Dreams: 5

Waking up after 11 on a Sunday is not unusual. It’s a bloody shame, of course. It’s a lovely day. Just the sort of day I really like. Sunny. Not too hot. Murphy was Ok. I took her out at 2 or 3 a.m. last night.

In my dreams: I’m standing on a subway platform and I’m late for school. Not just late for school I’ve missed lots of days of school and I’m worried I won’t graduate.

I can see my lackluster attendance record superimposed over my dreams. I have to relieve my overburdened and currently rebelling intestines and I’m uncomfortable. The train has been delayed. There is some announcement that people, children, have been torn up to bits and scattered over the north end of the station. I have my camera and I go to take pictures but for some reason the tracks are deep, really deep, and I can’t manage a picture. I’m not horrified that this thing has happened and I’m not panicked that I’m going to be late. I don’t believe that children were torn up and killed on the tracks. There are only three men, scattered, working on the tracks. I see a hand but it looks like a doll’s hand. I think it’s a hoax. I hear later that this accident which looked very much like a hoax killed the local police detective chief. They didn’t know who was going to head up the police now.

I must manage another form of transit. I’m on a bus or a train – not a subway train. I still have to relieve my anxious bowels. It’s not like a city train. It reminds me of a train I took in a foreign country. I like trains in my dreams. Dream trains are so romantic. I’m trying to manage relieving my bowels in my seat. This train was fashioned so that the seats were toilets as well and it was not supposed to be awkward but I still couldn’t manage it. I was sitting beside an Asian woman who was preoccupied not with my industry but with the two white haired gentlemen sitting behind me.

One was Bob Barker only his name was Bob Simon but it was clearly Bob Barker. The Asian woman thought he was a relative of Paul Simon and I joked, presumably with my pants still down below my thighs, that they were just second cousins. Bob, who couldn’t shake the Asian woman’s misunderstanding, was bemused but also irritated with my joshing. Bob’s traveling companion was Smithers Simon. Yes, Smithers from the Simpsons. I don’t know if they were brothers or married but they seemed like inseparable companions.

The train took a side street so that the route I was expecting was completely thwarted. Just changing my route a trace changed the entire world. The Simons wished me well and Bob asked that I come to his show. And then they got off the train.

I disembarked a stop or two later. I was lost but not anxious for that. A new space in my dreams often feels more like freedom than anything else. This new space felt like a suburb of a city I’ve never been in. It was quiet. It felt like early morning where everything was lit but it was not nearly hot. It smelled like lavender or magnolia blossoms. I don’t remember that I ever managed to relieve my revolting bowels.

Something else and somewhere else. It’s after school. It’s winter but not cold. Winter is rarely cold in my dreams. I go out to the school yard. It’s like a baseball diamond or something because there is a metal net. But there are also chained metal walls set up like a maze. I’m with three or four other guys meant to work our way through the maze. It’s not stressful. It’s meant to be a game.

Perhaps we are blind or in the dark or something. Because one of the bigger boys hits upon setting up a beacon to work more or less like a lighthouse in the dark for captains. There is a car beside the maze. He causes the driver’s air bag to expand with the intention to blow up the air bag. Presumably the gases in the air bag will light a beacon that will stay lit long enough for us to make our way through the maze.

Only there is some catastrophe. And now I am played by that boy from Home Improvement. The other boys make their way away from the car before the air bag explodes. But I get trapped under the car. The bag explodes as it was meant to. The car rolls over me. I’m not dead. But my face has been horribly burned. Nobody, not even I, really care much. That ended that.

SS