Last night

I dreamed.

I was in a movie theater, finishing an intense horror movie. The rows of seats were entirely full of goth looking kids, each face rapt, the glow of the screen shining off of their eyes. There were another row of seats, a complete theater set, perpendicular to ours, and I wondered about the designer’s intentions. Everyone who sat in those rows had to turn their necks at unnatural angles to watch the screen. These people did not have the unnatural hair color and styles as the others, and I wondered which group I looked like. It seemed impossible for me to look down at myself, or to find a mirror. When the movie finished, the lights did not come up, but seemed to get darker in anticipation of another movie to start. I checked the time, and realized I needed to be home, but no one that I was with would be willing to drive me if it meant leaving the movie.

I dialed Ryan’s phone number and tried to speak to him quietly. I asked if he could come get me, and let me either stay at his house or take me home. I had a pressing dread that I could not stay there, that I had to leave. He said that he would meet me out front soon.

I left the theater, and realized there were many exits, and many places that could have been called the front. I tried each in succession until Ryan arrived in a flashy car and a ridiculous outfit (Dream-Ryan, what were you thinking?). His mom was in the backseat, and I said hello to her as I slid into the passenger side. They offered to let me stay at their home, but I declined, asking if they could get me home. Ryan took a shortcut, and we ended up driving along a curved, rocky path with a sharp cliff to the left side.

He was driving fast, and reckless. I wasn’t afraid, not until the car went out of control off the edge.

It slid and rolled for the longest time, and I was terrified. I thought you were supposed to wake up when you fell in a dream, but maybe because I was confined to the car, it felt like it was never ending. I remember Ryan’s mom screaming to stand up, to get up, and I kept trying over and over. I woke up, no resolution to the dream.

My legs are incredibly sore this morning. I’m wondering if the dream made my leg muscles tense and twitch.

I have a thought.

I’m considering writing a book. Fuck, right? I haven’t even properly finished one short story, although I’ve started about a dozen. I write poetry more often than anything else, but I keep most of it private–apart from your prying eyes, dear reader. The worst of it is, that my book (hypothetical little thing that it is) would not be profound, or insightful. I seriously doubt it would shed light on the trials and triumphs of the human spirit, awash in the pretentious glaze of dime store words and bizarre grammar.

Kerouac wrote Big Sur when he was an alcoholic. Reading it is killing me, because he doesn’t capitalize anything (I know that I love ee cummings, but his media allows for it), he is full of misspellings and grammar errors and no punctuation but it is still beautiful and sad and terrible. He drinks with his friends, he drinks alone, he drinks on the mountain and on the side of the road. Where doesn’t this man drink? He could out-drink a fish.  Reading it is like watching a train crash in slow motion, except I and everyone else already knows the outcome. There’s no stopping it.

I would love to write a book, and then I walk through a bookstore and look at the thousands of god awful creations sitting on the bookshelves and think to myself, “Really?”. I get sent into this blind rage when I see books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Android Karenina. I haven’t read them, I’m already biased against it. The names are clever, but what else is there? I don’t even like the original genre to begin with, so what can I possibly gain with the addition of some anachronisms? Anyway. There is so much competition and weird ambition prevalent in my field. It seems especially strange because I write for myself most often, except when someone asks me to write specifically for them. Which, I of course, oblige.

Poetry is my love. It is always, always there for me. When I am loved and in a relationship, it sometimes takes a backseat because I write more levelly and sharply when I’m bitter. But still, it remains. And, I do have so much in my life that I hurt over that it isn’t terribly hard to revert back to that anger. But mostly I ignore those things, and sometimes capture them in little vignettes in my poems.

I keep changing my mind what my book would be about. Sometimes, it would be a dry, serious-ish type look at how ridiculous my generation is. Other times, I want to write about dreams, that elusive subject that occupies me so much. My current thought is of a man, desperate, at a loss, who is committed by well-meaning but incredibly stupid friends to going on a new blind date every night for an entire year. I have a fun time thinking of his scenarios, the women he would meet, how he could keep things interesting despite going through the same conversations 365 times. He would learn something by the end. I would probably kill off his character midway though and reroute the story though.

It’s what I do best.

to sleep; perchance to dream

What do dreams mean? What do my dreams mean, to be specific? I dream nightly, I know. I usually remember with startling clarity the details of my dreams, especially the more unsavory ones. When I say that I don’t recall what I have dreamed, it feels more like the nighttime stories have simply faded and that if I try hard enough, I could remember. The phenomenon of dreaming an event before it has happened has occurred to me more than once. It’s a more palpable recognition than deja vu. Weird, right? But I’ve talked to other people that it’s happened to and I’ve come to the conclusion that dream-precognition is not special or unique. The strangest things are the most commonplace.

I’ve read that dreams are the product of your daily experience combined with subconscious desires and fears. I used to be fascinated by Carl Jung (who wrote extensively on the nature of dreams), and found his ideas relevant. However, he was a Nazi sympathizer in his later years which discredits him, despite his revolutionary earlier work. Jung, like many psychologists and psychoanalysts, believed in the subconscious as revealing itself and it’s ties to the collective subconscious, through dream states. I often wonder then, what the hell is going on in my subconsciousness?
My dreams are bizarre. I dream of floods, and whale overlords, and last night I had a dream about a guy who was very much not-Ryan kissing me. In the morning, I woke up confused, wondering why my mind had conjured up so-and-so instead of someone else. A friend’s girlfriend often has sex dreams about people she sees around her campus; in times of lucid dreaming, she chooses exactly who she wants to be with. Interesting, right? I’m thinking what left me so confused by last night’s dream was the realness of it. There was almost nothing to tell me that it was a dream. What what what.

And yes, the title is from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech on suicide and death. That has nothing to do with this post, except that I’m writing it and I like Hamlet.