beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last night I got home from a gig and just completely crashed. I slept for eight consecutive hours, and during that time, I had the longest dream I’ve ever had in my entire life. I don’t remember it linearly enough to tell it all, but I do remember most of it. It was comprised of many scenes; each was very long, with a different cast of characters (many of whom I know in real life – there are too many of them to explain, so I’ll just mention them as they appear, and you’ll have to just roll with that, I guess), and all of the scenes were all linked somehow.

Scene 1:

A couple of my neighbors (Skip & Susan), my mom and stepdad, and my work friend Val and her three-year-old son are all outside talking in the around-the-corner part of the yard of the house next door. Everyone is talking; Mom and Stepdad are sitting on the grass next to each other, Skip is sitting on the steps kinda near them, Val is standing on the sidewalk talking to Skip, her son is walking from person to person like three-year-olds do, and Susan and I are standing in the street, a bit apart from the group, talking to each other but still paying attention to everyone else’s discussion. Val’s son walks over and stands right next to Skip’s shoulder, which makes him very uncomfortable. He asks Val’s son to back up a little bit. The kid laughs in a high-pitched and obnoxious way, and continues to stand next to Skip. Val doesn’t say anything to her son, but continues to tell a story to Skip and my family. Skip is becoming visibly agitated, and quickly rolls and lights a cigarette. The kid is still laughing and standing next to him, so Skip finally reaches around and gently pushes the kid away from him, telling him to please step back. Val steps behind Skip, grabs the back of his collar, pulls it tight and starts to berate him for ‘throwing her son around.’ My mom steps over and starts to yell at Val about how she should have ‘handled her son.’ She pushes Val, who makes a show of very dramatically tripping down the stairs and falling into the street next to Susan and me. She starts to cry and yell at my mom, but once she realizes that we all know that she’s not really hurt, she stops.

Scene II:

I am on a chartered bus, with a group of fellow actors, filmmakers, film crew and various supernumeraries, all traveling to a film shoot that is taking place in a large Victorian house out in the remote hills near Livermore, California. The group consists of myself, a few people from the play reading group, Jen B and Jason R, an older guy who has long black hair and wears a black top hat, and quite a few other people. The bus is full. We arrive at the house in the early evening and set up our gear. There are broken black clouds in the sky, creating a threatening feeling, which some of us comment on as we walk from the bus into the house. The actors (I’m one of them) walk into a large room to talk and rehearse. Sarah C comes in from the other room (she is one of the production assistants) to tell us that they’re just about ready to start filming.

Scene III:

The filming has begun, in the main part of the Victorian house, and it’s going well. Sarah C is standing near the door, holding a clipboard and watching us. There are two cameras, each of which is on an opposite side of the room. There is lighting gear and all sorts of cabling everywhere. They are filming from down low, so the floor can be cluttered, because it’s not in the shots. Suddenly, a group of anarchists (I don’t know what else to call them) bursts in to the room where. There are about ten or twelve young men and women, mostly men, in their early twenties, and they are dressed in a mixture of styles, somewhere between paramilitary and punk rock. They appear to be hyped up on drugs. They have all sorts of knives and guns, which they make no attempt to hide. Two of the guys grab Sarah and one of them holds a knife to her throat. A few of the actors are pulled aside also. Some of them are pushed to the ground and threatened, and others are taken into the next room. Sarah somehow gets free and turns around to try and calmly talk with the group’s leader. A wiry, wild-eyed young guy, wearing camouflage pants and a bandana, grabs me by the arm and pulls a very large fork out of his pocket. He holds it menacingly next to my right eye. He is watching his friends wreak havoc on our group and steal our gear and belongings. His hand is shaking with adrenaline. I am very frightened, and I tell him quietly, ‘Please don’t. . .do anything.’ He laughs and moves the fork even closer. Finally the anarchists seem to think that they’ve done enough, or that they’ve gotten what they came for, and they start to leave. They load a bunch of the film gear and and a bunch of other stuff (like small but expensive pieces of furniture from the house, and some of our personal stuff, like cell phones, wallets and digital cameras, and even clothes) into their battered old SUV and leave. The house is a disaster. Just about anything that they didn’t take they either knocked over or destroyed completely. We are all a bit dazed, but relieved, and Sarah is taking stock of the situation, making notes on her clipboard about the extent of the damage. Several of us stumble outside to get some air.

Scene IV:

It’s the middle of the afternoon the next day, and I’m riding on DogBus. No one else from the film is on there with me. Each of us went our own way after the incident. I was taking the bus to Yakima with a smattering of random people, including a heavyset Native American man in his fifties and AlcoholicUnionGuy from my old job. There is an open area without any seats near the back of the bus, where the Indian guy and I are sitting on the floor, making little jokes and counting quarters from an enormous pile of them that is there, inexplicably. I keep having to start again because I always put them back into the same pile, instead of setting them aside into new piles. The bus reaches its destination on C******t and 55th (around the corner from my childhood home). I almost ask if someone can drive me to 60th and L*****n (my family’s current home), but I decide not to ask, because I don’t trust or want to spend any more time with the people from the bus. I tell myself that I’ll get myself there, and that ‘I’ll walk if need be.’

That’s all I can remember, but there was much more. I really wish I could remember how everything linked together, because it really did flow from strange scene to strange scene. If you stuck with this story all the way to the end, I applaud you.

OneYearAgo

This morning, I had a dream that I kept waking out of (thank you, alarm clock!) and going right back into every time I hit the ‘snooze’ button (thank you, brain!).

* * * * * *

My friend Andrea, one of her female friends and I are hanging out and walking around downtown Portland somewhere, late at night. We walk into a mall, which is closed. There is a huge, lighted fountain in one section of the mall, and there is a grand piano in the section that is located behind the fountain.

We walk to the piano, and Andrea starts to play something totally random and cool, with lots of banging and dissonance mixed with beauty (in A minor!). Then she steps on one of the pedals, and it repeats the phrase that she ended with. She stands up and smiles, and her friend and I start laughing and clapping. The piano is still making sound, and I sit down and play octave A’s up high, kinda slowly and rhythmically around Andrea’s loop. Then the loop fades out, and I morph the piece into a little something in A minor, and then change it into 7/8 time. I have a little cello exercise I made up, and it was based on that exercise.

After I finish, the sound of the fountain sounds like a crowd of people clapping, so I laugh, stand up from the bench, face the fountain and say, “Thank you! Everyone! Thank you!” The three of us laugh, and then turn away and walk out of the mall.

The setting for the dream changes, and we are now standing in a short line of people waiting to get into a movie theater. Once we walk through the door, however, we realize that it is actually a movie set. It is a large, wooden room, with bright lights in the ceiling. The filmmaker (who, incidentally is DrummerScotty, who I play with in IrishBand in real life) is shooting a scene involving a guy and girl making out on a chaise longue. The two are doing their thing valiantly, and Andrea seems exasperated with the whole thing. She says something like, “I hate acting. It seems like anybody could just be making out with anybody else.”

This morning, I had a gruesome dream that started out nicely enough.

* * * *

I’m in my apartment building. (This is not anywhere I’ve lived in real life.) The interior is very modern; black walls with red and silver trim, and those little tiny halogen track lights hanging from the ceiling everywhere. The building is fourteen stories tall. I live on the second floor, and my brother lives on the thirteenth floor. Each apartment is accessible only by elevator, and each separate elevator stop is for each separate apartment. In other words, when you step off of the elevator, you’re in the front room of an apartment.

My brother has three cats in this dream; one large white one and two kittens, one white and one orange. I’m in my apartment doing something, and all of a sudden the elevator door opens, and the three cats come spilling out. I like them, but I’m getting ready to leave, so I herd them back into the elevator. (It seems that herding cats IS possible, but only in dreams!)

I step inside the elevator, hit the ’13’ button and then the ‘close doors’ button, and quickly step out. The doors begin to close, and just as they are about to close completely, the little orange kitten makes a dash for the door. He doesn’t make it. The door closes on him, and he is crushed.

I try to pull the doors apart, and hit the stop button, or do anything I can, but it’s too late. The dream’s location changes, and now I’m on the thirteenth floor, waiting for the elevator to arrive. When it does, the orange kitten’s limp, bloody paw is hanging outside the elevator door. The door opens, and I’ll spare you the details of what I saw. Suffice it to say that it was completely gruesome. The other two cats come running out, and I kneel beside the crushed kitten, sobbing.

* * * *

There are two realities in this dream; one in the ‘real’ world, and one that exists and looks the same, except that you access it by typing a password into a text-based Invitation screen on a very old PC, hidden in the back corner of the office building in which I work. (No, I’ve never played Second Life or any of that avatar nonsense.) There are a few people in this dream who I either know or have met in real life, but the majority of them are not.

* * * * *

The dream starts in the ‘real’ world. My supervisor is Indian (a nice guy who I met once when he was doing some training at my workplace in real life), and it’s my first day at a new job. He gets me set up with my own desk and computer. I look around the large room. It’s sort of a lounge area, dimly but warmly lit, with a handful of sofas, wooden end tables with modern lamps, and Oriental rugs. I can see some large super-computers and network cabinets just beyond the edges of the room; this seems to be a computer company. There are a bunch of people my own age and younger, male and female , who are sitting on (or standing near) the sofas, talking and laughing with each other. They seem very friendly, and before long, I find myself invited into their circle to make their acquaintance. They ask if this is my first day. I say yes. One of the women asks if I’d like to go to dinner with all of them. Apparently this is a common occurrence.

My supervisor is still there setting things up at my desk, and when I go back over to my desk, he says something like, “I have another place for you too. Come this way.” We walk clear around to the other side of the building, where the light is fluorescent and bright. Instead of desks, there are light gray cubicles. No one else is in the room but myself and my supervisor. This does not feel uncomfortable, it’s just where we both happen to be.

Periodically, I go back to my other desk, and when I do, it seems that quite a bit of time has passed. It feels like only a half hour to me, but my new friends seem to have been working for hours, and making plans for the evening, or for the next day. I check on my computer, and find that I have 693 unread e-mails, many of which are ongoing conversations that I’ve missed between my friends. I’m included in these e-mails as well, with people asking me things and explaining a few of the inside jokes. I see a message from one of the women that says, ‘Ouch. . .that remark. :(‘ I don’t remember saying anything, and I certainly haven’t written anything either. I don’t even know anyone, so I decide to ask around to find out who this person is, and what she thinks I said.

I see Charles (with whom I work in real life) sitting at a desk, and I ask him if he knows who she is. He does not. I walk back to the group in the lounge area, and they don’t know who she is either. They take me to the corner of the room, where an ancient PC terminal is sitting around the corner from the main room, out of view of everything. It asks for a password, which I instinctively know and type on the keyboard.

I find myself in the ‘other’ world. CollegeGirlfriend is there with me. We are walking in some sort of hospital, and I’m carrying a large box of computer equipment. Charles is walking down the hall in the opposite direction, and does not acknowledge us. A nurse appears, hands us a clipboard, and asks us to sign in. We do, and she takes us through a long, dark corridor and into another lounge room, in another computer company. We make new friends with everyone there, but we’re not there to work in this place. Something about these interactions feels different, and I am a bit unnerved. CollegeGirlfriend is talking to someone, but I need to put my box of computer parts somewhere, so I leave her and go back out into the corridor to find another room. I find one and enter it. The lights are off, and the only thing in the room is another ancient PC with the same password screen on it. I type the password.

I’m now standing in the real world, in the warm-colored lounge office. My friends are there, but now that I’ve had this experience, I want to find out more about how it all works. I ask a couple of them to show me the old computer again, but they say that they’re unable to, because it appears in a different location each time. It’s up to me to find it for myself, and what’s more, it’s in a different place for each person. I decide to search for it, and after a while of rummaging through a few dark offices, I find it, on a desk in the hallway, next to the drinking fountain. There is some sort of colorful program running on the screen, and it doesn’t look the same as the other screens have. I pull up the rolling metal chair and sit at the desk, wondering what I should do. A voice says, “Just enter the password, like you normally do.” The colorful program stops running, and a password box appears on the screen. I type in the password.

I’m in the other world now. CollegeGirlfriend is standing there. I start to tell her about this experience. She seems skeptical about it. I decide to show her. I grab her hand and start to walk. She pulls her hand away, but continues to walk a step behind me. “What are you looking for?” she asks. We walk into the large corridor, without anyone stopping us or asking for us to sign in. We stop when we find our friends, but they all seem agitated about something. I tell her to wait for me, and I start running through lots of hallways, looking for my friend Blaine. It occurs to me that he works at this company, and that he may know the answers to some of my questions.

I come to a metal door, and when I open it, I poke my head out to see a small room painted completely white, with a large, vertically sliding metal door that is slid up to reveal daylight, and a street. Cars are driving by on the street, and Blaine is standing outside, being interrogated by three men in suits, navy blue, charcoal gray, and light green, respectively. I pull my head back inside and shut the door behind me, thinking that the three men will think this is a movie set. I lock the door with my thumb and sit down against the wall. I can feel the thin wall shaking as the men are now banging on it and trying the door handle in an attempt to get inside. I sit for a long minute and then decide that I should go and check on everyone else. I run back to the room where they are, and I see them hurriedly packing their things, and leaving with whatever they can carry.

I started to drift off to sleep, and a female voice said, “Do you want to learn? I can show you how.” I somehow knew she was telling me she would teach me how to lucid-dream. I rolled my eyes in an attempt to mimic the REM cycle and hopefully enter the dream state. In response to the voice, I thought, “What do I do?” I turned over into a more comfortable position, and in the instant before I drifted off to sleep, the same voice said, “I’ll be there,” meaning that once I fell asleep, she’d be there waiting to guide me.

Then my alarm went off.

I pushed the button and went back to the same position I’d been lying in. I started to drift off once again, and had the same almost-lucid feeling. The voice told me gently, “Now do something.” I started to reach my arm out into the darkness in my dream. The alarm went off. I hit the button and turned back onto my other side and rolled my eyes again. As I finally drifted off, the alarm went off a third time, and I had to get up.

So incredibly beautiful, and so frustrating at the same time. I wish I could have stayed in bed for a few more hours, because I’m certain that I would finally have learned how to lucid-dream.

OneYearAgo