dream fragment

dreamBirthday Party

I’m in the car with Pehry. He’s driving pretty recklessly with someone else in the front seat telling him to slow down. We take a sharp turn into my dad’s auto shop. The parking lot is full of tiny cars for children but exact versions of their bigger counterparts. I keep saying I want one, and then remember that I “have” one, a tiny tan minivan. It’s parked out back.

We get out and go into my dad’s shop. It’s a party inside; it’s my birthday! My family and friends are all inside. No one pays too much attention to me, but in my dream world this isn’t strange and I am content just walking around looking at the things in the shop.

I walk over to my Nana who is sitting around a turntable. There are old nursery rhyme records all stacked on it. I go through it and each one is colored and decorated with story elements: one is green with a frog, one is red with a pony, one is blue with a bear, etc.

My mom comes over to me and gives me a little ticket. It says “dunk house” and I interpret this as a ticket for me to go into one of those dunk booths at the fair. I quickly give it back to her, and she explains that my Nana is in the dunk house at the fair this year and with this ticket I can dunk her no matter if I hit the target or not.

Everyone keeps doing their thing at this mini-party and Autumn comes in from somewhere. She has her school bag, and I “know” that the door behind me connects to a few classrooms. Because she’s really big, everyone gets nervous and kind of moves towards the middle of the room to make room for her (she’s not THAT big).

She comes over to me and talks about missing a certain project that she’ll have to re-do.

“What? No, that project was that we had to listen to records in class. Why would you have to do that out of school? It’s so easy and dumb,” I say. She has her usual bad attitude and just shrugs her shoulders and says mean shit about everyone around us.
Someone outside is driving a specially-made car.

“Isn’t that the car Marty made that runs off blood instead of gasoline?” I say.

“Yeah I know about Marty,” Autumn retorts as if it’s “cool” to know Marty and she wanted to make sure I knew that she knew about him. We talk about how the problem with the car is that the blood soaks through the seats and stuff so your clothes get bloody and you can’t keep papers on the seats and stuff like that.

Fragment

I walk into a really small classroom. There’s a substitute teacher (who is an actual teacher at a school I went to) and a chocolate cake sitting on the only table in the room.

“Fuck yeah!” I say as I come in and sit down. The kids behind me are excited too: cake and a substitute. I have déjà vu (or perhaps I dreamed this before, or perhaps a dream memory) that I had been to this class and had cake before.

I get a little embarrassed because I don’t know how to sit without being too close to anyone. Kate (a…friend of mine) is here. We all take big slices of cake and talk about dumb things.

We have a project to do in class: listen to a few certain records. The teacher changes from the substitute to my old U.S. History teacher.

Fragment

Jack, Heather and I are looking through a big dumpster of metal scraps, looking for good pieces to put into a trash compactor. We are having a lot of fun doing this.

Fragments of Fragments

• A room made of zebra print. Not painted over or wallpapered, but the structure is the patterns of zebras.
• I check a letter written to Morpheus, looking for a response. I go through sheet after sheet, looking for markings.
• I go downstairs and make myself toast.

Visiting Space

My parents and I are going to visit outerspace. Its night time and we’re in a family car traveling to the space station. We stop at McDonalds and while they’re inside, I get into my space suit. It’s a stretchy black mesh material and on each side of me I have some control pads for my hands.

When they come out, we eat and drive over to the station. Every family or visitor has their own cube inside a building (I don’t remember the building, just being in the cube). It’s a big wooden box with a wheelchair access incline inside of steps that lead into the center of the room. We get into place and I guess we rocket off!

At first, we’re all nervous and doing our jobs stabilizing the cube in space and tracking ourselves to our destination. Then we settle down and my mom starts ice fishing, because there’s an empty hole in the bottom of the cube to the right side. I look into it and there’s just black black water, as if the water was over the blackness of space (and then floating beneath our cube?) The fish are mechanical but also organic in a way that they grow the mechanical parts of themselves. My dad is playing with fishing line and hooking little beads together on it and stringing it around the cube in a decorative way.

I don’t remember landing, but we all are on stable ground now. I was unengaged with what my parents were doing for most of the trip and when I go over to them now that we’re here, I realize they’re fighting. They speak something about a lady that my dad meets here, or maybe a guy that my mom meets here. I don’t care! Let’s go explore!

All of the cool parts are lost in memory. My mom is somewhere, and I’m with my dad. We are about to go into a museum for something. The world around us is the same as Earth, just more exciting because it’s NOT Earth. It feels like I’m in an amusement park, and everything could be mundane but still not that bad.

Inside, the museum is a multi-tier building that stacks on top of itself. The biggest room is the first, and then you walk up stairs to a smaller room, etc until the last room which is an observatory. My dad and I are in the last room. Instead of peering out of the glass windows, I look at the display case in the center. There are a lot of crystal rock art sculptures. I’m amazed at one of them: It’s all solid clear crystal with a fist coming out of one side. I’d assume that it was carved to look that way, but so much of it seems to be natural. I am on another planet, so I don’t question it. I put it in my jacket after pondering about video cameras watching us and hoping they just aren’t around.

We walk out and no one notices me or questions me. Outside, we have to go through a gate with a guard who’ll direct us to our next attraction. The big rock has slipped down my pant leg, settling kind of near my shoe. The exterior of the museum looks like my old neighborhood.

On a tree there’s a hand painted sign that says “Give me one instant chocolate Reece’s cake mix and I’ll trade you a FREE TOILET!” That’s dumb, I think. No one wants a toilet. I have the conclusion that the guard we’re about to see put that sign up for everyone to see who comes from the museum, hoping someone has one of the cake mixes.

He looks at me and my dad and doesn’t question my bulging pant leg. We’re directed to the cubelot, where we meet up with my mom. She’s mad at my dad and I see a voluptuous lady with a thousand blonde curls wave at my dad. I see! We get into the cube and start going home.

Half-way through space, we stop at a little planet to get some food. It looks kind of like the other McDonalds. My dad meets his friend and tells us about some new information they found out about Earth.

“They took apart all the walls on Earth and on the light switches they found hind markings. E.T. did it when he was having his stay on our planet! Whenever a light turns green, I puke.” My dream self thought this made sense: he implied that all the walls of Earth, as if there were walls on the “outside” of our planet, were inspected for residue of the infamous E.T. (the movie dude in my dream was an actual alien who visited for a little while). The light switches he spoke of were what made the traffic lights work. The word “hind” was a kind of sexual term that implied he tried to have sex with them.




Fragment
It’s the last two days of the world. Everything has been ending and I am alive for these last days. I jump between the layers of my potential realities, but it’s all over…

Dream Graduation

It’s the first day of my senior year. Most of the student body is sitting on a giant multi-tier bench system that isn’t quite bleachers. It’s in the middle of a giant intersection downtown. All of us are seated by popularity, with the most popular at the bottom with no one in front of us so we can see the “show” that’s going to happen. I happen to be in the very front row (though I was never that popular). From where the benches are, we can see upper main street which trails off and turns a corner. It’s sloped quite a bit more than usual.

The “show” starts. All of the “really really cool” fashionably dressed kids come out and use main street like a runway. The first is this big black guy who was never dressed nicely at all, but he was wearing some classy clothes (classy in dream terms: truthfully it was quite wacky). A few more people trickle out of some building passed the curve of the street. None are girls!

As the fashion students strut around downtown, the whole world turns, or at least the benches we are on. If one starts walking down the street instead of up, all of us lean toward that end of the street. I am so scared that I’m going to fall off the bench which would be really embarrassing. Whenever the benches turn, I grab onto the girl next to me: a girl I know in waking life, Hilary. Behind me, my ex-boyfriend Dylan is sitting. In my dream, they are dating, so it’s awkward that I’m holding onto his new girlfriend pretty tightly.

Once the show is over, all the fashionably dressed popular students are allowed to look around main street alone; we are all here to visit the new shops on the first day of school. I realize that we will be able to join them row by row and I’m in the first row. I panic because that means all the still-sitting students will watch what I look at. My row is dismissed.

I walk around kind of hazily and embarrassed for a few minutes, waiting to see someone I know on the street and for the rest of the rows to come join us. Eventually they do but I can’t find anyone I know. I decide to spend my time as I should: looking at the new places.

The first place I see is a new tattoo shop right next to our older one. It’s called Astral Tattoos and it isn’t an actual store, it’s a pink and green painted wooden booth. They’re selling body modification, tattoos and henna tattoos. I don’t pay attention to what else or what specifically the tattoos are, but I imagine they’d be interesting.

I find my brother Holden (who doesn’t go to my school) and follow him around until we are all brought into the big building at the end of the street. It’s the high school (not where it usually is, it also looks very different).

Inside, we are all wearing our caps and gowns now. Everyone’s color is maroon; it’s our school colors (not in waking life). I follow a few students who are in front of me, because we are arranged alphabetically. Steven and Jamal are before me and Adam is in back of me, although all of them have last names that are in back of where I would have been. I’m really nervous and walk into the bathroom for a moment, look at myself and walk back out. We are led into the auditorium of the school which is absolutely huge and decorated with maroon everything.

I sit down in my row with Steven next to me. Jamal isn’t here so there’s an empty seat. As the students are being shuffled in, I question where I am.

“Is this a dream?” I look around but make up a history to make sense of where I am: yes, the graduation memory that comes to mind is actually when I graduated junior year. Now it’s senior year, so this is real life. Wasted dream check.

Behind me, Martin who is a junior but is sitting with the seniors is handing out camera kits for us to use. I go to grab one but realize that I don’t talk to him a lot and that would be weird and he’d want someone he knows to have them.

While I sit and wait for the ceremony to start, I look at a pamphlet that I have in my hands. It has a bunch of activities we were supposed to do while downtown. They include things like woodworking, pottery, volleyball, etc. I didn’t sign up for anything. I wake up.


Fragment

Heather invites me to her house. It’s a huge place and her room is the size of a usual upstairs area in a normal sized house. We go passed her room which is quite barren. We seem to be in the attic. In back of her room she has a big stage that’s halfway on the house, halfway on the roof with wide glass windows containing a backstage area. She begins to dance with life-sized puppets as her back up dancers. The music plays and she steps into the darkness about half-way on the stage, the dancers follow, and everyone glows in the dark.


Fragment 2

I remember eating a lot of maple sugar through a straw out of this tiny dollhouse. I drained it of maple sugar and felt sick. I could see all the sugar particles in my thigh which was where I would gain the weight if I didn't start running. The radio started to play and a commercial was discussing weight gain.

"Usually when people eat fatty foods, they will gain weight. However, some people have a large amount of bridges in their body which distributes the fat evenly, so they don't gain any weight." I knew I had a lot of "bridges" in my body and didn't worry.