I was an adopted child of this family who lived in a large windowy kind of house in the woods. The couple seemed happy to everyone on the outside but they were the type of people who always tried to trip each other up. One night while I was sleeping I heard sirens going off and I heard the police saying that a girl’s body was found decomposing in the woods. They saw that I was awake and asked if it would freak me out if they brought her inside the house. I said that I wouldn’t like that so they didn’t bring her in. After the police left, a couple of the other children (who must have been adopted by the couple) went outside and tried to find the body. They found it and they kept saying it was the most horrible thing they’d ever seen. I stayed inside because I didn’t want to catch any glimpses of the body. At some point, I must have fallen asleep in the dream because before I knew it, I was waking up in a bed with two other children. The father had us all come outside because he said he found something he wanted to show us. He walked us down the long gravely driveway to an old blue car that looked like it had been pulled out of a lake. He said that this was the scene of a gruesome murder. He was sort of excited about it. He grabbed a dirty blanket from the front seat of the car and looked at me and said, “I’m going to throw this on your head.” I got so scared that I tried to run away but he kept chasing after me, trying to throw that disgusting, dirty blanket on my head. I kept thinking that the blanket was probably covered with body fluids. I woke up while I was running away.
I noticed there were baby ferrets in my apartment and they kept trying to hide before I could catch them all. While I was looking for a box to put them in, I was telling my cat, Cricket, that I couldn’t believe he wasn’t helping me catch the ferrets. Some of them were sort of shiny and black and almost looked like snakes and some looked like sweet little baby raccoons.
i was on an airplane as large as several city blocks. my seat was a bed in a room with two twin beds, adjoining a living room space where friends sat. the bed had a seatbelt. when the plane took off my cereal and milk spilled across the floor.
later, my mom and dad were in seattle apartment hunting with me. we went into a building. immediately i lost them and ended up viewing an apartment that, though sparsely decorated, it became apparent was occupied and not open to viewing. i liked the space a lot. i left the apartment and found my mom and dad in the corridor. i tried to close the door to the apartment i’d broken into but the mechanism didn’t catch the door. i tried a few times. the tenant popped out on the seventh or eighth try. it appeared i’d woken her up. she was pretty and offered to make me tea. she made me a special tea that has a worm and an egg in it. the worm helps brew the tea, the egg is for growing a new worm.
i found out the font in the new wes anderson movie was called “lopez self-defeat.”
I rode my bike down a street in a residential neighborhood. It was overcast and I could see the ocean in the near-distance. The three people I was with warned me not to activate my brakes twice in succession, because it was the secret signal that RSVP’d “yes” to weird parties thrown by a girl who lived in a nearby house. I braked a couple of times— I had to. Stephanie B. materialized, wearing a bike helmet and looking overjoyed. I was going to her party.
This is from the other night:
I was a musician and someone had stolen my equipment. When I found it, this kid (probably about 13) said, “You aren’t a musician,” and I replied, “Just because you haven’t heard of me, doesn’t mean I’m not the best.”
I was at a wedding and there were different flavors of ice cream (watermelon, mint and chocolate chip.) I put them all together in a big metal bowl and mixed them into a new flavor. It was the most delicious ice cream I’d ever tasted.
Then I found myself in a room with a boy I had dated a few years ago (about 3.5 actually.) He was lying on his stomach and I was tickling his back. I felt guilty because I was married and shouldn’t be touching anybody’s back but at the same time I was happy because I knew that I was just learning to be happy about the events of my past and that I didn’t have to ignore them in order to feel good about my future. I think it may have seemed more profound in the dream.
a couple of music-related dreams:
1) a boy band of asian and white dudes called Five Escape English
2) i saw a music video for a new christine williams song. christine williams is my dream’s name for real life christina carter. i stop by volcanic tongue to pick up her new album. they are closed. i call their phone number. tom carter picks up and at the same time comes to the storefront door to tell me they are closed. i say ok and that i love christine’s new video. he thanks me for the feedback.
new belts
a sensai gives two martial arts students their new belts. one is yellow, one is purple. the yellow one, he explains, represents dancing, while the purple one represents horses.
show and yellow submarine
I chartered the Yellow Submarine for a record-release show and forgot to book any acts other than myself. Distraught, I asked Doug if he was free to perform. He wasn’t. We were sitting on a porch surrounded by lots of white wicker. He patted me on the back and told me not to worry, that the show would be fine.
There was a big hotel across the street, fortified with tall hedges and black iron gates. The famous and insanely expensive yellow submarine slithered on it’s belly into the hotel’s parking lot. It wasn’t on a dolly or in a truck or anything. Sparks and terrible screeching sounds issued from the sub whenever it’s metal shell ground against the road. I was surprised to see that the body of the sub wasn’t yellow at all, but long and thin and white instead. It looked plausible and antiseptic. The legendary yellow color had just been part of the myth we had been led to swallow whole-cloth as children. Disappointing, but I had bigger fish to fry. There still weren’t any other bands playing the big record-release. Someone tried to calm me down, “You’ll be the star!”. I sort of wasn’t as nervous as before. I think the album had come out really well and I was just excited to show it off.
a pair of recent episodes:
The gag in a sketch by the State was a character named Cory who had “the most beautiful hair in the office”.
In a white room with nothing in it, I gave an old woman drum lessons. She was pretty good. I was invited back to her “room” to “see something”. I tried to imagine the least likely thing it could be, an exercise which brought the imagined unlikely thing to life: a flight of stairs in two dimensions, made up of tiny ants.
i was at work at the university. a week or two earlier i’d begun applying to be a graduate student there. just now i received several documents in campus mail from various staff and faculty. i ran into one of the graduate school staff in the hallway who apologized for the lateness of the documents and asked if i’d received them. i let her know that they had just arrived and i had skimmed the notes written on the envelopes. she told me she hoped that my application alone would justify the creation in her department of a specialist for education and curriculum and for confrontation, the latter alluding to problems i’d had as a staff member. i told her i hoped this worked out for her. by this time we were over at her department’s section, the graduate school. a former boss of a boss was working there and placed a phone call to a man named paul. i believed i knew who he was.
after work i ran into composer/performer eliane radigue. she was beautiful and fiery. she was looking at a box set she had released with a maroon cover holding seven maroon disc cases. i asked if it was still in print and she said no. i loved it and began looking for it on discogs.com. suddenly we were on the set of the single movie in which radigue had appeared. she starred in a romantic comedy in the 90s. while the actors performed and the soundtrack played a voiceover announced that radigue was terrible in the movie which was itself terrible. i obtained a disc from the box set at which radigue had been looking and ran to a nearby pub exclaiming “est ici encore.” i put the CD into the stereo and we listened. it was awesome. as we were listening everyone vanished and i was suddenly listening to it in my apartment, naked and with headphones on late at night. i faintly heard someone entering the building. i noticed my door was unlocked and turned the lock. someone came into my room anyway. i asked her her name. she said her name is jenny. she was clearly drunk. at this moment a door opened into my room from the next-door apartment. jenny said her key and my key were boyfriends and that’s why her key opened my door. i told her we’d need to get that fixed. the guy who arrived from next door said that jenny’s boyfriend will, who was also there, is cute. i introduced myself to my neighbor, who was tall and said his name is mike.
i was in a play. it started off being an improvised one-act, in which i was seated around a table with some family members, just acting out our day. the table was located all the way at stage right, near the edge of the stage. i was not nervous at all, until i looked out on the audience and realized they were watching. then the curtains were drawn and the real show was about to begin. suddenly it changed to being completely crowded onstage and off, and it was suddenly a production of the who’s tommy on broadway. i was really nervous and i wanted a beer. my friend from the first year of college, becca, leaned over the side of the stage and peeked her head through the curtains and said hi to me. i asked her to get me a beer. she said, “okay… and say hi to yoko for me!” i realized then that she didn’t recognize me because i was wearing my glasses.
she got me the beer. it was called something like “koenigsburg” and had a label that looked like woodpecker cider. suddenly all these authorities swooped down on me and tried to take it away. i guess this was a school production. the auditorium looked like the one at my high school. i stood up to them, hiding the beer under the table and saying i would drop out if i had to, i was so nervous. we were seconds away from showtime. i think that my part was mrs. walker, only it was not a musical, only a play. i realized how ridiculous that was later on.
towards the end of a series of dreams, i was in a classroom with a book by roberto calasso published by adelphi editions, the publishing company calasso runs. usually adelphi publishes in italian, but this book was in english and featured beautiful images and font work including vermilion lettering for emphasis. people in the classroom were going around the room sharing things about themselves. someone across the room was speaking when a sound like several excited whistlers in unison was heard coming from just left of me. we heard it again and peered over. five largish snakelike lizards had made the noises and were peering out of a box. they all hung their heads out of the box in the same way. suddenly they all darted for the person who had been speaking. soon they darted at me the same way. i got up on my chair and onto a table to avoid them. they followed. i accidentally stepped on one and they all bit into the flip-flops i was wearing. someone came and gently squeezed their heads which got them to let go.
in another dream, björk had rerecorded her song “i see who you are” with phyllis forbes from out hud on backing vocals. i listened to it.
i came home from sf and there were a million litterboxes and food self-dispensers all over my house. i said to myself, “did julie really just leave all this here and go?” tambey was wandering around sort of confused. none of the litterboxes had much in them. the house was a different house. it was laid out in a box-style but there was still carpeting. all of our stuff was gone except these litterboxes and dispensers. the dispensers resembled popcorn-makers, with a yellow-tinted, clear compartment up top.
behind what appeared to be the bars to my childhood crib, propped up against a wall, i found rows of baby animals, snoozing. they all sat like ducks. there were bunny rabbits, kittens, puppies and hamsters (i wondered why tambey didn’t attack them). and there was also this strange black furry dog/frog/manta ray animal. it was the size and shape of the apple “airport”, but a little flatter, black, and covered in fur, with a wide mouth and no visible eyes, just brown “eyebrows” like a doberman or whichever black dog has that.
there was also a part where my sister returned from summer camp and she was chubby. i said, “jade, you ate too much pizza and pasta and candy!” then she accidentally broke somebody’s bass guitar while helping a band load in. she got distracted and dropped it flat on its front and the neck broke. i think we were on sullivan street in new york.
i yelled at her and then these people in a donut-cart photo place offered me a job, as a joke. they said, “you’re hired! come in on monday to start!” i said “okay!” then they said, “we were just kidding!”
there was another part where deenah had dyed her hair neon green with a red spot in the back, like an olive. her hair was really short. i think the olive juice music festival was happening. there was also a screening of a porno entitled “me and the major”, possibly starring major matt. also in the film (but there were a lot of people and scenes in the film) was a childhood friend’s mom.
