We, my mother and I, live in a giant apartment building. Only mom isn’t home. My car has been at the mechanics. It is immaterial what was wrong with it. I was watching afternoon TV after my afternoon classes. And seriously considering a nap. A knock on the door. We were high. Perhaps like the 20th floor. Somehow it felt like the 20th floor although I don’t remember any signifiers that it was.

I open the door. It’s a youngish man. Or I suppose an oldish boy. I’ve not seen him before. My car has been repaired. Is it outside? Has the mechanic delivered it? He wants payment. For some reason I don’t want to let him in. My hands are full. Perhaps I am carrying the mail or something. I feel unprepared and awkward. He has some papers I suppose that I’m meant to sign. There’s a ledge in the hallway where I try to sign his papers. But I drop what I’m carrying while I’m trying to sign his papers. And I’ve dropped my mail or some important documents behind the ledge which was something like a garbage chute. But my papers aren’t gone. They’ve caught on a hinge or something just beyond my reach. Nothing I can do, it seems, can rescue my mail. And it’s important. I don’t know what it is. But it’s important and I can’t reach it. His papers, the housecalling mechanic, his papers didn’t fall. The mechanic is not at all concerned that I’ve lost my significant mail.

When he wants a check, I finally relinquish and let the man in, giving up on my lost mail. My apartment is cluttered and shaming. There’s an island where I shift some papers. I find my checks after much effort. He tells me the cost. I remember it was tiny. But I am not pleased the cost of my car repair was tiny. I spoil my first check. I can’t find another. My checkbook seems filled only with those pages that look like checks but aren’t; they are receipts. I find more at last. The mechanic fidgets. He’s losing his patience. I need to write something on the back of the check. Only I can’t. My checks are made out of Styrofoam or have some sort of Styrofoam cover on the back and not a pen and not a pencil and not a marker will work. I have spoiled all the remaining checks. The mechanic has got dirty hands. Without asking he washes them in my kitchen. But he doesn’t dry them. He shakes his dripping hands into my briefcase. He thinks I don’t notice but I do. When I announce that I can’t write him a check I also get mad at him that he flicked his hands into my briefcase. I get mad and say I had some art in there that he has ruined. I was lying in my anger. There wasn’t any art in there. It didn’t matter anyway. The irritated mechanic didn’t care whether he had ruined my art or not.

I haven’t got any cash. And I have ruined all my checks. The mechanic wants to claim something as collateral. He helps himself to something.

He leaves and I figure out how to remove the front lip of the garbage chute. By doing this I can rescue my dropped mail, which I do successfully.

I’m outside. I overhear strangers in a car saying something about the mechanic. And how I can sue him, no, how I will sue him in a future episode because he had no right to take my property – did they say a gun? — yes, another episode. Presumably I was a TV show. I hadn’t known that I was a TV show. And presumably the fight with the mechanic was going to escalate now that I had thoroughly vexed him. My car isn’t there. I suppose that it must be back at the mechanics. I understand that I can’t go get it.

Something else. There’s a competition. I am expected to understand the rules but I don’t. I’m in a hotel with my coach. He is old. And doesn’t pay me any attention. And doesn’t offer me any instruction of any use. I don’t understand the rules of the sport. But I can’t ask. And there’s more than that. I’m at a competition and I don’t understand the details of that either. Where do I go? What do I do?

There’s a small flattened black cube. It is exactly the size and dimension of the step on weighing scale in my bathroom. But there are no numbers. And it doesn’t measure your mass. You step on it. And you float. Or rather the scale responds to the change of weight and awakens and lifts you up. It lifts you up because it exerts an anti-gravity field exactly in proportion to the person standing on it. We are in a large outdoor field. As large as a golf course. There are sand traps and swamps. There’s more to this sport than flying. There’s something I must do while I’m flying. But I’m not sure what that is. Of course there is large audience. But they are nothing more to me than a painted backdrop. I step up on the tiny platform. And I am elated that it lifts me up above. I am made to understand that I can drive it my leaning slightly left or right. I discover that these movements have to be small and fluid. I also realize that the machine fails when my body moves beyond the invisible borders of the flying scale. That is, since it lifts me in proportion to my weight, if I lose my step, even if my head or my arm moves beyond its edges, the weight will be wrong and I will crash. I move around quite well but I’m still accelerating, I’m still just getting started really when I crash. I’ve also dropped something. Perhaps it is like the ball in a sport. I’m surprised how far away from the beginning of the course I already am. The ball, I will call it a ball, has landed in the middle of a giant pea-soup colored swamp. The swampkeeper has rescued the ball and tossed it into a much smaller swamp. I am grateful. I run after the ball, to the smaller swamp, to retrieve the ball. I have lost my flying scale. Now that I have crashed I feel like I am not allowed back on it. I am just out of reach of the ball when a giant snake, designed after a cartoon — it is fuzzy and purple – raises out of its snake hole and bites me. It stings. It stings a lot. Its neural toxins shock my body. I am paralyzed. My legs snap and crumble underneath me and I am heavy and alive as much as carved wood is alive and stuck on the ground. The game ball, like my mail in the other dream, is just out of reach. I understand that if I can retrieve the ball, I can stop the snake, recover from my paralysis, and perhaps even get my flying scale back. But I can’t move. I can move my fingers a little. I can move my head more than a little but still not a lot.

Meanwhile of course the snake. His only work to stop me, to kill me perhaps. I have said, and it remains true, that I rarely dream fear or terror, and this time too, I was not terrified, but I did dream sensations of being stuck, being helpless, and there might have been a kind of lazy terror to that. When the snake uncoiled and snapped and came towards my face there was nothing to do but grab its puppet head. I grasped his jaws with my hand and held them shut. I do the same thing with Murph, not maliciously. She wrestles with me until she wrenches herself free. As with the deadly toy snake. I knew that four or five bites might kill me, and what’s more, disqualify me from the game. But I also knew that the bites really hurt and I wanted to seriously avoid another. I withstood the snakes wrestling head as long as I could. The fight restored some of my motion. But then another bite. On my cheek. I was not as immobilized as I had been the first time. It was a fight of willpower. It was a fight of perceptions.

When the snake snapped at me the third time, I thought it was coming for my face. I had miscalculated. It sank its jaws around my crotch and didn’t let go. It didn’t, blessed be his name, bite however. I don’t remember my escape. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps my toxic paralyzing toy snake is still clenched comically and dangerously around my crotch.

A third dream. This one even more disturbing. I was lying prone, perhaps across a row of airplane seats. I couldn’t move. I had as much ability to move as a rag doll without bone or muscle. I can’t even move my eyes or my neck. There is nothing to see. Like burying your head into a pillow and opening your useless eyes. I could hear still. And I could feel still. I was being touched. Poked. Prodded. Examined. I could feel weight on me. As if a dozen imps were perching on my useless body. And it was meant to be scientific or at least as clinical as a prostate exam or when, as a young boy, young nurses would take my pulse at my crotch. But there was a shaming biological response to all the touching, to the stimuli. And as with the clenching snake, it’s altogether unclear how I escaped.

Yes, I am not unaware. Somehow I have managed to have thoroughly libidinous and limp dreams simultaneously.

SS