Dreamscape

I am in my psychiatrist’s office. He leaves the room. I fall asleep. When I wake up I find I have a cup of lukewarm coffee in my hand. I wonder if I had sleepwalked over to the Store 24, or if I had gone there consciously and forgotten. Then I wonder if this is all a dream. Am next door to office. Sisters have apartment there. I want some coffee. Decided one I had in office was fictional, an illusion. Sisters each brew coffee in separate coffee makers. But they are pouring milk in instead of water. “I want my coffee black,” I say. Milk spurts out of Jen’s coffee maker, hitting my face.


Am on third floor of parents’ house, coming out of old bedroom into hallway. House if full of people, guests. Someone asks for bathroom. Brother says to try mother’s private fifth floor bathroom. Angry, wondering why she told him about it and not me. Brother points out infinitesimally thin, tape like secret passageway threading around house. I flow through it, ending up back on third floor, where the third floor bathroom should be. There is a different bathroom there, blue, with a huge Jacuzzi. I see baby picture on the wall. I think it is probably me, but resist acknowledging this. What I see is my brother, but I think I am projecting so that I don’t have to concede my mother’s love for me and give up being angry at her. “I think you’re angry at your mother for having your brother,” psychiatrist says.


Dream I am in NYC subway system. Keep getting out at different stops, trying to decide which one will get me closest to some bus station. But it is between 22nd and 24th Streets, not 42nd and 44th, where the Port Authority is. Realize I have gone too far. Day is getting later, about 4 PM, stations are getting darker. Cannot distinguish faces anymore, or even races. Am in dangerous station. Someone jumps me. I break away. He pulls my wrist watch. It stretches way out and snaps back. Someone, black or Hispanic, I think, is being attacked. They sit him down and pull off his rings. Next thing I know this scene I am watching is a movie. They take the guy upstairs, slit his throat , and tie him to a fire hydrant. I am in some kind of chair bed, covered with blankets, in seating area for audience right in the subway station. When the film ends I wonder how I am going to get out. Viewing area is otherwise deserted, except for maybe two or three street people, also covered with dirty blankets.


Note on California dream: As I was looking along the shoreline to try to see where I was, I noticed a rickety iron tower on the beach. I climbed it and looked around to see if I could spot any development that would tell me where I was. The tower was shaking. I wondered how long it would take for someone to discover me if I fell and was killed. For some reason I wasn’t quite sure if I had my wallet on me. I wasn’t quite sure what I was wearing. So I didn’t know if there would be a license on me by which whoever found me could identify me. Cobain left his wallet open beside his body before his killed himself on the second floor of his house outside Seattle, so he could be identified when they found him. It took them three days to find him...When I came down the steps again, the stereo case with the box of CDs, from my hotel room, was there. As I counted the CDs, they started to turn into cameras. One of them looked like a roll of film. It’s hard to tell exactly if they were all cameras, or parts of cameras, or other high-tech audio-visual equipment. One of them seemed to be a sort of lap-top computer with an audio recording feature. It had a voice modulator so you could record your own voice and mask it in various ways.


I woke up thinking about the coda from REM’s “California”: “...on the edge of a continent...on the edge of a continent...” Earthquakes...suicides...drug overdoses. Dreams. California dreamin’.

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