I said to my daughter “Get behind me.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure. Something weird’s going on.”
“I can handle weird, dad.”
I looked at her. “My kind of weird.”
She got behind me.
[I’m guessing at the date on this one, based on something I posted to Pinterest seven months ago. Apparently this dream involved skeletons and a doctor’s waiting room.]
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated May 4th, 2003]
…and as I’m walking through the parking lot towards my car, I see two guys approaching — I make eye contact, just to established that they know that I know they’re there . . . One of them nods and says “How’s it going?” And I realize that I am in trouble. They’re both heavier than I am, and they move with a raw plodding strength that I do not possess and cannot hope to match — Like an idiot, I’ve parked on the far side of the lot. The other cars are very far away and a few people are moving in the darkened a lot.
As I said, they’re big and they spread out a bit, drawing my focus first one way and then the other. I exchange words with the smaller of the two, can’t remember now what was said but things escalate and I realize that I’m not looking at a typical robbery — These guys are looking for someone to be and I’m more than convenient.
Bad news for me.
And this is the strange thing… I don’t remember how I got away from them but I did.
I remember shouting to a group of people who were standing in a pool of light 100 yards away… I remember leaving my car behind — perhaps Iran?
At any rate, I get away and at least one thing sank in — I wasn’t clear of them. They’d be waiting for me when I went back for my car.
The next day is Sunday and I am at church — not my real church but one of those awful Seeker churches tucked away in an industrial park behind a Sam’s Club and a warehouse.
And then everything gets murky. The dream went on for much longer, but it just didn’t stay with me long enough to capture it here.
…and when I walk through the door, she’s sitting there on the couch, holding a cup of tea to her lips, one leg tucked under her, staring out the window and I stand there, watching her for a moment and she looks up and sees me, and she smiles.
And I wake up.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated July 10th, 2002]
Yesterday morning I woke up with splinters in the palm of my hand — not sure how or from where and I couldn’t help wondering where I’d been wandering the night before.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated June 19th, 2002]
You wake up with blood in your ears, you wonder what it means.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated November 4th, 2001]
This place is full of voices. I can’t tell if what I’m hearing is from one who is here or who used to be here — but it hardly matters which. I’m hearing voices all day.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated September 12th, 2001]
And in my dream my three-year-old nephew [REDACTED] — plagued by depression and despair all his short little life — has finally given into his despair, twisting a length of picture hanging wire around his neck and hanging himself. I find his stiff body eyes open, jaw clenched. Although he is dead, his body continues to move and walk. He is speechless and his face is blank, almost hateful. We all avoid him, his stiff legged roaming across the floor, his baleful gaze. When his mother comes home, it is up to me to break the news to her. His mother, in my dream, is my aunt [REDACTED] — the mother of my cousin, I know, makes no sense — but she is full of cold rage and asks me why I didn’t take the wire from around his neck she blames me, I am certain of it and I can only point in horror to his animated corpse. Ignoring me, all business now, she takes the horrid little child and her arms raising him up and speaking quietly to him. She is a Christian fundamentalist and I realize that there is something far worse at work here then death. He twists away from her, in her arms, and stares at me with a blankly cunning look — and hideous, diabolical language pours out of his mouth like vomit, demonic and awful. He spews his bubbling, babbling talk at me and in growing horror I find my breath is gone, I cannot speak, I cannot pray any words of protection, my lips are numb and my tongue is thick in my mouth, and then, With ever-growing horror, I hear my own bubbling voice respond in kind, echoing his hideous demonic voice with my own.
I wake in horror and dread, mouthing the words “Veni Sancte Spiritus” in my gasping, choking voice.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated July 25th, 2001]
Nothing good is coming…
…and because my brother is being appointed to such a prestigious position as ambassador, our whole family has been invited to come and take part in the ceremony and reception.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated May 15th, 2001]
…and I am sitting there in Nate’s diner waiting for her to arrive. Finally, my time running short, I get up to leave. At the counter, the night shift waitress turns over the reign to the day shift. Nate stands, friendly and smiling wryly with his shirtsleeve pinned up to this left shoulder, a war injury I assume — perhaps mistakenly. While the women bicker over tips and time clocks, Nate hands me a bag. “On the house,” he says. Because I have been stood up yet again by my breakfast date.
He smiles as I leave, wading through the snow to my car.
And when I wake, it is summer and I realize that somewhere between the diner and my car, I lost the bag Nate had given me, its paper bottom stained dark and greasy from the warm chorizo and eggs he had prepared special for me out of pity.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated September 28th, 1998]
Dream of a child, born late and fully formed — with an unmistakeable look of recognition in her clear blue eyes.
Another dream of a bazaar in Night City — somewhere in The Midlands, at least — and a momentary flirtation that, once over, stays with me for the rest of the night.
Never free of dreams.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated August 10th, 1998]
…horrid dreams, my two children poisoned and dead in their coffins, and no one to save me from my despair…
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997]
I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob.
On their fourth pass, I make eye contact with the driver and I know then that this is no normal robbery. They want me to see them.
We stand there, watching the pass and I realize that we’re being diverted.
Misdirection.
Someone is already in the house, I know. Someone came in the back — the car had been empty? The car had been full on the first pass, but the last few times, I could see that the men inside were not so cramped; one of them was gone.
They were already in the house.
Through the house I go, searching.
Passing by my room I see that the french doors have been kicked in.
Someone is in the house.
In a back room, my teenage daughter’s room, I find them. He is sitting at the piano, holding a gun in her face. She sits on the bed, crying.
With a broken crystal candlestick, I stab him in the back — just to the left of the spine — before he can turn.
Push the splintered end deep into him, glancing off the shoulderblade, scraping against the bone.
He breathes once, heavy, and then dies.
When the car passes by the window again, I am there — his head in my fist, raising it high, my fingers in his hair.
I see the eyes widen as they see his glazed, empty gaze.
I meet the eyes of one in the car as it speeds off — that is the one, I know, who will return for revenge.
The car drives off into the night and I drop the head, realizing that — for the first time — it is snowing in the Midlands.
[2013 Addendum: This is a odd one to look at now. In 1997, I did not have a daughter. Now I have two. And, for what it’s worth, my bedroom (four houses and sixteen years later) has French doors. That’s not going to help me get to sleep any easier.)
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated December 6th, 1996]
…I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. I take one down, finding [ILLEGIBLE] and poetry, handwritten recollections between the pages — it dawns on me that these are the rooms of my great uncle, the missionary to Burma, and that only I know he is dead.
The guard eyes me through the front windows and I move on to the inner rooms, marveling at the collection of antiques, souvenirs, and artifacts [ILLEGIBLE] the grimy gray walls, the peeling paint, and the dusty windowpanes.
Within the inner rooms, I come upon a woman — elderly and wholly lovely. She embraces me and slowly we back to an old bare mattress with a brass frame and headboard tarnished and lovely.
…and then the guard is knocking at the window and shouting and I am still standing at the bookshelf, a book open before me with a picture of an alluring elderly woman open on the page.
And I know I am dreaming, but still I set the book back upon the shelf and move once again into the inner rooms, coming to the place of the woman yet again, embracing and being embraced yet again, awakening once more at the shelf of books with the guard behind me, knocking on the window of the dead man’s rooms.
And again, I turn to pass back into the inner chamber again,
And again.
Again.
Until I wake in the dark morning.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated April 11th, 1994]
And it doesn’t get any better as the days go on.
Wasted time and uneasy sleep. Like Macbeth, I have murdered the deep life — drowned by days, and smothered under chemical work and answering machines.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated April 4th, 1994]
Ghost dreams. Windows that won’t stay closed. Doors opening onto nothing.
Tired and depressed, once again.
Walking through a parking lot towards a line of children. Accosted, my money taken. Finally convincing them to let me go — “Please, I’m getting married today.”
Amazingly — I’m released.
But the ceremony has started and I’m late.
Putting on a tuxedo in the great underground empire while searching for a washcloth.
Sent on some pissant while of an errand by my wife, my own wedding starts without me.
* * *
My chest is continually constricted and I have blood in my eyes.
The gray dawn has returned and my nights are only pain.
Dreaming of empty houses. Rooms like vaulted graves, Corners filled with dust and bones.
Three old men. Drunken and cheaply dressed sit in a library and make vulgar innuendos to every girl who walks by. In the background a brass ensemble plays Cab Calloway tunes.
Do demons stand still? Can you look for them in corners or out of the way places? Do demons stop long enough for you to see them? Do demons stand near us? Where do they stand?
In the dream, my house has been transformed into a filthy hole. The kitchen is a mess, bits of food, dirty pots and pans, and crusty dishes piled everywhere.
My mother sits on the patio and smokes cigarettes.
My father sits in the living room, studying Talmud.
I try to clean up the mess.
My cat walks though my dream, his mind embraced by madness. His mouth gapes, his eyes stare, insane light shining through. His tongue flaps out between his fangs, drooling mucous and vomit. He yowls to wake the dead.
I call to my mother to put on her glasses. I ask her “Can you see him? Can you see the cat?” She doesn’t answer. And I ask her again, and then I say “Can you see demons..?” And I go into my earlier ideas on demons. I speak and the cat yowls and in the living room my father is a dusty corpse.
When I woke from this dream I was saying “Do demons stand still?” in a breathless gasp.