A Dream With Another Reality

I had another fun dream last night. The last time I was telling folks at work about a dream, my boss said that you know you're psyche is fragile when your dreams are so transparent. It's true...I've been having some real whopper dreams lately with symbols in them like a 9th grader's poem.

In the dream, I was sometimes watching a movie, and sometimes a part of the action. The premise is that there are two worlds, and you can choose to move back and forth between the two. The one that I have chosen to be in is a world inhabited by artists and communists, an experimental world, with clean streets and true love and everyone getting paid to contribute what they can and do what they love. It has happened, however, that this beautiful, exciting, theoretical world isn't working out, and there are riots, weird concerts that everyone is required to attend, and people doing drugs in these long, winding alleyways. I am trying to escape from something, and I seem to be either very privileged in this world because I can move in and out among the riots, the concert hall with the looming government officials, and among the drug addicts in the weird alleys. I think at one point about how it isn't clear whether or not I have special privileges or if everyone can just choose to move around freely because we are in the exciting alternate universe space where everyone is a free, intelligent being who can make adult decisions ofr him or herself. Also, at one point, I am a stripper. I am working as a stripper and performing at a tattoo shop in front of hundreds of people who are required to watch me by the government, and I can look out windows and see trees and trampolines and a rattlesnake in the branches of one tree, like what Becky and I saw one time when we were in middle school and practicing cheerleading moves on the trampoline at my childhood home.

Everything in vaguely frightening and liberating at the same time. My mind moves back and forth between understanding that I am completely happy and completely at peace because I have exactly what I want and knowing that I am in terrible danger.

To reach the other world, you have to walk up a very long hill (I am walking with my husband up this hill trying to get back to the first world, and we comment on the poor engineering of this road and how it is so impossibly steep, and he points out an alternate route we can take with stairs that are less steep and easier to climb even though it might take a little longer because it winds and covers more distance), pass through the rioting crowd (which is at the same time very menacing and dangerous and also not--they are wrong and right at the same time, they threaten you because they are against you but at the same time they represent a very deep truth and they are there to protect you), and then you have to pass through a terrible, beurocratic place, something like a post office or an airport, to come out in a murky, dark bus stop or train station or parking-deck kind of building. When I reach this building, my husband points at a child sitting at a counter reading a newpaper, and says, "This is how you know that the place we are is Jersey." He says this with more than a hint of derision.

We are disappointed to be back in the normal world, even though it feels much safer. The roads are less clean and there isn't the feeling of heightened idealism or transformation or whatever it is about the other world that is so much better.

What a strange dream! It was all sepia-toned and detached, and intricate, and strange, and obviously about how I'd thought I was making the right decision to be with my husband, and how I was making the right decision in so many ways but also making a horrible wrong decision in other ways.

It's funny how the mind does that...renders these weird excavations and buildings and stories from feelings you aren't even aware, or you're only partially aware, that you're having.

Oh, also in the alternate reality, almost everyone was biracial. It was very clear that everyone was biracial because we had become so intellectual that all races were blending into one. There was also all these forests, and I knew that there were people in the forests plotting things, like government coups or overthrows or revolutions, and it was scary and ok at the same time. I could walk through the forest and be a little afraid I was going to be held hostage or raped or forced to join some militant army, but I knew theoretically it was impossible because people in this place had evolved past such meannness.

Strange, strange stuff.

There were also all these people walking past the concert hall where I was a stripper/writer/tattoo artist, and the hall had tinted windows, who would seem to be looking directly into my eyes, but actually wouldn't see me at all.

And there was a moment when G and I were traveling to the old world where we had to go stop at a Croatian grocery store, and I wanted to buy something to drink that would be interesting, but I couldn't find anything, and I was sliding around on my stomach on the floor and somehow accidentally tore their linoleum and had to promise to bring them the tape to repair the linoleum that I knew I had in my house in the old world, and the Croatian men agreed (again with the menace and calmness at the same time), and then I bought some Croatian chocolate and a diet Coke.