I was with Gamma, she had a conch shell the size of a lime.
Then I was at Horst’s place, except it wasn’t a place he really has, more like a house or part of a house, with a view of an ocean or sound, maybe near Seattle, or perhaps in Denmark. Or Sweden. Or Iceland. Or Norway. (All places I have considered visiting lately).
There were a lot of strangers in the place, coming and going between different rooms.
I looked out a window that overlooked a small blue wooden balcony overlooking buildings and, beyond them, water.
I was packing or unpacking. Going through my stuff in a bag. Perhaps I wanted to leave, I was getting my stuff together.
I found Gamma’s conch shell, or should I say Gamma’s Chekhov’s conch shell?
Because I noticed legs emerging from it, eyes, pincers, the whole package. It was home to a hermit crab.
Then I noticed there were other various snail-type shells in my stuff, that I had thought empty, but they were all running around, hermit crabs all over the house. I was scrambling around trying to gather them all up while also trying not to make a big disturbance as I didn’t know the people in the house and also trying to figure out what to do with them?
I would put them back in my bag if i could gather them all up and take them down to the water and release them.
Wrapped up in some newspaper I found a blotchy red-orange bass/grouper type fish, sort of gasping for air/water, I wrapped it back up and put it in with the hermit crabs.
Although the situation had potential for slapstick or panic, I was going about gathering the sea animals methodically and calmly, with a clear solution in mind. I happen to think that emotions in a dream are as important as any events or symbols, and this was free of worry or panic or anxiety or any other negative emotions. Which, if you are familiar with my dreams, is a breakthrough. It was a good dream, for me at least, and the sea animals were going to be okay too.
I had everything under control.
I have been bouldering lately, and I was talking to Alpha last night about how the things you climb are called “problems” and how I love knowing that they can all be solved, unlike problems in life, where you don’t always know that.
For me the dream was (among a lot of other things) about dealing with problems with that positive feeling that they can be solved, rather than with angst.
Tag Archives: dreams
Remember back when we used to blog our dreams?
Posted in Das Gehirn, Metamorphosism
Tags: bouldering, dreams, fish, hermit crabs, problems
A cat licked my wife’s dish
It was my first day of freedom following the expiration of my quarantine. The others still had a day or two to go.
We were sitting on the terrace chatting after eating noodle soup for dinner.
We were talking about dreams.
We talked about dream architecture. I mentioned my theory that houses in dreams represent aspects of our minds. Generously, no one mentioned that everything in our dreams represent aspects of our minds. Everyone described houses and other buildings they had dreamed of.
Houses I have dreamed of: repeated dream of standing on the street looking at a suburban single-storey green house in which a family has been murdered. Repeated dream of (imaginary) sex club in Seattle that, the last time I dreamed of it, had gone out of business. One-time dream of a friend’s house in which I was fighting a stranger to the death and he Would.Not.Die. no matter what I did, including stabbing him in the jugular with a shard of glass; a frustratingly thin stream of blood sprayed out.
Alpha went inside to talk to someone on the phone.
A cat took that opportunity to lick our soup bowls clean.
I told Gamma that, regarding the shirt-shopping nightmare I had described earlier (two understocked shirt shops that overlapped such that one could not tell where one shop ended and the other began, nor even where the real entrances were, and which carried no really nice shirts, just mostly factory rejects or oddly-styled and funnily-sized strange-fitting shirts with unusual or ugly patterns that I did not want) that I had yesterday been thinking about Uferlosigkeit and Grenzenlosigkeit (and wondering whether there was a significant difference between the two). (Something that is uferlos is unbounded, and grenzenlos would mean without borders).
Inside the house, Alpha said something that sounded as if she were wrapping up her conversation, so I carried the soup bowls into the kitchen and put them into the dishwasher so the cat wouldn’t get in trouble; but it turned out she was not done with her conversation after all.
Gamma asked me how my first day out of quarantine had gone. I said I had forgotten how to drive. When I took my car into the dealer for a check up, I had drifted too close to the shoulder, for example, and was not paying as much attention as I should have. And while at the dealer waiting for my car, I looked at Humans of New York on Instagram and the stories made me cry. I imagined an apprentice mechanic asking the mechanic, Gee did someone give Mr. Living his bill already?
That’s all I did today. Plus a little work. Plus I went grocery shopping and the cashier had to remind me to enter my PIN code.
I was going to take a walk but it’s too nice in the hammock now.
I’ll take a walk tomorrow.
I didn’t gain weight in quarantine (actually I lost a little) but my belly is fatter, which I guess means muscle mass is down.
Washing dishes, taking walks. Life is an endless struggle against entropy.
Posted in Das Gehirn, Familie, Metamorphosism
Tags: car ownership, cats, dreams, emotions, entropy, exericse, humans of new york, quarantine
Halfway up a tree
Odin is halfway up a tree. It is a big tree. An ancient tree on an ancient, stony mountain, one of many in a grove.
A grove of Yggdrasils.
Odin is halfway up this one Yggdrasil of many. He looks down and thinks: fuck. He is so high up he would die a dozen times if he fell, so he keeps climbing.
But the tree is so gigantic he can’t see the top. And to be honest, Odin is scared. So he starts climbing back down. He doesn’t climb long before he notices a branch hangs over a plateau of grey stone. He climbs out along the branch and dismounts to the stony earth, to his great relief.
He wakes up and there is an angry red scratch on the top of his wrist he assumes he got roughhousing with the cat the night before.
At breakfast he tells his wife about being stuck halfway up an ancient tree. Did the fire department come and get you, she asks.
At lunch he walks to the coffee store and buys a kilo of coffee. Odin can never remember if he wants a kilo or half a kilo and always buys a kilo and notices afterward it is more than he wanted, he should have bought half a kilo.
He looks forward to smelling it when he gets home.
On the way to the coffee store, he saw the grey crow standing by the bench, watching him, so he buys peanuts and a sandwich. When he gets back to the bench, a German woman is parking her car nearby and the crows keep away until she finishes, waiting high up in the trees.
When she finishes and gets out of her car and walks away, two men walk past, carrying advertising from door to door. After they pass, a man walks by with a white dog on a leash. Three boys walk past on their way home from school. Several cars. A man on blue bicycle.
But then the crows come. First the black one, then the grey one.
The black one is eating a sandwich. Then Odin throws him some peanuts. It sets down the sandwich, takes the peanuts, hides them, then comes back for the sandwich.
The grey one does the same thing, except it hides pieces of sandwich too.
Odin guesses rats come at night and feast, and the next day the crows are all, WTF? But maybe not. Instincts are things that worked in the past, right?
“I am your life.” When he dreams, Odin asks his dreams what they mean. The tree said it was his life. Looking up dream symbol information online, a lot of sites say trees are the personality, or the self, or the life, or connections; all things Odin has been thinking about.
What say the slain?
Sometimes life is relentless. It is like the giant shark bending the bars of your shark cage. It is like the monster in the movies that can’t be killed, climbing back in through the window after you lock the door on it. Like an army of zombies surrounding your house. Like whack-a-mole. Like a salesman. Like an infestation of moles. Like ants. Like a tree full of birds, watching your every move.
What does it want?
It wants to give you another chance. It wants to give you exactly what you need. It wants to help you be more like you.
That would be so cool, it thinks.
I dreamed
about a woman with a miniskirt and no underwear.
that my dick was so big it hit me in the forehead.
that my beard was shiny black.
that my red cat was calico and defied gravity, walking on the wall.
that the beggar woman from the supermarket asked me for alms and i said no.
The interpretation of dreams
1. I am in the living room, Gamma is beside me on the sofa. The cat is going mad with a drinking straw, clawing the underside of the sofa. I slap the back of the sofa and tell the cat she’s making it hard to concentrate on ‘Inception’ which we are trying to watch.
2. No, wait, that’s reality, the top stopped spinning and fell over.
3. Alpha and I were at Gamma’s school. Despite her forgery tendency, all her teachers like her, except maybe the boring one who doesn’t like anything, and her grades are okay.
4. No, wait, the top stopped spinning again.
5. A dark-haired woman in a white dress was kind to me. We had a nice, long conversation.
6. My daughter was stuck in a house with lion and I had a plan to get it out, the lion.
7. Physicists were flying around with jetpacks. Which looked like barstools, and were very quick and maneuverable.
8. I played two recognizeable (to me) songs on the saw (Red River Valley and You Are My Sunshine – my dad used to sing them all the time. It was his birthday recently.). No, wait, the top…
9. Something else I can’t recall. My eyes hurt, I’m going to bed. But I’ll drive the van into the river first, just to be sure.
No, Tom, I don’t want to be your friend or in your movie or whatever
Tom Cruise invited Morgan Freeman over to talk about a project. Things kept happening while they talked. Accidents and catastrophes that Morgan Freeman eventually figured out Tom Cruise had prearranged. He also figured out that the project was merely an excuse to get him to come over, and that what Tom Cruise really wanted was for Morgan Freeman to be his friend. It was night and Morgan Freeman was wearing a colorful, striped terrycloth bathrobe, due to one of the catastrophes, and standing in front of the fountain at the Gloriette above Schönbrunn palace, when he said, “Tom, I’m not interested in being involved in your project, nor in any friendship with someone so manipulative.”
Then my alarm went off and I really had to pee.
I slept all night, interrupted only once when someone tapped me, twice, on the back. My wife seemed to be asleep. Have the cats learned to tap? I wondered. Or do we have freaky Mansonesque burglars? I couldn’t see anyone. Maybe they were hiding. But if we had burglars, the cats might be uneasy or something, and they seemed calm. But can cats tap like that? Like a wife waking you up in the middle of the night for some reason. Or a guy in a bar, before he picks a fight with you. Or a crazy burglar.
How odd, I thought. And decided to have a dream. And Tom Cruise wrecked it. I was showing Gamma a big, phat Vespa with a built-in television when Tom Cruise stole my dream and pissed off Morgan Freeman. Serves him right.
The Cripple’s Reel
I would like to compose a tune with that title, “The Cripple’s Reel”. With some unusual time signature, such as 7/3 or something. Or, perhaps, being a reel, 19/8. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking, Always the odd shite, Mig, because you don’t know enough about music to make something normal that’s interesting. To which I reply, What’s normal about being interesting? I mean, interesting about being normal? Unless the normality is merely a mask behind which nefarious or subversive intentions are implemented? That would be somewhat interesting.
I’ve been thinking about writing a clinical study on the interaction of muscle relaxants and Jameson Irish whiskey.
Abstract:
Large, mostly dark Gestalt appears to pursue two lighter, one reddish, one grey, and much faster shapes through a lime-green space, suggestive of infinite time/space.
See, this morning after Gamma left for school the kittens got into Gamma’s room and I, still a bit groggy from my “back pill” last night, was chasing them, in my usual black suit and tie, cursing like Harvey Keitel (I like to think) in a Quentin Tarantino film (Bad Vet, maybe). And the elusive little critters were diving between the bed and the trundle bed beneath it, and I would wait 30 seconds silently and, missing the attention they would climb back out, and I would chase them again, and they’d dive back under the bed. This went on for six minutes, or twelve tries, until I caught the female and tossed her out and closed the door. The male is easier to catch, generally, but by this time I was impatient, and my back was killing me from all the diving around, goddammit, so I endeavoured to make his trundlebed hiding place less comfy by sliding it back and forth with increasing velocity until he opted to join his sister in the hallway at which point all was calm again.
I have not combined back pills with whiskey since the first time due to the previously-mentioned (elsewhere) side effects which include falling down (due to excessive relaxation) and being treated well by my wife due to her mistaking me for a friend.
I have, besides this study, also been thinking about dementia, and two relatives directly affected, and how they are coping or not and also, as one does, at least if one has hypochondriac tendencies, wondering whether this dark hole haunting me has any connection to this.
You know the dark hole, right? Not really a hole, just this vast darkness in your mind? Or your meta-mind? This darkness back there, so dark it’s hard to say anything more about it but I’ll try? And you wonder if the names you forget, or switch, or the words you have trouble accessing, are somehow connected, and whether your pursuits, such as ballroom dancing, or music lessons, or artistic pursuits, or composition, are a good insurance policy against this, or useless.
Time will tell, I guess.
Also, fucking back, man.
At least I’ve been dreaming more lately. Great dreams, I am very grateful for dreams. Thanks! Two nights ago I was on a ship of some kind on a stormy nighttime sea, with a Danish singer of whom I am fond, and the ship was sinking, and maybe there was an airplane, and water was coming in, but the ship was very buoyant and my singer friend was reassuring me that this was entirely normal and the ship would not, in fact, sink, and that we would make it to Iceland just fine, or something. In the second dream that night I was pointing a plastic rocket launcher at a family about to escape in a helicopter, waiting for them to take off so that they would die in the crash when I shot them (they were bad guys) (there was also a cargo plane in this dream) when my alarm went off.
Last night: my wife walked into a wall in a seaside Japanese town (or so I was informed by a young man in the dream) and I was a spectator at a massage contest, and one of the masseuses and her friends had decided to massage me, when my alarm went off.
And so it goes.
Posted in Metamorphosism
Tags: composition, dreams, drugs, lumbar pain, muscle relaxants, music, science