Lindsay Lohan

(get out of my dream already!)

I never thought my dreams would be so short of rich subconscious material that they would have to resort to including some Lindsay Lohan sex scenes. Yes, indeed, I was having one of those awful school dreams where I spend the entire dream trying to figure out how I can get to school on time to take my notes. Once there I inevitably find out that I haven't been to class for a month and there's a huge test for which I am not prepared at all.

Furthermore, in this one, I find that none of my clothes fit and I'm in the middle of a move and so I'm lugging all these clothes around that don't fit and Jerry from ER is having sex with Lindsay Lohan in a bedroom off of the classroom (because, of course the school is in an old boarding house type building with bedrooms) and the sex is super loud and impossible to ignore and I lose all respect for Jerry because I can't respect anyone who sleeps with a woman whose ex-boyfriends refer to her as "fire crotch". Good Lord.

Incidentally, Jerry from ER isn't Jerry in my dream, he's a class mate who is also an opera singer. He was also supposed to be my ride home. Don't you hate it when your ride home ends up hoein' it in a back room?

I can drive cars in my dreams. I'm always surprised in my dreams when I realize I can drive. The funny thing is that it always seems so natural and normal and I'm so very much in smooth control I wake up and wonder if I've been torturing some part of myself who's harboring Nascar ambitions. Once I wake up I'm really happy that I only drive a scooter. The big question is, why didn't I just discover I had a car in my dream last night?

I'm remembering more as I write and realizing what a very long complicated dream it was. I've always been fascinated by the fact that my dream landscape is pretty steady. It's like an alternative life in which there is the same city I periodically visit, the same hotels, the same college campuses, the same houses I live in, the same countrysides that I've been coming back to in my subconscious for as long as I can remember. It's actually quite disturbing at times. It isn't that my dreams are recurring, though that has happened sometimes too, it's more like I keep finding myself in the same places in different situations and my dream self knows I've been there before and remembers the last dream and what happened and it's eerie.

It's eerie to be living a second life in my sleep. Most of that second life has been liberally peppered with gunshots, murder (both mine and others), dead bodies, anxious school experiences in which I will never ever finish a class or graduate, war, and other horrors. It's really only in the last few years that the nightmares have become a little less regular. Since having Max. I guess having a kid has even worn out my constantly anxious subconscious. Before having Max I was plagued with the worst bouts of insomnia where the little sleep I got was ruined by the most awful nightmares which would frequently wake me up and prevent any more sleep for the night.

I used to wander around in a kind of daze after a bad night of nightmares and feel that I was caught in my nightmare world. I would see the waking world through my sleeping eyes and it seemed so strange that no one else knew what I'd just been through, that they couldn't see what I'd just seen. It seemed so twisted that they could be so blase and insensitive to the horrors my eyes had seen. I wrote a lot of poetry back then because that's the natural language of dreams. It comes from our subconscious where language is in shorthand, undiluted, and still in it's primal skin.

I remember so many of the dream/nightmares I've had in the past as though they're real memories. The division between the waking world and the sleeping one has been blurred further by the overlap, by the ability I've sometimes had to control my dreams with my waking mind. To be aware you're in a dream and to coach yourself into changing it's tide is powerful and strange. I once was dreaming that I was getting beat up on a college campus and suddenly I saw what was happening, that it was a dream, and I told myself to start kicking and punching back because it was my world and in my world I can win. I totally kicked my attackers ass and it was the most wonderful feeling. How strange it was though to have the awareness of being both the dreamer and the dreamed and crossing the line between the two.