beautiful, funny, sad & true

I’m in Yakima, walking on Browne Avenue, about a block away my old apartment. Two guys, approximately ten years older than I, are standing next to the wall of an industrial-looking building that does not really exist in that location. One guy is high. He’s got his ten-speed bicycle leaning against his hip. The other guy is waiting for someone to walk by, and this time that someone is me.

“Hey, man,” he says, walking toward me. “I want to give you something.”

“Thanks, but you don’t have to do that,” I reply.

“No, man, yeah I do.” He puts his entire wallet in my hand. It looks like the black leather one I have in real life, except his is much more beat up, and is even more stuffed full of receipts, bills, and cash. Even though the wallet is in my hand, I leave my hand flat, to show that I have no intention of taking it.

“Really, that’s okay. You need your wallet.”

“Look at this,” he says, a bit incredulously. He shows me a wad of fake-looking cash that he pulls from behind his real wad of cash. “You’re crazy.”

“You need your money, I’m doing okay.” I turn to walk away.

He pulls out a six-hundred-dollar bill, and holds it in front of my face. “Then just take this.” He puts it in my hand, but again I leave my palm open. Our hands are pressed together with the bill between them.

“Really, I don’t need it. You keep it.”

Now he thinks he’s being clever. As if to entice me to stop him from doing something bad with it, he says, “I’m just gonna go buy a piece with it.” I know he’s lying.

“Keep your money. See you around.” I walk away quickly. He becomes angry, but drops his wallet at taht moment, so he can’t do anything to chase me. High Guy tries to get onto his bike to come after me, but he isn’t capable of walking, so the bike tips over, and the guy falls on his face. When he looks up after me and tries to yell something, his face is bloody on one side.

There is a woman walking past all of us, giving us wide berth as she walks quickly to her black four-door Audi and gets in. I walk down to my apartment, but I go in the side entrance, just in case the guys are still watching me, which I don’t think they are. When I get inside, I see a large group of children filing past my window, screaming loudly. My blond wife (not someone I know in real life, and I’m not married) enters the room and starts to loudly sing a nonsensical song. She looks very strange, and her face actually changes shape and become slightly disfigured as I stand there looking at her. I try to get her to stop singing by kissing her, which works somewhat, but she still continues humming while we’re kissing.

That’s when my alarm went off and I woke up.

I never felt threatened, or out of control of the situation. I was very calm, and somehow knew just the right way to interact with this guy.

Very strange morning for dreams. I was only asleep for 45 minutes, but during that time I had an uncountable number of short dreams of all types. Some were ads, for a refrigerator, and for some sort of new Google service (?), and for a couple of other things that are eluding me at the moment. Two were extremely fast-paced cartoons, one of which was about a little Peruvian donkey named Mayaya. (It makes me laugh just to write that sentence, because I know how weird it must sound.) I don’t remember the other cartoon. Out of all those dreams, the only one that had any kind of narrative that I could write out was the one about the two guys and the humming wife.

OneYearAgo

I’m in a town that is not named or known to me, but it looks like the north end of 55th Avenue in Yakima, the street and the town in which I grew up, so we’ll just say it’s that.

I’m walking with two friends around my own age. One is a guy with whom I work in real life, the other is a woman who I don’t know in real life. The two know each other in the dream, though. We’re walking up at the end of the street, where Cascade Avenue meets 55th, and there are two young hoodlum kids walking around near us, trying to associate themselves with us. We try our best to ignore them, and we turn and walk away, down the hill toward the Chestnut end of 55th.

The two kids stay up at the end of the street, which leaves the three of us. I’m a few steps ahead of them, so I stop to let them pass, and the woman asks, “What did you do that for?”

I replied, “Oh, it’s just that I hate to have people walking around behind me, so I usually just let them go around.” [This is true in real life too, actually.]

“Oh, okay.”

We’re keeping an eye on the two kids up the street, and then my companions decide it’s time for them to go home, and they turn and walk in a different direction, away from both me and the kids. I’m now walking alone down the street, and I hear the kids start to yell something to me. They’re trying to get each other fired up and talk themselves into whatever it is they’re intending to do to me. I walk deliberately slowly, to show them that I’m not afraid. I turn and walk into my house.

Inside, the house is nothing like our house on 55th was. It has windows that stretch clear to the floor, with large vertical blinds covering them. The walls are painted black, except where they are white above the windows. It’s very stark and interesting, and also decorated in a very Modern Art style, in a way that our house definitely was not.

From inside, I can hear the two kids yelling things to each other like, “Hey, I think he went into THIS house.” They run from window to window, trying to see in, and I’m quickly trying to turn off lights and close the blinds to make it appear that no one’s home. Too many blinds are open, and that worries me, but the kids don’t seem to notice me, so I go around to the back of the house, where there is a bay window that is rounded instead of angled, with a cobblestone floor. It’s sort of a room that overlooks the gardens in the back yard. I lie down on my right side against the cement wall, and one of the kids comes to the window and puts his face against it. I’m directly beneath him, so he can’t see me. I panic and my panic awakens me.

I’m lying in the same position I was in in the dream, except that I’m on my left side, so it takes me a minute to orient myself and figure out what just happened.

Life may imitate art, but dreams also imitate life sometimes too.

Last night, I dreamt that I was rehearsing for the play, and that it was completely chaotic, and nobody–myself included–seemed to know what was happening. So it was pretty much like last night’s tech rehearsal.

From there, the dream changed its location to a dusty basement, full of Tossed In and all the other actors. It seems we had thrown a party recently, but not cleaned up after it, so we were walking around in this basement looking at all of the stuff we’d left behind. Barbecue with the charred remains of animal of undetermined species, various dishes, cooking pots, wine bottles, everything was all over the place. Tossed In told me that if I could make a list of all the stuff that was down there, that would be great “because then we can delegate” people to clean it all up. “Okay,” I said, “but I won’t have any time to do it until after Saturday [when the play is over].”

Then I had an almost completely unrelated dream, in which I’m lying on the sofa in the same basement (the relation to the other dream stops there) cuddling with an ex-girlfriend who will remain nameless here. (It’s probably not who you think.) We’re not really doing anything, but my hand is underneath her shirt. We’re lying there silently for quite a while, when she gets up abruptly and says, “I don’t think so.” I make apologies, but she leaves. I stay on the sofa alone for a long time after that, feeling uncomfortable and remorseful.

It’s safe to say that last night wasn’t the most restful night I’ve ever had.

Last night, I actually had two dreams that I remember.

The first was a car crash dream, but it was different from the countless others that I’ve had, by virtue of the fact that it involved my car.

* * * * *

I’m in Yakima, and I’m driving on 54th Avenue. I’m stopped at a stop sign, and attempting to turn right onto Lincoln Avenue. Justin B. is riding in the passenger seat, and we notice that there have been quite a few accidents already. There’s one wreck to our left, and three or four groups of totaled cars to our right. We pull out to look past the wreck on our left, when a blue Chevy pickup comes racing past all the wrecks. We see him, and have only enough time to say, in unison, “We’re screwed,” before the truck hits my fender and sends my car spinning to the side of the road. We’re not hurt, but the fender goes sliding up the road, and suddenly my car’s interior is all white and padded with cloth. I get out and walk up the street to retrieve the fender. The back side of it is painted a sort of olive-green abalone color, and as it reflects in the sun, I think, ‘Wow, that’s really pretty. I wonder why they didn’t paint the car that color instead?’

* * * * *

And then here’s the second dream.

* * * * *

I’m on vacation, and I’ve brought a couple of friends with me; EngagedFriendChris (though he’s not engaged in the dream) and a woman he is on his first date with. We are on a tropical island in the Caribbean called Tuva. [No, it’s not the real Tuva, and yes, I know where the real Tuva is, and that it’s not an island.]

Anyway. I’m riding an old bicycle around, and Chris and his woman friend are walking. I’ve been to this island before, so I tell them that we “HAVE to go to the little village that’s just up the road. It’s really beautiful.” We continue on to a place where the road forks, and we can choose between going down the hill toward the water, where the town is, and up the hill toward the forest. The sun is starting to set, so we decide to go to the town. Once we get there, Chris and his friend go off on their own, and I decide to explore the town by bicycle. The town has narrow, cobblestone streets, and there are lots of little shops and restaurants. I ride down an alley, and I’m surprised to find that after a few sharp turns, it comes to an end in a tiny courtyard restaurant. I turn back, so as not to disturb the patrons.

I head back toward the waterfront, and come to a hotel where my family is staying. I don’t go meet them, but instead go down to the large basement room of the hotel, where there are a bunch of other bicycles parked in a rack, and a bunch of little kids down there playing. I leave my bike there, and walk to the other side of the room, to find a few shirts that appear to have been left there. I take them and walk upstairs to the room with my family. We visit for a while, and then I realize that I need to take the shirts back. I go back downstairs and hand the shirts to the man–also an American–who is supervising the children. I go to pick up my bike, but it isn’t where I’d left it. I look everywhere in the room, but it’s nowhere to be found.

* * * * *

Oh yeah, and I just remembered: One Year Ago

This morning, I had a short–but interesting–dream. I always set my clock for 6:45 (too early) every day, and then hit the snooze button three or four times, until it’s 7:20 or so (too late). During one of those snooze sessions is when this dream happened.

* * * * * * *

I’m in my room at my childhood home on 55th Avenue in Yakima. It’s the middle of the night, and I’m in bed. The curtains are open, and the moon is shining brightly into the room. It’s bright enough that I actually think, ‘I bet I could probably read in bed if I wanted to.’ I reach for a book on my bedside table, when suddenly I see a bright orange flash coming from the end of the street. One of the houses at the Summitview end [that’s a street in Yakima] of the street has just exploded into a thirty-foot wall of fire.

A fire truck races by with all its lights flashing, but the engine is silent. I get up and walk to the window to look, when suddenly about eight or ten pieces of flaming debris start to land in our yard, and on our house. The house up the street explodes a second time, with an even larger wall of fire. I run to wake up my mom and my brother, and then I see that in our front yard, there are lots of small fires burning.

I pull on a pair of jeans and quickly try to decide which of my instruments to take out to my car. I decide on the cello, the accordion and my ancient white Guild electric guitar. Interesting that the instruments were all the ones that I have now, and that the car was the red Honda that I have now.

* * * * *

That’s the point at which I woke up, one minute before the next snooze alarm went off.

Also interesting that today is the day I’m going to visit my dad. Hunh. I’m sure that fact and this dream don’t have the merest possibility of a hint at a suggestion of a connection.

Maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe I’m like the main character in the book The Lathe of Heaven, whose dreams change the real world–and he’s the only one who remembers the way things were before he dreamed the changes–and that maybe I’m nocturnally bound and determined to destroy Yakima once and for all, via my dreams.