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August 21, 2005

ported dreams, dec_01-mar_02

[from my pen and paper journals just before I left NYC for Cambridge]

Dream - 3/17/02

Dreamt I was planning a bank robbery. The targeted bank is a small, flat, window-less cinder of a building, reminiscent of a Jehovah`s Witness Kingdom Hall or a funeral home. The robbery is going to be committed by me, Jim and two other people. We practice it over and over, and I`m feeling confident until a fifth member joins us (Arul?). He asks many, many questions about my plan, asks the right questions. I have answers, but he gets me thinking. What if I have made a mistake? What if there`s a flaw in the plan? I don`t want my friends to get killed and I don`t want to get caught. When the day of the robbery comes things don`t feel right so I abort the robbery. I can`t tell whether I`m being cautious or timid.

The dream changes. A few months have passed and I am hiding out in an apartment in some generic projects. I remember planning the robbery, but don`t remember what happened. I walk around my cramped, dingy one bedroom trying to remember what went down. Did we get the money? Did anyone get killed? Why am I hiding? About then I notice there`s a dismembered body in my apartment. There are piles of tightly sealed garbage bags all over the place and each one contains a limb or organ. There's no smell because of the care taken in sealing the bags, but the sacks are heavy with liquid, the contents soft and jelly.

Who the fuck did I kill or get killed? Where is my money?

I decide to get rid of the parts before any smell or rot seeps out of the bags. I consider melting the parts in lye in the bathtub, but am concerned about the stink and gore. I think about moving it piece by piece to the dumpster but worry that someone will see me, discover the corpse. I think about all the movies I`ve seen where someone is trying to dispose of a body but all the depicted methods seem stupid when carefully reviewed. I stare out the project window at the kids standing on the basketball court, consider my options.

Dream - 2/12/02

Dreamt Jim showed me a short film he`d directed. It`s an action comedy about Asian-American teens, shot in the style of an HK action flick. It`s good, real good and seeing it makes me feel old and envious.

The screening takes place in an airport. Cole and Natasha come through. Natasha is impressed by Jim`s film, Cole is noncommittal. Nicky is with him, and we are introduced as if we have never met.

I also run into my father, who tries to get me to wait with him for two arriving passengers. I refuse. It turns out the couple he is waiting for is a bourgie black couple I know from Yale. I can`t imagine how my father could possibly have ended up greeting them at the airport, but I don't like the idea of him being their driver.

[EBOG's NOTE: The female half of the couple had, in her youth, been voted one of the four (or was it five?) most beautiful incoming black Yale freshwomen by the watchful junior/senior Kappas who kept track of such things at that time. She actually was one of the most beautiful women I had seen until then, but in a strangely still way that suggested a kind of sacrificial willingness to sit motionless in the cross-hairs of male desire. I remember catching a lucky, alcohol-fueled break and fooling around with her freshman year, this followed by almost a decade of sexual tension on the increasingly rare occasions that our distinct slices of black a Yale/NYC touched or overlapped. When she married her climbing clown of a husband I remember being washed over by an unexpected wave of disgust. In college we had joked about moving to France and making movies. I would direct and she would be my muse/star. (Did all this happen while we sat in the dining hall conjugating French homework? Idle language exercises suddenly finding unexpected application?) She had insisted at the time that it had to be a blockbuster and that I had to cast [MALE NAME] as her love interest, [MALE NAME] being an odd, incognegro that for some reason had caught her fancy. I had agreed to both terms immediately and without reservation. Starlets are to be allowed their fancies, I figured, because muses and directors had different, deeper, potentially sacrosanct connections. As for the question of the opening weekend, that went in one ear and out the other. I was 17 at the time and wouldn't give serious thought to such matters until I was 30. When she married the climbing clown it occurred to me that she had really meant it when she had intimated (in so many words) that she would willingly make herself the object of a man's creative focus, that she would sit there and be beautiful in exchange for a big enough marquee. The climbing clown is a climbing clown, but he has made her the star of a fine and long-running drama popular among the Black American moneyed-classes, i.e., The Tale of the Black Ivy Leaguers and their Architecturally Significant Brownstone.]

I tell my Dad he should just let [FEMALE NAME] and her husband take a cab, that they can certainly afford it. He tells me that for the life of hime he just can't understand why I'd be so rude to another black Yalie.

George Bush II arrives at the airport while I am arguing with my father. I try to leave the terminal, walking upstream through the crowd of soldiers and functionaries. My dream POV is shaky and hand-held, agitated. As I make my exit I walk past a midget marching band setting up. Bush drives by in a golf cart. He is short, reddish and driving himself. He looks, it goes without saying, like a clown.

Dream - 1/22/02

Dreamt I was in a Vegas-y midtown. I am either hanging out with an old homeless woman, or I am an old homeless woman. The homeless lady that I may or may not be is going on and on about the funny thing that happens when she lies down on the concrete to sleep. Sometimes the city looks like ugly she says, like teeth, but when she rests her head on her arm just so the city looks like Amsterdam. Arul appears suddenly. He tells the old woman\me that her priorities are all fucked up. Forget arm or no arm he says. Get the fuck up off the floor.

Dream - 1/19/02

Dreamt I was at work, only the office is a classroom. Instead of desks we all work at chair/tabletop combos. [NAME CHANGE] is giving some kind of lecture by a white board. As he gesticulates and enthuses I keep thinking: this man is not a grown-up. I look around the room wanting to know where the real teacher is.

I am not paying much attention to the lecture so I find myself getting a public dressing down about my attitude problem. I'm annoyed, but have to admit that I am acting like a sullen little shit, adolescent and eye-rolley. Except for annoyance at the public nature of the rebuke, I don`t feel terribly bad or concerned about my behavior. The situation in the office/classroom doesn`t seem real to me. It feels like play-acting, perhaps a re-enactment of a scene from a John Hughes movie, The Breakfast Club or Weird Science.

One lecture ends and another begins. The new lecturer wants us to re-organize our chairs so that we sit in a circle. I decide to sit on the floor at [WOMAN`S NAME THAT IS NOT THE NAME OF MY 2002 GIRLFRIEND]`s feet. She is wearing very nice, shiny Jimmy Choo boots and a shortish denim skirt. I am leaning against her, the back of my head on her exposed knees. She is massaging my scalp, digging her fingers into the center mass of my locks. She does this offhandedly while listening to the lecture, a slight, sleepy smile on her face. Every now and then she taps a pen against the crown of my head like I'm a pad or notebook. Blank, I am, wondering if she will write something on me. I lean farther back into her hands and her fingers and settle against her like a sigh. I think to myself: This is not a bad place to be sitting. When I wake up, I feel bereft, think that perhaps I should be crying. I feel ghost fingers in my hair and a tightness in my chest for days every time I see her in the office.

Dream - 12/29/01

Dreamt I was Nelson Mandela. He/me has just delivered some sort of speech, and as I am getting into my limo, I run into an old college roommate. He was a drama student and he is now a successful South African sitcom actor. I flashback to our old apartment\dorm. It is ratty, small, collegiate.

Flash forward. We reminisce and decide to have a drink. We go to several bars, including now unrecognizable college haunts. Gentrification has filled them with white people, liberal white college kids who are "honored" to be having a pint with Nelson Mandela. They get on our nerves, and me and my old roommate are carried away with nostalgia, start a bar fight. My presidential bodyguards materialize, intervene, break it up. We`re so old, the bodyguards have to carry us back into the limo. I look at the guards, embarassed that I have dreamt Nelson Mandela into such an undignified, un-Mandela-like circumstance, but they wink at me, assure me that my roommate and I could have taken those Boer fucks easy. It occurs to me that the guards don't just work for Mandela, that they love him with the fierce tenderness of children protecting a parent. This realization moves me to happy\sad tears: I feel happy for Nelson, sad for Gary.

The dream changes. Now I am a junior member of the US Congress. I am in Brooklyn riding a Manhattan-bound green line train with two ranking Republicans. I don't know where we are going, but I feel like I've been tricked into participating in some kind of bullshit collegial exercise, the dedication of a highway perhaps. I avoid eye contact with the rest of the riders, don't want anyone to think I am with the Republicans by choice.

One of the Republicans is a crazy, right-wing Cuban lady from Miami who keeps crawling and cavorting on the subway car floor. There is something vaguely MILFish about her, so even though I don't want anyone to think I subscribe to her politics I wonder briefly whether this might turn into a sex dream. I consider then discard the possibility. She is plainly pretty and well-preserved, and rather nicely poured into a maroon, polyester pants-suit, but the way she keeps crawling on the subway floor disturbs me. I wonder if she's been infected by some kind of virus.

As we approach the river and the last Brooklyn stop another motive for our trip begins to emerge: Some sort of disaster has brought us together. 9/11 goes unmentioned. We are on an express train, and when I check one of the stops for the local the other Republican - a very red faced Midwesterner - asks if I wish I were traveling with Democrats. "New times call for new solutions," he says. He seems sincere but I still wish he would stop talking to me in front of the other riders.

I shout at him: "I'm only doing this because of what happened." He laughs at me.

"Sure," he says.

I get off the train at Astor Place. The congresswoman gets off with me but the other Republican stays on the train. It turns out I am going to meet an ex-girlfriend instead of going with the Congresspeople. The crazy Cuban woman scoffs, tells me I need to move on, says I should come with her instead. It occurs to me that she is propositioning me. She looks better, less insane when standing upright, but the talcum powder between her cleavage looks like it has picked up dust and dinge from the subway floor. I beg off and she stalks towards the East Village, angry.

I go to the café where I'm supposed to meet my ex. My ex has blown me off at this very spot several times, and she does it again. As I wait for her, though, the dream develops a split-screen and I'm able to watch her hurry through a game attempt to meet me. I see her dressing, putting on make-up, looking for a babysitter. She is trying to call me to tell me she is running late, but the minutes on her cell, which I used to pay for before she became my ex, have run out. She looks at the phone incredulous, as if only just realizing that I have stopped paying her bill. The dream becomes a close up of her face. She's wearing a lot of make-up, dramatic eyes, high gloss Mac lipstick. I note with a mix of cruel pleasure and disquiet that she seems haggard, used-up. She keeps glaring at her dead cell, angry, but also grudgingly impressed that I have asserted myself by not paying her bill. Just then I think the crazy thought that if I had slapped her more than the once (the only time I ever hit a woman and the main reason I left), we'd still be together, trapped in an endless constricting (but unbroken) cycle of sin, debt, and shame. We'd end up like a doomed addict couple, bound by a craving not for rock but for the grim, intense high of having our ever sinking expectations (of each other, of the opposite sex) met.

Her preparations start to falter. I'm annoyed that she is going to blow me off again, but I have to concede that she tried. She made an effort to meet me. When the she gives up completely her side of the split screen collapses. I sit in the cafe anyway, enjoying two cafe-au-laits and a perfectly buttery and flakey croissant, dreaming of breakfast just before I wake.

[EnD]

Posted by ebogjonson in dream log, places, on August 21, 2005 8:22 PM

Comments

Posted by: Troy Bickford at December 1, 2006 7:50 PM