Dream Bits (updated 3/30/10)

  

Further refuge into the webbed darkness of The Controller’s brain has consequently opened strange new portals of the mind! Past Faulkner fixations, past Jarrad’s deep space human mutations, past the fretting of frail winter harvests, there lies the weird road into the gray. Odd dreams have now taken hold, waking The Wanderer mid-slumber in a cold & fearful sweat!   

The only excuse he can conjure up regarding this sudden influx of wild dreaming is perhaps due to the recent apparent lack of trailrunning. It’s been months, seemingly! In reality not nearly so long… perhaps only a few weeks… maybe less! Regardless, The Wanderer’s animal feet must meet the trail woods once again… & soon! Or, The Controller fears, the dreams will continue to haunt, disrupt, and possibly dismantle!  

So for now, The Controller can only log & report on these queer happenings of the subconscious…  

March 30th, 2010: Too disturbing to ignore, last night’s dreams were overwhelming, keeping me from solid sleep the night throughout. There’s a small piece of my property which is essentially a deep gorge. I was swinging from vine to vine through this gorge, & frustrated at the same time that Alayne was not outside watching. FADE TO NEXT DREAM SEQUENCE... I was wrestling with an unknown man & in the process, bit off the middle toe of one of his feet. I took the toe to my refrigerator’s ice-maker & used a glass to draw out blocked ice cubes. I changed my mind, selecting the crushed option. I suppose I was going to keep the toe on ice & give it to the man. FADE TO NEXT DREAM SEQUENCE... Jerry Seinfeld & another person have a horse strapped to an operating table of sorts. The horse poops gold. The horse, in order for this to happen, has to be fastened down & have drugs pumped through it with needles. Seinfeld is upset that the ultimate cost for the gold will be the horse’s life. FADE TO NEXT DREAM SEQUENCE… I’m attending a party somewhere up north with Rod & unknown others. Rod & I are in a living room when his baby daughter Simone suddenly comes up behind me. I look around & see his daughter’s mother, Jenny. She has arrived (with Simone) along with a group of black males. Rod asks if I had known about Jenny & Simone coming beforehand. I did not. The black guys are starting to cause trouble, attempting to pick fights with other people at the party. I’m holding Simone in my right arm as 3 black guys approach. They politely ask if I could/would step outside & fight them. I tell them that’s not how or why I fight. FADE TO NEXT DREAM SEQUENCE… Jason has sent me or is showing me a photograph from a family party which took place in Virginia. He says everyone one was there except for me, and Robert… he says that Prudence (his daughter, my cousin) said that Robert (Pru’s father) is not there because he’s bingeing on drugs somewhere else with his girlfriend. 

An Odd Dream-Image from The Controller's Mind

 

March 27th, 2010: I was in a car heading to Lake Worth Beach with some others. What others? I don’t recall.  

The drive was something that my friends & I made hundreds of times all during highschool. It was the closest surfable beach, taking us about 25 minutes to get there. For the purpose of my own inner-mind map, I’ll retrace the route: Out of Wellington, WPB to 441 to Lake Worth Road. Up that road into Lake Worth proper for about a 15 minute haul. Lake Worth was an old, depressed city back then. A few blocks of a “downtown” & then up & over the intracoastal bridge, & there’s the Lake Worth Beach. A fishing pier shot straight out into the Atlantic. There was a small boardwalk with some typical beachside shops.  Surfers & teenagers to the right of the pier, swimmers & tourists to the left. Condos & hotels spread across the coastline     

Back to the dream… As we pulled up onto the beach, the pier was there, but to the left were 2 gigantic rocks out in the water, about a hundred-200 yards out. Both were left of the pier. They were massive, both about the size of 3-4 city blocks. The one of the left was largest, while the rock to its right was broken some… not as perfect & boulder-like as the one next to it.  

Aliens were living in the rocks. They were human-like. A black woman-alien was my guide as she revealed what was happening within the structures. They were hollowed out. Chambers used as garages. You could enter the rocks from behind.  Aliens in the guise of humans were everywhere. A little girl alien mocked another alien for acting “too human.” My black female guide was beautiful. There was no threat.   

March 23rd, 2010: The first remembered dream of the night was a science fiction thriller! The Controller was thrown into outer space, marooned on a desolate planet. Wife Alayne was there, as well. She had been stranded earlier. How much earlier? The Controller did not know. There were giant, cloaked aliens canvasing the bare moonscape for any lost travelers… to kill! Once I found Alayne, there were moments when we had to hide underneath rock ledges as the fearsome monsters floated around looking for victims. When it was safe to emerge, with both arms I would hold a large metal box over my head & jump into the air. The gravitational pull from the atmosphere would then pull me up into space for a few hundred feet. The more dense the metal I found & placed into the box, the higher I would be pulled into the air. We spent time, in between hiding from the monsters, looking for various metals to lock inside the special-space-jump-box. This was our way out! Alayne would hold onto me as I leapt off the ground, & away from danger… a slow fade into the next dream… I was walking around a single level shopping mall with my kungfu brother Jarrad. The stores were large, wide-open & brightly lit. Beautiful girls abound… another slow dream fade… The Controller was at his old place of employment, Belk @ West Town. Danny Miller was at my desk. The store was holding open interviews in a room that was right next to my office. The room does not exist. An interviewer, a black woman, was pointing to the word “IHOP” on an application & kept saying “IHOP” over & over again. She was becoming angry. Sitting & waiting to be interviewed in another room was a large group of black people. I walked away & found Danny again, still in my chair at my desk. His feet were kicked up. I had 3 photographs I wanted to show Danny. I thought the pictures were hilarious & as I started to show him the photos, an unknown woman sidled up next to us & looked over my shoulder at the pictures. One was of a single, long, skinny french fry. Another was of me from when I was fourteen. It was supposed to a photo of a past girlfriend, but it was me instead. The final photo was a shot of me from an unknown past…   

The dreams are becoming more & more bizarre. I am waking throughout the night now, but interestingly enough, I’m not at all fatigued from all the interrupted sleep. I am, however, waking up with slight, suffocating panic attacks a couple times during the night, having to actually get up & leave the bedroom in search of a larger room to calm my heart & mind down.      

March 22nd, 2010: Another long night of streaming dreams kept me waking throughout the night, half smiling, half inconvenienced. The Controller began with witnessing a pair of dragons fighting over the front lawn. Fire-breathing, leathery wings flapping, scaled underbodies exposed… Then the dreaming went domestic, taking me to a strange, unknown apartment complex. I was with a girl, courting her. Things were going well. Holly, Alayne’s friend, put a stop to that, sabotaging the whole affair. As it obvious the fling was over, that the mood or intentions of the girl had switched, as I began making my exit the girl tried leaving me a cell phone bill for $90. Also, as I was leaving, the plumbing in her guest bathroom went haywire, water everywhere. I pulled Hooly aside & she gave me her reasoning behind the block: I wasn’t sympathetic enough regarding the recent death of her dog. I apologized, told her I didn’t care about the girl anyway, & then continued to smooth things over with Holly. It was raining & I was looking forward to the cigarette awaiting me in my car. Another sequence had me and a friend at a diner. Marlo (from The Wire) was there, as well as one of the friends of the girl I had (hours/minutes/seconds before) unsuccessfully tried to get with.   

March 20th, 2010: An odd one, to  say the least. Possibly at our North Carolina summer home, on the front porch. Strangers that are friends, or cohorts. Maybe we’re all on a reality tv show together. Kungfu brother Jarrad is there… maybe. A mother & her teenage son are with us. Mother is confessing to us, & to her son about recent sexual transgressions between her & a man. Sifu walks onto the porch from somewhere inside the house, hair disheveled & face hidden in the shadows of his powerful chi. Jarrad & I know what this means. The teenage son, instead of repulsed by his mother’s confession, is excited & incorrectly assumes that the man his mother had relations with is in fact Sifu. The boy congratulates Sifu. Sifu, consumed in his own dark mood, sets the boy straight, informing him & the all the other people on the porch how disgusted he is with the idea, & how he would never have anything to do with mother. Jarrad & I laugh about the whole thing later, reflecting on how Sifu was in one of his dark moods & how we recognized it as soon as he entered the porch.  

March 19th, 2010: Dreams are coming to me now in both an odd mix of recent & past events & memories. Random people, moments, feelings, & other strange things I pick up the day leading up to night’s sleep are thrown into the dreaming mind along with flash images & instances of old friends & acquaintances from the distant past. I wake up now several times throughout the night (as I knew I would –as I always have done once I’ve started journaling my dreams) ordering myself to remember this & that. Crazy dreams about crazy things that make no sense. To be honest, I’m only recalling the next morning probably half of what I try & promise to remember from the night before.  

(1) In an odd voice, my old friend Neil (from high school) is telling a funny story he’s written. I’m captivated. (2) Beth, our daughter’s babysitter, is selling comic books for 10cents a copy. I flip through them in Beth’s house… it’s large & there’s a lot of natural sunlight filling the spaces within. Adrienne, Neil’s sister & also one of my very first girlfriends, is in the same house with her family. (3) Pastor Kenny, my current church’s leader, gives a sermon on knives. He urges me to talk about the time I was stabbed by Tepper Gills, back when I was 13. (4) Back to Beth’s house. It’s cold now. We can see our breath as we speak. There’s an ugly baby with dead eyes in one of the bedrooms.  

March 11th, 2010: Dammit, Jim Jones… You stupid, stubborn bastard! We’re too late… Didn’t get back from your blessed restroom break in time. 2nd half started & we weren’t here… Forced to forfeit! We lose! –Out of the tournament forever… I could kill you right now…   

I’m obviously furious at the man. Seething, I can barely see straight… still not understanding why Jim, a past employee of mine from the Belk Store Service Team days, couldn’t pull it together & use the rec center bathrooms during our basketball game’s halftime. There’s no dream recollection of what transpired the 1st half, but judging by my reaction to having to forfeit the game, I can only assume we were winning handedly.  

The dream began immediately following the 1st half. Jim had to take a leak, but refused to relieve himself anywhere except in his own toilet. So, for some dream reason, I had to escort him to his own private home (via The West Town Mall entrance to the Belk Homes/Kids/Mens store entrance)… Upon returning from his place, we entered the rec center to find that we had missed the 2nd half, forcing our team to forfeit the game. Then I lost my temper & became extremely angry with the man. We were both sitting high up in the rec center’s bleachers, the next slated game underway below us, & I was yelling at him. He was silent during my verbal lashing.  

Jim is neither on my basketball team, or has anything to do with Belk Kingdom.  

Another odd DreamBit from this same night gave The Wanderer a strange show, indeed! He was witness to a horrible cast of dangerous space creatures dominating a paralyzed row of humans. Dark, disgusting & extremely visceral insect-like aliens who, through extended & dripping proboscises, deposited wet, slimy eggs down into the forced opened throats of the helplessly captive line-up.   

March 9th, 2010: This night The Controller found The Wanderer slowly windsurfing down an afternoon intracoastal waterway. The water & weather were warm & they were both reminded of South Florida… a midsummer’s heat set atop the slowly moving lengths of salt inlets & rivers… the Wanderer upheld a gradual pace as he & his windboard passed along all the rich & wooden docks of the expensive Blue Heron & Palm Beach homes.   

But alas, The Wanderer was not surfing properly! His flow down the stretch was impeded due to a tremendous & inconvenient drag… Rather than standing up in a windsurfer’s awkward balance, he was down low & sitting… straddling the long board, riding it as if he were on the saddle of some plexiglass horse.  

Up ahead was a co-worker. She was upright & surfing properly, moving down the waterway with the smooth & expected grace of an experienced windsurfer. The woman would look back to him occasionally & call for him to catch up.  

The dream faded away just as The Wanderer began examining his submerged legs, swishing them back & forth in the warm water current, considering the fearful possibility of a rouge shark taking a bite of meat out of his dangling thighs.   

March 6th, 2010: The Wanderer was asleep & in his bed. Wife far & away a million miles to his left, drowned in a mess of rumpled blankets & deep pillows. And so the creepiness began… from behind the foot of their bed a sort of black aggie came about from the late night shadows. The dogs were not risen, for this thing was as silent as death. It couldn’t have been more than two feet high, moving in a black shadow of haste. The Wanderer was frightened & watched as the figure moved beyond the bed & into the darkened bathroom. Angered by the fear consumed, The Wanderer quickly jumped out of bed & chased after the ghost. The spirit of a dead child! he cried out in his mind & followed its vaporous trail into the bathroom, & then further into the adjoining bedroom. The aggie slipped into the black cracks of a midnight dresser & so The Wanderer pushed his hands into the wooden drawers after the dark mystery, only to pull back plastic sacks of pre-bagged lunches…