Journal. June 26, 2013, 5:33pm. Daydreaming on the sofa, I recollect two dreams from the previous night.
Downstairs hallway with lockers. PK is going to work. Some bird somehow through the crack of a barely open window takes the biggest bird shit of all time on my jacket, which I promptly put in the washer there. It is also an Asian restaurant? I think BL is there.
Walking slowly up a path or street, from the ferry or somewhere downtown, which is crowded with movie film crew personnel, as though they are queued to enter the house. To people who challenge me and my reason for being there, I explain that I am a friend of the director. The street/approach is your current one. I lounge under an umbrella drinking some kind of tropical kind of thing, as though suddenly the end of my walk, directly outside your house, is in Aruba or something. You [ZS] greet me, we chat briefly, and then, knowing you are very busy, I say something to the effect of "Go in there and boss those people around; you're so divine at it."
"The content of all dreams that occur during the same night forms part of the same whole; the fact of their being divided into several sections, as well as the grouping and number of those sections—all of this has a meaning and may be regarded as a piece of information arising from the latent dream-thoughts" (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams).
And then a few nights later I had a dream in which I related both of these dreams to both of these people. And then PK wrote to me. And then ZS called me and asked me, and I said the two dominant moods of the dream were inside knowledge and regret at not spending more time together. And then ZS said, "What if the dream-me were some aspect of yourself, what would that mean?" And I explained it could mean that I have to get off my ass and do some work now, or it could mean that I need to think about whether or not I should ever play a leadership role in something.
I am walking under an elevated freeway not unlike the Alaskan Way Viaduct (which, IRL, is currently being demolished). There is a chainlink fence to my left, running along a grassy field. I freeze in fear, for I have looked ahead and spotted a tiger in the distance, up a slight incline in the road running under the freeway. What I learned about tigers in John Vaillant's book floods my brain. I somehow manage to unfreeze and scramble up and balance myself on top the chainlink fence, though I can see that it is not high enough to protect me. But now the extra height allows me to see that there are scores…no…hundreds of tigers (impossible! they are solitary predators!) streaming toward me. Because...they are men wearing tiger costumes. But I feel certain that one of them is still a real tiger; I'm sure of what I saw. The tiger is cleverly using this parade of men in tiger suits to conceal itself. The crowd has nearly reached me. I manage to leap from the chainlink fence to a kind of cement branch angling off one of the freeway columns, just as the crowd engulfs it. I am a bit higher now, contemplating the sea of tiger-men flowing around the base of the column. In a blink, one of them has also leapt onto my perch. I’m startled. He seems menacing, but I’m not sure? No words will come out, and I am desperate to warn him that there is a real tiger down there — or is it that I am trying to confirm, in that pedantic way one speaks to children, “You do know that there is real tiger down there, right?” Perhaps I doubt what I have seen after all? When the words finally come, the tiger-man cannot understand me, cocks his head. He responds in French. I try in French, but I don’t know the words. I wake up.
ReplyDeleteMany days later, when I reported this dream to my mom, she asked why I didn’t go over the fence into the grassy field in order to escape. I don’t know.