Dream Log: September 1, 2000

feeling tired when i woke up.
i was debugging some code in my dream.
i woke up and came office and
am doing what i was doing in my dream.
duh...

Strange dreams of the summer camp I worked for in 1994. In my dream, it was a summer camp, yet it was also the campus of the college in Minnesota my boyfriend went to.

I fought with someone about who was coloring a picture the best. I thought his color scheme was garish and annoying, while mine was clearly superior. We took it to a teacher to decide. I won out, and stuck my tongue out at the guy. His head turned into a demon head, snarled at me, then he ran away.

Then I was driving along a long highway in a VW Beetle that was painted with the Red Bull logo. I think this was in Maine, although I don't remember a highway like this in Maine. I was driving very fast, passing all the cars. There were big round rocks in the road, like river rocks, and I swerved around them. I thought I should go back and move them out of the road, but didn't go back.

I got to camp, and it was the first day. All the kids were arriving in buses and cars. The parents were making sure to tell me to take care of their little girls. I smiled and said sure, then turned to the girls and saw little demons instead. I started running from the camp, back into the forest, looking for the highway to drive again. The branches from the trees were hitting me in the face and hands.

I woke up then, with the sheets and blankets twisted around me and the sun in my eyes.

Remind me never to read Rilke before bed. I dreamt of San Francisco, not the city of today, but as it was in the sixties (which is funny because the closest I've been to San Francisco in the sixties was reading Tripmaster Monkey; I was born in 1976). I somehow walked from the corner of Ashbury and Haight through the Castro (which was stubbornly the Castro of today; I hate anachronisms) to end up in Golden Gate Park. Somewhere along the line I took a trolley. I had a journal and was obsessed with aptly describing the color of the sky (it was sort of a mauve). Once I got to the park, I met a ballerina who was standing en pointe. We had a long conversation, most of which I do not remember except she told me, "Nobody loves a genius child".

For some reason, the line from the Langston Hughes poem frightened me, and turn and ran. I ended up on a sidewalk overlooking a cliff. There was a long-haired man who was spraypainting something in Latin (I don't remember what) on the cement. He looked up at me, smiled a toothless smile and vomited on the pavement. I woke up, realized I'd only been asleep for two hours, scribbled down some details of the dream in my journal, then went back to sleep.

Some unspecified threat hanging in the air. Sense of dread. Something about extremely toxic spiders or other jumping, biting insects. Someone (it seems at the time it is me) is attacked in a stairwell and goes to be evaluated. But then I am digging holes around our house, preparing to plant bulbs, and S. (my partner of 16 years) is with a nurse — the nurse seems to be one of our pediatricians' nurses, as it happens, though the clinic seems to be across the street from our house.

I am told (because maybe at this point I am dreaming from S's POV?) or perhaps I walk in just at the moment to hear the nurse saying something about the diagnosis, and the effects of the medicine she is giving to S., particularly about how it will cloud her vision. It's not clear whether her vision will improve with time or whether this is some permanent side-effect of what the nurse is calling an infection, related to some sort of foreign matter that the "spiders" injected into her eyes during the attack.

Before I/we can ask further questions I awoke in a panic, wondering how we would make ends meet, if S. were no longer able to work as a radiologist, due to the impairment of her vision.

Backstepping, there is an atmosphere that pervades this dream of a sort of humming threat. Dark stairwells, dim rooms, overcast skies for the most part, at least up to and including the examination room. Maybe this is the blurring of vision the nurse is talking about?

The girls are also there, somewhere, though no specific image remains. Someone, an older man, is standing in the flower beds, telling me things about tulips. Though it feels like fall, I am given to understand that spring has come (though then why am I planting bulbs?)... the man seems to suggest that spring has somehow failed to arrive in the right way and most bulbs have failed to come up this year, except for a few very flashy tulips, which is strange, since these are usually eaten by the deer.

There is a background of prior dreams that I'm not recalling that somehow bolster the sense of unease that pervades the parts I do recall.

I haven't remembered my dreams in weeks until last night.

I couldn't see much detail, it was hazy, but I was driving in the car with two women. One of them resembled my grandmother who has been dead for years and she was asking me if I liked shrimp. Yes, I do, I said, and suddenly I'm seated around this huge table. Everything is cluttered the way her bedroom used to be and my grandfather is there, too. We're all eating shrimp. I reach behind me and my ex is sitting there. I ask him if he needs me to peel his shrimp, and he begins asking very technical questions about the food before him. He turns into John suddenly, and the surroundings change...

John and I are on a beach. It's cloudy and very misty. I remember this dream having gone on for a long period of time. It seemed so real and in order, unlike most of my dreams which hop from one scene to the next. We're laughing and talking. There's this big tree in the middle of the sand surrounded by wooden boards, like a tree you'd buy at the store before you plant it. It's huge, though, and we're both leaning against it talking. He keeps leaning in close to me like he wants to kiss me, but I'm chewing on some food. He keeps doing this and I try to chew faster and swallow, but he has to leave before I even finish.

It is my job to plant the onions and then to pull them back up. It doesn't seem fair. I say, Why should one person have to do both? It seems like the endless hole-digging and hole-filling-in in Cool Hand Luke. If my work's going to be undone I don't want to be the one to do it, it's insulting. But the blind man insists.

The wheelchair is broken and lying in a crippled heap at the bottom of the stairs. I wonder if they had to carry her away from it, or if she was able to walk. Later I see her face in a peeling circus poster and I think Good at least she's happy.