beautiful, funny, sad & true

I’m driving along a two-lane road, with dense forest on both sides. Snorsha (not her real name) and Tossed In (not his real name, either, but it sounds like that) are with me in the car. We are returning from an exploration trip of some sort.

On the left side of the road is an opulent Spanish-style mansion, which has since fallen into disrepair, and been overgrown by the forest. It appears to have been built before the turn of the last century, around 1880 or so. Moss covers everything, and ferns are growing out of every open ground space, but the place is still mostly intact, including all of the glass windows.

There is a long, low stucco and brick wall along the edge of the mile-long property, and the building complex itself is probably a half mile long. I say to my companions, “Look at this amazing place! Can you imagine what it must have looked like in its heyday? And didn’t it used to be a mausoleum or cemetery or something, after that?” Neither of them knows the answer, but we are all entranced by the place as we drive by.

Eventually, we come to the end of the property, where there is an enormous, open courtyard paved entirely with red bricks. It’s about four o’clock on an overcast day, so the orange fluorescent floodlights are beginning to light up. There is a dip in the curb, so I drive into the courtyard and park the car in the middle of it. The three of us get out and walk back toward the building complex. On the side of the courtyard, away from the building, we can see that there is, in fact, an old cemetery that recedes down the hill and away from the courtyard and main complex.

We’re not the only ones who are investigating. There are a few people milling around in groups of two or three, all there for the purpose of investigating this tremendous, unusual and remote place. The three of us decide to separate. I walk toward what seems to be the main entrance. A man has set up a tiny food cart near the door, where he sells roasted chicken and chocolate-covered ice cream bars.

I walk through the entrance and into a large room–probably five hundred feet across and one hundred feet deep–that is also floored with red brick. Despite the patina left by years of this type of foot traffic, the floor in this room still retains a slight polish that reveals its exquisite quality. The room is softly illuminated by natural light, which shines through the ceiling that is made almost entirely of frosted glass. I wander through this room for a while, and then I notice a double door along one wall. I walk to it, open it and step through.

The room I enter is much smaller, perhaps a hundred feet across. The room is dark, except for torches that have been lit and placed in holders on the walls. The floor is made up of large, gray marble tiles. The ceilings are so high that they disappear into the darkness, high above the faint light from the torches.

There are a few other people like myself in the room. There is also a group of around ten actors in beautiful, multi-colored costumes. They are holding out scripts and reading from them, but still acting the parts at the same time. The performance is excellent and riveting, and the audience is spellbound. The actors are not confined to a corner of the room, but instead are walking around everywhere. If not for the bright costumes, the actors and the audience would be indistinguishable. I spend quite a bit of time watching and listening.

This is the point at which I woke up.

The dream I had two nights ago was a nightmare. The dream I had last night was supremely beautiful.

TWO NIGHTS AGO:

The setting is an amazing house on a bluff on the coast of California. There is a pool, and a deck, and a patio, and multiple levels to this party. There are approximately two hundred people at this party. Everyone is chatting and laughing and having a great time. I am standing near the back of the crowd.

From the adjoining bluff comes a round of gunfire. There is a man on the edge of the cliff who is pointing a gun and strafing the crowd that I am a part of. Lots of people are shot, and everyone else completely panics. I fall down on my side on the patio, with my arm over a young kid who’s standing right near me. The people who haven’t been shot are all falling down, pretending we’re dead so that the gunman will leave us alone.

I pull a blanket over myself and the kid who I’m protecting, and I wait for the gunman to leave. After a couple of interminable minutes, he is looking over my shoulder. I start to freak out. I think, ‘If he sees me move, I’m dead. I’m dead.’ He moves the kid next to me and lifts the blanket I’m holding. I make a point of keeping my arm limp, to preserve the illusion of my death.

That’s the point at which I woke up, scared to death, heart racing and sweat pouring out of my entire body.

* * * * *

LAST NIGHT:

The scene is Portland’s Sunset Highway. For those of you who live elsewhere, the Sunset Highway is a curvy highway that links one of Portland’s suburbs to downtown, via a tunnel cut through the middle of the forested West Hills. You go instantly from natural beauty on one side of the tunnel to downtown Portland on the other. It’s very striking and amazing.

It is the middle of the night in the dream, and the moon is very bright. It has snowed recently, and there are two-foot high snow drifts along the center and both sides of the highway. It is also unseasonably warm, and the snow is melting quickly. So quickly, in fact, that there is a torrent of water flowing down the steeply banked highway. I am not driving, but I’m floating above the surface of the road, approximately ten feet off of the ground, while still restrained by the retaining walls and barriers of the road below. A new red Volkswagen Beetle goes sliding across all of the lanes on the road beneath me, but the driver manages to regain control just before he enters the tunnel. Almost–but not quite–another car crash dream.

The Volkswagen enters the final turn before the tunnel, and I wonder if I will be able to go over the retaining wall. My pace slows, and I find myself floating higher and higher above the ground, and I do pass over the wall, over the hills, and into downtown Portland.

The moon is bright, but fog shrouds the city. As I fly higher and higher, the fog gradually clears. I start to see the buildings of downtown, lighted from within. There is a carnival near the waterfront, and as the fog continues to dissipate, I’m able to see more and more detail of the colors and patterns of the multi-colored lights. ‘Wow, this is really beautiful,’ I think, continuing to fly even higher. ‘Yes! More color!’

I never thought I’d say this, but if only I hadn’t left my clock radio turned on and tuned to NPR, because the distraction of the 3:00 a.m. broadcast of Morning Edition is what woke me up.

I had two–TWO–car crash dreams last night. I have more of those than anyone else I’ve ever heard of.

One came as I woke up in the middle of the night, and rolled over to go back to sleep. It lasted for only a few minutes, but what it lacked in longevity, it more than made up for with its detail and brutality.

It’s the middle of winter, around midnight, and there’s snow and ice everywhere. There’s a frozen six-lane highway, with a hill and a cement retaining wall on the side of the road. A car starts to skid out of control, a Jeep SUV tries to avoid it by driving up onto the vertical retaining wall to pass, but instead lands on the roof of the first car, sending it skidding off the road. The Jeep spins wildly into the oncoming lane, causing a huge head-on collision with a convertible, which also crosses back into the opposite direction of traffic. Since it’s the middle of the night, there are few other cars on the road, so the convertible is free to slide for quite a while, until it is completely clobbered from behind by a tractor-trailer, which showers a huge puddle of steaming oil and gas all over the frozen highway.

The second dream I don’t recall, but I do remember that it was very long, and that the car crashes only happened in the very beginning of the dream, and then the rest of the story took place.

Well, I made it through the rough patch.

I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but there was a combination of factors that led to that little meltdown. Add a few sad dreams–I’ve had a few brutal ones lately–and a liberal dose of exhaustion, and that makes a perfect recipe for depressive episode.

I walked to work three days this week. It’s about a half-hour walk each way, so I get a pretty decent amount of exercise when I do that, and it’s a great way to wake up, too.

Luckily, my dreams have also been more normal. Well, okay; normal for me. The one last night involved a friend of mine who was selling a brand new BMW (but it looked more like a swoopier, sportier SmartCar) to a guy he met online. My friend needed me to go over with him to help drive it over. The guy lived in a town that was perched on the edge of a cliff that overlooked the ocean, like Big Sur or something, so we drove through a curvy, mountainous road, and through an old mining area with a water slide (I don’t know, it was a dream!). When we arrived at his house, I saw that he had a drum set, but it wasn’t like any that I’d ever seen before, so I was trying to figure out if I could jump back there and play it while the guy was testing out the car. There, you see? Completely normal dream.

Tonight is RockShowGirl’s birthday, the third of the three Capricorn girls I know. I could barely keep my eyes open at work, so I’d love to take a nap before heading downtown, but I don’t know if I’ll actually do it.

My friend Maddy has been raving about a book called The Unhooked Generation for weeks now, and I finally made it to the library today. Coincidentally enough, it turned out that today was the perfect day to go, because there was a woman working there who seems to be exactly my type, who I’d very much like to ask out when I go back. I normally wouldn’t share that here, but I did for the simple reason that I’m a little bit shy, and I’m more likely to do it if I’ve told someone about it.

I also checked out some DVD’s; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and Mondovino, an excellent documentary which I’ve actually seen before. It’s about the wine industry, and it compares the ‘new’ practices of the industry–led by American companies, naturally–with the more traditional, mostly European ones. It runs the gamut from the super-ultra-mega-producers like Robert Mondavi to a tiny French vineyard run by a single octegenarian gentleman, and everything in between. Alyssa and I saw the movie about a year ago, and I think you can probably imagine which we preferred, and found ourselves rooting for.

Tomorrow night is a Susie Blue gig, and although I’ve played accordion or keyboards with her for two years now, this will be the first time I play cello with her, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Our rehearsals have felt great.

The rest of the weekend is wide open. Here’s to some wide openness!

Man, yesterday was rough.

Work was the usual; boring and stressful, and I pretty much sleepwalked through the entire day. Got home to find an e-mail inviting me to listen to some early mixes of some songs that I played on a month or so ago. I listened, to find that half of the stuff I’d played had been either deleted completely or otherwise pretty well buried in the mix.

I decided to watch a movie to try and cheer up, but that didn’t help. I realized that I’d left my phone in my bag, and when I went to get it, there was a message from my dad. He asked me to please return his call, because they’re leaving the country on Friday, and he wanted to check in with me before they go. As tuned out as I felt, I figured it was the perfect time. I laid on my bed in the dark, only half-listening to his braggadocio and stories. We ‘talked’ for about twenty minutes, and then he had ‘stuff to do, and I’m sure you do too’, so I told him that I hope they have a great trip, and that was about it. I came away from the conversation feeling even worse.

I went in and dinked around online for a while longer, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I decided to go to bed early, and read or something. Even that didn’t work. I couldn’t focus on the book at all, so I put it down, shut the light off and laid there, on the verge of tears.

When I fell asleep, I had a dream that involved MostRecentExGirlfriend, in which she invited me to a party with a bunch of her friends. You’d think that would be a fun dream, but things didn’t exactly go as we planned, and we ended up either arguing or trying to avoid each other the entire time. It was a very sad and frustrating dream.

I feel worse this morning than I did yesterday, but I have my fingers crossed nonetheless. If you’ve been trying to get in touch with me lately, I apologize. I’ve been feeling very strange for about two or three weeks now. I’ve been avoiding phone calls, for the most part, and wanting to be alone a lot more, to a degree that is unusual even for me. This last weekend was great, though, and the dinner/movie/conversation with Joan last night was great also. I’m sure this weirdness will pass, but I haven’t felt this listless in years.

It’s below freezing today, but it’s supposed to be sunny and nice again, so I think I’ll bundle up and walk to work, which is a great way to wake up, and it always makes me feel good. I walked yesterday too.

I hope this listlessness passes soon; this is not my idea of living.