Tag Archives: dreams

Which Way To Wonderland?

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Sometimes I really do get confused between dreams and reality. Take today for example: I slept in ’till very late as I tend to do these days. I kept waking up and opening my eyes just slightly, only to find myself in unfamiliar surroundings; for some reason I was lying down on a makeshift bed in the middle of an unfamiliar kitchen. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it, so I kept drifting back to sleep, hoping that everything would clear up once I’d gotten rested up sufficiently. When I actually did wake up more or less fully, I found myself in the middle of that same kitchen—a well-appointed one at that—but definitely not my kitchen. I lifted my head up just enough to get a glimpse of what lay beyond and sure enough, I was in a stranger’s house, having slept for God knows how long in the middle of the kitchen floor.

I closed my eyes for a moment until I heard loud breathing just above my head and opened them again with alarm, only to find two small children crouching over me and staring. I realized they had probably been there for a while, no doubt waiting for me to fully awaken. I said hello and asked them their names, but they didn’t answer and just kept staring. The younger of the two was just a toddler and probably didn’t speak yet, and the older little girl was no older than three and seemed too impressed to answer. I called out “hello?” a few times, hoping to find an adult there who could tell me where I was and what the hell I was doing there, but no answer came. I was terribly groggy and kept feeling myself being pulled back into sleep, so I summoned up all my energy and stood to take a look around.

It was a beautiful bungalow-style home, tastefully decorated and with great big windows through which the light of early afternoon was generously pouring in. I looked at the neighbouring houses for any possible clues but did not recognize the area. Then I noticed a beautiful large swimming pool in the backyard which was made to look like a natural pond, and before it properly dawned on me that it was summer out there and how incongruous that was, the kids walked out ahead of me through the open patio door. The little one quickly dove into the water and started swimming around in circles while his older sister ran around the perimeter giggling and looking back towards me, no doubt hoping I would chase her. I was now in a panic. Here I was in a stranger’s home and now responsible for these two small children, one of which was possibly in danger of drowning.

I started calling out louder, hoping someone would emerge from the house, or possibly from one of the neighbouring homes, but nothing. I jumped in the water but the toddler was swimming so fast, like a little fish, and I couldn’t catch him. Finally the little girl jumped in too and just as I was starting to completely freak out, she pulled out her little brother and gently led him inside the house by his tiny hand. Dripping wet now, I caught a towel on a lounge chair and draped myself as I followed them back into the house and into the large den, where there were now a man and a woman, which I took to be the parents. They were a very attractive couple, and I was quite sure I had never seen either of them before. The woman was sitting on the large L-shaped couch and staring at me, obviously wondering what I was doing there. I was drained of energy and didn’t know what to say or where to begin, so I just lay myself down on the other side of the couch, barely able to stay awake again. The husband spoke up and said he had found me the day before; I had been wandering around, visibly lost and confused and then when he had tried giving me directions, I had fallen into his arms, fast asleep. He’d thought he’d bring me back home and let me rest until I was better, he said, and so here I was.

I was just about to ask them why on earth they had left me alone in that state to watch over their children when I heard meowing next to my ear. I turned around, and there was a beautiful cat staring into my eyes. I blinked and saw it was Mimi standing not two inches away from my face. I was wondering what she was doing in that house as she continued meowing with what I detected to be a note of alarm. When I started fully regaining consciousness I realized almost with surprise that I was no longer in the house with the strangers but was actually back in my own bed.

Who knows? Perhaps if Mimi hadn’t called out to me I might never have found my way back home. I suppose there could be a worse fate, but next time if I’m lucky, I wouldn’t mind running into the Cheshire Cat, and maybe even dancing the Lobster Quadrille with the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. As incongruous as it would be, it would also seem… much more familiar.

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Mistakes, We’ve All Made a Few

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I want for this day to be over with already. I’ve never equated being alone with being lonely before, probably because as an only child, I’ve always had a knack for entertaining myself with whatever happens to be on hand. But I have to say truly and honestly that there is no other lonelier day to spend a day alone than Christmas day. I did wake up late this afternoon feeling quite excited about a vivid dream I had just had and thought: “wouldn’t it be the best Christmas gift of all if this dream actually prompted me to write a novel??” But then when I switched on the voice memo application on my iPhone and started taking verbal notes, those dream sequences which had seemed so full of story potential just fizzled away into random incoherent sentences.

Eventually, I decided to surf around the net to distract myself from all the unpleasantness going on inside my head. For some unknown reason, I had a Wikipedia page about Chlöe Sevigny up on my web browser. I’ve seen her in the movie Boys Don’t Cry and in the HBO series Big Love, but other than that I can’t say I’m a fan of hers, or that I know anything much about her and her body of work. I’ve never quite understood why she acquired fashion icon status (though I do know she was one of the original icons of all things fuggly back in the early days of the very funny site Go Fug Yourself). Reading on out of sheer boredom and curiosity, I found out that she sparked controversy with her lead role in a 2004 movie called The Brown Bunny, which involved Sevigny performing unsimulated fellatio on co-star, writer, director and producer Vincent Gallo. After the film’s release at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, the William Morris Agency dropped Sevigny as a client, one source stating: “The scene was one step above pornography, and not a very big one. William Morris now feels that her career is tainted and may never recover”. Ever the trouper, Sevigny went on record after the Cannes screening saying “It’s a shame people write so many things when they haven’t seen it. When you see the film, it makes more sense. It’s an art film. It should be playing in museums. It’s like an Andy Warhol movie.” I viewed the scene in question—all in the name of research of course—and I must admit that I couldn’t help but wonder what drug cocktail might have convinced Miss Sevigny that taking part in this project might be a good idea. That being said, I will not join the ranks of Sevigny-bashers based on that performance. Not today. Instead, I wish to thank Chlöe Sevigny for the fact that she still continues to make a living as an actress and a public figure, and to this day defends her performance in a project which would have been best left to die in Vincent Gallo’s mean little egomaniacal head.

Mistakes, we’ve all made a few. On this lonely Christmas day, I can always console myself with that fact that in this, I am far from being alone.

Hijacked By Dreams

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Looking at the date today, I’m not quite sure what happened in the last three days. I recall going to the day hospital to finish up some of my crafts pieces yesterday, where T and E where friendly familiar faces who have since followed me here to blogland (you are most welcome of course). I’ve helped my friend M narrow down the selection from the hundreds of shots we took last Friday (and was reassured to see how naturally that part of art directing still comes to me. Some things really are like riding a bicycle). I remember eating jam and cheddar toast with Earl Grey tea, which is a no-brainer since I like to start off my days with that combo lately. There was an early yoga session with J and a evening of wrestling with M on Tuesday which has left every muscle in my body screaming ever since. There wasn’t so much writing for NaNoWriMo since I felt both mentally and physically exhausted.

This morning was slated to begin with an early yoga session again, but my body would not cooperate. Then the doorbell rang at 10:30 and I was so engrossed in my many confusing dreams that I couldn’t understand how it was possible for my mother to come ringing at my door like that when just the day before she had still been writing me from France. Of course, by the time I actually made it to the door it wasn’t my mother at all, but an accountant I had made an appointment with who was coming to collect papers to finally get my taxes done as agreed. But I was so out of it that, after apologizing profusely, I sent him back saying I was coming down with something and couldn’t possibly get on with our meeting today. He didn’t protest too much. These days, with H1N1 seemingly looming in every corner people will pretty much leave you alone if you imply you might be getting a bout of the flu.

Many hours and many more dreams later, my friend M put his head through my bedroom door to see how I was doing. It was well past three and I had been sleeping all day, lost in one series of dreams after another. There was lots of traveling, there was lots of flying (which apparently I’m getting more and more proficient at), there was a cyclone and a stay at a posh and deserted hotel waiting for the weather to calm down (five suites with four rooms each to share among a couple of hundred people with limited food supplies to distribute fairly, and somehow people were looking to me to make major decisions. I think they figured if I could fly, I was probably also good at survival skills in general). There was a pregnancy which lead to birthing hundreds of tiny little animals; cats of course and tiny elephants and giraffes and snakes and lions and horses and countless other creatures. I was meant to feed them but they were eaten first by the many predators who were surrounding us and not having the resources to fend them off, they got to most of my brood and only a few of them were able to survive for a while and grow a little bigger. There was a serial killer who sent his victims beautiful picture postcards before striking and I was hired to foil him somehow, being an image specialist and all. We finally managed to arrest him because of some violation with Canada post he had apparently repeatedly committed. There was a job for domestic defence involving putting a sign up in front of a juvenile prison parking lot warning would-be escapees that the stealing of cars would be severely punished, then a road trip across North America tied up to the top of a truck to avoid being seen by various affiliated gang leaders who apparently wanted to exact revenge on me for helping prevent an all-out bloodbath at the juvenile detention centre. Then a late-night TV show starring me as a tall blonde in my late 40’s who didn’t look like me at all, throwing around a basketball in a modified game where the hoops were three times as high as usual and the all-girl team wore uniforms composed of leggings and flowery tunics—very pretty but kinda silly. Somehow this was very important gig for me because it could lead to more career opportunities in late-night tv programming, even at my advanced age.

I’ve been up for almost four hours now, and two cups of tea (with jam and cheese toast, of course) later I still can’t seem to shake off the dreams. My main consolation is that this sort of thing where my waking life is overtaken by the dreams is happening less frequently these days, because there have been periods fairly recently where this state of affairs was the norm. On the upside, I guess this is the right headspace to be working on my NaNoWriMo novel right now, since I’m running behind on my word-count and this business of not being all there sure is conducive to automatic writing. Of course it could lead to even more unexpected occurrences for my characters and chances are it won’t help make my already convoluted story lines any more decipherable, but as it happens, that isn’t a consideration I need concern myself with at this time, so may as well just go with it.

Graduation Day

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In her blog this morning, my mum mentions that she awoke from a dream where the internet service was down only to find that her email accounts were disabled (yet again). On my end of the world, I was woken up by contractors for the cable company drilling and talking loudly just inches bellow my bedroom window and then of course found both my cable and internet were down here this morning too. Interesting coincidence.

I shouldn’t be here writing this now, but I’ve decided I’m spending “graduation day” from the program at the Day Hospital by staying at home today… a combination of mood, hormones, gray skies… not conducive to goodbyes. Besides, I’m not really graduating from anything—just getting on with my life—hopefully a bit better equipped to take care of myself now. They don’t mark the event in any way when any one of us is discharged, which is the term they use for it (and how I’ve come to hate that word), unless the dischargee him or herself brings in flowers or baked goods (as I had considered doing) of makes a speech or something, which tends to be the rare exception rather than the rule. But all that seemed like too much effort today. So for many of us, one day you’re there, the next you’re just gone. No more no less. Sometimes the other remaining participants circulate a greeting card, which is sweet. I just hate goodbyes. There are too many goodbyes in life and besides, I still have a few arts & crafts projects to finish up so it’s already agreed I’ll be there for the workshop session next Wednesday morning and possibly the following week as well. I’ve already got the contacts of most of those I’d like to stay in touch with, and I’ll still be going to that hospital to see my regular shrink periodically, so nothing stops me from popping by and saying hello to whoever happens to be there.

Part of me feels this sense of overwhelming guilt, as if I know I’m not doing the right thing today. Probably the grown-up, responsible, mentally sound thing would have been for me to make that extra effort and pull myself together—put a smile on my lips and courageously face the fact that yet another phase in my life is coming to an end—said my thank you’s and goodbyes, spread some hugs around. But just the thought of it makes me want to cry. I guess I’m just not feeling quite so courageous enough. Sometimes, the grown-up thing to do is to just accept one’s own limitations. And besides, I’ve got a whole drawerful of writing paper and notecards kept especially for writing thoughtful thank-you notes and the like; something I know is always appreciated. That’ll just have to be good enough this time.

Again and Again

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The alarm clock rang this morning, so I pressed snooze. And again. And again. Next thing I knew, it was 6:00 p.m. and I’d spend the whole day in bed again. My excuse this time is that I had a dream so strange and so upsetting that every time I started to come out of it, I’d try figuring out whether it was for real or not and what it could possibly mean and fall right back into it again.

One thing I was trying to understand was why I’d still keep having dreams about my ex D when it’s been over ten years since we broke up now. He’s married with kids. I’ve got my cats and my mood disorder. The dreams are always more or less the same: I’m staying at his apartment while he’s gone away to a business trip so that I can pack up the last of my things and move away for good. As I make my way around his apartment, I look back on our relationship and try to find clues as to why things went wrong for us (and discover plenty of them). But this time there was a huge twist because in this dream he came back home wanting to work things out and shortly after he dies in my arms after a terrible accident. I kept trying to save him and he kept dying over and over and over again. It was incredibly upsetting. I woke up crying a few times and went back to sleep hoping the dream would change it’s course by the time I woke up again. But it didn’t. It just kept getting stranger and stranger and he just kept dying again and again. Now that I know the outcome of all this—he dies in the dream, I wake up more upset and feeling stranger than ever, having missed out on another day of school—I do realize what I should have done was get out of bed first thing this morning, go to school and leave it all behind me.

Some things I’ll just never understand.

This is (Sorta) Funny

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After sleeping for three straight days, I woke up around 7:30 and decided to get myself in gear and off to the day hospital just a short while ago. Took my shower, had my morning OJ/grapefruit juice, fixed my hair, got dressed, got my lunch and breakfast ready and made it out the door (almost) in time for the 9:18 bus, but I wasn’t too worried about catching it since there’s also a 9:35 bus that gets me in not too too late when needed.

Just before stepping out I checked the weather report which was predicting a warm (27ºC) and overcast day. Then going down my steps I thought “wow, they mean it when they say overcast” and said out loud “gee you’d think it was 9 in the evening it’s so dark out” one of my neighbours, a religious nutter, was walking by at that moment and I know she heard me, but she just ignored me as she usually does. I walked a block further towards the bus stop as it kept getting darker and darker which is when I started getting serious second doubts. I ducked into the convenience store “I know this is a strange question, but is it morning or evening right now?” “Evening” said my Chinese friend with a chuckle. “Ok… how about this: what day is it?”.

Monday. Monday evening. Boy am I out of it. All those dreams swirling around in my head… sure have me confused. But hey, this way I’ve got a head start on tomorrow morning at least.

Saturday

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Today was a day of sleep and strange reveries. The alarm went off at 10:30 though it felt more like pre-dawn to me and so I fell back in bursts of fitful sleep well into late afternoon. There was a very long, very convoluted dream playing while I slept which I woke from occasionally only to check whether Mimi was still watching over me at her station by my feet before slipping back into the dream. There was a poorly organized trip to Asia which required last minute rush preparations, there was family, there was somebody having a grandiose and very important marriage, there was flirting between young men and women which to my horror and to their amusement quickly turned into violent sex, there was me being a great disappointment to all and especially to my mother who let me know in no uncertain terms she no longer considered me her daughter (!) then my aunt who still tried helping me as best she could even though nobody wanted her to and I was all but unresponsive, there was a promising young suitor who eventually felt forced to move on to other candidates seeing as I was proving ufit as mariage material and of course there were cats showing up everywhere , all of which is just a very small portion of this particular dream-freak-show. From all this, the message the dream made sure to communicate to me in no uncertain terms is that the only road to my salvation is to start believing in fairy tales again. Easier said than done since in my opinion, a stubborn belief in fairy tales is what’s brought me the greatest grief and trouble in my life. I think I’ll just let that one sit and stew for a good long while.

My meals consisted of hazelnut milk chocolate and fresh cherries even though my fridge was filled with meal options and to finish off the day there was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a lovely movie based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald which I must get my hands on. I cried for the full second half of the movie which is nearly three hours long, so now am sufficiently exhausted to tuck myself in early and hopefully get rested enough so that by tomorrow I will be able to tell the difference between dreams and movies and reality and maybe even make some kind of useful contribution to the day.

Torpor, Coma, Languor, Lassitude, Stupor, Hebetude…

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There was this ongoing dream while I slept the very few hours I had last night in which I was so tired and so weak I felt quite literally like a ragdoll. I was at a friend’s place passed out flat on my face in the middle of the living room floor, on which a white duvet, sheet and pillow had been deposited (by whom?) as a makeshift bed for me. When came the following morning, I opened my eyes and saw light filling the room and all was white at first, and then I started noticing that there were toys and cats, toys that were cats and cats that were toys scampering around the floor, peacefully napping on various surfaces, hiding in the corners, climbing all over me. I wanted to wake up so I could further investigate these stange mutant-like creatures, but was overwhelmed by the strong pull of Morpheus, who refused to release me from his grip. I wavered between this dreamy consciousness and what seemed like a morphine-induced coma (I can only imagine, having not actually ever taken morphine). By midday my friend’s boyfriend came into the room, his living room to listen to music, his music, and work on his computer (modern art projects combining paintings with musical compositions). Somehow, I knew that my friend had left the house and that we were alone together and I also knew that he wanted to do laundry, play his music louder and invite friends over. I could feel he was annoyed with me lying there like a corpse and refusing to budge. I felt ashamed as the sudden realization that I was attracted to him, had always been attracted to him, dawned on me now. More than anything, I wanted to get up and out of the way, but I could barely stay conscious long enough to formulate the thought before nodding back down on my face in that seemingly drug-induced torpor.

When a dog started barking right next to me, it took me a long time to come to, and opening my eyes I did not recognize my surroundings and nodded back to unconsciousness. But the barking persisted and I awoke just enough to realize the sound was coming from my alarm in “real” life and was not yet another part of that ongoing hypnotic, soporific dream. As I grew conscious of my tangible body, I understood I was feeling exactly the way I had in my dream, with the addition of a throbbing headache and the distinct feeling that a truck had rolled over my body (several times and from different directions). I decided the best place for me to spend the next few hours was precisely where I was laying.

I might have felt guilty about sleeping through what should have been walk up hill #1, then bus ride, then walk up hill #2, then first workshop, then interview with med student, then lunch, followed by a relaxation session, then 40 minute walk back home. But I had a vague memory that during a moment of semi-consciousness I had picked up the phone to alert them to the fact that I was unable to come in today. The words came with difficulty and I remember slurring out each syllable as my mind kept drifting into a different plane.

A voice inside me said “Rest Now” very gently and yet with full authority and then a yellow-tinged 16 mm documentary film featuring the last 3 days played itself in my head. So much… so much… talking. Listening. Interacting. Moving. Walking. Climbing. Thinking. Questioning. Absorbing. Rest Now, the voice said again. So I did.

A mystery remains: what did the sleeping self in my dream dream about?

Feed the Imagination

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“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
~ Albert Einstein

Today’s yoga lesson was delayed by about three hours which normally would have made no difference, save for the fact that I had a lunch date booked with my lovely friend K. While I was waiting for J to finish up the work that was holding her up from our yoga session, my stress levels all of the sudden started spiking. Then I had to laugh at the fact that a) I’d end up being double-booked considering there never anything on my agenda these days and b) that such a small thing should stress me out at all. It’s a wonder I was ever able to hold down a job at all really, considering. The yoga felt great, plenty of stretching and breathing and relaxing, nice and healthy. And then K and I went to this great place just a stone’s throw away from my place on Notre-Dame street which serves these amazing gourmet sandwiches and wicked desserts and where we happily stuffed our faces* while I pretended I’d never learned the definition of “dieting”. The place is called McKiernan’s and is run by the same people who run Joe Beef right next door (which I have yet to try out since it’s touted as one of Montreal’s best). There. Free advertising. That should kept me fed on free gourmet sandwiches for a while. Or maybe not. It’s now 10 hours after the meal and I’m still stuffed to the gills. In fact I would very much like to not have to feed myself for the next couple of days to give my digestive system time to recoup.

I guess spring does things to our hormones and body chemistry, because this week I’ve been feeling lonely, which is something I hadn’t experienced for so long that it took me a while to recognize just what it was that was troubling me so, making the depression seem worse than ever. I’ve been replying to the ex-bf’s text messages more than I should, even talked to him on the phone once and caught myself actually considering his long-standing offer to get back together and let him take care of me. Even though I know it’s a terrible idea. So it was nice spending time with my friend K today. Not quite the same thing as being idolized by the ex, but it’s always pleasant, effortless and easigoing with K, and usually there’s tasty food in the mix too. After our delicious and (over)indulgent lunch, we took a short walk in the rain in my ugly neighborhood (even K who rarely says something unkind had to admit that the area is pretty dreadful), after which talked books at my place for a while and then she was off to take the train to feed her family.

I don’t know if this is something I read somewhere, or whether I came up with it myself somehow, but tonight I was thinking that one of the worst things about depression (and there are many) is the fact that it just leaves you completely empty and steals away your imagination. I don’t think one can have hope without also having imagination. Watching a bunch of Robbie Williams videos this week somehow reminded me of old yearnings and longings from my youth, of thinking I’d be “somebody” someday and make my mark as an artist somehow. How strange it is to be confronted to childhood dreams at such a time. And now here I am at this crossroads, which could be an opportunity for me to reinvent myself and do whatever the hell it is I think will make me happy, or rich, or famous, or whatever it is I might be secretely yearning for (so secretely though, that I myself haven’t got a clue what it is). So I keep asking myself: If you could do anything, anything at all with your life, sky’s the limit, what would you like that to be?” And I just draw a blank, which makes me feel even more depressed. So tonight I though: “I need to ask myself the question differently” and my dad came to mind, as he still to this day sometimes says to me “think of your life as a movie” and he usually means that as a way of detaching yourself so you can look at your life more objectively, buta I thought “If this was actually a movie about my life, how would I want the story to go from here?” and I was telling myself I could make it into as big a fairytale as I wanted to. And for now, it kind of made my head hurt to even try to wrap myself around that notion. Because of the lack of imagination, you see, which is what fairy tales are made of, as we all know. So for now, I’m going to let myself off the hook. As K would say “You’re always so hard on yourself. Why are you making yourself miserable? If trying to figure out what to do with your make-believe movie life makes your head hurt, just don’t think about it!”. Which sounds like common sense enough. So I guess… one more day of not thinking about it isn’t going to make a difference at this point. And besides, everything will work itself out the day I bump into Robbie Williams**. :-)

*Mum, something tells me you’d want to know what I had. It was a chicken tikka with mango and tamarind chutney, caramelized onions and very thinly sliced fresh pineapple on a pressed ciabatta served with a coriander sauce. With a lovely glass of white wine. Followed by a homemade rice pudding which had more alcohol in it than my wine did. And a café crème. Oh yeah. It was goood.
**Can’t tell you people how pathetic I find myself for having a crush on a Pop Star! Other people do that. Not me. Eek!

Image from imaginaryfoundation.com