From my notebook 12/31/06

I used to keep a dream notebook—well, I still do—but lately I haven’t been writing in it, primarily because the dreams are so horrifying, and I’ve found that if I don’t write them down I forget them faster. But anyway, today I had the unique experience of having a nightmare, waking up, going back to sleep for less than an hour, having a worse one, then after getting up for awhile, and being careful not to doze off AGAIN, momentarily dozing off to continue a nightmare from much earlier (or from another day!). As usual, I cant even talk about these dreams, because the horror was so acute—and I’m a fool for even mentioning it now—but one thing just occurred to me—that part of one of the dreams was about someone getting robbed, and then hearing that the robbers took (along with the usual valuable stuff) their Danny O’Day ventriloquist dummy!

Okay—so I won’t seem like I’m trying to be all mysterious and everything, and just making all this up—one of the dreams—not the worst of them, though, was just one of those about someone trying to kill me. In this case, it’s a young, jock guy, he’s up on some structure—it’s the inside of a building, like a train station—but it’s—as usual with my dreams—an invented, new location—not something I can identify from the real world—this guy has some ridiculous military rifle that has rocket launchers on it and scopes and lots of hi-tech shit—but he’s just trying to simply SHOOT me as I run out. I get away, but then into a place where I’ve never been—but is somehow familiar—like an apartment or suite of rooms—very cheap locks on the doors—I even lock TWO of them—but still he’s coming—and then things just get WORSE. I know when you write it out like this it doesn’t sound so bad—because it just makes you think of a MOVIE where this would be happening—and with my hero’s ingenuity I would set up a HUMAN MOUSETRAP and get the dude—or else find a convenient handgun floating around and suddenly (though I’ve never shot a gun) I’d be an expert marksman and shoot him before he could shot me (or perhaps John Wayne would, hiding in the shadows). But NO, this dream is really much more along the lines of a movie like Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT. But even worse than that. The fortunate thing is being able to WAKE UP! And then to forget. Often I have horrifying dreams and once I wake up I’m not even that disturbed by them, just happy that I’m awake and the dream was a dream. Well, this morning, when I dozed off AGAIN, I had that weird continuation dream from?—when?—who knows—sometime earlier—or maybe not—maybe it’s just dream déjà vu—annoying—this one was bout me smashing all the windows of the cars in the driveway parking area of where I live—I had smashed the car windows sometime earlier in that earlier dream—now I was facing the consequences.