Vignettes...

... from my first full night's sleep in a month.

I am sitting on a dirty cement stoop in front of a 15 storey apartment building.  The 30-something guy I met half an hour ago on the bus is whispering his life philosophy to me.   He's wearing a greasy used-to-be-white wool cap over his curly ginger hair; his cheeks are scruffy and weathered.

The late afternoon sun slinks into evening; the sky deepens endlessly.  A series of ever-more inebriated women walks past us up the wide shallow stairs, asking, or slurring, if this is the party for Cecilia, and we say yes.  We should know; we walked her here.

It's dark.  We've wandered deeper into the neighbourhood, on a sidewalk that winds illogically between grimy residential high-rises.  A man jumps out from the shadow cast by one of the infrequent trees backlit by even-more infrequent streetlamps.  My heart skips a beat then double times as he comes at us half-running.  Then opens his arms and hugs my companion.  They exchange loud incompehensible pleasanteries; he leaves.

I'm weeding my friend's garden.  I pull a up giant thistle out and find its roots embedded in the body of a decaying rat.  I gag.  Take a shovel and dig it out.  It's just as visceral and disgusting an experience as you imagine.

On the bus in Liverpool, a woman of impressive girth and height stands, gripping the overhead sling in one hand, the her six year old daughter's upper arm with the other, and argues loudly about motherhood with her sister.  I settle the dispute with Ring Pops.  We listen to the daughter's walkman without headphones, and sing along to Brittney.

Street corner.  Kirk Douglass passes me.  He's wearing a tan raincoat, nice shoes.  We say hi.

It must be the red wine

First work anxiety dream in Europe!   

I was attending a series of talks by grad students and upon arriving discovered no one had organized the pizza lunch.  I grabbed the phone to call Zeek's pizza and discovered we were in a room on the other side of campus not serviced by the pizza delivery.   The department head (an actually super-competent female PI in reality) said I should just run out and grab it from the north Capital Hill location.  I raised my voice a tiny amount and explained how that would take well over 45 minutes after I’d walked to my car, driven there and back, in traffic.  She shrugged and said then we’ll just drop it.  No, I insisted.  I will just miss the talks.   

Halfway to my car I got lost in the health sciences building (this could really happen actually) and had to ask a burgundy-scrubs-clad group of medical students which direction was west.  

I finally emerged from the building and found myself on the wrong side of campus, still half a mile from the car park.  I glanced at the program to estimate whether I'd get back in time for any of the talks and realized that the names were all of second year postdoctoral fellows and my name was listed halfway down the itinerary as a presenter.  

 I began to panic, mapping out how to get to my lab, grab computer and memory stick, write the talk, while driving to the pizza parlor and back.   

I opened my eyes in my friend’s guest room in Bordeaux, two hours into my post-french-lunch siesta, simultaneously relieved to not be delinquent and disappointed that I had not found a better solution to my dilemma than the cheater of waking up.

Werewolves of Paris (well, actually Bordeaux)

First anxiety dream of the European trip. 

Zombies who were werewolves, a classroom full of children, headmaster who didn’t believe in my imminent apocalyptic vision, mass slaughter, lots of running from menacing half-dead dog human hybrids.  The usual holiday slumber party.

Them's fighting words (dogs) ((moms))

I was having dinner with family on Capital Hill.  Since it was a dream, by "dinner" I mean a table at Harborview hospital cafeteria and by "family" I mean my mom, a random gay man I just met and his tall, blonde movie-star-looking "hag" (look it up in the urbandictionary if you aren't familiar), a group of unrelated-to-us grieving family members and a microphone built into the pale green plastic urinal on the wall beside the table through which my sister spoke, or rather sobbed, from a room deep inside the hospital where her boyfriend's aunt was dying.

I leaned into the wall as it was loud and echoey in the cafeteria, strained to hear and responded with an steady stream of "oh honey" and "I'm sorry", while roving nursing interns brought us trays of jello and weak coffee in plastic mugs.

Needless to say I was glad enough when dinner was over.

We exited the hospital and were immediately at the corner of Broadway and Denny, which  if you live here in Seattle you already know is unlikely without some kind of futuristic physics-based intervention*.

The lack of sci fi accessories in my dream notwithstanding, we prepared to cross Broadway heading east but mom was somehow walking faster (*see earlier note about the low probabilities of events lacking medium-to-far-future technological assistance) and I missed the light.

Mom ended up on the far side and as I mimed her an apologetic wait-for-me, she refocused her gaze slightly southward and began running back across the street against the light.  Someone a half block west on the opposite side of Denny was waving to her.

To reach her friend, mom had first to negotiate a phalanx of Matsumas (yes I know this is an easy-peel orange; in my dream they were a breed of irrationally aggressive guard dogs that would put a German Shepherd Pit Bull mix to shame) that occupied the entire crosswalk from north to south on the east side of the Broadway/Denny intersection.

The dogs were so aggressive that their owners typically blinded them, leaving them only their sense of smell to locate perpetrators (or mailmen, random passers-by, children, the elderly, squirrels, and any life forms, honestly, that consume oxygen as a means to survive).

Panic rose in my chest and time slowed to a thin molasses drip.  Moment by agonizing moment my mom inched closer, apparently oblivious to the enormous raging dogs in her path while I vainly yelled for her attention.  The owners were clearly in the same grip of fear; they frantically waved her off while struggling to maintain hands on leads at the ends of which strained and frothed their massive charges. 

My mother, it needs be said, even in waking life, is not easily deterred.  Certainly not by hoarsely screaming daughters.  Nor, inches from the first lunging snarling monster, by the tacit panic on the face of its owner who was clearly foreseeing having to watch their pet rip a woman into small pieces right in front of them.

Mom was at the very south end of the line of dogs and I prayed she would go around.  For a moment it looked like she had narrowly missed the dog, as she wove just south of the group.  But then I saw her stumble and go down.  Dogs that had been snapping and lunging in random directions, turned in terrifying unison toward the south sidewalk.

Though it sounds cliche, I am here to tell you that in that moment my heart was in my throat - and I do not mean that figuratively.  Other organs made similar threats of relocation as I lost sight of my mom in the converging dog mob. 

And then, miraculously, she popped up.  Stumbled once more, to which I will always attribute the loss of my spleen and 25% of my personal fortitude, but a small price to pay, for a moment later an owner offered her a hand up and she resumed her jog, apparently unscathed.

If you are a regular reader of this blog (and by that I mean you have read even one other post) you will know that happy endings really aren't the speciality of my unconscious mind. 

Despite the generally unrelenting science fiction horror show in my dreams, I strive to achieve gratitude on a daily basis on my non-dream life.

So today I am grateful that my mom was not eaten by a pack of semi-wild dogs.  The end.

No more gin before bed

A few patrons ahead of us in line at the donut store, the poet wore a floor-length emerald green robe with gold trim; he alternately quoted verses and flirted loudly with his sister.  My mother imprecated quietly in my ear, mainly about the Catholic church, since the poet's popular latest volume was dedicated to his priest - and all profits supposedly went to the local parish.

I worried they would run out of coffee before I got to the front counter; back in the schoolbus, five of my labmates waited for lattes and mochas.  With budget cuts in federal research money, charter buses had become a popular alternative to airlines as a means of transport to scientific meetings.

A few minutes later, I was riding in a converted van with my father.  I opened a trapdoor in the middle of the floor and peered down  into the dark subcompartment.

"Did you know there was a cat in a cage down here?"  I asked him.  I scanned the dim space anxiously, trying to determine if the animal was emaciated or dehydrated.

"What?" he responded.

"And a kitten.  No three kittens.  More cats.  There must be half a dozen caged cats!"  My voice echoed loudly in the space below, sounding more agitated than I actually felt; looking around the cats were clean, groomed. 

My father sighed.  "It's probably another rescue by your mother."  He shrugged.  

I woke groggy and parched, the most vivid memory that first moment looking through the floor at the cats, a sense of terror and sadness at what I might find.  A few days ago I'd had a dream I put two kittens in a tupperware container and half-killed them with neglect.

I'm going to assume that dreaming of healthy well-cared for cats is a better sign.  As for the preist, the poet, the schoolbus and my mom... I probably just need to hand that off to a starving comedian.

Space carnival accident

My father walked over to the big green plastic carnival ride.  It was broken but he glued it together, assuring me it would be "good as new in no time." 

He acted like it didn't bother him at all that a family friend had said something snarky last night about  my father's hobby re-building carnival rides: "It's not like he's sending rockets to the moon, or anything."  My father's cheerful banter as he worked meant, of course, that it bothered him a great deal.

The ride had a thick plastic green tree trunk of a base, into which fit a giant ball joint from which sprouted four extended arms.  From each arm dangled a small pod.  We had ridden it endlessly in summers of my childhood.

As it rotated, the pods would flare out in wide ruffling arcs, like one of the high speed swinging bucket centrifuges in my lab might do  if the operator ever lost his mind entirely and started a run without first balancing the load.

The ride normally sat four, the size of my nuclear family.  To test it, my father was loading just one pod with three people - himself, my mother, and the family friend, leaving the other pods empty. 

"Well," he smiled at me, zipping a silk jump suit up to his neck, "wish me luck."  He said it the way you might if your dangerous mission were going to the corner store for a liter of milk.  I nodded at him, smiled back.  He hopped into the pod and snapped shut the door.

My best friend and I watched the pod's progress on the video moniter he had rigged, next to an altimeter with a digital readout.  First I was confused, as we watched the numbers rapidly count backwards from 900.  Just before they reached 0, I understood that he had set the pod to shoot straight up.  It was unclear if he had meant it to go this high, but at 0 it would exit the earth's atmosphere and they would be in space.  Had my father been wearing a helmet?  

No sooner had the question entered my mind, it was answered: my father's head, a grainy black and white shadow in the moniter, changed from a single blob to a wispy spray, then dissipated into.  Nothing.  For another second, when the pod's other two passengers remained intact, I wondered if he had provided them with helmets.  Then their heads too became staticky confetti.

It is hard to describe that long moment, in which there was time for so many questions and regrets, like that old cliche about your life flashing before your eyes before death, only it was my final moments with my father that replayed in agonizing detail in the microseconds after I watched my parents die.

I remembered this sensation that had risen as his eyes met mine, right before he clambered into the pod.  I'd wanted to ask.  What he was doing.  Did he need anything.  Did he need anything special. And then he was gone.

There wasn't even time to fully process the event before I woke up, groggy, feeling hungover from last night's fried chicken.  The shock was wearing off and I began to mourn my family even as I realized it had been a dream.

It's such an odd feeling, this residue of grief matched with reality.  That didn't happen.  It wasn't real.  And still I feel such a sickening, terrible sense of guilt and sadness.  That I didn't ask the question.  Didn't understand.  Didn't insist.  Didn't even hug him goodbye.  I just let them go.  And then my family was gone, without fanfare, just a horrible, low resolution, soundless explosion.

Smuggling operation

I was hiding in the back of a closet in the cellar with my cat when the police battered down the door.  It was dark, - maybe 1030pm - by the time they broke in, but there had been a helicopter circling overhead with a floodlight for the last several hours.

I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.

Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.

I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions. 

"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.

I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me.  She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something.  It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation.  She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do. 

She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.

The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns. 

It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty.  I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.

This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police.  Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges. 

When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there.  There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen. 

So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in. 

I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come.  By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling.  After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar. 

I heard sirens, far away, then closer.  They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house.  I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me.  I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.

Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda.  I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard.  They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy.  I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank.  And that is where they found me.