In My Other Life

I live two lives, one is my waking life, the other is my sleeping life. I cannot tell you how many times this mailbox has featured in my good dreams. I don't actually have very many good dreams but I'd say that about fifty percent of the good ones feature this mailbox. I want to say this very mailbox but I can't because time marches forward with entropy and at some point in the past twenty five years that I have not lived at 360 Scenic Drive, the original mailboxes were replaced.

It used to be the classic metal kind with the round top and it has continued to receive my mail since I abruptly left this address in the summer of eighty five in a dramatic and swift race between my parents to file for divorce first. I come to this mailbox in my good dreams and I have a thousand letters from lost friendships and ghosts of the past. This little spot on earth is one of my biggest happy places even though in my waking life it belongs to someone else.

Maybe most people think of their dreams as being not real. The things we dream about don't really happen to us. Except that they do happen to me because I carry the memories of my dream events around in my head and my body in exactly the same way that I carry the "real" memories.

Last night I was on vacation with a large group of people and we were supposed to go to some fancy event right before packing up to leave so I was putting on makeup but couldn't get it right and then I put some product in my hair that turned out to be tinted brown an dripped down my neck. I tried to fix it and was in a department store with my luggage...trying to find the event while wiping the stuff off of my ears and then found the event which turned out to be ball room dancing in a high school gym and the bleachers were so steep and reached almost to the ceiling and I didn't want to dance and there were so many people not dancing...arranging themselves in the bleachers like fancy dolls at a stale tea party.

I resented having come. Then it wasn't dancing anymore. It was a convention and someone was shoving a microphone into my face asking me to give a talk...blank panic...I tried talking to all the faces turned to me but had nothing to say and slinked off to get on my scooter and ride the two day twenty four hour trip home with my two pieces of luggage uncomfortably arranged on it. I got spotted by some young pimply person who was there specifically to pick my brain. More literally than was comfortable. Guns came out when I demurred and said I had no time. I ran as the whole place went up in the chase with gunfire. Suddenly there were twenty floors to get down to where my scooter was. Luggage all gone.

Can't get down the stairs. Am always two seconds too slow to get away. Classic resistance dream in which I can only move by grabbing things and pulling myself forward. Legs don't work properly or air is holding me in place...anxiety is permeating my dream. Can't move can't move...why doesn't the dream release me so I can get away? I know at this moment that the whole dream is going to continue in this fashion and yet I don't wake myself. It's not bad enough yet. I finally get to my scooter but by this time I know that a very magnetic dangerous person is gathering forces all around me and I will be lucky to get away. The person in question is there in the crowds of people and the crowds know he wants to get to me so they try to be his arms.

At some point I rush past Anthony Hopkins dressed in colorful motorcycle gear and I engage in some on-the-fly conversation in which I am amusing myself and then realize who he is and tell him that we will probably be seeing each other on the road, passing each other, and waving and then tell him that actually he probably won't be waving to me or noticing me because he's so famous and doesn't have to notice anyone and this little interlude has distracted me but the danger is now overwhelming and I say a breezy goodbye.

On my scooter trying to cram what belongings I have left but everything is falling all over the ground and I find out that the magnetic person has hidden one of my boxes of belongings under a table and I dive for it even as a ton of people try to stop me. I know now that I am running so late. Everyone else is going to get there before me. To the other end of our destination.

I got the box crammed on my scooter and put the keys in and the keys wouldn't go in and then the magnetic person is enjoying the spectacle and laughing and telling me how he will be seeing me on the road. Watching and following and how I will never be far and I will always be in his reach. He's playing now, so sure that I will be like molasses. Somehow the scooter starts and I get up a huge mountain and think I'm safe.

But as dreams do, something changes slightly and I'm now staying in the house of one of Max's friend's mom. On this mountain. But that's the only thing that's changed really because I'm still trying to make time on the road to get to a destination on my scooter instead of by plane and this time I'm suppose to be meeting Max at the other destination only I won't be there and I have failed to book him a flight so he won't be wherever we're meeting either. I am still packing. Always trying to finish packing and I'm still being pursued. S has three tigers on her property that she's quite sanguine about. But I know that I won't get past them.

I never get past the big cats in my dreams. I grab a few of Max's things feeling a pang that he will be so neglected and deprived and try cramming it all on my scooter again and try to leave but all the paths lead to where the tigers are and I'm in slow motion all the time. One path narrows and becomes an impossible bridge over water and I fling my vehicle forward by accident but it isn't a scooter it's a toy car. I go back to beg S to get it out for me only she isn't S anymore she's Philip. He gets it out and I'm on my scooter again. He's gone. Like smoke.

S is trying to tell me how to get on the upper road that will be safe from the tigers and get me going in the right direction but I don't understand what she's saying. Over and over I don't understand and I try to get out but I can't because the big cats are circling me like they always do. Finally I take some path right around her house that leads to the next house and it seems OK until suddenly the cats are right there and there's nowhere to go. I'm in the next person's house and they are freaked about the tigers that came with me and are now nostril close. The neighbor calls for S who ambles up a dirt road and calls the tigers who don't come. One swipes at me and I know it's only playing because I'm only hurting a little bit but will be dead soon.

Something distracts the tigers and I get past them to a road. But now I'm hopelessly late and I have no belonging left. And then Max crawls into bed with us and I'm pulled back to my waking life. Still feeling that sluggish pull of slow motion dreams that freak me out so much. Still feeling the magnetic one next to me. A step behind me. He may even be in bed with us all. He's still around as I write this because we're tied together inexorably. Always.

The only time I'm not running in that anxious slow-motion-body impossible way trying to lose death is when I arrive in my dreams at the mailbox at 360 Scenic Drive and get my letters. Time stops. I stop. I'm calm. I'm happy. I'm home.


What I'd like to know is what does it mean to have the following elements make frequent appearances in my dreams:

Big wild cats (always lions or tigers)
public bathrooms with no stall doors and broken overflowing toilets
inability to move my body (legs) so have to pull myself forward using other objects
being chased
being killed
finding dead bodies
getting mail at my old address
trouble packing luggage
chivalry extended to me
driving cars

Anyone have any ideas? I think I'll look some dream symbolism up.

Lindsay Lohan
(the floosy in the other room)

(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.

At least Lindsay can't steal my man and have a public fight about it with me.*

*I'm making some very serious assumptions here. And I feel totally comfortable doing it too.