Asakiyume mita

Dreamed that I was making grilled-cheese sandwiches, only they weren't sandwiches, they were paperback books. I was cooking up paperback books in a frying pan. Butter on both sides, medium heat, flipping them over ... watching for whether the covers were getting nice and golden brown.

Oh oops! I tried to grill a hardback! So frustrated with myself: the crust will be much too tough and the heat will probably not penetrate to the center. Maybe I can cut off the spine at least....

The dream didn't get to the eating part.

They weren't books I was interested in reading. I don't recall the titles.

So here is what the tree in my dream looked like: like bamboo, but with leaves like a locust... except in this drawing, the joint-rings aren't raised enough-looking, hence the second, eye-searingly colored (expertly! with a mouse!) diagram/digital doodle to show you how the rings fit round the trunk and boughs.






Also...

Heard the first wood thrush of the season today. I was wondering how far south they go for winter--do they make it all the way to Colombia? ... Google says no; they winter in Central America. Google also tells me they're the state bird of Washington DC.

The cat wakes me up (most delicately) in the wee hours, and when he does, if he's interrupting a dream and I write it right down, I get it in clarity and crazy detail.

Other people's dreams are boring--but not this one! It's a youtube video preview for a Black female poet's spoken-word performance.

You hear her voice-over, saying,

You act like you never asked
someone to share a secret
but only tried to steal it

The image is of her behind a chainlink fence, and with her, all around her, are papers and documents and books, and hands from the viewer's side of the fence are reaching through the fence and grabbing at those documents and trying to pull them through the fence, and in the process are tearing and shredding them.

Then the voice-over says,

Some things you want to never hear
and other things you want all of,
and I'm worried
because one way we disappear
and the other we're impoverished

Dang, subconscious--give me some of that sweet creativity in waking hours, why don't you?

Also: thank you, Jiji!

Maybe he's monitoring my dreams and waking me so I can recall the worthwhile parts.

sovay wrote about a dream she had that featured a bottle of beer:

I dreamed of reading a story printed on the label of a bottle of beer; it ended apocalyptically, with the ghosts of slaughtered whales and other, increasingly less identifiable leviathans passing in endless procession down the road to the sea. The label was red, the text white. I remember just the last half of the last line: "and watched the road burning, which was America."

I can't stop thinking about this. It makes me

(1) want to invent beer names (always a fun thing to do)
(2) create beer labels (potentially a fun thing to do?)
(3) write a poem ending in that line .... so many poems could end in that line these days

My brain isn't reaching to a poem, but I made a beer label. Behold:



Very weirdly coincidentally, the beer we had this evening matched the color scheme she described:



(Sorry for the unedited snapshot--complete with stove time stamp, LOL)

When my kids were little and required a watchful eye, I would sometimes have dreams that duplicates of them would appear. So for instance, I'd dream I'd just helped the ninja girl into the car, but here is another ninja girl. It was bewildering. It wasn't a case of one being a fraud, or of my somehow overlooking that they were twins; it was just pure duplication. It was like when you add a stitch accidentally in knitting. There was just one of her, but now there are two of her. Occasionally I'd have dreams with further multiplication. It seemed wrong, but there was nothing to be done about it. Certainly I couldn't just ignore or neglect the duplicates--it wasn't their fault there was this hiccup in reality.

Not the ninja girl. Source


You know how, in film, a series of still shots are run in succession, and so you see motion? If a person is walking across the street, each still shows them a little further along--but it's the same person, just one person, and when we watch the film, that's what we see: one person walking across the street.

If I were to imagine an explanation for my dream experience, it would be that versions of the ninja girl from very near, but distinct, points in time somehow got detached from their place in time, as if a person in a film still could climb off the film and wander into another still, somehow while the film is running (and then from then on I guess the film compensates by having the duplicate in all the subsequent stills? I'm getting tangled up in an analogy that's imperfect.)

In the dreams, the extras usually disappeared eventually, which was a relief. I don't know how to work that into the film analogy--it's more like double vision that clears if you blink hard.

I thought of it just now because I was snuggling with our cat, and I thought I heard him calling from outside the door. I'm always alert for when reality might start to behave like a dream.

ETA: Maybe I'll write a story with this in it....

Some people have the gift of telling dreams so that, instead of a confusing mish-mash of incomprehensible (often even to them) signifiers, you instead get a well-turned, strange tale. sovay, for instance, can do this.

And so can Little Springtime--at least, she just did:

I dreamed we drove to Russia, and there were bears everywhere. We got to a train station, and there were bears there, too, and I said, "I'm sure glad we didn't bike." And then the customs people stopped us and one of them held up a potato and said, "Who tried to bring this in here?" And I said, "Are potatoes not indigenous to Russia?" And there were these magnificent fur coats, and I wanted to buy one, but I wasn't sure of the price conversion from rubles to dollars--like is a ruble half a dollar? Or twice a dollar? And so I tried to Google the conversion rate, but the results I got were totally unhelpful--like how many dollars to the pound, and how many pounds in a stone.

Don't try to smuggle potatoes into Russia
(image source)

(from two nights ago)





I dreamed an old friend died
I dreamed a speculator tore down my house and tried to buy the ruins
I dreamed the city flooded, and there were alligators
I dreamed I waded through, up to my neck
I dreamed women sat above the waterline
Picking through platters of half-eaten fruit
Pulling out the untouched pieces to sell again
I asked them for directions to my ruined house

All through the night I kept waking and nearly waking
Consoling myself with the intuition
That it was all a dream
But it was not till I stood upright
In the crystal cold of morning
That I believed it.

Oh no! It's an entry about dreams

Re-laying the track

A dream about train tracks being taken up and re-laid, in a slightly different place, while I'm on the train

A person in the dream asks, somewhat non sequiturially, given the circumstances (but hey, it's a dream!), but what if you're on the last car? And then the response was something like, so long as you're on the train, you'll get to the destination, but the route will change.

Ahh, the tinny sound of dream profundities. And yet, to actually see the track taken up while sitting on the train--visually compelling.


Don't ask for whom the company operates (it is not for you)

A rich and powerful man looks out over a nearby city, at some construction project going on, and says, "I'm thinking of buying that company."

Me, anxious: "This is an economically depressed area with a high poverty rate, so I hope if you do, you find a way to create more jobs, not simply streamline it to eliminate jobs."

Jasmine and burdock

A woman I knew in grad school offers me mood-enhancing pills that are like pastilles: one is raspberry, another is jasmine. We're sharing a room, but she retires under a tent of gauze to sleep, and I don't want to disturb her, though I'm filled with a desire to talk about careers, children, youth, and aging. So I walk outside, where people are admiring a huge burdock plant, remarkably tall, and with even more-giant leaves than usual, growing by a billboard.

Sometimes I drift to sleep, or drift toward waking, with the news on in the background, and the results are always strange.

The BBC was talking about the cold, and about the sea freezing from the top down (unusual, bad), and in my dream, Tokyo Bay was freezing--

--but this was manifested by men marching to shore, two by two, brandishing machetes of ice, which they banged against the ground, loud, ringing strikes, as they came.

Athena Andreadis very generously let me speak about Pen Pal on her blog; she asked about cultures and why I wrote the story (link here). Very grateful for that opportunity--thank you, Athena!

I'm a bit under the weather right now and not keeping up with things, or feeling very much myself, so please forgive slowness to respond, both to posts and to comments. I will pick up soon, no doubt.

Sometimes people aren’t led to fairyland by ghost-pale lights or bewitching smiles . Sometimes it simply swallows them up, gulps them down. They fall into it without realizing. They’re lost and don’t even know it.

Like Maddie, walking home from the train station after a long day at work. She stops to admire a crabapple in full bloom, ghostly in the black-and-white of nighttime, luminous—from the starlight? Like the petals are cups filled up with it.

Her head becomes completely filled with petals and starlight, and then at some point she blinks and starts and thinks, Did I just doze off ?

And,

Where am I, again?

There’s a lake up ahead, filled with water lilies. Some are breaking free from their stems and rising off the lake, spinning lazily into the air.

Is she maybe dreaming? Did I maybe leave out the part where she got home, collapsed on the couch without brushing her teeth, and fell asleep?

Maybe I’m the one that’s dreaming, or maybe you are.

It gets worse. Who am I, again? she’s thinking. She knits her brow, trying to pull together some thoughts, trying to make some sense of things, but the only thought that comes to her is something about bells—is it that the lilies can be rung, like bells, if you catch one?

Maddie has that nagging feeling that she needs to remember something. It’s important, so she strains to, shuts her eyes squint-closed and presses her lips together hard, but it’s no good.

When she opens her eyes, someone with black and white fur on their cheeks standing in front of her, someone with a red tattoo in the shape of a star between their eyes.

“Lanterns, or bells?” this person asks, holding out both hands, and in both hands are lilies, tugging to be free from this person’s grasp. Those on the right are glowing slightly; those on the left chime, subsonically, when they brush against each other.

“Bells,” says Maddie, and the person smiles and hands her a lily, and she smiles and takes it.