dreams of things

What do those dreams mean when you're crawling through spaces that get smaller and smaller? I woke up from a dream this morning at 7:00 too exhausted to keep on dreaming it!

I was at a big sauna day spa public space kind of thing and I was supposed to check out at 9 o'clock, but I decided I wanted to see more naked people, so I snuck into some big area where there was an even bigger steam room which turned out to be along the back wall of a big studio where they were giving away some kind of Black Awards (there were Black TV actors and musical groups all dressed up in matching outfits with the funny Afrocentric hats on) . The steam room so crowded, there was a constant line of people in towels and people at the awards show going in one door and out the other. I was one of those in a towel (most of the time, the other part of the time I was wearing clothes). I filed in with the others and saw a man sitting (dressed) looking intriguingly at the front of another man's pants who was standing in front of him. That man was kind of swinging about, so I positioned myself to see the front of his pants, and his zipper was undone! He seemed to catch it just because I was looking at it, then I looked at the sitting man's crotch and his zipper was undone, too. I didn't take it to mean there was anything going on, just that they had forgotten to zip their flies.

There were also parts of the dream where I was in the more intimate dressing area of the spa, looking at the clock, making up a story in my head for why I was going to try to check out an hour late, or if someone came around looking for me because I hadn't checked out on time. "Oh! I completely misread the clock!" or "Oh, is my checkout time 9? I thought for sure it was 10."

And then on top of all of this activity, I kept running off to climb through an old building to get tickets for a theatrical show -- sounds like it was Broadway but the tickets were really cheap if I climbed up all of these external building fire escape ladders and through wooden cutouts, which were roughly cut; I hit my head on a little snag of wood sticking out in a corner. But I was going through this one square hole again and again throughout the dream, thinking it was so real, telling myself, "This is the kind of thing I would have to do in a dream that would freak me out," and also, "I should keep this hole in mind for when I'm dreaming and think back on it to make myself know that it's really not so freaky."

But then of course I was at a different hole in the external wall of the brick building that was just a little small for me (which was the last hole I had to go through to get those wonderful theater tickets), and on top of it there were spiders and bugs everywhere, which I kept swiping out of the way because I didn't want to smash them, and because I was just a little bit freaked out by them.

Then I could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a boy inside the building just sitting there all ghost-like and freaky. And then there was a little hard-shell caterpillar, pinkish, who was standing at the entrance talking to me. I kept trying to flick him away from the hole but kept missing, and he kept on talking.

That's when I woke up, my left arm was completely dead asleep. I stumbled off to pee and saw what time it was and tried to go back to sleep, but I rarely am able to do that, so I just got dressed, made my bed and turned on my computer, looking for work, of which there is none, so I'm left to sit here pondering this most bizarre dream.

Here's some thoughts on it:

The next chapter I'm working on is a tricky one; Randy is driving along the interstate, "high" on Trucker Zoom, stopping at every rest stop, at first because he needs to pee, but then because he recalls the experiences of public sex in NYC, so he's looking for it. Hopefully the chapter will weave seamlessly from reality to fantasy without too many bumps for the reader. I need it to work in this chapter because it happens again in a later chapter (this is the setup for the experience, I guess).

I went to Spider House yesterday (that's not why I dreamed about the spiders, I don't think! but then again, maybe it is) to read over old notes on previous versions of this chapter, and also because there was no work to do, and because at 4:20 I agreed to go with A to have Dillon put to sleep because he had stopped walking over the past couple of days. That was difficult, but it was also nice to know that "Dillon is with J..."

I got a little bit of reading done, and wrote a few notes, but P called and said she had something for me (what she should have said was she had something for A, because I embarrassed myself when she arrived with a bottle of liqueur and a card thinking it was for me, me, me! though I did have a toast with A and some other people at her house after we got back from the vet). P and I visited a while, and so I still have the big work ahead of me on this chapter.

I think the sauna and steam room references in the dream have to do with the rest areas and places for public sex in the upcoming chapter.

As for the Black awards show, I'm not sure. The funny hats were definitely inspired by a YouTube video I watched the other day of Earth, Wind & Fire singing "Fantasy" in a 1988 concert and the lead singer was wearing an outfit with one of those funny delivery boy kind of hats, but with a zebra print or some kind of animal (his whole outfit was black and white). In the dream, someone on the show (or in the outside world -- perhaps in the steam room?!) had made a racist comment and one of the women in the group wearing one of the matching outfits stepped forward when her group was receiving an award and said some rebuttal, which, in the dream, was all muddled like a Charlie Brown parental character.

This could have to do with the fact that I went to dance with the Dance Group I was really into for a year but haven't been to much in the past year. I went last night (to memorialize Dillon a little because he used to go there with J, and because A was there), and somebody put a new sealant on the floor and fucked it up; it feels like a fine sandpaper. I asked during Closing Circle what was up, and a friend who is a contractor (and a woman) said that she had tried to warn them against using this particular sealant, but they ignored her advice, possibly because she's a woman, which she went on about for a good ten or fifteen minutes, repeatedly saying she didn't want to go down that path (that she believed it's because she's a woman, "but still..."). She is also the first and maybe only person in the Dance Group who has expressed that she is "not totally straight," and I guess perhaps it's easier in a dream to represent the minority of which I am a part using Black people.

As for the clock-watching, after the Dance on Wednesdays, people often go to Austin Java for half-price appetizers. The dance gets out at 10:00 and Austin Java closes at 11:00, and oftentimes the wait staff there gets bummed when a bunch of low-tipping hippie dancers show up at 10:30 or later. A went ahead of a bunch of us who were hanging out, and when I asked LR if she was going, she said, "Ooh, we better hurry, huh?" Then she took my asking her to mean that I was on my way and asked me to order her a turkey burger and a spicy soup.

I don't know what Broadway show I was going to see. Perhaps this is my novel I'm thinking about, or maybe it's S's rock opera "Lizzie Borden" that he's currently working on, and for which he will be out of town (in NYC) in a couple of weeks to work on it. Yeah, that's probably it. I was sitting on the front porch last night too wired to go to sleep right away, thinking about the idea of having a party for the Dance people while he's gone. Just because. But I probably won't. Just because.

I'm not sure what the climbing through holes represents in my dream -- that's why I put that question out there; I think it has something generally to do with the subconscious. Or no, that's water. But I do know what the talking caterpillar probably represents. While we were sitting at Austin Java, a group of about ten of us, a baby opossum ran through the restaurant. A group of people cornered the poor little guy, which bummed me out, but then they chased it out one of the open doors, which made me feel better. One person at our table -- whom I've referred to as an "oaf" in previous blogs (and got reprimanded by S!) went on and on (and on) about what he would do if a possum showed up in his restaurant, naming this dish and that dish that he would fix with it. It wasn't completely horrible, but it didn't go well with my sensitivity for the animal, particularly after having to watch D get put to sleep, and because of the baby bird I saw a day or two ago who had fallen out of its nest and I tried to put in a safe place but really there wasn't a lot I could do, so I felt really bad, even cried a little bit (I was walking home from yoga). But anyway, the caterpillar in the dream looked a lot like a baby opossum, come to think about it, and man, oh, man, he was certainly speaking to me.

Oh, and last but not least, I think the open flies on the pants of the men in the very public steam room (as well as the ghost-like silhouette of the young man in the shadows of the building) had to do with this young man I met at the dance last night. A red-haired boy named D, who naturally made me think of my main character, Randy Reardon, mostly because he's a redhead. D was dancing around last night having a lot of fun and I started dancing with a woman who does a lot of contact improv (L) while she was dancing with him, so naturally the three of us were dancing together. And then later again. And the third time D, L and I were dancing (with other people involved), L and the other woman she was dancing with split off and suddenly D and I were dancing together, and the music got slow, and we weren't bumping and grinding or anything like that, but our dance became a little more intimate, and I got a slight erection, which I chastised myself about. That was a lot of what I was sitting on the porch pondering when I got home. In times like those, I know that I'm more of a homo than anything else, which unfortunately still causes me to chastise myself about... But I also chastised myself for not being completely in the dance with my partner, and then furthermore for being upset with myself about the intimacy of the moment. Oh, it's a tangled web. (Ha! maybe that's what the spiders were about...)