Blog

My dreams have had a very straight narrative flow lately. Last night I dreamt I was traveling by motor scooter. First, I was helping make a documentary about a notorious New England preacher and also helping fix up the house where he had lived. One of the things I had to do was replace some window screens, and I got in a fight with the guy at the hardware store because he was rude. Then I was on my way to New Orleans, and somehow I found where my friend Mike Schandorff was living (I real life, he used to live in NO, but left after Katrina, and he’s now in Birmingham). He was asking me what I thought of some books, and they were all sci-fi. He got offended when I identified them as such. Then we went to get some lunch.

The night before, I dreamt I was dating some younger woman, but I fell in love with her mother. They were living in a hovel in Tampa, which I bought for $12,000 from a shady businessman two doors down, and I was helping them fix it up. Both mother and daughter were redheads.

The night before that, I had a dream that I was in love with my friend Suzanne, but she was dating some jerk who treated her badly. I convinced her to break up with him and go out with me. When we confronted him, I got in a fight with him, but I got the girl, But after a couple of weeks, she left me for no particular reason.

I’ve been out of Lexapro for a couple of days. I wonder if it has something to do with that.

I drank a cup of coffee at my gig last night, and it didn’t keep me awake, but I did start having weird dreams again. It partially involved several anxiety dreams that I have fairly often about pets escaping and about drinking. There was also a travel aspect to it. In one part of the dream, M and I (and two of the three cats—Frankie was absent from the dream) stayed with a family who lived in a house attached to a General Store, which they ran. They also had a lot of pets, including two big dogs, at least one small dog, and some kind of rodent like a guinea pig. Out back, literally in the back yard of the house, there was a market where people sold exotic herbs and peppers.

At some point, there was an opportunity where we might take over the house, as well as the store.

Somewhere near the end of the dream, I was searching through the fridge for a beer and drank a PBR. I poured it in a glass, hoping nobody would ask what it was I was drinking. I couldn’t remember if I’d already relapsed, but I suspected that I had.

A sign, or just anxiety? Who knows?

The dreams had stopped for a couple of nights, although I had a couple last night. In one, I was in high school, I think, and participating in some sort of statewide competition in Montgomery. I wasn’t sure if we were driving there from Birmingham or Dothan until I asked the bus driver, who said we were coming for Birmingham. He didn’t actually know how to get to I-65 from where we were, so I was trying to tell him, but we got lost. In another, the brakes went out in my car, and I was coasting backwards, eventually colliding with some parked cars. I read later in the paper that there was a passenger in one who had broken his back in the accident. The cops tracked me down and shot out the windows of my car during a chase. They finally caught up, and I was arrested.

In last night’s crazy assed dream, I somehow became friends with Steven Malkmus from Pavement, and then used that friendship to surreptitiously get my “friends” at Rolling Stone an interview with him by taking them, unannounced, to his house in New Jersey. Needless to say, this annoyed Steven greatly. I tried to smooth it over by acting casual about it and talking about some records I’d recently heard that sounded influenced by Pavement, including one by Jon Bon Jovi’s brother. Also, when Malkmus was just hanging out in his living room, he was listening to System of a Down, which seems pretty unlikely.

I had another one that was alternately in a bookstore and a library. Both were near our apartment, somewhere in the West 40’s. There was a book that was supposed to have one of my stories in it, and I was supposed to get a free copy, but I hadn’t gotten it yet, so I was trying to get the bookstore to give it to me. At one point, I walked into the bookstore/library and my mother was sitting at a table talking to my ex-wife Doris. I avoided them.

Crazy dreams continue. This time, running into my writers’ group at a mall on their way to a class most of them were taking together. Then later at the actual meeting, they had invited a lot more people than the five I had initially counted on, maybe twenty people altogether. We met in someone’s house, and every time someone made an entrance, a group of young girl ballerinas would announce them, and if they were female, give them a tiara. Instead of going over the chapter I had submitted, I played Onion Man on the ukulele. Some people danced and others pulled out their own instruments to play along.

Oh yeah, and there was also a dog that put on a puppet show. I can’t remember many details about that part, except that one of the puppets was an owl holding a book.

Still crazier dreams than ever. People setting up cots to sleep in the laundromat while their clothes were being washed. Wandering around in some kind of crazy appliance store. Very weird.