You're DREAMY

Yesterday, my honor was challenged (negligibly—but “it’s a slippery slope”) when I recounted a part of a dream I had; this dream seemed too fantastic, I suppose, to have been actually dreamed. To defend my honor, and put that fantastical dream in context, here are partial accounts of some dreams I have had this week, and one “classic” dream I had several years ago.


In my dreams:

2/29/08 – You say to the photographer that in the end, you’d agree to do what she had said you should—that if she died, you would look in on her mother at the nursing home and visit occasionally—but that, “like most guys, it left me wondering why you picked me.” She doesn’t respond to this but says she thought it had been settled before, that it needed no formal acceptance, but you insist that you had come to the point of laying out the terms but not accepting them. The whole conversation is a farce, but a highly amusing one.


2/27/08 – In a house with a walkthrough (short hallway between two main rooms), three horses run across from one room to the next, the third horse striking a small white rabbit with its hoof, trampling the rabbit’s hind leg. The rabbit cries out.

I wait for the horses to clear and shout for someone else to “call Animal Control” because I think the rabbit must still be alive. I get latex gloves and go over to the rabbit, careful not to step in or touch the gore left by the horse’s hoof, but when I try to pick it up to assess its injuries, it tries to jump away, so fearful that I think it will die if I continue. I stop trying, and when it eventually seems to calm down, I can see that flies have swarmed its injury and are eating away not just the bad flesh, but the good as well.

I am transported outside (in that way that dreams have of just dropping you elsewhere), next to a bush, and I lay the rabbit down next to it. It is night, and the brown spot that had been on the rabbit’s back has disappeared completely, leaving the rabbit completely white and smaller than it had been. The rabbit dies, and I am frustrated by my inability to save it from the hive mentality of the flies and maggots.


2/26/08 – All in Simpsons style animation: I am staying with the Simpsons, who live in Connecticut, and have just learned that a disease is turning people into werewolves. In response to this, the mayor of Hartford, Daniel Negreanu, declares amnesty for all prisoners, and I look out the window of 742 Evergreen Terrace and see dozens of animated black men running down the street.


2/24/08 – I go to Boston, being invited, and then to DC. I get lost at night but am rejected by Metro-train ticket sellers who say they’re “on break” and tell me to “go get popcorn” instead. I can’t find the popcorn, so I look for a car but ultimately cannot remember how I got there to begin with.

Later, I am a social worker with a fourteen-year-old girl who tells me how she’s fixed all the problems in her home life. Her story is convincing, so I leave to go to a conference. An African-American social worker and Ellen Muth give a presentation in which the black woman pretends to hate Ellen but as she moves her own student-desk, she pulls Ellen’s along as well. Ellen has a keyboard and plays self-composed music as their desks whirl around the room. “It’s a metaphor and a presentation at the same time,” I think (absurdly).


2002 – A commercial in the middle of my “regular” dreams, entirely from the perspective of a “camera,” 70’s soft-lens: A slow pan from the ceiling, out of focus, down to an oven door, shut, on a side angle. An oven-mitted hand reaches in from the right and draws down the door, another hand reaching in and pulling out a cookie tray. The shot freezes as chicken fingers are revealed on the tray, and a (deep) voiceover announces “None of these chicken fingers was found guilty in a court of law.” This happens two more times, with “Only three of these chicken fingers” found guilty on the second tray.