the dream

We were there to rob the place, the four of us. Each with our different set of skills. It was large, the place, like a museum, but it should be mostly empty this time of night.

We got separated and I went with one of them.

We walked through the hallway looking, trying to complete our portion of the mission.

We heard voices ahead, and looked to each other alarmedly. We looked around the corner and saw several patrons and some workers milling about and in conversation. It looked like the hour before an opera when people are starting to show up.

"Let's go," we said to ourselves.

As we tried to get through the gate we were stopped.

"Don't you need to help us get this working?" The security guard said as he pointed to a malfunctioning gate.

"Oh right, well I don't have my equipment," said my partner.

"What, is he new?" The guard asked me.

"Yea, I know right," I said mockingly.

My partner pushed the buttons on the key pad. After a few minutes he had it working and went through to the other side, because that was his skill.

Alarmed, I tried to follow. I was dressed in a white t-shirt for sleeping and the guards stopped me.

"You don't even have your key card pass," they said, pointing to my chest where it was meant to hang.

"But I HAVE to get in there!" I explained, whining.

"Why don't you just go right around to the side where the keypad is?" They asked, bewildered.

"Oh right," I said, moving away so they wouldn't ask if I was new, too.

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***Later, you and I are given a special key from a butler after doing a good deed...***

I took your hand and started walking down the lawn. Happiness filled my heart as the key given to me by the smiling man behind the door jingled and stuck in my left pocket.

"One more thing about me in this place, don't be scared, but I can fly."

"I'm not scared," Stacy said.

"We may get a couple stares, but people here are mostly used to it," I said, as our feet left the ground.

You held on to me tightly as we soared into the air, gathering speed and elevation.

We veered off to the left, swooping past an old brick and stone archway, grey with years and unuse.

As we flew higher the city of NY in the other world came into view. It was dusk and the lights of the buildings were coming on. We flew over the water and I looked around to get my bearings. It had been a long time and much had changed.

"Let's see if we can get higher so I can see where we need to go. The house where we are going is at Long Island Sound."

You smiled at me and held me tighter.

"This is amazing, Sal", you said.

Old ships like pirate frigates were docked against the piers. We soared past them all. We moved closer to the city on our right and shot forward with speed, the wind zipping through our hair. I started feeling apprehensive because still nothing looked familiar.

"This place does that..." I said to myself.

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Let's try the other side of the island," I said out loud. "Let's get some altitude and see if we can fly over it."

From the sky, the city was beautiful. The ships, made of wood with sails creaking in the water, dried behind us as we sped ahead. The buildings below were old, brick, tall, majestic, of various types and styles, but none familiar. It was the city, clearly that I remembered, but none of the familiar landmarks were there.

We came down to the top of some buildings and almost got caught up in an archway, we zoomed lower and did a barrel roll with my arms around you and you laughed, carefree. We saw water, foggy, impressioned between the buildings ahead, bust barely seen. 

Some young people were walking nearby and I shouted to them, starting to lose hope. They were walking down stairs on the side of the building, against the street below, a few of them apart. I shouted to them as they looked unalarmedly up at us floating by. 

"Excuse me, is Long Island Sound near here?"

"Yes, that's it just there," a young lady said.

"Thanks!" I said with renewed excitement. I took your hand and we descended towards the water we had seen. We were almost home. More questions you would have soon, but for now I just needed to get back to that special place. It was very exciting. We were close.

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As we approached the water we saw lights. We took some altitude and I tried to determine which lights were the house. Directly below us I saw some promising lights.

"I think that's it!" I exclaimed, hopeful.

I wanted to nose-dive, but you wouldn't let us. You had learned how to fly, in a short amount of time, but would still need my hand for a while longer. So I righted myself w/ feet downwards and we descended slowly with your facing in front and me with my arms wrapped around you.

But as we approached the lights below, I noticed something strange.

"Something is wrong," I said.

The lights were pinpricks on a large group of lily pads. It wasn't an island and we were still too close to the buildings of the shore. I felt myself waking up. The vividity of the dream was breaking up, fading.

"Not yet, please," I said to myself.

With renewed fervor I grabbed your hand and shot out towards the sound, over the water, frantically searching.

With vivid clarity the boats and small islands in front of us shot into view and behind us.

"We are going to make it," I said to myself.

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Then, as a ship passed to the left, I saw it.

"That's it! That's it!" I said. I was overjoyed. 

The house was rectangular on the sides with a cylindrical entryway with a flattened front. The lights were on and welcoming. I started crying tears of joy.

For a moment I panicked but I still had the key in my left pocket.

Trembling I looked inside the tall window near the door and saw my familiar painting/clock facing the entry way.

I took the key from my pocket and placed in into the lock. It fit perfectly. And brought back the memories of the place. I turned the lock and with a satisfying click the door swung open. I rushed inside to go look around but was dashed by emotion, as I saw the first "playroom" of decorated blue walls and unimaginable childhood wonder, I was overcome with emotion and fell to the ground weeping on my back with my arm covering my face.

"Thank you, thank you," I told you. "Thank you for helping me find it."

-THE END

Last night's dream

I was at a basement rock show.  We were sitting on the floor near the front.  The band had four guys and the veeeery beautiful Scarlett Johansen (so far so good).  The guys all had tans and climbing bodies and were wearing tighty-whiteys but they played pretty good.  The drummer walked passed Scarlett and he had dirty underpants that were sagging and I was like "how can she like him?" There wasn't much room where I was sitting so I wiggled under one of the unused pianos and watched Scarlett who was playing across the "stage" which was really just the floor of the basement.  The song was over so they were moving around and I realized they needed to use the piano I was under.  I didn't have time to move, so when they started I was causing problems.  The song started sounding off and they were hitting bad notes.  One of the band members sat down across from me, against the wall.  I knew his name.  He told me how disgusting I was and what was my problem.  He had missing teeth and I didn't know what she saw in him.  He kept putting his rectangular pink tongue between his missing teeth and glaring at me with unmasked loathing at my ugliness.  After he left, I wiggled back to my spot in the front row, on the floor, and looked out towards the back where he had walked and said to Jess "I can't wait to kick the shit out of that dude", but I realized that was probably just false bravado.

dream number six

i'm at home, as a child, at my mothers house. i feel disconnected, and i feel something stuck in my teeth. i put my finger to the back of my mouth and discover that my back molar has become a thumbnail. when i pull out the thumbnail, i can feel a hole where the tooth used to be. now in my hand is this big, crescent shaped, nail clipping. i run to the nearest person in the house...

"look, look"

but they don't seem to see me. i yell, "everyone look!" i get a response, but they are just confused, as if they can hear me but not see me.

i start to spit like you are trying to get a hair out of your mouth...

"pfft, pssft, ppsstppstff"

out of my mouth start spraying thumbnails and fingernail clippings, like my teeth are disintegrating into shards. this continues until i have a fistful of fingernail shreds...

jump to...

i'm in the army, i have a black partner. we are special ops who are some bad ass mother-fuq-ers. we are headed to a new assignment where we are going to be stationed in a important city after civilization has destroyed itself. disease and nuclear bombs and starvation are all about in equal numbers in this new world. we arrive at the barracks...

as we walk in the door, immediately we have a sense of not belonging. all the soldiers in the barracks room walk to their bunks and turn their backs on the door we just walked in. we are being ignored. a small woman walks up to us to interview us on if we are supposed to be there, either me or my partner pushes her away...

"i'm not getting interviewed by you!"

she is too small and insignificant. instead, two bodies approach, they are wrapped in kind of a red leather, they are the newest recruits before us. this must be some kind of initiation. we will not be so intimidated and let ourselves be taken advantage of. let them try to do that shist to us. we find the empty bunk and swing in like the pros we are,

we put the blankets entirely over our body, as do the rest of the soldiers in the bunker. the image of 100 sleeping soldiers covered entirely by blankets so that only their shape is seen. as the camera pans towards a single soldier, the imagery is of the blanket rising so that the shape of the soldier is lost, first near the base, then only the head is discernible, then only the face....then as the blanket lifts, the details of the face are erased until a blanket of nothingness is all we see.

that night,

we wake up to a fight, two of the leading soldiers are fighting us. my partner fights first. he wins and then i fight, the one i fight has a bomb, i throw the bomb out the window, then i decapitate the one i fight, i throw his head out the mail slot by the window (it fits?!) and then it follows the bomb, since i was outside already (?) i fork through the mailslot (this means to me in my dream that feet first i enter through the mail slot, then i kind of limbo my torso through the slot and come out on my feet)...

when the bomb goes off, it was a nuke, everything is decimated. the bunker, the people, the base, and oh crap, my mom's pleasure cruiser is out on the water, she was coming in to visit me, but the blast from the nuke destroyed the cruiser, now it is just a flaming wreckage. i sit on the beach, too soldier to cry, sitting behind a tin-can dumpster just watching through a pinhole the cruiser burn. i get up....

a street urchin girl is near the street as i get up and start to walk back towards the base; her friend screems and points at a beer bottle that has become alive and is running at the first girl. the girl tries to get away through a door of a building that has been blown off it's hinges, but the bottle gets close to her and then goes off like a firecracker. the girl is dead even though the blast shouldn't have hurt anyone, it wasn't a big blast, maybe the glass got her...

i walk with my partner through the wreckage of the base...

"hey, when we find our C.O., i'm gonna have to ask for time to go help with my mom...this blast was bad for everyone, but he's not gonna like that..."

"actually, my mom got blown up, so i guess there is nothing really for me to go back to"

DREAM ENDS

a morning dream

we were in an Avis van, my mom, my dad, and me. we were heading to the airport to go out of the country, to africa I think. when we got to the airport, it was really big but kind of run down. it looked like a mid-80's terminal with the architecture and old paint. when we got on the plane it turned out that there was a little problem with the throttle control. due to some wire, the engines would suddenly get cut, and then start again. it was like if you had a bad connection with a wall jack and the thing you had plugged in couldn't decide to stay on or turn off, so it would just flicker. the pilot, who was this old guy with wispy gray hair in a horseshoe around his head and a kind of shabby but not unclean outfit, was able to keep the plane from falling out of the sky. the trick, you see, is to use the potential energy from being high up in the air to give some speed when the engines cut out. at one point, (I was sleeping in the coach section, curled up with one of those pillows), my mom woke me up because they had lost enough altitude that the ground was coming up. I looked out and couldn't see much in the dark, but it looked like a huge, black, ocean. in fact it was trees. from the ground, anyone standing in the path of the airplane would have seen a huge 747 clipping the canopy branches. at one point we got so low we actually chopped off the top centimeter of a tree branch reaching above the rest of the canopy, "that is a sight you don't see everyday".

the next thing we were in the Avis van again, but no longer in america. we had ditched the plane because it was taking too long and we had got a van and were going to the local airport (now in africa or something) to get a new flight to our final destination. when we got to the airport it was nice, and there were a lot of africans with yellow and green colored outfits walking around, and quite a few of them were in wheelchairs. "it must be because of the heat, that they don't want to walk". we came to a door that said 'Le colonie HaHa's', which was the name of the dominant group at the time. My mom reached for the door and I told her to stop and explained. the door led to a corridor that we couldn't see much about. there was another door 'The Boy's Hatanian' which I thought they were from Haiti and were obviously the second most powerful group. Their room was dark, as in a unused movie theater, and in the same fashion had stadium style seating but the seats seemed to all be facing uphill, towards the back of the theater. "Come on mom", we walked down to a lower level, where there was a door that led in the same direction as the corridor above, towards the airplanes.

four dreams

I was standing in a crowded place, probably somewhere near the ocean. I started to hear screams, and I could tell that everyone started looking in the same direction. I followed their gazes and saw it: a huge wave. At first we thought it was water, but then the smell hit us, it was gasoline. the pungent odor changed things immediately, instead of worrying about drowning or clunking your head when the water hit, now we were worried about the vegetation, it was all going to die. I found an old cold meat locker which was neither cold nor had meat in it, but it had no windows and a door that locked airtight. when the water hit, I couldn't feel anything of movement of the locker, but I could hear all that was going on on the outside. I noticed a small, opened can of nacho cheese sauce and thought "im going to need to save this so when I get out of here I have some food, since there won't be any when I get out". I knew I had to watch out 'cause if it was water, a little drop of water in the cheese sauce wouldn't hurt it, but if gas got in it it would ruin it. eventually, the noises stopped, but I didn't know if I was at the bottom of the gas ocean or floating at the top, but then I could hear people crying coming from the crack in the door.

the scene on top was much different then the old world. only the tops of mountains had a few trees and is where all the people now separated lived. everyone had formed into zealous fanatical groups. there was one group who felt strongly about this, and this group thought we should do it this way and so they wanted to do it like this, and one small group was in charge of the food. you were lucky to get a crust of bread in a day, they were unfair with the distribution. I killed someone, stabbed them, when they tried to get my food, I didn't want to hurt anybody, I just wanted to live.

There were five of us, in some kind of a ghost trick house. shadows flew by just outside your vision and you knew if the shadows got you they would kill you. you walked slowly, trying to avoid the shadows, but if you saw one coming you ran. one room was cluttered with two doors in and out, and there was a disgusting bathroom that was a safe room, there were a few staircases that kept leading to different places. every once in a while, you heard a scream, now there are only four...now only three. finally, a shadow got me and I freaked out.... everything went out.

the game started over, but this time I WAS the ghost. I had to run, run as fast as I could because I knew if I was seen then I would cease to exist. I was constantly running, here comes someone run up the stairs, look for an exit, the sliding door into the closet, now what, there is a small staircase to a passage upstairs, look for an exit, run run run... finally, I was cornered, I couldn't get away from the human that was unknowingly trapping me in the room, he saw me, and I was so mad that I was going to cease to exist, I shook him, screaming, until he died.

she was really really big in the belly. she got a little smaller in the belly by having a little baby, but the big baby was still in the belly. we went to the woods and the baby was walking through the trees. we weren't paying attention for a moment. the woods took the little baby, we hadn't watched it for a moment and now it was gone. later, near the football fields where the band was practicing, we saw the cop lights coming. three cruisers pulled up, they were school cars, not the real thing. we thought they must have come to deliver a message to one of the people out here since there was no phone, maybe. but then they got out of the cruisers and started walking towards the woods. you could see flashlights. then, from far away, you could hear the calls of the persons name they were looking for, the woods had claimed another and they were looking for them.

the soccer game was very competitive, but we were up by a goal. we switched some positions, the large golden skinned guy with the mexican team shirt played behind me on defense. he shouldn't be playing defense. he makes a big mistake and they score. I tell him, "you are really good on offense, don't play defense", and he nods. I reassign someone else to the position and we take our places again in the center of the field. now I'm on a break away, but the guy behind me pulls on my shirt to slow me down, I fall. I chase after him and cleat him in the back of the leg with my cleated shoes. he says, "hey" and I say "don't pull my shirt and I won't cleat you". now even when I don't have the ball, he is behind me holding on to my shirt and yelling "faster, faster" because I am like a dogsled dog pulling him through the dirt. I put my cleat on his throat and step on it, then the same on his exposed belly. he looks at me with surprise, but no anger. the other team doesn't like that I'm abusing their teammate, so they start harassing me as well. I have enough cleats to go around. the game is very competitive.

dancing with waitresses

spending the time on the boat up until then had been completely normal. there were the big rooms with the games and the flashing lights, and there were the huge indoor rooms with that smell of freshly washed walls and vacuumed carpets. but everything that night was about to change.

we all went to the big room for dinner. it was a big room, with ceilings that you couldn't fathom and long skeletal rooms that had the walls coming down and arching over that made you think that it was some kind of cavern in the belly of some big ocean beast or a sleeping giant. the waitresses were cute and friendly, young, and fun to dance with after the party. the food was decent, but I didn't finish anything as usual and had a big styrofoam container holding about half of the food I had ordered. I think it was this and the fact that I hadn't spent very much money at all that set off the next series of events.

it was after dinner, and I was dancing with two waitresses. (I had just found my ipod in a puddle of beer and was cleaning it, taking that clear cover I had put on it, lotta good it did, using my shirt, it had a thin white, flaky residue on it that came off with your fingernail. I was going to get one of my wipes to fix it when I got home) they kept steering me away from the hottest ones so that I would keep dancing with them. I'm not complaining, 'cause they were cute and fun to dance with. but then it really was closing time and I went to go pay for my food. up till that point I had avoided spending much, probably mostly by having my drinks bought for me. it had been a while since I had eaten.

I signed the paper and started walking out, but I saw that a waitress had went to our table and picked up my styrofoam container and was headed for the trash:

"hey, wait, I want that! hey," she just smiled a big fake, toothy grin, "hey wait, that's mine, stop" she kept on going, she threw out the food. "why would you do that?" that big toothy smile was really starting to wear on me, "didn't you hear me what's your problem?" she didn't seem to even be aware that I was talking to her "fine I'm not paying for it then" did I forget that I just signed? maybe I didn't sign yet "why would you do that". and I started walking down one of the huge corridors of the ocean vessel, one that had the walls going up, up, up and the floors with carpeting that made my drunk head spin. I couldn't really talk straight at this point and I remember slurring a little.

as I walked down the corridor, there was a tall, important looking man with a clipboard and a plug in his ear. the busboy was telling him the situation and he was listening. he looked at me and started walking "I'm not paying for that food",

"fine, " he said

"or I want my food and then I'll pay for it,"

"cook it yourself"

"me? you want me to cook it? the kitchen is closed"

"then wait until you get home, your wife will do it for you"

as he was walking, he looked straigt ahead, and I really hated this person.

the paper had said that he was a true gentleman, and another had said that it as his handsome irish face. me, I thought that the old father was a f-cker and wanted to ...