thefutureandthepast

Oh, I try so, SO hard to remember my dreams, but my body seems intent on deleting the files. I woke up hot, when the heat kicked on at seven a.m., and fell back asleep tense, in fits, with allergies stuffing up my head. My bed was too soft, too big, my blankets too many, my pillow to stuffed. The room was too large, too hot. My stomach grumbled like an approaching thunderstorm. I wondered, in my sleep, what was wrong with it. What was wrong with me? WAS there anything wrong with me? If not now, would there be soon? It seems to be my general sentiment upon waking.

I had so many dreams, and I tried so hard to remember them, but they’re gone, gone, gone. Just emotions are left, the bare skins of emotions, like clothes one the dressing room floor. I look into the mirror and it’s just me, empty me, awake. With a bit of a sore throat, from the heater. This morning I’ll put on rice for breakfast and chop some carrots and onions for the lentils. I’ll listen to Creedance Clearwater and talk the dog out for a walk that could never be long enough- he is so bored and just wants another dog to play with, but there are none of them, anywhere, in this rain-drenched wintertime world.

I didn’t dream, I suppose. I wasn’t even here. Nothing happened at all. The world waited, it made new cells, my liver cleaned my blood. Muscles slept. It rained, hard, then nothing, then hard again, the sun swept over for a minute, and then rain like fog traveling at high speeds. Good strong portland winter. It’s good for the constitution, builds character and mold allergies. The mold is blossoming like tulips in the springtime. Earlier, walking the dog, I coughed a bit, wheezed, felt tired and hot behind my forehead. The mold has returned from christmas visiting its family, has returned to fling open the french doors of my lungs, let the dog out, throw its sweaters on the chairs. Inside my chest, the mold drinks a glass of water and checks its voicemail.

I had a dream that I was dancing at the club to britney spears’ song “gimme more”. Then I woke up and realized that I HAD been dancing at the club to that song. And now it was nearly noon. And the heat had kicked on. And pearl needed walking. And I was still tired. After returning home from dancing I’d gone on a bender of late-night photo-uploading, instead of going straight to bed as I should have. So now, I’m tired. And the snow is all melted and we’re back to regular rainy winter. And I’ve just eaten a banana. And some toasted hazelnuts. And now I’ll make some eggs, and a salad of massaged kale…

I slept for a hundred hours. I remember only one dream. I worked at a sprawling, decaying, excessive, country estate, which began in floors and floors of hardwoods and gold, and ended in a tall-grass meadow planted in pines. It was summertime. I was camping in one of the meadows, and I saw Michael Jackson there. I saw Michael Jackson, and I thought, “Hey- you don’t look so bad in person!” in fact, he was beautiful. In fact, he looked like me. Wait a minute- were we related? Looking at him in my dream, I was convinced, suddenly, that we were related. He told me that I’d been camping behind his sister Janet’s house. Or maybe it was Latoya.

Amazing.

Because I didn’t sleep. I drank whiskey, and when I drink I can’t sleep. Which is why I don’t usually drink. But it was Thursday, and I thought- what the heck! And drank at a friend’s potluck at five in the afternoon. By eight I was sober. At midnight I couldn’t sleep. At six a.m. I let the dog out to pee and he ran away. At six thirty I found him. At eight I gave up on sleeping and rose to make slaw from grated veggies, clean my room, and watch twenty minutes of Napolean Dynamite, before a friend showed up for breakfast. My friend arrived and showed me how to make “egg pie”, beaten egg and leftover rice in the little castiron. We both took pictures.

I woke up like a light fading, and couldn’t remember my dreams. The cat meowed in the hallway, assaulting my barricade of throw-pillows. I felt awash in a memory of movement, or travel, of haste. As if I was late for something. And then I remembered the job I needed to apply to, and suddenly I was all the way awake. Regretfully. I would have liked to sleep longer- I would have liked to sleep for ten hours, with dreams packed in like a suitcase full of clothing that’s too small to wear. And in the morning my fantasies would spill out like a mason jar full of glass beads, tipped over on its side as I rose from the bed.

I had dreams about sockmonkeys last night, and the woods. Almost a nostalgia for the woods. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, naked. I was a girl. Like, really a girl. With long hair. I took my clothes off in the woods and before I had a chance to put them back on, I was headed out in the bed of a pickup truck, in front of traffic and everything. All I could do was hold still and make myself invisible that way.

I had two sockmonkeys, one very old, woolen and nappy, and one newer, clumsily made, fresh. The newer one was beige, the older one was grey with striped clothing. They were muppets, too, or puppets, with wires in them. They could be posed. Or they were a sort of oracle, a vague, murky oracle, whose purpose is yet to be known.

I dreamed I lived in a great, rambling building, which had been abandoned, of course. I didn’t live there so much as stay there, and I slept in the coldest, darkest, moldiest room, which was the worst for sleeping. The building was run by a collective of friends who tolerated me, but resisted becoming too invested in me, because I was leaving, because I didn’t really live there, because I lived nowhere. Many of the rooms of the building had rotted wooden floors and bed-sheets made of tattered sack-cloth, and many of the rooms were very nice, and they led one into the other, like a sort of maze.

One of my friends was stomping around on the wooden floors upstairs and I went to see what was going on. She was in a great ballroom I hadn’t previously known existed, arranging vases of flowers by lamplight.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We’re having a ball, a Christmas ball.” She said, frustrated, as if I should have known, as if I’ve been told already, as if I forgot. That was when I remembered that I didn’t live there, that I had a flight home on the twenty-third, that the twenty-third was today. I woke up then, to a world blanketed in snow that is normally blanketed in rain, and realized that there was no flight. I was home. I was home. My bed pointed east-west, it did not spin. My room did not lift in the air, like Dorothy in Kansas, in the night while I slept. I was home, I could hear, I could think, I could remember. And unfortunately, I was awake.