No night dreams right now, only a thick, heat filled sleep. Waking with cat hair in the eyes. Metal on metal hammering at 6 a.m. Sometimes there are fragments as the cats move through the night but mostly it's only waking dreams. Pauses in time, in the yard after midnight, after movies, no traffic, no cicadas.

dreams of dying - 06.10.05 - 06.19.05

hit by a truck
smothered
drying up like a plant with no water
falling off building
stabbed
needle in arm
drowning
slowly smashed
car accident

HEAT DREAMING - summer03

When it's hot like it is now I have a lot of waking dreams. Not daydreams but times when I'm half asleep/awake and I think I'm awake but then a loud noise actually wakes me up. Usually I've just spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time figuring out an incredibly mundane problem. And upon waking I realize that the solution I came up with is completely stupid and unrelated to anything.

Like the other day, I laid down to rest my eyes for a minute. The carbon monoxide smog rolled across me and I must have dozed off. I had a long and complex conversation with someone I knew really well. I hadn't seen him in years and we both had intricate stories about where we had been and what we had been doing. We talked about why we had ended our relationship and our motives for certain actions. About our dreams for the future. About failures and successes. All the big stuff. The conversation had that old friends feeling - no judgment or hidden motives. Pure unconditional love. Then I woke up and not only had I never met this guy, I couldn't remember any of the great advice he had given me. So as I climbed out of the smothering sweaty fog I was filled with a sense of satisfaction for having spent such quality time with an old friend as well as a sense of sadness cuz this guy and I had only met in a dream.

Other times things turn on me as if some inner self was out to get me with a vengeance. After one of these you don't really have much motivation to go back to sleep. Like this one I had where I was taking apart my life in minute detail. (not an uncommon theme for me) There were incidents in there from when I was in the third grade!?! What the fuck! Do I really need to examine things that happened then? And I'm not talking about any kind of interesting incidents that you remember as life changing epics. No this is some really mundane crap in which I always come off as a lame ass. I shoulda… I coulda… Why didn't I… These are quite exhausting dreams. Waking up covered in sweat.

I can be completely cognizant in my dreams. I taught myself how in order to deal with a series of nightmares I was having when I was in my early 20's. The trick is to know that you are dreaming and then to either wake yourself up or change the dream (or if you like the dream then to simply enjoy it). The problem with the heat dreams is I think I'm awake. So they just go on and on until I hear some noise (like a ROOSTER or a DOG) that wakes me up. Then I'm always seriously confused for a few minutes from the heat, the complexity of the dream and the fact that I thought I was already awake.

2 dreams - spring03

first:
There was a party at my house, which was a big loft space at the top of a long skinny flight of stairs. The door was never completely shut and there was a bare light bulb hanging on a single wire at the top of the stairs. Sometimes the place was packed and then I would turn a corner and it would be empty with only a few people in the corners. It was dark and really loud. Some guy was being an asshole and I wanted to kick him out but knew he would give me a hard time. He looked at me and laughed and said I'm just going to sit here. I was really sad because I was walking with a cane and kept almost falling. I lurched around the party thinking about this guy - knowing I couldn't move him. I leaned aginast a wall and then realized that I was a super hero and although wounded at the moment I would soon recover and then be able to kick this guys ass. My super hero friends were there and could take care of him for the moment.

I woke up in a great mood.

second:
I was in a hurry to get somewhere. I was walking through backyards and alley's, taking a shortcut, I knew I was really late. It wasn't Chicago, more like a small town in Ohio. I realized it was night and snowing heavily. Where I was trying to get to was getting farther and farther away. I heard some noise behind me and without slowing I moved to the side to let it go by. It was a horse drawn thing like a stage coach but really stripped down. As it passed, the guy on the back grabbed me and pulled me up. I was standing in front of him on a small ledge so it took a second for me to realize it was J Cookson. I wondered where he got the horses. He said you'll never get there that way you need to come with us. I said ok but I have to stop at my dad's house. He said we know that. I could look over the top and see the guy driving. We parked in my dad's yard.

Jump cut to us leaving my dad's in a hurry. We're in the yard getting on the stage coach. Some how either we've insulted my dad or he's insulted us - I know he wants us gone and we're in a hurry to take off before he notices. We have to leave one of the horses there because we don't have time. We round a corner and I say we need to tell him that horse is in his yard. J says its already taken care of. I see his friend coming out of someone's house that we parked in front of. He doesn't know the people he just used their phone and for some unknown reason we are on an important mission and they have to let us. A small child stood in the dorrway watching us go back down the street.

I woke up wondering where J got the stage coach.

Feb. winter03

This dream had a long and complicated set-up, most of which I don't remember. But all my friends and I were part of some kind of grifter clan. Marc and I were a team on our first big job. We had to rob a house. We got in ok and then had to enter some kind of a stairway through a window. It was incredibly complicated and for some reason we had to crawl over a screen. that wasn't even attached to the window which was really a doorway. But we couldn't move it. On the other side was a narrow stairway going up to the left. Marc went up but as I was going through the door/window the front door opened and it was the guy who lived there.

- Melinda Fries