Night Sleep

I am at the ocean. It is warm; I’m wearing a ragged swimsuit, and the sand is chunky and soft, alternating those warm, tide-shuffled shades of beige and brown.

We are in a group of perhaps three hundred, young and old men and women, a gaggle of college sororities and fraternities, and some much older, Hemingway-looking men.  We all share bungalows dotted along the shore, and I am sharing with a group of young wealthy women: some sorority.

Everyone is arranged in a massive circle.  A Hemingway-looking man comes out pulling a boat, and extending from it is another smaller boat, and from that an even smaller boat.  These are the only boats on our portion of the beach.  There is a contest, and each must explain why she or he should be selected to take a trip on the boat train—to look for treasure.  The little boy I do not know (except from his cameos in many of my dreams) makes an appearance, says nothing, and climbs into the smallest boat wearing water wings, a mask, a snorkel, and flippers.  We proceed around the circle and each makes a case, self-promotes.  It becomes oddly Aristotelian in diction.  I am not there; I am still at the bungalow, trying to find a different swimsuit.  I finally arrive late, only to say, “I will appreciate this most. I love the ocean more than anyone.  I would never have the opportunity to explore it if you didn’t choose me.” Lame.

The Hemingway-looking man doesn’t select me; in fact I’m not sure who wins the privilege of taking the boat out to hunt for treasure.  One of the sorority girls talks to me as though I am pathetic.  She has crimson lipstick and unnaturally red hair. “It was him.”  I look, and the man selected is the character Jesse from that television show Breaking Bad.  

Oh.  Not a bad choice.

I decide to swim out instead, to hell with the boat, the sharks, the riptide, and the bizarre group.  Everyone else follows.  The water is delightfully warm and calm, and I make it to a cove about a mile out. Treasure.  Sort of.  On a little sandbar there are stacks and stacks of wrought-iron furniture, mostly chairs, ornate and lovely.  Pleather couches.  Silver silverware. I grab as much as I can an start to swim back to shore. 

End of dream.

—JLE

Night Sleep, Dream Fragment

I am finally, finally, in a futuresque landscape—the dream I’ve been dreaming about—or at least in a world devoid of anything that grows. I am in a slick silver suit, of indeterminate age, and walking in rubbery boots on terrain that is also pure silver.  Everything undulates beneath me.  Everything shines silver, even the sky.

At one point there is a tiny person, a child, wriggling on the ground, and I put it in my backpack in order to save it from inevitable starvation: I am looking for food. The child is of an age where it repeats every word and sound it hears. 

Soon, I encounter a multicolored oily river churning through a metallic cut in the ground, and the river begins hissing.  At me.  The tiny person in my backpack hisses in echolalia.  Out of the river spring heads of about a half dozen creatures with long hair, long as the river itself.  They are a harpy-siren-gorgon concoction I have (literally) dreamt up—ugly and hard to look at, but my mission is to save what’s left of living creatures.  They rise and sink in the water rapidly, remain difficult to communicate with.   

“Sneaky bitch,” they hiss at once.

“Sneaky bitch,” repeats the little one in my backpack.   

I feel dejected.

End of dream.

—JLE

Night Sleep: Approaching Morning

I am on a world tour with a group of people in their twenties: A skinny Danish girl with long pink hair in two ponytails, a reserved Chinese man, along with his grandmother, who must be 100, a German girl who would be heading back to Germany permanently, a stern fat Mexican woman—our guide I believe, and the driver—and a pair of Latin American men, twins, with icy blue eyes and jet black hair, that we gathered somewhere along the way.

My plan was to visit Latin America and China and head back after that, while the rest went on to Europe; I didn’t have time or money to go on. They only added me to the group, originally, to have one more contribution to the hotel rent. (We all shared one room.)  Somehow we drove to China from the US. I remained very quiet in the car, hung on the idea there was a mystery to be solved and that I was being frivolous, committing to the trip and taking the time off.  There was no way to get back and I feared getting stuck, penniless, somewhere I didn’t trust the citizens or the weather.

In China, it was surprisingly warm, and we waded through a river.  There were cherry blossoms though it was supposed to be winter.  The river was shallow and clean with walls on each side of it, and crocodiles and fish swam swiftly past my ankles. I caught a fish in a piece of cloth; it turned into coins. I kept them. I spoke to the 100-year-old woman with us, and she told me not to fear the crocodiles.  So I didn’t.  

Suddenly we were in Mexico.  It was so, scathingly hot.  We hadn’t showered since the river, and the hotel room we shared had cut out square holes in the wall where windows should be. I stayed committed to sobriety despite it being a dream, which reassured me, while others went on to the cantina for food and drinks.  Their money supply was endless; mine extremely limited.  I managed to find a wireless signal from the hotel room, emailed my job and my landlord and told them I wouldn’t be back for a month or so—I’m not sure why.  When the group returned, I asked the Chinese man where his 100-year-old grandmother was:

“Terminated.”  

“What?”

“She only came to ensure I saw China as a last act of tradition so people would respect her in death.”

She didn’t even seem sick.  For whatever reason, he was quite matter of fact about the idea of putting his 100-year-old grandmother down like a dog—“terminating” her life.  It was a matter of course for him.  However, I on the other hand began to cry, and not quietly—huge, heaving sobs, big tears, a flood of choked breaths, ruining the vacation mood for everyone.  It was as if I was crying for all people who ever died or had to die.  Or as if she needed someone to cry for her and I was the only one to take it on.

Then we were somewhere in Brazil.  It was dark and the two Latin American men had some beautiful woman sitting on their lap when we returned to the hotel.  The threesome were drinking a mysterious purple liquid in a blue glass bottle.  Everyone seemed to know what was going on but me.  I knew I had to get back home, but it was too late.

End of dream.

—JLE

Night Sleep

This one was so remarkably detailed and, well, plausible that I feel compelled to write it down. It’s been a while since I took note of a dream.

I was creating a course to teach and pulling together the curriculum to pitch it to some or another community college somewhere.

Toward the beginning of the dream, piles of reading material accumulated on my bed (which is actually just a mattress on the floor) in a dome-like heap.  The articles were in paper form, packed in tight stacks in manila envelopes, which is odd since the last time I even taught it was online and paperless. Actually the whole thing’s odd since I found teaching to be such a thankless, soul-sucking and downright dangerous profession, I vowed never again to do it.

Anyway. No accounting for the subconscious or the unconscious.  It’s all still viable experience, says Jung.  

The class was to be a reading course called READ (Reading, Exemplification, Analysis and Discussion) that focused ostensibly on contemporary writing.  

In it, though, the analysis not only of consisted of the basics of the original text, but of hypertexting and analyzing the allusions to all other forms of culture and art within the text.  It became a sort of everlasting task, where we began with analysis of contemporary book reviews from NYRB, LRB and LARB, then we discussed the books that were reviewed, and then the allusions evident in the books themselves, and then what they alluded to, and so on and so forth—a sort of complete cultural mapping of a piece of writing from the present to its very roots.  

Oddly, the students in the dream had no faces.  Take that for what you will, Freud.

End of dream.

*This course surely exists in many places, but when I woke up I immediately thought, wow, I want to teach (or take) a course like that.   I’ll find one.  

**Another odd point worth noting is that this is the first dream I can recall where I wasn’t desperate and fraught with anxiety trying to solve some mysterious, unknowable problem; it was an evident unraveling.