Percocet Dreams

Sky hanger (Playing with Magritte) by Hobo pd

I'm on day five of trying to pass a 7mm kidney stone. So far, no good. Thankfully, my in-laws were staying with me on Saturday night when the pain came down out of the sky. They rushed me to the hospital, and I've been traveling in tiny, white subway cars of Percocet ever since.

Saturday was a night of firsts for me: first gurney, first IV, first narcotic. I understand why people can get hooked on these things. Aside from a few times when the dosage was too thin to cover the pain load, these pills are making the agony bearable and everything else somewhat pleasant, like a winding coastal drive at sunset. The constant worry volume in my head is cranked down to 1, and I've been getting about 18 hours of peaceful, cozy sleep per day.

And I've been having a lot of dreams. In one, I was riding in a golf cart with Donald Rumsfeld to the White House cafeteria. Rummy objected to me calling him "Don," so I made him laugh by saying, "Well excuuuuuse me, Mr. Secretary of Defensiveness!" We both silently walked past Dick Cheney, who was eating at a table alone while doing an abstract paint-by-numbers.

Then there was one dream where I was looking at 35mm color slides, holding them up so I could see the light through them. I woke up and found my thumb and forefinger just inches away from my left eye.

This morning, I dreamt that water was leaking through all the cupboards in my bedroom. I woke up to find out that there are no cupboards in my bedroom.

Still, as nice as the Percocet has been to me, I want to go back to normal. I want to deploy this stone!

Precognition or Déjà Vu?

The Force of God Split This Wood

I had a conversation yesterday with Hendrik and Elise about those times when you experience something you're sure you've dreamed about in the past. She had a dream scene that she saw, months later, in a movie. I had a mundane dream sequence of driving in a car with Cristian and two other people I didn't know in a U-shaped parking lot; months later, when it happened, I almost had to pull over.

But, I said to Elise, there might be a simple explanation for this phenomenon. It's possible that we never had these dreams at all. It could be simple déjà vu and that the a priori experience of it was a fake memory of a dream that never occurred yet seemed real and specific. Her point was then how could one trust any memory? The real proof would be in writing down the dream prior to the event.

I don't often dream and less so since Wendy died. This morning, though, I dreamt of going to an office park. I think my purpose was to go to a therapy appointment of some kind. There was an atrium in the building, and on a table there was a photo album of people at a swim party. I poured over the photos. Men and women my age having fun, relaxing in the swimming pool. They were playing sports, pool games, and even board games--there was a table-like platform in the pool and each would swim up to take their turn. After that, I ran into a college friend of mine who had just left a photography class. He said that this week's models were infants, and that the assignment was to get all sorts of shots with shadows and expressions. He showed me how he would coo and shout at the babies to get the right expression.

My next dream was short and upsetting. I was driving down a rural Northwest mountain road. I came to a stretch where there were cars all around, some of them overturned. I slowed down and really had to think about what I was seeing. I thought, why would people arrange their cars this way? I slowly realized this was a massive pile-up. I quickly pulled over and ran to find survivors. On the side of the road, there were huge cut logs hanging from chains--some sort of tribal art installation, I suppose. Where they would likely not sway even in a heavy wind, the accident and flying cars had made them sway violently. I had to dodge them like a videogame character. Then I woke up.

There was a realness and detail to the second dream fragment that was missing from the first. It frightens me, especially after yesterday's conversation.

Rang Dream

Last night I dreamt that I walked into a room in my parent's old house and bumped into my grandfather, who was all dressed up for St. Patrick's Day with dark green sportcoat and a kelly green tie. He was even wearing a green bowler hat. He was happy and had a twinkle in his eye. It was strange to look him face to face and put my arm around him; he seemed so small. He was old, but healthy.

His friends called him Rang, short for Rangval, his Norwegian name. He was dressed up, I'm sure, to go out and sing barbershop quartet songs with his group, the Vallyaires.

Only after I woke up did I realize that he seemed small to me because, in the dream, I was my full-sized adult self but was a little boy when he died, so all of my memories of him are as a towering adult. It's strange to have such a realistic dream of someone who died 30 years ago, to dream of him in a proportion that I never knew, and to remember every detail and line in his face.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

pain away 2 by pinprick

I found a weird story on the Internet this morning (thanks Digg) about a new sleeping pill that will supposedly promote dreaming. Since traditional sleeping pills just knock you out, users miss the REM state where dreaming occurs. This new drug interferes with a part of the brain that deals with dreaming, addiction, feeding, and God and Science know what else. This article says that lab rats on this drug indicated higher memory capacity, improve dreaming (they can tell by brain waves and muscle tone), and it suggests the drug might help with obesity, narcolepsy, and, of course, insomnia.

This scares the shit out of me.

Look, I'm all for drugs that cure or manage disease, but we're coming into an era when drugs try to improve us. I want to dream more and expand my memory capacity. I don't want to take a drug to do that. I don't want to compete against others who are taking drugs to do that.

I respect the fact that drugs help people, but I worry about what they're doing to our society. It's a slippery slope. How did Viagra go from a medicine helping men with a serious medical problem to a TV commercial starring baseball stars? How do antidepressants go from aid to those at the end of their ropes to something that helps us deal with the complexities of modern life? How do antibiotics go from something that fights off deadly disease to something we wash our hands in at the kitchen sink? And when this drug comes to market (2012 is the current estimate), how will we keep from using it to dream us out of this difficult, messy reality?

And an even better question: Where do all these chemicals go when they leave our bodies and minds?

Dream: My Repeat Burgler

Last night, while we were having dinner, we turned on the TV and watched a little of a really bad Clint Eastwood movie called Absolute Power. Clint plays a jewel theif who watches the Secret Service kill a woman who was having rough sex with the President of the United States of America. Ugh. This horribly distasteful premise is supported by a sloppy plot and hare-brained writing. For example, the First Lady starts the cover-up right away and orders one of the SS agents to check the woman for evidence of sex since the Prez is too drunk to remember if he cleared all the bases. SS agent: "I'm no gynocologist." First Lady: "I just made you one!" Ick.

I think the movie made me dream of burglery. I dreamt that I was awoken by the door bell late one night. I opened the door and there was a policeman. He started talking to me through the screen door, but I couldn't understand him. I tried to open the door and turn on the porch light, but I suddenly lost motor control of my arms. I kept fumbling for the light switch and the doorknob, but I couldn't find them. I was apologizing, but my lips and tongue were thick and I could only mumble out the words. It's like I was having a stroke. Wendy came up came up behind me and engaged the cop.

After he left, I regained my senses and Wendy started to tell me what he wanted. Then we heard a noise in the bedroom. I ran inside and found a burgler going through our things. I wrestled him to the ground while Wendy called 911. I hit him several times in the face, but he was able to get me off my balance and knock me over. He escaped.

The next night, we had a dinner party. I was telling our guests about what had happened, when I heard a noise from the other room. I went in and found the same burgler going through our guests coats and purses. This time I hit him repeatedly in the face--almost as though he couldn't fight back. I felt queasy and guilty for hitting him, but I didn't stop until he was unconcious. He was just a kid in his late teens.

Columbia: Sleep Dreams

• Kickball satellite: This was a toy that someone had given me. It was a round, soft, feather-light ball with a remote control receiver. First, you would program the ball to suit your desires. You could make it track the weather for you, or spy on people from above, or bounce communications from place to place, or a few other options. Once it was set, it was your job to launch it into orbit. The makers sold a sure-fire launch kit, but that was extra (and it was for babies). The whole point of the kickball satellite was to launch it yourself with one swift, manly kick. Usually, it took a couple of tries. It weighed a little less than air and it had some tiny jets that would turn on above a certain altitude.
  
• Star Wars Help Book: I was still working at Amazon, and had written in some great detail about some crossover Star Wars and business book. Cost Accounting for the Empire, or something like that. Someone across the country asked that I mail them a copy of what I had written. I went to Kinkos to find out how much it would cost to print it out and ship it. I was surprised and troubled when I found out it would be almost $100. The guy behind the counter said, "Why don't you just turn this into a book. You're most of the way there. That way, they can buy it for $20 and you can make some extra money." The thought had not occurred to me.
  
• L.A. Times Corn Maze: Wendy and I went to a corn maze that was owned and operated by the L.A. Times. About half-way in, we stopped at a snack bar. The guy at the table next to us was marveling out loud at all the transvestites and cross dressers in the maze, though I didn't see any of them. He was crazy, and Wendy and I moved to another table to be farther from him. "Look! Look there!" he shouted to everyone at the snack bar as he pointed to a busload of exiting old ladies, "There's a whole group of them."
  
• Retro Reality Exploits: Someone I knew as a younger man became famous, so I and our mutual friends had all become splattered by the blowback of fame. None of us minded. TV producers came to us with an idea to do a reality show about all of us, though they wanted us to pretend we were still a close-knit group of friends. Also, they wanted to set the show as a Western. And they wanted younger actors to play us at that age, but then they decided to turn the whole thing into an animated show and use our voices. For those of you keeping score at home, we were to write and voice a past-tense reality show with a completely fictionalized, historical setting. Oh, and they allowed us to choose our own character models. I chose one with a head that was three times the size of my body.

From the Dream Archive

These come from an undated pad of paper I had next to the bed, which I think comes from some period between 1997 and 2000. I wrote down little snippets of dreams and hypnogogic ideas that came to me with the plan to flesh them out later. The pad was lost, but now it's found.

People walk around town carrying others without really knowing it. Either they are riding them or they are clinging to them.

A wealthy man in desperate straits would buy your breath from you.

...like an ice truck on a bumpy road out of Hell.

A: "There are no monkeys in the army."
B: "That's what you think, but you don't know that."
A: "Well, you don't know that there are. And if there are anyway, they're just research monkeys."

Memory is a funny thing. Imagine trying to remember someone and only conjuring the shape of the roof of the house they grew up in. Summoning a memory is a conjurer's art--some times the magic's there, other times it isn't. Your first girlfriend's phone number, once a well-trod path, is now overgrown with weeds. You'll remember the combination of numbers one day out of the blue, and then the next day it's gone. Though you've lost the number, the memory of having it is fresh still in your mind. You will lose that, too. You are entering the middle years--the age of forgetfulness. When you are old, you will be assulted by memory.

I can only see as far ahead or behind as would be permitted by the light of a campfire on a foggy night.

I just thought of a science fictoin process of drugging/hypnotizing someone to they lay in a dark room, hooked up to IVs and lay in the dark listening to 100 straight hours of suggestive programming to learn a language, stop smoking or take a class in business law.

Character names: Graham Dribbler (or Grim Drabbler), Parallel Itchyfoot (or Parnell), Axel Theopossulus (Acts of the Apostles)

I was dreaming of pulling clothes off a metal clothesline during an electrical storm--afraid to be hit by lightning--when Wendy twitched in her sleep and woke me up.

My Father's Unexplained Return

Dreamt of my dad last night. I guess it was the first real dream with me interacting with him. He just suddenly showed up again, and there was no explaination for his 10-month absence. Just showed up at the doorstep, looking cold and confused. Everyone in the family was too happy to see him alive again to ask a lot of questions. They were beaming at him and when I would ask my sister or my mom questions like, "Well where has he been?" or "What about the funeral...we saw him in the casket?", they would just wave the question off, marveling at him, never taking their eyes off him, and answer by saying, "Doesn't he look good?" And he did, I suppose. He was spry again; no shuffled cancer walk, no wince of pain. But he was really quiet and didn't seem to really remember us well. I finally got the courage to talk to him, and though he looked and sounded like my dad, he seemed like a different man. I asked him some pointed questions about what happened, but he was casual in his answers to the point of being aloof. My dad was formerly a very engaging, direct man, who never failed to look me in the eye when he spoke to me or listened to me.

"Where have you been?" I asked.
"Oh, you know, around."
"No, I don't know. Where have you been?"
"Different places. Walking, mostly."
"Didn't you die?"
"No."
"What about the funeral?"
"That wasn't me."
"But I saw you in the casket!"
"It must have been someone else who looked like me."
"But then how did you leave the hospital?"
"I walked out."
"But what about your liver and all the pain you were having?"
"It went away. I got better."

I eventually just gave up on the unsatisfying interrogation and stood back away from him with my family and watched him.

This isn't the dream I was hoping for. It was likely influenced by a novel I've been reading (Bruce Wagner's I'll Let You Go) about a boy in search of the schizophrenic father who abandoned his mother before he was born. I wanted the Obi Wan Kenobi dream, where the voice of my father would come to me and tell me things I would need to know.

Okay, now for something a little lighter. Before the above mentioned dream, I had another dream last night that I was a film producer of a certain pornographic niche--lit porn. Basically, we would take sex scenes from literary classics--D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, etc.--and we would film these very explicit sex scenes that were faithful to the source text and were edited with a voiceover of an actor reading the text. The dream, however, was without nudity and coitus, and instead consisted of a lot of research and phone calls. Still, not such a bad business idea. I could imagine the ad in the back of The New Yorker, or perhaps facing the short story in Playboy (do they still publish fiction at Playboy?).

My Business Trip to the Moon

I dreamt that I went with two co-workers on a business trip to the moon. We went there in space helmets and short sleeves; the moon was very balmy in my dream. I was happy to see that the clumpy dust was a consistent blue-white color, but I was disheartened to see the entire earth in my field of vision, to see that I was so far from it.

I wanted to go to the Sea of Tranquility, but my co-workers said it was time to go. When we got back to our landing spot, our capsule was no longer there. One co-worker sat down in the dust and started arranging driftwood around him. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm putting the ship back together," he said. "Come on, let's go." I had to explain to him that the pieces of wood were not our capsule and he, confused, argued, "But it got us here!"

I set out to find out what happened to our capsule. I found a moon base and was able to use the giant-screen telephone to call back to our company on earth. I learned that a vice president of the company needed a capsule to pick up his girlfriend, and that ours was the closest available. They promised to send one shortly. I walked around the moon base and met some other employees. One guy complained that he hadn't been told before that the moon was this warm or this casual, and all he brought with him was suits and overcoats. He felt embarassed for being overdressed. I reached into my bag and gave him some of my t-shirts. "Keep them," I said, "I'm going home soon."

I went back to landing site to find that my coworkers were gone, too. They left a note apologizing for leaving me, but they also left instructions and a form for how to order another capsule to come for me.

The capsule came in pretty short order--not a long enough wait for me to worry much or get mad at my co-workers for leaving me. I was pretty anxious in the capsule by myself, though. I tried to roughly calculate the chances that my ship would overshoot the earth and hurtle out into space for eternity. At one point I was so panicked that I regretted leaving, thinking that it is better to be stranded on the balmy moon than to be lost in space forever. But then I re-entered, splashed down, and was glad to be home.

Dream: Playing Onstage with Paul McCartney

My e-mail box at home had gotten pretty empty save for e-commerce messages and spam, so I decided to go through my contacts list and send e-mails to a few people. I got surprisingly long e-mails back from people I hadn't heard from in a long time. It's a good thing to do.

I had a strange dream last night about playing onstage last night with Paul McCartney in Las Vegas and then palling around with him after the show. He said he was thinking about divorcing his new wife because she drinks too much and she got herself into a drunk-driving accident that he had to pay a lot of money to cover up!

We were in my hotel room and I went into the bathroom to change clothes before going out on the town. When I came out, he said that my boss called the room to remind me that we had a breakfast meeting at 8:00 a.m. the next morning, to which Paul added, "And she asked me who I was, so I told her Paul McCartney, and she didn't believe me." He said "believe" in that sing-song Liverpool way, as if he had never had a problem convincing people who he was over the phone.

Then I awoke, went to the bathroom, and looked out over my yard at 4 a.m. The full-moon light cast deep, beautiful shadows through the tall trees.

Middle East Dream

Last night I dreamt that I was in a burned out, ruined building, somewhere in Israel. I asked a man there with me, "Won't this all end if Israel just gives the Palestinians the West Bank?" He looked at me grimly and said, "No." I don't know which side he was on.

It was strange to have such a political dream, but it comes after reading a list of comments of computer gamers who downloaded a game called "Kaboom." The game is played as a Palestinian suicide bomber and players score points by killing men, women, and children and by doing damage. The game is made by an American. Reading it made me feel guilty for being so disconnected to what's going on there, and yet I can't understand why people are fighting that way. I can't imagine believing in a religion or a disputed piece of property so much that I would be willing to put up with the risks involved. Because I can't understand it, and because I can't decide who's right in this case, I just want to ignore the whole situation.

I sold my Kia yesterday for $2100--I was asking $2500 and was willing to take $2000 for it. It was pretty easy to sell it; we have only had the newspaper add for about a week. It's not so easy to let go. The guy who bought it is coming over to get it today while I'm at work. It makes me sad to sell it, but Wendy just doesn't understand that. I just have so many memories assigned to that car. Plus, it was something that my mom and dad bought me as a graduation present.

Last Night I Dreamt of Comediennes

Last night I had a strange dream. I was watching (or maybe producing) some sort of television retrospective of an aging comedienne--sort of like a cross between Carol Burnett and Rosanne Barr. The show had scenes of her previous episodes interstitially cut with scenes of her watching them from a couch on her set. Then the whole thing became just a random collection of people doing things and being with each other: mothers and their babies, people washing cars, couples walking together. Afterward, I went outside with a bunch of people--none of whom I knew--and it was night in the desert. We watched shooting stars by the hundreds move like migrating birds across the sky. After I woke from the dream, while I was in the shower, I almost wanted to cry because I could still feel the beauty and comfort from the dream.

I like dreams. In narrative writing class we shared our methods of writing and I said that dreams really influenced what I wrote and that some of my fiction was a transcription of dreams. Someone in the class found that incredible--that I would actually expose my inner psyche by writing down a dream. It just never bothered me...it's just a dream. Even if I dream that I kill someone, it doesn't make me a murderer. And besides, anyone uncomfortable with sharing their inner psyche has no business writing narrative fiction--or writing anything for that matter.

I was thinking of a really nice analogy before I went to sleep, but I was too lazy to write it down. It had something to do with waves and/or emotions or something. I must try to remember that.