This Dream Is Totally Copyrighted

Beware, those who enter.

This is the kind of movie that plays in my head while I sleep during the few hours of sleep that I’ve been getting each night this week because of

1. kids peeing in my bed
2. kids having nightmares
3. my back hurting
4. kids getting sick

I would blame the kids, but they are not at fault for the things my brain makes up when it is sleep-deprived.  I’d rather be awake, reading a book or eating a bowl of cereal or even writing, for Chrissakes, like I imagine tortured writers do when they can’t sleep, hell – I used to do it when I was tortured.  But now I’m not tortured any longer, so look how my output has suffered.  Go figure.  I also have gained back an amount of weight that my friend and colleague Jessica Gottlieb would love to scoop out of a manteca barrel and show you in real life, just so you could see how much fat that is.

One would think that living such a happy, idealistic life would allow one to sleep peacefully, but no, here I am, dreary-eyed – or is it bleary-eyed?, I certainly feel more dreary-eyed – and shoveling in as much banana bread as I possibly can, because the neighbor across the street brought it today to welcome us to the neighborhood four months after we moved in, and wouldn’t it be un-neighborly to let it go to waste?

No really, all is well.

So in this state of suburban bliss I’ve had the craziest dreams night after night after night, and many of you have starred in them (I say “you” of course because in this age of internet responsibility, one must assume that the entire world reads one’s blog, and the throngs of costumed party-goers who made up the background in last night’s feature?  I’m sure many of them are reading right now.)

I’ve been trying to hold onto some of these dreams because you really can’t make this shit up, unless you have a brain like Neil Gaiman’s, who incidentally did pop up on a staircase in one of these scenes, like a macabre father-figure, whose message of course I cannot remember.  But he is so dreamy himself (if you’re intoxicated by words like I am) that I sort of felt like he was really there.  Kind of like the time I dreamed about Jon Bon Jovi being in love with me, which stayed with me for decades until I actually met him and couldn’t look him in the eye because I felt like he’d already learned my darkest secrets.  None of that kept me from sitting so close to him that our knees were touching for a good 20 consecutive minutes.

Last night’s dream, without further ado: (except to tell you that only a very few details of the following have any basis whatsoever in real life)

My friends Chuck and Stephen have a yearly costume party on or around Halloween.  I have traveled very far to attend this party, which was underground in a network of caves, a la one of those wineries in Paso Robles that keeps their oak barrels in limestone caves or some such cool dark place.  At the moment we’ve all been waiting for, when usually something else happens, like the best costume is revealed or a mystery guest arrives, it turns out that this is actually Chuck and Stephen’s wedding and there is much rejoicing.

Except that at that moment I have to go to the bathroom, so I duck into the ladies’ and do my business, and when I come out again I note a gentleman in a smoking jacket leaning up against the wall in the hallway, calmly smoking a cigarette.  Two other partygoers notice this at the exact same time, and we all shout “THERE’S NO SMOKING IN HERE!” at him, and I go so far as to ask “Should I call the police?”  The gentleman, who turns out not to be a gentleman at all, tells me to fuck off and tries to kick me – kick me! – in the face.

So I do, in fact, call the police, who say they’re not sure a crime has been committed, but that they will swing by when they get a chance.  The many costumed friends of Chuck and Stephen usher the newlyweds out of the place, for fear that some harm will befall them if the fuzz do arrive.  In the frenzy, I try to change out of my costume for my own getaway, in a space that I can only assume is the bathroom because of its toilet and bathtub, but the large room and the kitchen table, desk, and sink, tell other people otherwise and before I know it I’m holding up my clothes to shield my nakedness and sneaking behind the door to finish the job.

So then I’m leaving, and grabbing a ride to the train station with some other girls, who get me there moments after my train to Syracuse leaves the station, because I’ve spent too many minutes searching the trunk for my gift bag, which has inside it many DVD’s and other fun things that I can no longer remember.  But the searching and the not finding of the gift bag is one of the most stressful parts of this adventure, which might say a lot about me.

Anyway, the delay forces me to wait another hour for the next train, but that will get me into Syracuse too late to make my connection, so I choose to go ask a favor of an old friend who lives in my family’s old house on Washington Avenue, in the upstairs apartment.

The house is impervious to entry, it seems upon first glance, having no door or entryway visible to the naked eye.  Except of course, the front door, which seems obvious enough, but I know better because I lived there until I was five, and everyone knows we never use the front door.  With no other choice, I try the handle, and lo and behold it works.  But inside the house looks nothing like I remember it, and the apartment of old friend, who is an older man and a bachelor, is nowhere to be seen.  Instead, the place has become a warren of small alcoves prettily decorated, Shabby Chic style, with bunk beds and overstuffed couches and decoupage,

[this reverie interrupted by another of child’s nightmares…]

So, anyway, decoupage.  The house of my early childhood has been transformed into something of a college dormitory, and once I realize this, the dream ends.  Either that, or the interruption of my writing has made the vivid memory of the dream evaporate before my very keyboard.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

I’m sure we’ll never know, although some of you are bound to take a guess.  And since the world, I assume, reads this blog, then by sheer numbers alone there has to be at least one guess, most likely zeroing in on the creepy older men who showed up in my dreams this week.  No, Neil, I did not mean that you are creepy in general, but you were kind of creepy in the dream, to be fair.  And some of your shit is frankly very creepy, and downright terrifying, and even morbid.

The point is – yes, dammit, there is a point, I don’t blather on for paragraphs of nonsense unless

1. I’ve had some beer, which I haven’t, in favor of the red wine at hand, which only makes me wine-Tweet.
2. I’ve been reading too many blogs tonight, which admittedly I have in preparation for the weekend.
3. I’m doing a creative writing exercise, which God help me I haven’t done in years, perhaps since I read The Artist’s Way and never got past the creative date.

Bloggers do sleep.

Since I’m doing only one of those three, that means I have at least 2/3 of a point, which is to say, I’m tired.  And I’m really looking forward to this weekend when I will be in Ojai, CA at a retreat lodge (or as some call it, a vacation house) by the creek for Creative Alliance ’10, a smaller, retreatish blogger conference that has all the signs of being just like Peer Counseling retreats at Higganum in high school.

Oh yeah, you know what I’m talking about.  Where we wrap ourselves up in sweaters and take long reflective walks on the grounds and sing James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” (which is actually kind of hard to sing) and write little positive bombardment notes to each other and resolve to be supportive to the entire student body, unless one of them overtly likes the same boy, in which case, we will kick her ass, which is all the funnier since we have never and will never kick anyone’s ass because we are total pussies and that is exactly why we are at Peer Counseling retreat instead of getting drunk on wine coolers at a party in some parking lot and getting felt up by the cute guys with the floppy uneven 80’s hairdo’s they think are so cool.

Whatever.

Is she done yet? you are asking yourself, if you’ve gotten this far, which you most likely have not, but again accounting for the sheer numbers of the entire world, there are those of you who have.  So, thank you and good night.  Wish me luck – if I don’t sleep this time it’s going to be me with night terrors wandering around the sure-to-be dormitory-like sleeping quarters of CA ’10, terrifying my fellow retreaters and making them tweet rude things about me or posting rants about me on their Facebook pages.

Then again, that might be a good thing.