Thursday, July 14, 2011
Sleep poetry
Sometimes I write lines of poems down in my sleep. Well, in that half-awake, half-asleep state that you get into sometimes, where weird things make sense. (Speaking of that, here's a great story about that state of being.) I always think "This is such a great line! I gotta write this down so I don't forget it...it's going to be one of the greatest poems I've ever written!" But it's always something crazy.
Something like this. Here's what I wrote last night:
Ducks speak in tongues.
Verbs verbs,
wrong sums,
then nouns.
I have been born
from the viscera of
my sleepiness.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
July 11 - Lake Elizabeth and tricks of the mind
Heather and I were visiting Lake Elizabeth in Fremont, and for a while Jacob and Jordan are with us. We wander into a boathouse and find Opa there, working on a small remote controlled boat. He’s a much younger version of himself, and it’s a surprise to see him there, but he greets us warmly and serenely, and sends us on our way.
We continue our walk, and Jordan and Jacob get distracted and end up falling behind. Around the other side of Lake Elizabeth, there’s a labyrinthine little shopping village, similar to Pier 39, but everything is on a smaller scale…the sidewalks, the doorways. Not too much smaller, but as if it were made for people who were an average of a little under 5 feet tall. Heather and I are wandering around when we hear Jordan, and all of a sudden it becomes a game to run away from him, so we duck down a boarded walk and run, laughing as Jordan chases us. We keep repeating this game, and every time he gets closer and closer to catching up to us. Finally, we escape by crawling through a small wooden tunnel, fifty feet above the ground…a sort of “sky-walk” (except it’s a sky-crawl). Jordan sees us go in, and then as Heather and I get out the other side, we see that to save time, Jordan has climbed on top of the sky-walk tunnel and is running along the ridge of the roof of it to catch us.
All of a sudden, from our side, John Cleese, and Roger Merrill (who is wearing a fake moustache) climb up onto the ridge of the roof and begin chasing Jordan. It was hysterically funny in my dream, and Jordan, Heather and I were dying of laughter. Jordan was finally “captured” and he joined us, and we spent the rest of the dream telling the story. (Somehow the fact that we met John Cleese never really was extraordinary.)
When we caught up with Jacob, we discovered that he had run into Derren Brown, and the two were discussing his next big “trick” thing. (Jacob and I have been on a youtube binge of this fellow lately, and both of us keep having dreams about him. He's probably making us do that on purpose, the bugger. He's a fascinating person.) Anyway, the only part I remember is that it involved convincing strangers that he was a tennis coach, and that his trainee was a champion who couldn’t find a court to play on. We had to knock on people’s doors and convince them to let us play on their tennis courts, just to practice, even if they didn’t have a tennis court.
In the process of knocking on these doors and finding someone to let us do so, we ended up in an Easter dress shop with a ton of people…I remember the following people were there: Dave Grohl, Tyler Beus, Amanda Horrocks, Omar Hansen, Melissa Whittaker, Jenny’s sister Kelly and her daughter, and a recently returned missionary from our ward whose name I don’t even know. Then the dream took this dark turn, and I don’t remember the details…all I remember is that all of these people in this house were actually trapped there.
It was an elaborate building…it had a gym and a warehouse and several different shops. Everyone in the building had slowly been brainwashed, and as the dream continued, I slowly realized how close they were to destruction. As the dream went on, we would see little clues of how far gone these people were, and slowly the clues became more and more dreadful. At first, we would find a few dirty books around, and find food left out for days, or realize that someone hadn’t changed their clothes in days. But as time went on, I realized that children there were starving, and I would walk into rooms to find secret orgies going on, and no one could remember anyone else’s name. I finally found Jacob left on a table downstairs, dying of starvation. The people around him kept saying “The master said soap and water, soap and water only,” and they were squeezing a sponge of soapy water over his face, waiting for him to revive.
I pushed them out of the way and tried to feed him some cereal that I had found, but he was unconscious. In the room down the hall, I could hear a meeting of some kind going on, and I finally stomped over and opened the door. I didn’t stop walking but interrupted what was going on and said “I move that anyone in the vicinity with medical training of any kind be called upon to save the lives of Omar Hansen and Jacob Chapman!”
The room was silent, and finally someone said “Who seconds the motion?” And slowly, hands went up as more and more people sort of “woke up” and realized what they needed to do.
I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but it seemed like suddenly everything was different, and suddenly Derren Brown was there, smiling at me and helping us put everything to rights.
(There was also a bit with Hyrum Conrad being dressed as a tourist--Hawai'ian print shirt, etc--and having a huge emotional breakdown, but I don't remember the details.)
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Being a woman with a sword
Beckah and I are on campus, but it's a different version of campus. We are walking toward the car, where it's parked, and discover that a huge old SUV thing with a lift kit has parked ON TOP of our car. Or "over," to be more precise. We climb in and prepare to back out from under this car, when we start to notice that things are weird...the seats are pushed forward, things are missing (like my wallet), and we find a sword and a small dagger. And the keys are suddenly magically tied to my shoelace. Then we find a letter calling us to play this role-playing fantasy game, which makes us both furious. We have a ton of stuff to do and these people stole some of our belongings.
After leaving and conferring with friends and family, we bring Isha and dad back, and then we all climb into the SUV ourselves. We start looking through their trash, looking for a name or phone number. We find a wallet, but suspiciously, we find that they have at least four different driver's licenses (all with different names and phone numbers). We discover a few advertisements for a story-telling group, and the name on the flier is the same as the name on one of the driver's licenses, so I call Judy to ask her if she has contact info for this group. But Shadi answers the phone (my old boss from Kirby) and tells me Judy isn't there. Then we find a cell phone, and Isha and dad somehow figure out how to find all of their contact info by taking the cell phone and hooking it up to a computer and running a "spider program." Which consisted of actual spiders digging through the info, wrapping what we wanted in silk, and delivering it to us.
So we call the number, and a friendly, slightly flirty guy answers and says he's excited to meet us and that he'll meet us at the car(s). When he comes, it's him and his brother, and they're both nerdy but extremely shmoozy. We request our belongings (wallet, especially) and say something to the effect of "Take your invitation back. We don't want to play." The main guy smiles and starts opening the doors of my car, and digging things out that I didn't even know were there, but his familiarity makes me furious. I take the sword out of the car, and hand Beckah the dagger. I walk up to the main guy, and point the sword at him.
"Here. You forgot this," I say. He smiles and starts to take the hilt from my hand. Before he can take it, I snatch it away and put the sword at his throat. "And if you ever try to steal things from this car again, I will end you." I glare for a moment, then start to return to the car.
He smiles and says "Why should you have the right to decline this game?"
I turn and lean on the sword. A breeze picks up and blows my hair (which is long in this dream). "Because I am a woman. And that is enough."
The guy smiles again, but this time like something has dawned on him. "Now," I say. "I'll return this sword to you, and you and your dumb-ass brother get your SUV off my car." (In retrospect, it seems that returning the sword was a risky thing to do given the confrontation. But in my dream, my certainty in the power of my sex was so solid that it didn't cross my mind to worry.) The two boys get in their car and have some trouble figuring out how to move it, until one of them says "Just do the same thing you did last time." And then the other farts and the power of it lifts the entire car up into the air enough so that they can back up and "free" my car.
And then Beckah, Isha, my dad and I all drive into the sunset.
I'll come back and analyze this dream a little later. Right now I'm too swept up in its awesomeness.
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