I am not a writer by nature. I have always wanted to be a writer, and I have a notebook full of scraps of paper and outlines, detailing the stories I want to share with the world, but when I actually attempt to coherently put my budding thoughts to paper, I have a tendency to get lost in the details. Also, my lack of ability in the realm of spelling slows and frustrates me. So, bear with me.
When Sadie asked me to write something, I was flattered. "She must think me interesting, worthwhile, a man among men", I thought. Then reality set in and I realized she probably just needed a break, maybe some quiet time to get Raynard into a candlelit tub.
After the sense of flattery wore off, I forced myself to sit down and write, again dreading my eminent failure. Don't get me wrong, I write all the time. At my fairly fun 9-5, I write a ton and voluminously document the things people say, exhaustively researching the bullshit they feed me in an effort to "find" the truth in a labyrinth of lies. So, basically, my qualifications for the task assigned to me by Sadie is that I can type.
And type I did. Sadie gave me no guidelines, which is difficult for a person like me. I like to know what my assignment is. I am a person who gets things done, no matter what the obstacles between the beginning and the end. But in this case, there was no defined end... just a nebulous beginning. So, at first, I figured I would write about one of the several things that I feel defines me. I thought I would write about the importance of loyalty over all other human qualities. Then I thought, I would write about "perspective" and how we all see things from different angles. I thought, after that, perhaps I should write about fatherhood, and how that struggle has profoundly changed the person I am. As you can see, I was starting to loose it.
After writing and discarding, I now have several things that I could polish and send off to Sadie, should she ever ask me to write something again, but after putting some of those ideas to paper, it made me feel preachy. I mean, who is going give a flying F about my belief system? So, in the end, I decided to change direction and write about dreams. I don't mean the silly, sappy, aspirations we all have for our lives. I mean DREAMS, the odd and often scary shit that run through our subconscious minds while the sun hides behind our side of the planet. Why dreams? Well, dreams are weird and interesting.
When I was in college, I lived with the person that I considered my BFF, who in all actuality never considered me his BFF, but that is a theme for another day. Anyway, this person had had a rough life in ways I couldn't begin to understand. In an effort to comprehend human existence and the crappy way things sometimes go down, my BFF-1 occasionally spoke to a therapist. That therapist told my BFF-1 to keep a dream journal, and after my friend told me about it, I started one too.
I have always had vivid, bizarre, gory, and sex-filled dreams, but it wasn't until I started writing them down that I realized they were telling me something. Many of my dreams involve sex. In my dreams I have had sex with women I know and women I don't know, including my current wife and old girlfriends. I have had homosexual dream-sex with my BFF-3, who I met and lived with on my first real adventure away from home. My dreams are, more often than I feel comfortable admitting, violent. For several years I experienced a reoccurring theme in many dreams where I was in possession of a silver automatic pistol of obviously large caliber and a gigantic silver knife, both of which I used to lay furious, bloody waste to those deserving. Being chased, and sensing overwhelming fear of the unknown are also topics that regularly show up in my nocturnal ramblings.
So, as an introduction to the mind of me, I thought I would share an example of one of my recorded dreams from nearly 20 years ago. Prepare yourself for jotted notes, poor spelling, and a disjointed story. Reader beware.
12 March 1993: "... I was living with (BFF-1) in an upstairs apartment. We were not getting along well so I spent much of my time working in a library. There was an evil presence in the apartment. One day I received a phone call and a police investigator told me that (BFF-1) had been killing people in our apartment and burning the remains. I rushed home. In the dim light I found that all of the walls were red and there were several smoldering oil pot in the room. The house smelled of decay and the evil presence whispered to me that everything was my fault. I panicked and ran from the apartment. Even thought we lived upstairs, I left from the downstairs apartment at (insert real life address where BFF-1 and I lived at one time). As I ran, the evil spirit told me that my friends hated me. As I stood on the back steps, looking at the garage (of a house where GF and I were living), I saw all of my friends in a translucent doorway desperately trying to get away, but there was something clear and solid stopping them from exiting. It bent outward like a big bubble but they could not pass. I clearly saw (BFF-2) and my cat, Ali Pasha of Yanina, squashed within the mass of people. As I watched, the evil presence told me that they were running from me."
What in the world could this dream possibly be trying to tell me? Dreams are very personal, and in order to make any sense of it, I had to look at what was going on in my life at that time. First, in March 1993, I had been back from my travels for less than a year. I had moved into an apartment with GF. I felt somewhat abandoned by BFF-1, whose C-word of a wife had driven us apart based mostly on her knowledge of my infidelity to GF while away on my world adventure. This sense of abandonment had pushed me closer in my friendship with BFF-2. I think this dream was bourn of my anger toward BFF-1, a sense that he was wronging me and that his wife was a rotten cooze, but also a manifestation my own feelings of guilt at my disloyalty to my GF. I believe the dream was dredging my soul, showing me that I felt as though I did not deserve to have the people, and animals, in my life that were important to me. I was a bastard and deserved the contempt and abandonment of the ones I loved. The me in real life was immature and inconsiderate, but at the same time, I was at my core a loyalty guy, so my subconscious was reaching out to me to show me that I was on the wrong path.
Dreams are difficult to remember and even more difficult to understand, but dreams are powerful. That is why keeping a dream journal, and looking back over my subconscious roving, is such an important exercise in my life. Now if I could just figure out what it meant when I dreamed of 13 corpses crucified on my dorm room wall...
