I lose E____ at the waterpark

I have a vague recollection of a dream in which I was with my friend E___ at a waterpark. It wasn't the chlorinated, baby-blue, slippy-slide kind, but a more rugged version, with an island and a moat. On the island was a rock climbing promontory made of crudely fashioned blocks of concrete, some supported with rebar and some precariously balanced in cairns. 

E___ decided to swim across the moat to the "mainland" while I proceeded to climb to the top of the dangerously constructed edifice. I was concentrating on handholds and foot placement, and I didn't notice that my friend had vanished. Once I'd made it to the pinnacle, rewarded with a 360 degree view, I looked around for her, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Ghoulash

Here are a few scraps of dreams that I can't find a home for, so I'm tossing them all into a casserole. There won't be any binders or common themes, just individual ingredients. 

 

Walking around in my mom's house, I found a cigar. Nothing Freudian there. It was just a cigar. An enormous 10" cigar. I was admiring the craftsmanship and texture and thinking that I'd like to smoke this thing, but I didn't think my mom was going to approve of me lighting it in the house. I wandered from room to room, but I never did find a suitable venue for Big Stinky.

----

I was at the dinner table at my mom's house, and we were doing some arts and crafts with Marcus from The Bear. His little paper cutouts were coming out way better than mine, and he was quick to point this out to me.

"Yours are crap, Andrew," he said bluntly, "but you know this. Everything you do is crap."

Feeling the full weight of his criticism, I began to sniffle. 

"That hurts, Marcus," I whined through the unbidden tears. "I have feelings, you know."

----

I was in a prison yard at a camp where the guards would just as soon shoot you as look at you. They didn't bother with warning shots either. If you were spotted straying too far out of bounds, they aimed right for the head. A fellow inmate decided to make a break for it during a momentary lapse in vigilance as two of the guards engaged in a heated conversation about football.

"Hurry!" he whispered and tugged on my uniform, motioning me to follow. 

He took the lead and sprinted for the fences. He made it over three of them before we were spotted. The guards were taken by surprise, but for some reason, they held their fire and began a foot pursuit. It was beginning to look like we had a chance, since they were not in the best shape. We wound our way through some nearby apartment buildings, toward anonymity and freedom. 

I guess I never heard the shot. I woke up in another freezing night sweat.

----

I was coming home from the market, and I pulled up to my front gate. I looked over to the left and noticed that someone, presumably my neighbor Stan, had dug a nice pond for me down by my well. It was rectangular, about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. 

The fill dirt had magically disappeared, incorporated into some grading and leveling he'd done elsewhere on the property. Next to the pond, plugged into a power source at my well-head, was a MacBook Pro laptop, open and displaying a presentation of the work that he'd done. 

I looked around, but Stan was nowhere to be seen. My mom was present, however, and she was quick to point out that he'd done all of this at his own expense. I was mentally fretting about how I was going to repay him, when my mom chimed in:

"You know how much this little project cost him out of pocket? Twenty dollars," she said, proudly. "That's how much he spent on gas for his excavator. Twenty bucks. That's it." 

I was contemplating how much additional tip would be appropriate for such a fine job as I fiddled with his laptop. It had gotten muddy, so I took a can of some unknown spray and gave the keyboard and charging cord a good spritz then wiped it with a cloth. 

Unfortunately, the can contained freeze spray, and it turned the charging cord brittle, causing it to break off in my hand. As I examined the damage, I found that it was an integrated cord, and replacing it would require major disassembly. Fortunately, I woke up before I had to deal with it.

----

It was a Thursday afternoon in early summer, and I was in the backyard at 9309 Mines Ave, the residence of Robert Leon and occasional meeting place of his Bible Study/cult. A few others had also arrived early for the night's lecture, among them a very naked Sofia Vergara.

"Come over here, now!" she commanded me in her signature Latina accent and over-emphatic diva fashion. 

Of course, I obeyed.

"I'm going to lie down on the blanket. Like this--" she said, and pointing to a red and white tablecloth, she laid herself out picnic style on the grass, knees bent, her legs apart and arms outstretched to draw me in. 

"You're going to do stuff to me," she continued, "and I'm going to like it."

There was no arguing with her. Following her instructions, I began performing a rather long shopping list of sex acts, quite a number of them things which with I was only vaguely familiar. No matter. She was not at a loss for words to direct me.

"Start here! Use your tongue! Don't stop til I tell you to stop!" I was being bullied by the famous TV actress.

I worried that some of the other cult members would catch us in flagrante, but on some level, I realized that this was a sex cult, after all, only thinly disguised as a Bible Study. Who knows, this might have been part of an initiation. I was likely to get rebuked either way, so I just did as I was told for the moment.

I woke up before getting my gold star. Her list was too long, and I needed to get up anyway

Rabbit vs Trix, and why I hate Lake Mead

 

 

Last night I dreamed. 

I also woke up four times, and my memory only permits a brief window between dreaming and the writing of these reports. I've tried writing my stuff down immediately upon awakening, but that isn't as pleasant when one has to pee. Additionally, I have to feed the cats, brush my teeth, make the bed and attend to a bunch of other insistent time-consumers in between the time of the dream and the time I finally sit down to write.

My cats agree that there is a certain level of priority to the tasks that I must perform in a day, and writing my dreams down doesn't even make the list.

Back to the dream...

I dreamed my friend E____  was lying next to me in my bed. There was no light, except for the faint glow of the electric heater in the bathroom. We lay there side by side in the semi-darkness, presumably both sleeping. 

I woke up, still in my dream, and upon my awakening, she rolled over in my direction and looked at me through sleepy, squinted eyes. In the dim light, I could see a mischievous smile beginning to form at the corners of her mouth.

"When was the last time you kissed me?" she asked coyly.

I had to think about it. "Never" was the word that came to mind, but I didn't say anything. My mind was still trying to process the question. Was this a trick? Was it an invitation? Was I dreaming? 

Ding, ding, ding! You are correct, sir. Answer number three. Tell him what he's won.

Unable to fathom how to answer, given my semi-lucid dream-state condition, I blinked a few times, and this ended the dream. Trix - 1, Silly Rabbit 0.

Next, I was transported to Lake Mead where a search was underway for a missing cache of, um, cash, left by D.B. Cooper. I was walking around the lake's perimeter in an area near a spillway leading out into a major river. 

Water was moving fast in that area of the lake, and falling in the water was not on the approved list of activities. Naturally, per dream protocols, the instant that I became aware of the danger, the ground underneath me became unstable, crumbling away and leaving me scrambling to remain attached to the bank.

I grabbed a tree root, and it held me long enough to get my bearings. Little bits of earth were still crumbling away, and it was then that I noticed a very weathered, dirt-encrusted briefcase embedded in the rocky earth. The seams had been eroded away, and I could see stacks of silt covered, dog-eared currency, presumably stashed by the missing hijacker, poking out.

As I reached for the handle, the tree branch I was clinging to gave way sending me and the briefcase into the drink. Floating toward the spillway, and certain death, I had but a few moments to regret my life choices, and then I woke up. 

My last thought in the dream was, "Now I remember why I hate Lake Mead."

My geriadolescent fantasy continues, and I get a phone call from Hog Beast

I don't dream much at night it seems. I guess my mind occupies itself enough with such things during the day, so at night it just wants to sleep. Occasionally, however, there will be little snippets that emerge which tell me that more must be going on behind the scenes.

I did dream last night, and although I would love to have a coherent story with lots of descriptive details, I really only remember this:

I was lying in my bed. Next to me, on my right, was my friend E____, stretched out like a cat, her back slightly arched and her arms above her head, squirming and shifting to glean the maximum amount of comfort and enjoyment from the warm bed. We were lying pretty close together, maybe a few inches from one another--close enough for me to feel the heat radiating from her lithe frame--but not actually touching.

On my other side, sitting in an upright position facing the television was Linda. I think she was there as a chaperone, but she wasn't doing a very good job of keeping us the mandatory six inches apart. Her attention was focused on the TV screen, although I don't believe it was actually on. Occasionally, she would issue cautionary instructions, but they were completely out of sync with anything (or the nothing) that was going on between the two of us beside her.

"Alright you guys," she said, finally abandoning her self-appointed life coach role. "You know what to do--and what not to do. I trust you." 

She said it as though she were going to leave us, but she remained there next to us. It was as if she just switched off, and she became silent and motionless, like a robot going into sleep mode.

E____ looked over at me, her eyes brimming with warmth and playfulness. She was inviting me to come closer if I dared. I did dare. We nuzzled nose to nose as the distance between our bodies shrank to millimeters and then, like a magnet reaching critical proximity to iron, we were suddenly drawn into a full-body Saran Wrap hug.

It was glorious. I was enraptured, but also just a little tentative. I didn't want to spoil the moment or overstep. I could have died in that instant and been happy forever, but E_____ beckoned me further. 

"Go big!" she whispered excitedly in my ear.

We became as intertwined as was physically possible for two fully clothed people with a robot chaperone friend sitting next to them. I caressed the top of her head and slowly ran my hands down to her mid back. I didn't know what else to do. To me, this was  big. It was everything.

We remained like that for a while, and eventually Robot Linda began making sputtering noises. I guess the dream ended at that point, or perhaps Robot Linda switched the channel, because the scene shifted, and I found myself in another situation entirely.

I was waiting in line at the Pizza Roundup when my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number, so I answered with the slightly suspicious, accusatory tone reserved for telemarketers and randos.

"Who is this?" I demanded.

"Hey, motherfucker! It's Hog Beast! I'm back! How come you never call me?" he said, not angrily, but in the wannabe white rapper, ex-con, faux tough guy voice for which he was known.

I didn't want to explain to him that I never called because, frankly, I was scared of him. This was Cory Allred, the guy who had gone off the rails on a meth bender in 2005 and taken his parents hostage at gunpoint. He'd spent at least seven years of the fourteen to which he had been sentenced behind bars, learning all kinds of criminal skills, no doubt, and becoming a fully muscled thug.

"I'm sorry," I said, feigning an East Indian accent, "you have the wrong number. No Andrew here."

I'd forgotten that he hadn't actually used my name, so I was doubly fucked. I'd accidentally incriminated myself in the process of lying to my ex-coworker/friend. 

"How did you get this number?" I continued my ethnic accent but with less enthusiasm, since I knew the jig was up. "Prank caller! Prank caller! I'm hanging up now!" And I did.

I looked across the street at the dirt lot where a house had once stood prior to the Cascade Fire. Some construction was going on, and it seemed that the workers were taking a break and throwing a little shindig. I walked across the road and approached the group. 

Because it was a dream, I naturally assumed that someone in this crowd must know how my ex-con friend had gotten my phone number, so I began hurling the accusations randomly.

"Hey! Which one of you assholes gave Cory my number?" I yelled.

I spied Junior from Yuba City Honda behind the BBQ grill, sweating and drinking a beer nervously. He ran over to me just as I was about to call him out. He must have known I was onto him. He was the culprit, I just knew it.

"Why, Junior? Why?"  I pleaded with mock hysteria. At least I called him Junior and not Chunky, as everyone, including his bosses called him.

He just looked at me with the big, dumb look that always got him out of trouble at work. It was hard to be mad at him for the clever, manipulative things he did, because there was a childish innocence at the core of his misbehavior. He was just a big baby, really, and as a person who was spoiled as child myself, I understood. Besides, he seemed genuinely glad to see me, my current mood notwithstanding.

"So," I said resignedly, "How ya been?"

----

That's all folks. I have a shitload of real-world thoughts, events, plans and ideas in my head these days, unfortunately (or fortunately) they don't seem to be making their way into these posts. I guess I don't want to fuck up my winning streak by talking about it. 

Perhaps, when I have already played out my story, and the ending turns dark, I'll be more likely to write down all the details. And I will have pictures to remind me of the highlights, in case I somehow forget.