29Jan / 2025

What is my art

Cat with only slight halitosis
wakes you up in the middle of the night
licking your beard as you remember
how happy you were when she finally came home
one cold winter after being missing for weeks
and everyone else gave up but you didn’t
and one night she just scratched on the door
like before and you let her in
skinny and dirty and sick
with a variety of parasites
and she keeps licking your beard
with little grunting noises mixed in with the purring
you wonder which parasites they were
you think of all the sick mice she probably ate
on her heroic snowy winter trek home
and probably still eats and she licks and licks
licks and grunts and licks, pure love.

I had one of those dreams in my head when I woke up.
One of those *bam* dreams
that would change your life
if only you could recall one or two fuzzy things
I was talking to a baby that was also older than a baby
it looked like a drawing I made of Beta when she was a baby
so, basically a baby with curly fine light baby hair
but underneath that darker straighter older hair
and the baby said goo-goo ga-ga stuff for a while
but then it also said, and I quote,
“You have to decide what your art is.”
And art means art, but it also means (in German) “kind” or maybe “essence”.
I told people about the baby, in the dream
and they all said, no, the baby doesn’t say goo-goo ga-ga it talks
the baby can talk.
And I said, yeah, I know.
And I woke up feeling it all through my body

Permalink

02Aug / 2022

No one is upset and nothing hurts

I was dreaming this morning when a cat woke me with a bladder massage.
In the dream, my extended family was celebrating my birthday at my childhood home, around a redwood picnic table my father had built, on a sunny summer day, in the shade of a cherry tree, a maple and some redwoods.
There was picnic food on the table, no animals were trying to steal it, the sun was warm but gentle and not blinding, the way summer sun used to be.
Everyone was happy at the same time, but not excited, there was no drama, no one was sad or mad at someone, everyone got along.
My grandmother was not there. I imagine she was in Montana, as a teenager, riding horses.
My uncle, who sometimes felt compelled to be weird at gatherings, I suppose due to anxiety, was not there. He might have been in the hills filling his green and white Ford pickup with scavenged firewood.
My parents (whom I remember missing yesterday) were there. They were younger than they had been when they died. 30s or 40s. My father looked fit and was not wearing a shirt, which was typical of him in the summer at that age. I talked to my mother.
I talked to my father. I asked him how Heaven was.
No one is upset and nothing hurts, he said.
My sister gave me a letter she had written for my birthday. It was written with a wide calligraphy pen in several colors. Each color said something else, and the colors intertwined, and tangled, and she had written it in her normal handwriting not calligraphy despite the nib she was using so I was unable to read it.
I asked her to read it for me.
She was about to read it when I woke up.

Permalink

10Aug / 2018

Infestation

“The body takes what it needs,” said my acupuncturist about my acupuncture treatment, during which I had fallen asleep, head back mouth open.
So I went to bed early that night and had a dream, the first in a long time.
The wall was covered with something that looked like corrugated cardboard, seen end-on, this rough uneven texture, and that was covered with all kinds of moths of all shapes and sizes – clothes moths and kitchen moths and porch light moths all flying about and walking about on the walls and I was trying to kill them all, mostly by swatting them with a rolled-up periodical, but also by clapping them in my hands when they flew around.
The wall was lit gently, as if with evening light through a window or one or two 50-watt bulbs, and I went about the killing calmly and with a sense of purpose, until my alarm went off.

Permalink

07Apr / 2015

There was a strange baby that sang at midnight

A long line of strangers’ cars in the darkness, headlights off, idling or moving slowly. A little moonlight. People walking beside and amongst the cars.
Strangers all.
Near you, a strange woman has a baby and a lot of other things to carry. Maybe she is pulling a wagon. You hold the baby for her.
You want to comfort her and the baby, so you comfort her by comforting the baby.
You hold it gently to yourself, protecting it, and hum.
There in the night, among strangers, you hear a beautiful noise and it takes a while to realize it is the baby singing.
The night is quiet, people murmur, engines idle, tires grind on gravel. Footsteps and your tinnitus whining and whirring and jingling.
The baby’s song rises above all of it like wind whistling through a canyon.
You share a look with the mother. How wonderfully it sings, your eyes say.
How wonderfully the strange baby sings in the night.
What is all this, you ask the dream.
The necessary coexistence of the strange and the beautiful, says the dream.

Permalink 2 Comments

02Sep / 2014

Odin’s dream

Two beggars came to the door

says Odin.

Laborers, or criminals; foreigners, male and dark.

They could not speak our language.

I did not let them inside.

They looked hungry. I will make you a sandwich, I said

says Odin.

I found bread, white loaves. I couldn’t decide whether to spread butter or mayonnaise on the bread. Then I found mayonnaise I had made and thought, it will go bad faster than butter so I had better use it up.

I made them cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise and sliced cheese that was beginning to go translucent around the edges. I fed them before I woke up

says Odin.

What does my dream mean.

Fear and liminality

says Loki.

You are an old man blind in one eye. Long white hair and beard, and blind in one eye.

but

says Loki.

Still you love the unknown and secret and feed it freely.

Next time feed it something richer than old cheese sandwiches with old mayonnaise.

And see what happens.

Of course the question is, should you take a trickster’s advice.

Permalink

28Feb / 2012

New wardrobe

I was picking out clothes.

I had this medium-length tan coat, similar to what Steve McQueen wore in a movie. Bullit I think.

And this knit cap, like what Daniel Craig wears in a scene or two of that remake of that brutal Swedish movie about the reporter and the hacker, which I happen to like (the cap. And the movie, as it so happens, despite the brutality).

It was kind of a strange combination, and wouldn’t look good on me, I don’t think, but this was a dream.

I was going to see my dad. I was real happy about that in the dream.

I was still happy when I woke up; then I remembered that my father passed away years ago.

Suddenly, the dream was disturbing.

My wife says I was moaning and groaning in my sleep.

Remember the old days of blogging, when we wrote about our dreams all the time?

Permalink 3 Comments

07Dec / 2011

Yes, yes I did

I remember, back in the early days of blogging, back when my first computer was powered by a little steam engine, that bloggers often wrote about what they had dreamed.

I sometimes did.

Then that got old.

Also, it turned out that I might have interesting dreams, but they rarely are still there when I wake up.

Well.

A couple nights ago I had a vivid nightmare that someone had bought the wrong breakfast cereal.

It was just an image and an emotion. The image was this box of muesli. It looked wrong. There were too many puffs in it, for example. I do not like my muesli with puffs, or with chocolate. At the moment, it is hard to get muesli in Austria without puffs or chocolate, that may have been the source of the dream.

Or it may not. Who knows with dreams?

Anyway, in the dream, I removed the clear plastic liner from the box, with all the cereal in it, and double checked. But it was clearly full of puffs.

Someone had bought the wrong muesli.

I was filled with profound disappointment.

Then I woke up, as one sometimes does with nightmares, still saturated with the emotion.

Wow, I thought, that was some nightmare.

Once, I had a nightmare about a rock in a stream. A big, flat boulder about an inch under the surface, with the water flowing silently over it. At night. That one filled me with regret and guilt. Some terrible crime was buried beneath that rock.

I have never forgotten that one.

Obviously.

On the other hand, I once had a dream about trying to kill a guy who was absolutely impossible to kill. He kept fighting back, it was amazing. I was tussling with him in a friend’s basement while a couple friends watched television upstairs, so on top of everything else, I was trying to kill him quietly. For some reason, it was impossible to strangle him. He was about as strong as me and kept getting away. I finally stabbed him in the neck with a shard of window glass. I hit an artery, too, because the blood was squirting out real far. Unfortunately, I seemed to have only nicked the artery, because although the blood squirted out real far, it squirted in a real thin stream. It was taking forever for him to bleed to death.

In fact, he never bled to death in that dream. He just kept rassling with me.

Then I woke up, full of anger and frustration. Still, it wasn’t exactly a nightmare.

Dreams, aren’t they weird?

Where do they come from, I wonder.

Permalink 6 Comments

← Older posts

Metamorphosism

Tag Archives: dream

What is my art

No one is upset and nothing hurts

Infestation

There was a strange baby that sang at midnight

Odin’s dream

New wardrobe

Yes, yes I did