration

2011-07-30T16:04:00.003-05:00

I was confident, bossy, and teenaged. A boy told me my hands were medieval-shaped.

Magic

2011-07-23T12:47:00.000-05:00

I was getting ready for bed, pulling down the top sheet and flipping the pillow to the cool side. A current from the open window lifted a book off the nightstand, floated it through the air in a short, shallow arc, and deposited it on the pillow. I was amazed and told everyone.

Recurring city access dream

2011-07-11T07:45:00.001-05:00

I was in New Orleans with Tara and Jennifer. We had explored the French Quarter and then decided we wanted to see the rest of the city. I got directions from the concierge to a gambling district I had heard about nearby. To get there, we had to go up a long, giant, concrete ramp and turn left onto a bridge/walkway that slowly sloped back down to street-level and deposited pedestrians in a new part of the city. I hesitated at the top of the ramp--there was some invisible obstacle--but I was able to pass by it soon enough.

In the gambling district, we stopped at the first bar we saw and sat at a table on the sidewalk. The waiter was a card dealer and sat at the table with us. He wore a bookie hat and slowly sipped a dark brown liquor drink. Whenever we wanted drinks, we told him and he radioed the order into the bar. He kept our tab written on a scrap of paper he kept in his pocket. I left to explore the shops, and when I came back, everyone was still there. I offered to pay the tab just to get everyone moving even though it was $1,000. I told our waiter to write in whatever tip he thought was fair. When I looked at the receipt, I saw he had tipped himself over $2,000. I scolded him, and he looked ashamed.

I was asleep in a dark room. I heard a loud knocking and woke up enough to answer the door. It was Betsy P., and she told me it was 3pm. I realized that I had fallen asleep in a bed in my office. I remembered coming into work early in the morning and taking a shower then getting into the bed. Betsy said she had peeked in through the window and had seen my hair across the pillow and my feet sticking out from the covers, so she knew it was me. She said she decided to wake me up so I could do some work. I was confused, but happy that I had slept so deeply.

2011-07-10T09:20:00.002-05:00

I lived in an awful southern town where I was a student. My apartment was more like a dormitory than an apartment building, with twenty stories of dilapidated rooms. Mine was on the bottom floor and filled with gray rags, torn curtains, and dust bunnies. I found a large scrapbook from the 16th century with what I thought might be a Roman coin in the back flap. Adrienne and Doug were coming to visit, and Doug wanted to see the coin. I told him the coin had what may or may not be an eagle on one side, but when I looked at it again, the image was a candle.

Adrienne and I ran up a square staircase to the top floor of my building. We passed a bakery, and I wanted to stop and have an espresso and a large pastry I saw in the window display case. It was shaped like a foot-long, hollowed-out yam and covered in thick, crusty sugar that glittered like diamonds under the lights.

Chia!

2011-07-08T07:23:00.001-05:00

I was supposed to fly to Japan to participate in a graduation ceremony. I found out the day before the event and so packed a bag and went to the airport to buy a ticket even though I didn't think the plane would make it to Japan on time. Chris Sm. and Chris W. were also there to buy tickets on the same flight, but the attendant wouldn't sell to them, and I walked away with the last ticket.

The plane was small, and instead of seats, there were benches along the sides and bean bags on the floor. The other passengers were sprawled around the plane, eating and talking, and we all had our luggage at our feet or behind our heads.

I could see our route marked on a green light board above our heads. We were going to be flying over a shallow ocean between the U.S. and Canada, doing a loop over Costa Rica, which was near Maine, and then continuing north. When we neared Costa Rica, we had to make an emergency landing in the middle of a crowded street. The plane floated down carefully, and we all disembarked. The pilot said it was because he saw a man in the street waving a gun. He went to the man, picked him up piggy-back style, and walked away with him.

The rest of us went into a resort above the street to look around. We could see hot springs, and huge snowy mountains in the distance, which were in Quebec. Though it was snowy on our block, just up the street there was a park where it was like an island community. People were walking on their hands and singing, dressed in flowered skirts and wearing leis.

We began to load back into the plane. I was speaking to one of the other passengers on a cell phone that wasn't mine. He asked me if I knew a joke, and I told him the one about a tourism commercial where an islander says, "Chia!" as though it's a greeting to tourists. He didn't understand me, and I became embarrassed. The phone disconnected, and I didn't call him back.

As we went into the plane, we all looked behind us. We were walking up a ramp, and below us was a snowy mound. A small, white minivan came toward us quickly from up the street, turned as though into a driveway, and drove straight into the snowy mound and into a garage. We were very impressed.

On the plane, I found the woman whose phone it was and gave it back to her. She was very relieved and began rooting through her bag to find another phone. I sat next to her as the plane took off, and she started talking about her husband. After a while, I realized she was married to Chris Sm. She was offended that I hadn't known that already.

2011-07-05T09:47:00.000-05:00

I was in the mountains doing some kind of construction work with Dad and Brad. There was a small town in a nearby valley. Early one evening at twilight, I saw Brad getting into his truck. I ran up to the window to ask him to wait for me because I needed a ride home. He pretended not to hear me and drove away.

I turned to Dad and asked if he had just seen what had happened. He was as appalled as I was.

I got a ride home from Dad. I was staying in a second story room in a hotel, and I was in bed, asleep. I heard scraping and thumps coming from outside. I went to the window and saw Adrienne, naked, scrambling up the side of the hotel toward my window. She was a vampire. Doug was down below, standing on the crest of a hill, and he called her name. She turned around and scampered back down the wall.

I stood looking out the window and saw Brad pulling up in his truck. Dad saw him, too, and told he wanted to have a word with him. I said I would talk to him first.

Nashville State Community College

2011-06-18T08:32:00.003-05:00

I was wandering the halls of NSCC. It was a liberal arts college, and I was one of the students. A ceremony was taking place in the multipurpose room of the Student Services Building, and we began to gather there and take our seats on wooden pews. A tall and handsome student with black hair sat next to me and put his arm around me. We smiled at each other and snuggled down against the tall back of the pew. We were laughing and joking without speaking. I asked him how old he was, and he said 18. I laughed and told him goodbye.

Tara was there, sitting on the pew behind me. I went back and sat next to her, and she told me she had been having an affair with a professor that had been going on for years and that was how she was able to stay married. She was looking directly at me and speaking emphatically. Her eyebrows had been shaved off, and she wore white geisha-style makeup. She also wore a loose white mask made of thin cotton that hung off her nose and chin.

I sat in a car with P. at the bottom of a tall hill. It was getting dark, and I was watching the sky change colors. I saw seven alien ships come up over the horizon and hover above us. P.'s phone rang. It was one of the alien ships contacting her to tell us not to worry.

I was in my office with my staff when a small nuclear reactor in the corner of the room started to overheat. I ordered everyone to put on their radiation suits and went over to examine the machine. I looked at a panel of flashing lights and realized it was a false alarm. The reactor hadn't overheated. It had just leaked a jet of liquid sulfur onto the floor.

.......................................................................................

I was a child ballet star in a Russian company. I was performing the part of the mermaid in a ballet. My costume was sparkly green with a curled-up tail. I lay on my stomach on the stage, propped up on my elbows, with my tail curling up and waving behind me.

I was riding a unicycle down a hill on the east side of Durango. I wanted to explore a shop at the bottom of the hill in a neighborhood I wasn't familiar with. A woman had turned her house into a sundries shop. She rented out a back room to a priest. She let me in to wander around but warned me not to disturb the priest. I made my way through narrow, dark hallways and small rooms with low ceilings. She sold glass, clothes, incense, and brooms. In the front room, there was a huge, round wooden table with a towering display of dried grasses and flowers. She asked if I wanted to stay for breakfast, and several ladies form the neighborhood started to arrive. I left through the front door and tried to ride my unicycle up the steep hill. I was also carrying a large thick piece of yellow styrofoam. I planned to go back to the shop when I had more money.

2011-06-16T07:13:00.000-05:00

I crawled under a low white satin rope into the bulk section of a grocery store, dragging a large white bucket behind me. I opened the chute at the granola bin and let it pour into my bucket. I used a big silver scoop to keep it from spilling over.

2011-06-08T09:18:00.000-05:00

I was at a roving party of people from college and from middle and high school band. I had on a pink, bobbed wig and a short skirt that flared out on the sides. I was only 5'2", and it felt strange to be so short, but I also felt bouncy and quick.

I was pushing a grocery cart. I would push it away from me as hard as I could and then run to catch up. When I got close, I would launch myself full length across the handles, and with my arms and legs straight out in front and in behind, I rolled down the hills.

Katja was with me, and she wanted to be a flag girl in band. I introduced her to Mr. Collins. She sat down on his lap and put her arm around his neck. He said, "I heard you had a role to play in the last football game." Katja leaned in and kissed him on the lips. I went behind a glass wall so I could watch but not listen. I saw them talking and kissing, and then Katja got off his lap with a satisfied expression on her face. I raised my eyebrows at Mr. Collins, and he raised his, and we shook our heads at each other in dismay. I mouthed, "what just happened?" and he just shrugged. When Katja came around the corner, I asked her why she had kissed him, and she said, "Because he was very kissable." He had given her the flag girl job.

I was still at the roving party, but everyone was inside a barn, and I was on my own outside. There was a huge green hill that ended in a small concrete platform. I liked to run down the hill and onto the platform. Then while I stood there, a pink wave of water crashed down the hill and curled up over the platform in a foamy wall. The water was not wet. I had a friend who I showed how to ride the grocery cart and how to run down the hill ahead of the wave and then play in the foamy spray of water on the platform. She brought three poodles with her, and sat them above the platform on the top of a brick wall. She told me the second poodle was 40 years old. They talked to each other and seemed like very good friends.

2011-06-06T07:02:00.000-05:00

I was on a science field trip with grad students. We were in a small town on a coast. It was extremely hilly, and the houses looked like they were built on top of each other because of the sharp switchbacks on the roads. I rode my bike around searching for something and climbing trees.

Downtown there was a scientist explaining the project we were there to observe. A remote-control operated machine would go in the water and measure the depth of a trench. The machine was huge and had two parts: a hind end that towered above us, with jointed, sharply-pointed legs like a spider. It walked along behind a small tractor that helped to guide it. We were extremely excited to see how deep the trench was. My friend had estimated it was 202 deep, but we didn't know which units.

All the grad students walked to the hind end of the machine, lifted up a curtain, and gathered together under the pointy legs. They would walk with it as it maneuvered along the shallower part of the water toward the trench, then come out before the machine plunged to the sea floor. I was too scared to go with them.

While I was waiting for them to come up, I saw a gun fight between two men up in a tree. They stood in the limbs above and below each other and tried to reach around the thick branches for a clear shot. One of them jumped down and start staggering down the street toward a yellow school bus. I used a pay phone outside of a restaurant to call the police, but they were already on their way. I was crying and shaking.

I saw the scientist standing under a pavilion. The test was over. I asked her how deep the trench was, and she said it was 202 oz deep. I told her I didn't have an intuitive scientific sense so she would have to explain that measurement to me.

2011-06-05T13:49:00.002-05:00

I lived in London, and my job was to deliver coal to people’s apartments. I was also a student, though it was a paid position, and I worked for the provost. One day I didn’t go to work, either as a student or as a deliverer-of-coal, because I had met a fun group of people who wanted to take me on an adventure in the city. I planned to wait until late afternoon and then call my employers and tell them I had been in the hospital.

The city was extremely hilly, and it was dangerous to drive. I roamed around alternately on foot and by go-cart with my new group of friends. We went to museums and to bars tucked into small brick caves at the bottoms of steep hills. In one bar, I crept down a hallway that ended with a wooden-planked door with an arched top. I knocked, and two women rushed out screaming at me to leave them alone. They shouted that I was a fool to invade their privacy just because they lived near a bar, and didn’t I know how London was arranged between the residential and the commercial?

This reminded me that I needed to start delivering the coal. I asked a little boy sitting next to me what the name of the company I worked for was called so that I could call in and get my route. He called it Quickspool, and I had to ask him over and over how that was spelled. I was proud of myself for not being anxious that I had blown off work, and that I didn’t know who I worked for or how to get around London pulling a coal cart.

2011-05-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

I was at a prison camp for men and boys. It was perpetually Christmas there and not hard to escape. I was still a boy, even though it had been many years since I had lived there. I didn't know why I was back, but there was a parade or a festival nearby, and I was caught up in it somehow.

I had an escape partner, and sometimes I was him (an older man) and sometimes I was me (a young-old boy). I led us away from the prison guards and their dogs up to the top of a roller coaster track, which was also a concrete ledge overlooking a train track down below. I yelled down at the guards, "Didn't I once drive a Santa-sleigh up this path?" The guards looked up and saw me, but they couldn't make it up the concrete wall.

2011-05-21T07:08:00.000-05:00

I was at a festival at a mountain resort. I knew lots of the people there from high school. I was often alone, but not unhappy about it. I wore climbing shoes and a harness, and though I had no ropes, I climbed everything. I was thrilled that I could climb so well, and I felt so free. I walked around with my arms spread joyfully. The last thing I climbed was a tree. It was dawn, and most people were just sitting up in their sleeping bags and looking around. The tree had ropey vines and several sections twisting apart and then coming back together above my head. It was an impossible climb, but I didn't know that, and I tried hard to move around the vines and get to the next section. When I gave up, I didn't feel like a failure, and I heard a woman say, "Good judgment."

Later in the morning I was resting on a wide pad with blankets. A man who looked like H.Z. and who had that same intense happy energy got under the blankets with me, and we embraced. We were in love. Suddenly a priest and a wedding party appeared around us, and the man grinned at me. I covered my face against his chest and though I felt happy, I was nervous about what he was asking. Everyone stared at me, waiting. I got up and left, and the man followed after a while. He found me resting on another pad and got into bed with me again. The wedding party appeared again, and this time I agreed. I said, "well, it's not like we can't just get a divorce anyway," and everyone laughed. I felt bad about saying it, but it also made me realize that I really loved this man, and it would be fun. We kissed, and we wouldn't stop kissing to let the priest marry us.

I left for the airport, driving a tan truck. I was on I-35, and there was construction at every curve. I took a dirt off-ramp and ended up in a construction zone with huge dump trucks slowly maneuvering around piles of dirt and huge concrete pylons. I made it back on the highway and to the airport and even to my gate. The woman taking my boarding pass told me that I had to go back out to the construction zone and sit on a bench to wait for a man to drive me to the airplane. I was still in love and happy.

Gold, Fish

2011-05-19T07:18:00.002-05:00

R.B. showed me two new pair of shoes she bought. They were in the bottom drawer of a dresser, still in their boxes. Both pair were identical gold ballet flats, but they were different sizes. I was meant to go to a party later that night, and I wanted to look nice. I took the shoes without asking. They didn't fit well, so I wrapped silver duct tape around the toes. Later I worried that the duct tape would leave marks when I pulled it off, and that the soles were now dirty and black. I felt nervous about how I would explain it to R.B.

...........................................................

I was in a large cave, standing on the edge of a small, shallow pond. There were ferns and other green plants growing around the edges, and tall stacks of smooth rocks. Two fish, which were as big as people, were in the pond, half-covered by the shallow water, lying side-by-side. One was a gold carp, and one was a red tuna. They invited me to come into the pond with them. I climbed in and lay between them. Someone was trying to get my attention near the entrance of the cave, and I was distracted.

2011-05-18T08:27:00.000-05:00

I was in a small, mostly empty room in a small, mostly empty house. A chest-high dresser with four wide drawers sat up against a wall. It was haunted, and I was angry. I felt the ghosts trying to escape the dresser through the two knobs on the top drawer. I leaned against the dresser and pushed myself up against the knobs. I could feel the energy pushing back against me, and I gritted my teeth and pushed back. The knobs pulsed with a white light. I moved away from the dresser and stood waiting. Each time I felt the energy trying to escape, I pressed myself up against it again. Over and over.

Several months later

2011-04-29T15:24:00.000-05:00

I was trying to move a tan-colored truck off of a lawn. It was mine, or I thought it should be. Every time I approached the lawn, a sinister man, hunched over and menacing, moved closer to the truck. I waved him off angrily and took the truck bit by bit.

He broke away from the edge of the lawn and chased me into a dilapidated house. I led him through all of the rooms until I had him off balance and running the wrong way.

I took off through a suburban neighborhood, running along the edge of lawns and wide sidewalks. I looked down at clumps of dark, blue-green grass and wondered how much of a head start I had. I was panting rhythmically, and when I woke up, I could still hear the panting, and I was afraid to roll over and turn my back to the open window.

This week

2010-10-30T09:54:00.002-05:00

I was naked, driving my truck up and down the streets. I didn't know where I was, but I hadn't been driving long, so I thought I must still be in my neighborhood. Nothing looked familiar, and I was nervous. I saw Alexander Street, and even though it looked different, I thought that if I stayed on it, I would eventually get home. It was hard to make the truck turn onto the street.

      ..................

I was hanging by my fingertips on the edge of a sheer cliff with green rocks. David San. was bending over me, trying to pull me up. He over-balanced and fell over the edge. I scrambled up and looked down at his body.

   ..................

I was in a huge room, like a rock cavern. There were large metal balls on the ceiling, each with a bundle of long, white strings hanging down.   I grabbed onto the bundle of strings nearest me and swung across the room. I flew and flew and flew, making a long, wide arc, then swung back the other way. The metal ball resisted the pull at first, but after a few passes across the room, it slowly started rolling toward me. When I stopped swinging, I was on the far side of the room from where I had started. I immediately began to look for a way to swing again. A woman handed me a balloon and several small magnets. I attached my white strings to the balloon and threw the balloon up at the ceiling. It wouldn't stick. I found more magnets in a bowl and glued them onto the top of the balloon. The balloon popped, but then I was holding it again and it was inflated. I couldn't get enough magnets on it to make it stay on the ceiling.

                                                 ..................

I was outside a cave in the woods. There were two men holding me hostage. One of them filled a trough with water and empty soda bottles.   Another filled a similar-size trough with explosives. I suspected they were going to make me drink all the water in the trough before the explosives blew up. I decided I'd take my chances and ran away.

2010-10-17T19:45:00.001-05:00

I went to New Orleans and stayed with an old woman in her house. I wanted to live with her, but I wasn't sure if I should ask. I sat on a sofa in her living room and looked behind me through an open archway into the dining room at the back of the house. I could see a glassed-in area beyond the dining room, filled with plants. A group of women came to pick me up and take me to dinner. From the driveway, I could see that the old woman lived in the shadow of the New Orleans Football Theater. It was blue and gray and loomed over the neighborhood. I had second thoughts about living there.

The women took me to a bar on a beach. I wandered off by myself. Near the tide line, I came up to a large, metal garbage dumpster. I peered in through a small, rectangular window. There were two girls living there. They sat on a couch in front of a TV. There was a rug and book shelves. The girls looked up at me and invited me in. They wanted me to help them, but I wasn't sure what they wanted me to do. It smelled like smoked meat, and the walls were rough and ugly. I didn't want to go in there.

2010-10-15T07:13:00.003-05:00

The freckle on the inside of my elbow had grown into a big, red, liverish, silver-dollar-sized growth. It was squishy with raised edges.

   ... ... ... ... ...

I was in a backyard, Indian wedding. Tables were covered with hundreds of white-frosted walnut cakes.   I went into the house and stood in an upstairs hallway looking into a mirror. I peeled off my dress and found another one underneath. It was bright green and fitted. I turned sideways to see how it looked and felt something down around my legs. I raised the dress and found a corset and compression stockings knotted up together around my knees.

                                                                               ... ... ... ... ...

I was in a high school hallway, hiding behind some shrubs along a wall. I looked across the hall at a row of lockers. They were very wide and appeared to be made out of grayish-green chalkboard material. I saw a girl standing in front of her locker reading what had been written on it in white chalk. It said, "My lipstick was so red when I walked in this morning that someone wrote '[enter marino]' on my locker."

2010-09-30T07:07:00.000-05:00

Sara Q. and I took the train to Silverton. She was carrying brightly-colored, cubed-shaped luggage. The train pulled into Durango, and we got off. Then Sara spotted an assistant dean in our department sitting with a group of people at the front of the train. She decided to go say hello. I reluctantly followed her. She sat down on a sofa near the assistant dean. I took the club chair next to him. He and his friends were smoking cigars and joints. His sleeves and pant legs were rolled up, and his tie was askew. He looked rumpled and drunk. He stood up from his seat and squeezed down into the club chair next to me. It was a snug fit, and my skirt rode up over my knees, so I draped my scarf over them. He leaned forward and turned around to face me. His friends began to sing a song. I wanted to sing along, so I joined in quietly, trying to find the tune and learn the words. The assistant dean mouthed the words at me. He stood up suddenly and went over to a table on the other side of the sofa. He had two dark-haired sons who wanted to go swimming. He told them to go ahead and warned the older one not to try to pull down the younger one's pants in front of his friends.

Netherlands

2010-09-27T06:39:00.000-05:00

I lived with my family in a suburban neighborhood at the foot of a mountain. We had been invited to a party at the house of some family friends who lived north of us in the hills. We rode our bikes up to a fork in the road, left them there and got into a small, white tram car. It had open windows and high bench seats. Polls on either end were for holding onto around tight corners. The tram took us along a ridge line surrounding a basin. There were houses here and there below us on the slopes. Looking across the basin, I could see other tram cars following the same route, and out beyond them, the border of another country.

2010-09-26T08:25:00.000-05:00

I walked down a sidewalk in a suburban neighborhood. It was wide, and the concrete was very light-colored. I stepped over each crack into the exact center of the next square. It was winter.

I stepped onto a square and started to sink. The concrete turned into icy water. I rolled over onto my back and struggled against sinking as ice chunks bobbed around my face and stuck to the fuzzy parts of my coat and hood.

2010-09-11T16:56:00.001-05:00

I was renting the back room of a house from an elderly couple. It was time to leave to go to a karaoke competition, but I needed to find something in a drawer. I looked through every drawer I could find in the house. There were meat-wrappers and other trash everywhere. My landlady took me into a part of the house I'd never been in. We walked down winding, light-filled, adobe-walled tunnels. She was proud. She said it was her dream house, and she'd just finished building it.

Wayne was driving me to the karaoke competition. I fell asleep in the back seat. A loud noise like a train whistle woke me up. It was Wayne playing harmonica as he drove.

A paralyzing dream in the early morning: I was asleep on my left side with one leg drawn up. I woke up when I heard a light click on in the closet. I felt a dark figure sit down on the bed and reach for me. He put his hands on my back. I tried to break the paralysis. Finally I was able to yelp and wake up.

2010-09-06T09:08:00.000-05:00

There was a young woman in a dim room, kneeling in front of a low, curved, wooden window seat. Her back was to me, and she was busy cutting small silhouettes out of red paper and placing them in front of candles spaced evenly along the curve of the window seat. I could see through the window that it was night-time.

She got up and came into the middle of the room near me. We knelt down and looked at the things she had made: tiny, happy people, dressed in winter clothes, ice skating on a tiny, frozen pond. Sparkly frost fell through the air and the people spun and danced and laughed. Most of the people wore red coats and hats and held umbrellas. One of them was a woman dressed in a sparkling, silver leotard with a silver hat and a wand. She danced in place, using her wand to create the frost and sparkles.

We heard a rumble overhead and looked up to see a tiny helicopter flying around the room. The woman was very proud and told me it was a real helicopter that she had shrunk.

I went with her to a hearth, where she put a few tiny candles into an oblong container with a wide mouth made of thin, clear glass. She tossed in a match and there was a popping noise. She tilted the container on its side and filled it partially up with water. She looked at me and said, "The show is 1/4 over!"

I was living in a house across the street from a park. It was cold and rainy outside, and the park was very muddy. There was a giant toad there, the size of a small car, and I wanted to see him. I talked Erika into coming with me. We entered the park and looked down a dark boulevard with tall trees spaced evenly on each side. Far down at the other end, I could see the shape of the toad. He was squatting there, not moving. I wanted to run, but waited to see what the toad would do. Suddenly he charged toward us, running so much faster that we could. We crossed a field and stood near a high brick wall.

The toad caught up with us, and he had a friend with him, a lizard carrying a pole. They turned into men, wearing capes and tall boots. The toad-man was enormously tall, and the lizard-man was his guardian. I started asking the toad-man questions--how he came to be a toad, what it felt like, when he would turn back into one. He was tired of my questions and wanted me to leave, but I kept pestering him. He asked me what my address was, but I didn't want him to know, so I lied about the house number. Erika and I left to go home, but she disappeared halfway there. I walked from yard to yard, back and forth, unable to tell which house was mine.

2010-09-02T07:19:00.000-05:00

I was the MC for the opening of the new performance wing of a music building at a university. I stepped out from the wings onto a wooden stage. The boards were loose and warped, turning up at the ends near the footlights. I looked out into the audience and saw my bassoon instructor looking at me expectantly. I raised my arms over my head dramatically, then jumped up and down three times, driving my feet down as hard as I could. The stage floor shook, and dust clouds puffed out at the audience. Suddenly I realized that it might be considered rude to show the audience how dilapidated the new stage was, but my bassoon instructor communicated with me telepathically, saying, "It's what they deserve, spending so much money on crap like this."

2010-08-29T08:29:00.000-05:00

I went to a music shop to pick up my sax, which was in for repair. I walked down a row of open guitar cases on the floor. Each one contained a pair of tennis shoes, designating a different customer's repair ticket. I found mine at the end of the row. The tennis shoes were not mine, but I recognized a plastic bag full of pennies, a guitar pick, and piece of string. I tried on the shoes--hideous, curved-sole sneakers with shiny-pink stitching. They were much too big. I looked up at a wrought-iron platform where the repairmen were to see if I could spot my sax. There were several children up there, drinking coffee and playing guitars. I went up to ask if anyone knew where my sax was. They told me they'd seen an ill-looking street kid take it and that I should go up the street to find him. I looked out a large window at tall buildings. I found myself sitting on the sidewalk in a circle of street kids. I leaned up against one of the boys and told him I'd give him a blanket if he helped me catch the sax-stealer.

I was the coach/teacher at some kind of an industrial day care. I lay on a metal beam overlooking the children below me on a sidewalk. I asked them trivia questions and they shouted the answers up at me. I carefully stood up and made my way to an upstairs area with a view of a grassy field, like a press box at a stadium. I directed all the children to go out on the field and line up in rows with the other kids from their academies. I asked a coach if he thought they could play a massive football game and recognize who was on each team. He didn't think so.

I was some other person, a man, and I had an enemy. He stood on a platform in the middle of a pond, a knife in his hand, staring at the muddy bank. I sneaked around behind him and got into the pond. Swimming up behind him, I knocked him off his platform. We fought under the water, and I kicked out at his knife hand. He dropped it, and I swam away.

Guest Post 7

2010-08-25T20:20:00.000-05:00

We were having a barbecue as a 'going-away' party for our leaving for the United States. In the distance, there was this factory/industrial complex emitting dark smoke. Suddenly, the weather started getting rough, with high winds, and people became concerned. The smoke that was coming out of the factory was turning into black serpents in the sky. My friend saw people who were in a panic running outside the fence and figured things were getting bad, that we should be running too, so we took off after these people, and followed them into town. The very second everything began calming down, I headed back to the barbecue and finished building a huge cheeseburger I had been working on when we split.

Guest Post 6

2010-08-24T06:55:00.002-05:00

When I was still in grade school I had a recurring dream that I still vividly remember. Gary, Kathy & I would be outside playing, and I'd see a black car coming down the highway toward our house. I knew if that car got to our house before we got inside something bad would happen. I was frantic trying to get Gary & Kathy in the house. I'd get Gary to go in and then run around the yard trying to get Kathy in, and then Gary would come back out. Then I'd get Kathy in and frantically try to get Gary back inside. All the while the black car was coming closer and closer. I never got us all in the house and would wake up before the black car got to our house. I have no idea what this dream was really about.

2010-08-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

I was in a cafe in the mountains, in the 1930s. Everyone's clothes were made of felt, leather, and velvet in dark shades of green, brown, and purple. Many people wore alpine hats and suspenders. A woman with short, brown hair was sitting at a table by a railing. I saw her raise her eyebrows and cock her head to the side in invitation to a tall man sitting at another table. I thought she was a lesbian, so I was confused why she was flirting with him. They got up and left, walking down toward the ocean. I followed them. On the beach, they started kissing, but the high tide was coming and their feet were getting wet and tangled in sea weed washing up in the waves. I grabbed the man by the arm and ran with him up the mountain through patches of ferns and huge hemlocks and cedars. We stood on a dirt-packed trail together, and I kissed him. Soon he started to leave, and I hugged him for a long time, resting my head on his chest. I called him Northern Check.

I was playing a trivia game with my family for cash prizes and vacations. The board was set up in long, rectangular strips, with trivia questions written on each strip. I answered them as quickly as I could. Two questions stumped me:

What was the final career of Educatariat who became Secretariat?
What is the main ingredient in Mexican ketchup when it is used as pasta sauce?

I was a mechanic in a castle with a winding staircase. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was happy to have the job, and I thought I could fake it if I had to. A man came up the stair case to my office. He handed me a long, metal wand made of light blue plastic. He told me his truck was not working, and that it had something to do with the wand. I looked at it carefully and saw that the indentations near the top looked like a face. I laughed and pointed that out to him, then followed him down the stairs. His truck was parked underneath a giant spruce tree, and he said the children really liked it. It looked like a jeep made out of pink and blue hard candies.

2010-08-21T07:44:00.002-05:00

I drove out east on Walnut Grove Road to see where Steve lived. I found myself parked on the side of the road in front of his house. I got out of the car and saw that it was snowy there. I looked back down the road I didn't remember driving on--it was covered in a thin layer of snow with gray flecks where the gravel and asphalt were showing through. The road curved downhill into a grove of trees. I went to the back of the car and stood there, running my hand over a large, sloping hedge of packed snow next to the sidewalk. I could see up the driveway into the open garage, filled with boxes and sports gear. The curtains at the window of the front room were partly open, and there weren't any lights on inside. A tall man with long, wispy, gray hair came out of the house to the right of Steve's and asked me if I wanted to go inside. He started across the yard up to the front door. I waved him off and shook my head. I said it was too early to wake anyone up.

2010-08-20T06:50:00.002-05:00

My dog B.J. was alive. I looked up a mountain and saw him standing on a round, metal, moon-like object at the top. He looked over the world and decided to destroy it. To stop him, I lured him down from the mountain and injected him with rabies. Then I went skiing.

I skied down a mountain bounded at the top and bottom by two roads. An old truck was parked on the bottom road, and I got in and drove to town. I saw Durango Dave at a bar and we went together to my house. We kissed, and then he told me it was time to go to church. I watched him take a shower, and then we sat together on the kitchen counter. He went to the Roving Church of Marisol, which met weekly in various members' kitchens.

B.J. was in the living room, walking around slowly and growling, his eyes rolling back in his head. I knew I should kill him to stop his suffering, but it was difficult to get close to him. I wondered if I should strangle him. I felt bad about having injected him, and I didn't want him to hurt anyone. He had become very dangerous. I was enjoying talking to Dave, but I knew I should call Diane and tell her about the dog. I became more and more uneasy.

grand jete

2010-08-18T20:17:00.002-05:00

There was a large field with green, springy grass. There was nothing else to see. I ran in a circle, leaping into the air every few steps. At the apex of each leap, I concentrated and stretched up through my back and neck, hovering for a moment. I was delighted to be able to do this. A woman ran behind me, leaping like I was. We went around and around and around.

2010-08-11T07:01:00.005-05:00

I was at a large elementary school, which was also a house I shared with five housemates. The kitchen was full of glassware, and I was busy organizing it. I looked in the cabinet under the sink and saw water dripping from holes in the back wall. I called the landlord to report the leak, but a man whose name I couldn't remember picked up. I could see him, and he was sitting at a picnic table with two other men, one of whom was the landlord's son. He was Matt from high school, who always dressed up for Renaissance Fairs and jousted. I couldn't think of his name, so I tried to describe what I wanted by referring to his clothes. "You," I said, "like to wear capes and tall, leather boots, and you're sitting to the right of the person whose mother I'm trying to call." This strategy didn't work--I could see him scowling in confusion--so I hung up and went outside.

People were in a long yard bordered by a white, split-rail fence, playing frisbee and running around. A woman threw a softball into a pear tree on the other side of the fence, and hundreds of pears burst off the limbs and flew through the air. Everyone laughed and ran into the field to collect them.

I went back inside to go to the bathroom. I was looking in the mirror over the sinks, fiddling with my barrette, when the principal of the elementary school came in. He ignored me and stood combing his hair with his fingers. Another man came in and went into a stall. I realized that I was in the men's bathroom, and I laughed and apologized and went out. I told everyone about what I had done, and they all thought it was funny, except Dad, who was very disapproving and acted like I had made an unforgivable mistake.

I went into the living room where we had a large karaoke screen mounted high up on a wall in the corner of the room. Four Israeli men were running in a circle, singing along with a song I had never heard. I joined in, skipping along in a wide circle around the room, singing at the top of my lungs.

Recurring city acess dream; Teaching

2010-08-02T06:45:00.004-05:00

The 5 boroughs of NYC were on top of a mesa in Colorado, and I lived in a house at the bottom of the mesa, in its shadow. I was so happy that I could visit the city whenever I wanted, almost like living there.

I was teaching a Women's Studies class to undergraduates. There were over 100 students, and the classroom was wide with wooden desks strewn across the flat, tiled floor. It was very early in the morning, almost 4am. Everyone was sitting still and watching me as I stood at the front of the room. I started the class by asking who had visited the feminist website called OVID and read the posts there. I asked who would like to share their impressions, if they saw anything that caught their interest or was confusing. No one volunteered, so I pointed to a Mexican man near the front and asked him to share. He wore heavy-framed, black glasses, and had messy hair that stood up in spikes at his crown. He looked shy, so I smiled at him and gestured for him to speak. He began to speak in a very small, quiet voice that only I could hear. Soon all the other students were milling around and talking loudly. I asked the student to wait and moved around the classroom, trying to make everyone go quietly back to their seats. They resisted my efforts, talking more and more loudly and laughing. I started strategically targeting the person at the center of each group. I shouldered my way into the middle of a crowd of students, grabbed the person in the center by the arm, and told her to sit down and shut up. Soon I was surrounded by women students wearing heavy makeup and flashy jewelery. I screamed at them to shut up, and one by one they went back to their seats. I stood at the side of the room, under a row of windows, and gestured to the student to continue speaking. He walked to the front of the room, and I crouched down on my heels to listen. He began to talk about being raised to be able to shape-shift into animals. As he spoke, I felt something heavy at my side, and I looked over to see a dog wearing a vest with the words "Electronic Resource" embroidered on the side. I pushed him away, but he crept back and stretched his front legs across my lap, so I let him stay. Meanwhile the student at the front of the room was continuing his story. From the waist up, he had turned into a black dog, a little like a German Shepherd, and was digging through a tall, black, rubber trash can in the corner of the room. The class was silent and completely focused on him. He turned back into a human, smiled at everyone, and walked back to his seat. I stood up and looked at everyone, raising my eyebrows and widening my eyes.

Selecting; Things you can't see

2010-07-30T06:54:00.003-05:00

I was shopping for diamonds on the internet. I looked down at the screen as a slide show of diamonds displayed. Each looked like a thin slice of geode--speckled and colorful with irregular edges, flattish, and about the size of a dinner plate.

An invisible barrier held back invisible water in the back half of someone's yard. The contained water was four feet deep, and I could see water plants and grasses swaying in the invisible current. I swam in it, like floating on air. When I put my feet down, waves sloshed over my head, knocking me around.

I was out to lunch with four people I didn't know. I looked at the menu, trying to decide between a salmon salad and a carrot salad. It seemed to be a very important decision.

Underwater

2010-07-18T08:01:00.003-05:00

I'd discovered an underwater archival collection of presidential papers. Sometimes it was the Lincoln papers, sometimes Reagan's. It was like a sunken monument made up of oily, yellow, metal cabinets lined up in numbered rows. The water was gunky yellowish-green. To access the papers, I had to put on a space suit and take a small submarine to the bottom. It was a terrifying place, and I felt like people with bad intentions were waiting for me down there.

There was an old, furry dog who lived at a prison. His job was to mow the lawn. His legs were short, and he limped, but he was still put to work every day. I saw him struggling to push the mower straight up a grassy hill, and I ran to help him. I got behind him and pushed. We struggled together, his short hind legs scrabbling in the furrows on the hill. We finally made it to the top where we both hung our heads over a stone wall and vomited tomato soup. He hugged me and said he'd like to have me over to his home someday.

I was with Tara and Jennifer, and we were in a hotel exploring a new part of the country. We were planning to take an underwater ride that required us each to take a pill for nausea first. I took mine and forgot about it, then fell asleep. When I woke up, Tara was shaking the pill bottle and telling me that we were not supposed to have taken the pills in the afternoon. I left the hotel riding a motorcycle and shot down the highway. The lanes were crowded and close. A military truck with canvas sides passed me on the right and someone inside stuck a leg out and kicked at me. I veered but didn't fall. I stopped at a grocery store and put a few things in my basket and went to the check out counter. The clerk was nice to me and helped me unload the cart. After I had paid, I asked him where I would find the almond milk.

2010-07-17T10:33:00.003-05:00

I lived on the streets. One afternoon I walked through a village full of athletes. I stole a small bunch of purple grapes from a young man and ran away. He chased me down a busy road with tall buildings. A friend of mine emerged from an alley as I passed and waved me on. He joined a group of street musicians standing in the road on his bass clarinet in an effort to distract the man chasing me.

I was walking up a snowy path with a woman. Sometimes we walked on something pink and fluffy, sometimes on snow. We were in the woods and it was dark outside. I could see the trees growing taller on either side of the path. When we got to the top of the path, we crawled out through a small gate made of rocks.

I wandered through a hotel full of circus performers. I asked a woman if I could borrow tweezers and a paint brush. She handed them over and I got black paint on my palms. I could tell she was skeptical that I belonged in the hotel with the performers, so I walked away quickly down a hall. I saw an open door and went into the room, shutting the door behind me before the woman got close to me. I didn't want her to see that it was full of sawhorses because I wanted her to think it was my hotel room.

I had black, V-shaped tattoos on both feet.

2010-07-13T12:40:00.002-05:00

I decided to become the winter caretaker of a cabin on a high, windy, ridge in the mountains of Colorado. The position would be starting in a few months, and in the meantime, I decided to visit the area. I arrived at the cabin to find Brad living there and hosting a party. A large group of people had gathered along a wire fence near the cabin. Brad was demonstrating how to shoot birds called little coxes out of their hiding holes in the trees. He twirled a shotgun over his head and nearly dropped it. Everyone gasped and scattered. I sat inside the cabin with Sabrina, who said she wanted to be my co-caretaker. I agreed but tried to give her an easy out because I knew the winter would be brutal, trapping us inside for months.

I had been attacked somewhere in a city and was sitting in the passenger seat of a police officer's car. He was fiddling with a little stick he thought of as a meter between the seats. He wanted to take me to the police station downtown, and I was indignant and resistant because he made me feel like a criminal. I told him I wouldn't go with him, but he ignored me, continuing to fiddle with the meter. He got out of the car without looking at me or acknowledging me in any way. I slid over behind the wheel and drove away. I stashed the car on a side street and went back to my apartment. Mom, Uncle Gary, and the police officer came to the apartment and looked through my closets for incriminating evidence that I had stolen the car. I gleefully denied everything.

2010-07-04T10:29:00.005-05:00

This month I haven't remembered many dreams. I've been traveling and sleeping in unfamiliar places.

I do remember having a smoking dream one night last week. You find yourself happily enjoying a cigarette before you suddenly remember that you quit smoking however long ago. You are devasted that you've started up again, and you wonder how on earth it happened, when it was that your vigilance slipped.

I also remember dreaming about 5th Avenue in New York City.

And about teaching something to somebody. Making music.

Last night I dreamed I started my new job. I showed up for what I thought was a meet-and-greet picnic, but which was simultaneously one of the staff's apartment and the library. I had not brought enough food for everyone, and I was wearing my ridiculous, beloved, tie-dye T shirt with the Colorado state flag on the front. Before I left, I offered to vacuum the floor, which was covered with cracker crumbs.

I think it's worth noting that in December of 2009 or thereabouts, I dreamed that I came to visit Iyla in Oklahoma City. In the dream, she had joined a cult of raw foodists. She took me to a raw food restaurant where I ate long, long carrot strips (cut on the spiral), and she had little white cakes. This month, I came to visit Iyla in waking life in Oklahoma City. She had not joined a cult of raw foodists, but we did, at her suggestion, go to a raw food restaurant where I ate moo shoo featuring long, long carrot strips and she ate little white cakes of something. I didn't consciously remember the dream before, during, or after the meal. I came upon the blog entry in which I had recorded that dream a few days later because I was bored one afternoon and randomly browsing my blog archives. I was surprised and pleased to see the coincidence, if that's what it was. The questions are, was the dream prophetic? Or did I subconsciously re-create the elements of the dream when I found myself in a similar context? Or is this an example illustrating my theory that there is a Sleeping Life and a Waking Life for each of us, like alternate universes, and what happens in one always happens in the other, simply at different times and in only vaguely familiar ways?

2010-06-12T10:55:00.002-05:00

I saw the tall, red-haired man again. He took me to a party.

2010-06-08T13:10:00.006-05:00

I was at a party in the woods on the outskirts of a large city. We sat in a circle and passed around cocaine on a napkin. The man to my right poured the cocaine into my cupped hands. I held it up to my face, wondering how to ingest it. I decided just to give it back, but I had gotten mud and dirt mixed up in it, and it was crumbly, brown, and greenish. The circle of people got very quiet, a lull in the conversation, and I leaned back into the grass to look at the black sky and enjoy the silence. The man to my left was a large, red-headed man. He put his arms around me, and I leaned toward the man on my right and asked him to take the cocaine back. I whispered to him, "This man with his arms around me--I keep dreaming about large, red-headed men like him."

2010-06-06T10:05:00.003-05:00

I was asked by the faculty to re-present a paper at ASIS&T. It was a comparison of 1920s journal articles on cookies, fashion, and architecture. One of the faculty said that she would bake the cookie replicas for me, but I couldn't find the paper on my travel drive. I stood at a tall counter facing a mirror and tried to remember if it had won an award and been archived somewhere.

It was the last day of high school, and I stood at a black iron railing overlooking a large field. Music was being played in the clouds. Students dressed in black rushed out onto the field and danced beautifully. I was content not to join them.

I wandered through a park with Tara the next morning. We walked by Theron on a pay phone, looking sweaty and nervous. He stopped us and asked if we had seen his textbooks. I took his hand and it was very cold. He was holding his textbooks, but Tara and I said we hadn't seen them.

A couple arrived in town in strange, new cars. They were bright blue and green, upright rectangles, and the drivers stood up behind the wheels to maneuver them forward, sideways, around in circles, and backwards. The couple moved a lot of art into the apartment behind my house and started a radio station. I stood on the side porch of my house and listened to them arranging their records.

2010-06-05T10:24:00.005-05:00

A visionary put together a team of balloonists. They were planning a trip across the ocean together, riding in a small, woven basket lifted by helium balloons. I stood at a railing over-looking the beach, watching the ocean and imagining myself being lifted by balloons. The team came along the walkway behind me, and one of them stopped to ask me if I'd like to join in. He was tall with red hair and seemed very nice. He held out his arm, and I took it shyly and walked with him.

We walked down a set of stairs toward the beach and came to a dark, urban street in Sweden. A woman was leading a rally there, herding a large group of people into a strategic position at an intersection. I stood to the side, by myself. The woman spoke to me and I replied in a bouncy, sing-song voice, explaining to her that this is how Americans imitated a Swedish accent.

I was at a university, and I noticed a plastic syringe stuck in the flesh above my left knee. It didn't hurt, but I couldn't remember how it got there. I asked all the passing people where the student health center was, but no one knew. Completely frustrated, I threw back my head and screamed. The tall red-haired man arrived, took my arm, and walked me across the street to the health center. The doctor pulled the syringe out and told me it was Katja's, and that she used it for injecting vitamins, minerals, and extra-fine oxygen.

2010-05-30T19:14:00.003-05:00

A cannibal was trying to get into the house. He went quietly from a window to the door to another window. He passed each one three times, gently tapping the glass and looking in. Three of us sat inside, holding our breath. I made a run for it through a dark neighborhood. I ran into a house to find him waiting for me at the kitchen table. There was something about me that he liked, so instead of eating me, we sat together at the kitchen table, and he contented himself with wet, sloppy food like potato salad and creamed corn.

2010-05-27T10:52:00.002-05:00

I was sick. A witch doctor picked four blossoms off of a little plant that grew in the grass, and I drank them brewed in tea. Later I saw that the blossoms were everywhere, like clover, and that I would die if I didn't take two more blossoms in tea immediately.

2010-05-26T12:31:00.003-05:00

I was involved in a protest at a doughnut shop. A group of us took turns buying doughnuts with nickels and then pitching them into the pond in front of the shop. We ran out of nickels, and I was put in charge of getting more. Everyone gave me dollar bills, and I went to a plant nursery nearby to get the nickels.

The nursery didn't have any nickels, but I purchased a long, single, living vine while I was there. On my way back to the doughnut shop a chihuahua charged by me at top speed, and I lassoed it with the vine. The chihuahua kept running and the end of the vine whipped out of my hand and wrapped around my neck. I spun as it tightened and clawed it off my neck.

Back at the doughnut shop, I debated if it made sense to ask them for nickels, or if that might defeat the goal of the protest. As I stood there thinking about it, a man with red hair and extremely well-developed thigh muscles asked me if he could come by my house some Sunday afternoon to listen to music and dance with me. I said that he could and hugged him. He rested his chin on top of my head, and I hugged him as hard as I could, which made him laugh.

2010-05-24T17:54:00.002-05:00

I was shopping. I found a red-and-white striped Christmas stocking on a table in a shop. It was very long, knit of wool and cotton. The price tag said One Dollar, and I was enchanted. I picked it up and cuddled it against my cheek. A man in the shop pointed at the thread-bare places and raised his eyebrows. I told him it was a damn bargain and raised my eyebrows back.

2010-05-18T14:11:00.002-05:00

I was Homecoming Queen. When I took the stage to accept the award, I gave an ironic talk on high school fashion that made people roll their eyes. Then I was a man, a fugitive, and I ran across a field chased by politicos and cops. I hid in the backseat of a car. Then I was in love with Brad again, and he broke my heart, again.

2010-04-30T07:43:00.002-05:00

I was in a giant pool complex, and there was a young man who was a mortician standing on a wide platform overhanging the water. He was pleased that I wasn't afraid of him, and we became friends.

He fell into the pool, which was also a river, and was swept downstream. I jumped in to rescue him. There was a monster in the pool who lurked near the bottom and tried to capture us. I fought him off over and over and pulled us to safety.

I worked in an old university building, and David Boreanz was my boyfriend. He was a scientist and had an office there. I kept sneaking down a set of stairs to a table with a set of books on it. The books were off-limits since I was not a scientist, but I took them one at a time with me back upstairs.

2010-04-27T11:31:00.002-05:00

Diane gave me a dog. He was small with short, caramel-colored fur and small, perky ears. We were sitting on the floor facing each other, and I was asking him questions. I asked him if he was hungry, and he said that he was. I said, "Can you talk?" and he said, "What?" trying to evade the question by pretending he didn't understand me. He realized he had given himself away, and he became very shy and ran down an elevator shaft filled with stacked luggage.

Traveling

2010-04-22T09:59:00.003-05:00

I was in the army, a new recruit. It was the 1960s, and I think maybe a different planet. I had just arrived in the barracks and was trying to find out how everything worked, how I would be living. There were some other women who were also new, and the men who had been there for a while were very unpleasant toward us. I wanted to put away my duffel bag and take a shower, and I asked where the women's locker room was. The men leered and said we would take showers where they did. It was clear they weren't going to be cool about it. I was given a huge bundle of strands of beads by another woman. I turned them upside down, and they made a noise like a rain stick.

Mom and Dad lived in a new house on a hill near Telluride. I went to visit, climbing up to the top of the hill into their backyard. The house was pale brick and had a number of arches and porticos.

I was being driven somewhere in the mountains. I looked out the passenger window as we passed a row of houses. Each yard was enclosed with high, chain-link fences. As we drove slowly down the street, bears came out of the houses into the yards and performed flips, hand-stands, and somersaults. There was a grizzly bear with long, brown fur, and a tall, skinny panda bear whose fur stood out from its body as though it were full of static electricity. They seemed very angry, especially the panda.

Housekeeping

2010-04-18T10:19:00.002-05:00

I wandered through a night-time, suburban neighborhood and came upon a house with a yard filled with tents. Each tent was made of white sheets and broomsticks, and each had bunk beds and small yellow lights inside. They were joined by intricate tunnels that criss-crossed the yard. The tents were made for homeless people, but no one wanted to use them.

2010-04-06T08:19:00.001-05:00

I sat looking at my feet, flexing my toes. They grew long and thin, finger-like, and then the toe nail on my right big toe turned into a screen. It grew larger and larger until it was the size of a small TV. A horror movie was playing on it.

2010-03-28T08:59:00.003-05:00

I sat in a black truck parked in the center of a wide road with two new friends. The owner of the truck, who wasn't with us, had just returned from the Anti-Gathering in London, and we were looking through his souvenirs. I found a post-it note with a message about traveling on it and stuck it to the ash tray. We played with a beaded necklace and a black glove.

Above us, in the sky, flew a black robot-dragon the size of a train. It swooped down over us in a glittery puff of smoke and slapped its metallic tail against the bed of the truck. We got out and began to run down the street, towing the truck with ropes. I yelled to one of my companions to get into the exhaust pipe and prepare for an anal examination. I thought it was the only way to save us.

2010-03-18T04:37:00.004-05:00

Soldiers were chasing me. I ran across a wide open plain and came to a drop-off. I looked down a wall covered in green grass. I stood on the edge and judged whether I could jump down to a ledge about fifteen feet below me, or if I should try to climb. The wall was very smooth and perfectly vertical. I saw a boy crouched on the ledge looking up at me, and the soldiers were getting closer.

Biscuits

2010-03-15T21:37:00.002-05:00

I stood at a white kitchen counter. I held a bowl of dough balanced on top of a stick. Just below the bowl, a very small oven was impaled on the stick. Resting on the floor, a second small oven rotated around the stick. The second oven was shaped like a bucket.

2010-03-10T10:19:00.002-06:00

I put purple mascara on the lashes of my left eye. It began to thicken and turned into lavender-colored paint that dripped down my cheek and ran upwards across my forehead into my hair. My eye turned into a starfish.

Dreams are lately hiding

2010-03-04T17:17:00.003-06:00

I'm not remembering my dreams lately. I hate that. Only scraps.

Last night a small creature crawled out of a cave. It walked toward me, and I backed up. I put a hand out, not wanting to touch it but wanting to give it comfort. In the dream I thought it might be a puppy, but the dream-observer knew it was a tiny raccoon. It crept and wobbled toward me, its pink nose twitching, the stripes in its fur barely discernible.

2010-02-10T17:04:00.003-06:00

I was standing outside the Communications Building, and I needed a ride home. J.S. walked out of the building and offered me one. Before he could take me home, we had to go to his house. We drove down highways, crossed bridges, circled round-abouts, and climbed hills. It was late afternoon when we arrived at his home in west Knoxville. He parked his minivan in his driveway, and we walked uphill to his front door and into the house.

His children were inside, running through the living room and kitchen, making sandwiches, and playing with blocks. J.S. was busy picking up papers and putting them back down on chairs, filling up a backpack, and herding his children from room to room. I looked around and saw a number of stringed instruments scattered around the living room. There were hanging plants in the corners.

I was beginning to feel worried that I would never get home, and I went to look for J.S. I saw him in his backyard going through the door into a combination pavilion/shed with a high ceiling and tarps for walls. I spotted a coil of purple climbing rope beside the door.

I decided to wait out front for him. I stood on a rock path leading into the yard. [end]

Today I ran into J.S. in waking life. I told him about my dream and asked him which elements I got right.

family minivan? check.
house on a hill? check.
stringed instruments in the house? check.
purple climbing rope in the backyard? check.

Oleo? Ohio?

2010-02-07T09:07:00.003-06:00

I was working at a community college, teaching day-long summer courses in history, math, and science. I didn't remember applying for the job, and I wasn't sure if I had already missed several days of courses already. I had a thick packet of papers in a dark blue folder that I consulted to find out what I was teaching each day. One day I was concerned that it was a math-day, and I decided that if it was, I would put the students into groups at tables and let them teach each other.

I had a colleague who was more on the ball than I was. He remembered each day to go to work and what he was supposed to do there. He sometimes helped me, and we fell in love. He was a very short Mexican man, and he liked to wear blue shirts and gray pants. I always had a hard time remembering his name. I thought it might be Oleo or Ohio.

I lived with an old man and an old woman who knew how to do magic. The old woman liked to sit in the living room on a padded foot stool and cross-stitch. I liked to fly around in the backyard. I swooped and dived through the power lines, touching down onto the grass and springing back into the sky.

I was out on a date in Boston with a John Cusack look-alike. I took him through a hotel lobby, across an alley, and into a bar. I left the bar to walk to another part of town, but my date wasn't with me anymore. I went back in and found him ordering beer at a table. I wanted to explore, and I was disappointed that he wanted to stay in the bar. A woman asked me if I wanted to dance, but I wasn't in the mood. She was a waitress there, and I followed her up the stairs to the staff dressing rooms. The stairs were carpeted in a pattern of pink and purple roses on a beige background.

I was driving a van through the area of Boston I wanted to explore. The streets were narrow and hilly. I pulled up in front of the Sheraton and got out of the van. A group of children on a field trip were in the street, looking at white powder on the ground. They thought it might be snail poop and were poking it with their shoes and squealing. I walked behind them and up the stairs to the alley behind the hotel.

Bell Tour

2010-01-27T08:34:00.004-06:00

I had a new family, and they came to visit me in Durango. Chris' dad and his girlfriend were my new parents, and Chris, Katja, and Joanna were my new siblings.

Chris woke me up early in the morning and told me we were going on a tour. They were all waiting for me in a large van out front, so I quickly put on a pair of orange tights and a brown sweatshirt and ran after them. Our first stop was at La Baguette, which had many new levels and was filled with people and their bicycles. It was hard to get around, and I was rushing to get coffee before everyone decided to leave. I went to the bottom level, which was set up cafeteria-style, with a long line of people snaking through a walkway designated by velvet ropes. I found coffee urns but no cups. I asked everyone around me where the cups were, but no one would answer me. I left to try the other levels.

The third level was an open porch, and I saw Katja there. I made my way toward her through the crowd of lounging people, tripping over their bicycles and knocking them down as I went. Katja didn't know where the coffee cups were either. She told me we were going to meet in the van to go on a bell tour. I asked her what that was, and she looked at me in disgust at my ignorance as she explained that the van would follow the sounds of the bicycle bells all over town. I said that sounded stupid, and Katja ran away from me. I chased her down the stairways and out the door to the street, stopping at the corner to watch her run down the sidewalk along a brick wall.

I made my way to the van and found Joanna in the back seat. I told her that when she grew up, she should consider going to art school. I thought she was 8, and then I saw that she was already an adult. She wanted to glue glitter to paper plates, and I sat down to help.

My new family arrived back at the van, We got in, and the driver pulled away from the curb. I asked the driver to please stop, explaining apologetically to everyone that I wanted to walk home to put on some shoes and make coffee. The driver didn't stop, and I watched worriedly as he drove farther and farther away from my house.

2010-01-24T16:15:00.004-06:00

Diane and I were planning a presentation about dogs. I walked into a classroom filled with desks. Dogs lay on each desk, curled up with their noses under their tails, but not asleep. During the presentation, we planned to take two dogs at a time to the front of the room underneath the chalkboard and create a new composite dog out of them.

Murder

2010-01-15T03:43:00.003-06:00

I had killed two people. I swam around in a small pool, arranging huge armfuls of yellow and white flower blossoms into giant letters: C and S. The flowers sank to the bottom, but held their letter-shapes. A plane flew over, and it reminded me that a satellite might be able to spot the flower shapes. The letters were evidence of the murder, so I kicked and splashed through the pool to break them apart.

Wind, paralysis, shadow

2010-01-07T15:15:00.003-06:00

Lately during the paralysis dreams there is always the sound, and maybe even the actual sensation, of wind at my back. The sound of the wind precedes the paralysis, and I've been playing with it. I let the wind blow louder and louder and stronger and stronger until I feel the paralysis about to begin. Then I open my eyes and wake up just enough to stop it from setting in. Then I sink back into sleep and listen to the wind start up again. After a while, I feel the presence of a being in the room, usually a dark shadow coming from the direction of the bathroom. This is scary, so I wake myself up all the way by turning on the lights and sitting up for a while.

2009-12-28T09:38:00.004-06:00

I went to visit Iyla in Oklahoma City. It was dusk when I arrived at her house with Mom and Diane. Iyla lived in a large barn with beams and staircases criss-crossing the floors and ceilings. People I didn't know were coming and going, and there seemed to be a cafe in the backyard. Iyla didn't speak to any of us and seemed busy preparing food and making pottery. Mom and Diane felt she was being very rude and decided to leave. I asked Mom for money, and she gave me her credit card before she drove away.

Iyla continued to ignore me as I followed her around her house, through the garden in the backyard, and up a set of stairs into a separate building under a nearby highway overpass. This building was a restaurant, and I stood on the back steps, peering inside through the screen door. A woman with gold hair came out, and I asked her if she could send Iyla out to me. She didn't say anything, but opened the door and motioned me inside. Iyla was sitting at a table eating a meal of raw food. There were small cakes with brown spots on the tops and shiny carrots cut into spirals. I sat down with Iyla and helped myself to one of the cakes, dropping it on the floor accidentally. I began to make conversation, and I noticed that she couldn't hold her neck still or keep her eyes from rolling back into her head. She said she had finally done too many drugs and was coping as best she could. She hoped the raw diet would make her well again. She was very thin and had joined a cult of raw foodists and artists who believed that it was important to stay outside as much as possible. They congregated on wooden staircases leading to nowhere.

Iyla stood up, and when she turned around, I saw that from the back her hair looked like a galaxy of stars. I decided it was time to leave and walked along the highway overpass. I stepped onto the highway and followed it on foot as it spiraled upward again a rock wall and became narrower and narrower. Soon it was only a few inches across, and I walked carefully, placing one foot directly in front of the other.

whiskey dogs

2009-12-25T12:00:00.003-06:00

I was preparing a Halloween display. It consisted of a large wooden screen propped up on 2 x 4s, with two St. Bernards tied up behind it, and a smaller wooden screen with two St. Bernard puppies tied up behind it. I put all of it in the back of a truck and drove it into a field. I left it sitting there, planning to come back and finish arranging it in a week.

A few days later, I began to worry about the dogs, so I went to check on them. They were sleeping as I approached, and I realized what a terrible thing it was to have left them tied up there. They woke up when I approached and seemed healthy and happy. I wondered where I would find the hay bales to complete the display.

2009-12-18T08:19:00.004-06:00

I was a foreign exchange student going to Africa. I would be living with three other U.S. students in a house outside of a small city. I arrived with another of the students, and we explored the house. Two of the bedrooms were huge, with pink carpet and several bathrooms each. The other student told me that she had heard those bedrooms were already taken by our new housemates, who had arrived a few weeks ahead of us. I went to my bedroom, which was small and gray with a large bathroom. One of the students had dug my bathtub for me, and next to it, there was a small patch of dirt with a tube in it. I ran a bath and got in to soak. I noticed that the tube in the patch of dirt was filling up with water. The water began to run out over the sides and I saw something solid and blue pushing its way out. A chicken burst out, followed by two others. They were blue and green, and their feathers were wet and shiny. They strutted and pecked their way around the bathroom. I ran to the bedroom and got a blanket to throw over them so I could take them outside. When I came back, a boar was in the bathroom with the chickens.

I went to the front porch and looked across at the mountains. They were yellow and pink from the glare of the sun rising opposite them, and they were filled with little holes. I was afraid to leave the house because I didn't know the name of the city.

A woman driving a bus stopped and picked us up. All four of us had arrived now, and we were going into the city together for the first time. The driver of the bus was our sponsor, and she tried to orient us to our new life. Two of the other students had been there before, and one of them was a famous singer. We drove down streets filled with clubs and restaurants, and saw young women posing in the doorways and in the windows.

We stopped at a restaurant and went inside. In the back room was a salad bar filled with fried breads and taco fillings and toppings. The other three students filled their plates and went to the front to pay. I followed them and paid as well, not understanding that I was supposed to have filled my plate. I went back to the salad bar and saw that a sheet had been thrown over it.

I went to a swimming pool and climbed up into the lifeguard stand. It was early in the morning, and no one was swimming. I looked across at the mountains and realized they were just like the ones I had seen from my porch. I thought that I must have been asleep before, because now the mountains seemed much more real. I saw three African men practicing yoga on the lower slopes, and I hoped they wouldn't talk to me because I was embarrassed that I still didn't know the name of the city. A professional diver began to practice flips off of the high dive. The pool filled with people. I climbed down from the lifeguard stand and wandered over to the diving well. I tried to climb a rickety stand next to the high dive, but it folded up and collapsed. The professional diver was watching me, and he suggested that I use the regular ladder. I climbed to the top and saw that I was far above the diving board and had to crawl down over piles of dirt to reach the end. I stumbled at the end and fell onto the board. It barely bounced, and I jumped off, but suddenly I was rising into the air. I rose higher and higher and then plummeted into the pool.

2009-12-11T08:59:00.003-06:00

I went to a costume party in the woods. Everyone wore capes made of various flags from Britain. My favorite cape was green, black, blue, and red--a combination of tartan and Cherokee.

2009-12-09T20:28:00.004-06:00

I held a frog in a pot. He was a very special possession, and I loved him. He managed to live through some sort of trial that I don't remember anymore. Then I set him on train tracks. He became a black fluff of chiffon as a train barreled toward him. Before the train passed over him, he blew away in a gust of wind, and I captured him again in a pot. He was in a very traumatized state, and I didn't know how to keep him alive. I loved him so much, and I thought he should be kept wet to survive. I drizzled water out of my fist onto his back and filled up his pot. He drowned, and I was so sorry. I woke up and lay very still with my heart pounding and a heavy gray sadness in my head.

The next night I dreamed that I was on a stage. I was a dancer with a very special partner. First she was an old woman. Next she was a figure I don't remember. Last, she was an old Buddha whom everyone loved so deeply. I held him in my arms and spun. We faced the audience, and he collapsed and dehydrated. I held him as he slumped to the stage with his eyes closed and died.

2009-12-06T08:49:00.004-06:00

I lived on a deserted island with Willow and a small group of cast-aways. It was always dark there, and we were in danger from something indefinable. We lived in a row of rectangular caves. My cave was on the end and opened to the light, so I planted a garden of celery, carrots, morning glories, and lettuces. At Christmas, I decorated a tree with angels I made out of pomegranates, cotton fluff, and little bits of red candy. The other inhabitants picked the angels off the tree one at a time, ate the candy bits, and threw the angels into the trash can. I rescued each of them from the garbage for recycling. Willow came to visit me in my garden cave and told me about her sex toys.

2009-12-05T10:02:00.004-06:00

I lay on my left side in bed, facing the door. I heard a rushing noise and felt myself becoming paralyzed. A loud wind blew at my back. I let myself drift in and out of the paralysis, hearing the sound of the wind stop and start, until I was trapped. I stopped breathing and woke myself up with a gasp.

I was jogging up a wide, snowy trail in the mountains with a group of circus performers. The trail was a dry stream bed, and we had to watch our footing because of the smooth, rounded rocks everywhere. The snow lay in little patches between the rocks, and the branches of the evergreens on either side of us were coated with frozen, shiny snow.

I topped out on a snowy hill and continued running down the other side toward a tennis court and a rock fortress. I ran past half of a bright red carrot on the ground and stopped to pick it up.

2009-11-15T07:36:00.004-06:00

There was a party. It started when I heard the doorbell ring. I went to the door and peaked through the wooden blinds covering the window. The Flaming Lips were there, disguised as a marching band, playing a song for me. I was shy to go out, so I watched them through the wooden blinds covering the window in the door, then went to the living room and watched them from behind the curtains. Tara knocked on the door, and I let her in. The Flaming Lips followed her in, and soon there was a party in the backyard. Everyone was dressed in black, with lots of makeup and dyed hair, and everyone was singing and dancing. Some people had wings, and they fluttered through the throng. A band began to play a song. It was mostly electronic, and there were parts from Hedwig and the Angry Inch mixed in. I stood very still in the middle of it, watching the performance. The music was complicated and wonderful, and the band moved around from place to place in formation, and the people with wings flew above them.

I mingled in the backyard and sat on the lawn watching people. I walked to the bar set up in the gazebo and leaned on a wooden table. Two teenage boys from Arizona stood next to me. One of them threatened to rape me, and I asked him to put his hand on the counter so I could cut off his finger. He did, and I picked up a large kitchen knife and brought it down across his middle finger. I didn't push very hard, but the knife was sharp, and when he lifted his hand, his finger dangled down, attached only by a strip of skin. I felt sick, but also pleased. I told him we were even now, and maybe he could rape me later.

The party went on all night. A woman was in love with me and followed me everywhere, but I only wanted to talk to the band about the song they had played. Tara and I got drunk and laughed at everything, and in the morning, we went to her house to make breakfast. I was starting to feel nervous about having cut off the boy's finger. I imagined him driving back to Arizona with his friend, stopping at an emergency room. I imagined him explaining to the doctor that he had been going to rape a woman, but that she had cut off his finger instead with his full cooperation, and I imagined the doctor rolling her eyes at him. I decided I was probably safe and wouldn't go to jail.

Tara was cooking breakfast. There were several types of breads and eggs cooking together on a grill contained within a bookshelf. I asked if one of the breads was a cinnamon-raisin bagel, and Tara snapped at me that of course it wasn't, as that would have taken all morning to make, and we had just arrived. I realized that Tara was tired of company, so I left. I went outside and saw that there was a huge water slide in her yard, running down to the street. I jumped on and careened downward, slipping off into a mud puddle halfway down. I laughed and laughed and saw Tara headed down toward me. She streaked by and made it all the way to the bottom. I got in my truck and started to drive away. I leaned forward to read some words I saw on the mirror, and I felt something break near my face. It was a pair of glasses I was wearing, and I saw shards of glass and the bent, metal frames in my lap. I realized I was still drunk, but I needed to go to the hospital because the white of my left eye had been cut open. There was a wet, red, jagged cut.

Mining

2009-11-14T11:11:00.003-06:00

I was driving my truck through the desert. There was a mining operation there, and I was looking for a job. I drove up to a mountain and parked my truck in front of the entrance to the mine. There was a large, grassy area covered with snow and bordered by trees behind me. I went to the foreman and asked for equipment to start mining. He gave me a breathing tube, a pair of yellow overalls, and a mining hat with a headlamp. He said that no one was working today, but that I could go into the mine and explore, if I wanted to. I was terrified to put the breathing tube in my mouth and to walk into the dark cave, but I did. Soon I began climbing a beautiful staircase made of blond wood and glass. It was bright and hot inside, and I climbed up and up and up. I arrived back at the entrance to the mine, and I asked the foreman what had gone wrong, why I hadn't entered the mine. He didn't answer.

I went to my truck and crawled into the back to let my 5 dogs out. They were burrowed together under a white blanket. I let them into the grassy, snowy area and watched them run around. I planned to let them stretch their legs for a while before I made a second attempt to enter the mine. I watched them run in circles and bark at each other, then loaded them back up and made a nice blanket nest for them. The fifth dog was missing, a red retriever. I could see her through the trees, and I called out for her over and over. She finally came running to me, wagging her tail and barking, and I loaded her into the truck with the others.

I was falling. There was a huge structure made of metal and wood, like the frame of a skyscraper. I climbed to the top and hung down from one of the metal beams. I let go and fell, trying to aim myself for the beam below so that I could catch myself and sit down. I fell quickly, straight down next to a rising column of hot air. I slowed at the last second and sat down on the beam. I climbed up again and fell, over and over.

2009-11-05T07:29:00.002-06:00

I was a little boy in an old neighborhood with towering trees. I was exploring an abandoned house on a street near mine. It had a screened-in porch and an over-hanging roof with missing shingles. It was twilight.

A man came out of the house and stood on the porch looking at me standing in the yard. He wore a red T shirt and old jeans. I ran away from him, and he chased me, up a hilly, black-top trail that wound through trees and yards. The trees were black, and their branches were twisted and spread out against the sky. I stayed in the lead and lost him, but it was a small neighborhood, and I thought he's probably find me anyway.

I was getting married to Rob, who was also a stranger. Our wedding theme was a gender-bender cartoon fairy tale. Rob was the princess, and he wore a green scarf tied around his torso like a halter top. He had a blond wig and sparkly eye-shadow. I wore a buckskin suit and a fur hat. We sat in the stands at a rodeo with the wedding guests and watched the entertainment. A Native American man stood in the center of the ring and played a clarinet, aiming the bell at a small, wooden cart. The cart began to roll away from us, and the man walked behind it. It veered to the right, so the man bent down and played his clarinet as hard as he could at the right, rear wheel. The cart stopped, then slowly began to turn to the left. When the cart reached the edge of the ring, it filled up with cows and rolled quickly across the ring toward us. It took off and began to fly, and just as it passed overhead, a burst of bees and deer exploded out of it, and the cows leaped out and began to run through the sky.

After the wedding, I drove us home through downtown Durango. I stopped at a Native American store to request a taxi. Two teenage boys wanted to share it with us. We got in, and I drove us all together to the hotel. The meter said $30, so I asked the boy in the front seat for $15. He began to cry at the expense and handed me a wad of bills. I looked through it, decided to pay it all myself, and handed him back three $6 bills.

I went inside to get dressed for a night out. A woman from the Native American store called and asked me strange questions about what sort of wedding package I had rented from them for the wedding. I didn't trust her and refused to answer her questions directly. I suspected that she hadn't processed the return correctly and was trying to pin it on me so that I would have to pay extra. I told her I had already returned the package and had a receipt to prove it.

I went back to the store to see what else I could buy from them. The man at the counter told me I would like the selection of walking sticks. I couldn't hear him and had to ask him to repeat himself over and over. He showed me a walking stick in the style of a walker. It was made of sticks carved into each other so that they created a big square frame with a handle. It was decorated with feathers and beads, and the wood was shiny yellow. I said I'd take it, and walked around the store trying it out. It was too short for me, and I had to hunch a little to use it, but I decided it was worth it because it was so pretty. I browsed the glass cleaners, as well. There was a shiny, metal ledge to spray the cleaners on to see how well they worked. I also purchased some clear packing tape.

2009-11-01T19:55:00.001-06:00

I had a nice stash of fat, ripe, red tomatoes in a cage in the basement. I planned to barter them.

2009-10-31T08:49:00.003-05:00

I went to a clothing shop in a mall with Willow. I tried on a fitted, tan, suede jacket with a belt and admired myself in a three-way mirror. I decided to buy it, and went to the counter in the back of the store. Lindsay was working there, and she took the jacket from me and wrapped it up. I paid her $206 and left the shop for groceries.

I stood at the check-out counter with a gallon of yogurt and a lemon. The cashier informed me that someone was looking for me in the back of the store. I walked toward the back, past tables piled with oranges and apples. A tall man with red hair walked toward me carrying a red scarf embroidered with my name. He told me I had dropped it while I was shopping. He asked me if I would be his friend and smoke pot with him. I was pleased that he wanted to be friends with me, and I suggested that we go out get to know each other first so that I might feel comfortable smoking with him. He was angry that I didn't want to smoke first and shooed me away from him. I went to the front of the store and stood leaning against a display of potatoes and lemons, feeling very still. If I moved too suddenly, I would cry.

2009-10-27T19:53:00.004-05:00

I was given a pair of socks in a bag. It was a present. They were long and gray, red at the toes and with a thick red stripe around the top. One had a hole in the heel, and they didn't stay up very well. I thought they must be grandmother's socks.

2009-10-24T16:11:00.003-05:00

I was late for my thesis proposal defense. I went to the City Pool in Ft. Collins and took the elevator to the third floor. I went to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet to pee. I took off my backpack and set it on the floor in front of me, rooting through it for my notes. It felt strange, so I pushed it away from me, underneath the edge of the stall door. It was wobbly and full of something. I nudged it with my toe and realized it was full of toilet water. I emptied it out onto the floor and left to find Dr. Mehra.

I went to a room crowded full of people standing together to hear a band. Bright light shown in from skylights and transom windows placed high in the walls. I wanted to dance, but I saw Dr. Mehra. He was disappointed in me and told me that I had missed logging into the computers on time to meet the rest of the committee. It seemed unfair because he hadn't even told me where we were supposed to meet or at what time. I wanted to give up.

2009-10-16T08:51:00.004-05:00

I lived in the midwest. It was full of dusty, yellow fields, and the sky was always gray. There was a murderer-monster on the loose. He was a tall man with dark brown hair and big shoulders. He was half robot, and he never spoke.

I ran through the fields to get away from him, trying to jump into the sky and fly away. The invisible spirits who lived in the field would catch me on an upward leap and throw me into the air. I flew fast and high with my arms outstretched in front of me.

There was a spirit who I could see. He looked like the monster-murderer, but I could tell he was friendly. He leaned against a low, red brick wall, invisible from below his neck to his knees. He hoped to get his body back someday, and I invited him to come with me on a bus.