crude matter

I dream frequently, but I rarely remember them.  I dream in cinematics - in the third person, with wide-shots and closeups and scores and dramatic tension and sometimes I’m not even in my dreams or sometimes I am and I die and the dream keeps going because the world isn’t always seen through my eyes.  I feel like it’s my subconscious, telling a story - I’ve always loved stories, I think, more than anything - and I woke up this morning feeling like this totally absurd dream that stuck with me wasn’t important but the feeling it gave me was.  So I decided that for once, I’d write a dream down.  And maybe in a few weeks or a few months I’ll look back and I’ll read it, and it won’t make any sense but I’ll laugh and remember it just a little, and that’ll help me figure myself out.

“Dream logic” is a cheap phrase to explain how your subconscious jumps around in a dream.  One minute, you’re floating in space, speaking out loud even though sound couldn’t possibly exist out there, and the next, you’re at the bottom of the ocean, worrying about getting breath or not worrying about breathing at all, depending on the type of dream you’re having.  I don’t remember how this dream starts.  But my subconscious mind worked up a helluva backstory, exposition to explain the circumstances that ended up being a cinematic nightmare.

Aliens had invaded.  Or something.  Maybe they were monsters, but it felt more to me like they showed up all the sudden from somewhere else and were fully intending to take things over.  They had futuristic looking weapons and armor that wasn’t really armor - just those sort of haphazzardly placed pieces of foreign looking metal covering a shoulder like a gladiatorial costume or something.  You see it in “historically accurate” movies all the time.

They looked like a cross between this thing:

And this thing:

Some frog-like creation that my unconscious mind whipped up.  Froglike, bipedal, not too scary until you got up close and saw how ugly they were.  The leaders - I remember they used a royalty system, a “king” and a “queen” looked more like the Predator.  Arnold would call them “ugly motherfuckers.”

Anyway.  Dream logic.  I am with a group of survivors, a resistance movement, fighting back against this “invasion,” for lack of a better word.  We’re in the parking lot of the Tribeca apartments, where I normally park my car.  We need to climb the fence.  Except on the other side of the fence isn’t my apartment complex, it’s the campus of my middle school.  And the fence isn’t a slotted fence, it’s got glass or plexiglass or something in between the bars so it’s more a wall than a fence.  We climb it, and we have to scale it very carefully, because for the invaders’ big secret weapon, get this, was water.  Just water.  Water that could think and move and follow orders.  And the water was building up on the other side of the fence.  So we had to climb up the fence, and then shimmy along the perimeter so we could get to a clear area on my middle school campus where there wasn’t water.  And, oh yeah, if the water touched you, you killed yourself.  Flat out.  Like The Happening or some bullshit.  Like, a single drop hit your skin and you would just give up and kill yourself.

So this group - come to think of it, I can’t even remember seeing myself in the group.  Maybe I was just dreaming about strangers - climb the wall, shimmy up, a few of them get a few drops of water on them and just kill themselves.  The water gets smart - it decides rain would be a more effective plan of attack.  So it starts raining, more people kill themselves.  It’s down to just a few, maybe four or five people.  The two braver ones, a black guy I’ve never seen before and John Cho (yes, John Cho) decide to make a break for it.  The rest of the survivors would stay in safety and the two heroes would find a way to beat the bad guys and come back for them.  Jon Cho, however, is crippled.  His leg is amputated, so he was climbing that wall with crutches, and it was a whole thing.  He decides he would only slow the group down, so to give the other guy a better chance of escaping, he books it down the hall and decides to attack the Queen - who’s passing by - directly.

He uses his crutches as a slingshot, and kicks the Queen right in the face.  Which does little more than piss her off.  So she punches him in the face (remember, this is a Predator looking thing) and her fist goes straight through his brain and out the other side of his head.  Gruesome death.  Totally awesome.  He’s dead, but the other guy was able to hide in what used to be the A/V studio classroom at my middle school.

So he’s in there, waiting for the commotion outside to pass.  The door starts to open - bad guys are making rounds, checking rooms, because they KNOW resistance movements are out there.  So he hides himself, behind an A/V cart and wedged up against a desk.  There are knocks on the wall.  I guess that’s how they search.  And two of the things come in the room, looking for him.  They walk right by him, and I swear to you, if my brain could win an Academy Award for cinematography, this would’ve taken the cake. I can’t explain it, I can’t accurately type out how Anne-Frank-30DaysofNight-if-they-had-just-looked-the-other-way-they-would-have-seen-him this was.  I don’t get scared by my dreams.  I just don’t.  I die in my dreams frequently - in third person, so they keep going.  I’m used to nightmares, so you can’t really even call them nightmares anymore.  But I woke up after this was all over with, and this particular moment really stuck out.  Not quite scared me, just left me feeling amped.  Breathless.  Adrenaline.  Like I, myself was in a fight-or-flight situation even though I was dreaming about somebody I’d never met or even seen before in my entire life.  Some creation of my lower-mind, maybe a persoinfication of myself but probably not that I cared deeply enough about to worry over, like the protagonist of a novel you create a visual representation of entirely by what you perceive on the pages.

He sees his opening.  They have their backs turned.  He takes off - out of the room, across the courtyard, up the hill, over the knee-high fence, onto the sidewalk, and…safe.  No more absurd monsters, no more homicidal water, just safety.  And he realizes, I don’t know how this conclusion got made because frankly, it’s bad science, and shame on my brain, that live electricity was the key to killing his enemies.  He escaped, and figured out how to stop the bad things from happening, so what does he do?

He decides to go back.

And then I woke up.

“Mr. Negative.”

“You’re just wearing your normal clothes.”

“I know.”

Drop like a bulletshell, dress like a sleeper cell.
I’d rather go to hell than be in purgatory.

So please, please, please, let me, let me, let me, let me get what I want this time.

There are going to be so many Snookis this Halloween that I might just dress as the guy that hit her and punch them all in the face.

VS.

Fight.

Me: “Now you know how Lady Gaga feels.”

gerfatty: guess what i’m gonna be for halloween
jeffmartinftw: What?
gerfatty: drunk

He wasn’t sure of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to…and who he was.

He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him.

She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: “Now your third wish. What will it be?”

“Third wish?” The man was baffled. “How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?”

“You’ve had two wishes already,” the hag said, “but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.” She cackled at the poor man. “So it is that you have one wish left.”

“All right,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in trying. I wish to know who I am.”

“Funny,” said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish…”