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by doug | February 8th, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
Last night’s entertainment:
Two or three members of my accounting firm and I are auditing a rural high school — nothing out of the ordinary there. Only at this school we have to trudge through a cold, grey swamp to get to our designated work area, the gymnasium. Although we are out in the sticks, the community is extremely inner-city. In fact, the students pretty much have the run of the place. As we are setting up our equipment and going through the motions — filling out forms, trying to figure out where the bathrooms are, etcetera — one of the administrators comes up to us and warns us that the students will be arriving soon. When one of us asks what the big deal is, the admin reveals that the students are extremely violent with newcomers and that we would likely be subjected to some gang initiation rituals before being accepted at the school.
Before we have time to start worrying about that, the bell rings and the students begin to slowly trickle into the gym. It is an odd mix of guys that look like they should be starting for the Chicago Bulls and young, nubile, Catholic-schoolgirl-esque girls. Basketballs are being thrown around, the boys are yelling obscenities at each other, and the girls are hanging out in the bleachers and along the walls. We try our best not to be too noticeable, but it isn’t long before the students see us and try to engage us in conversation. We try to exchange niceties, but are soon being harassed by a group of large, menacing thugs. I attempt to laugh it off and avoid escalating the confrontation, but another auditor tries to explain that we are not going to be in their way and that they would hardly know we were there. The boys are unmoved, and the unfortunate auditor begins to get shoved around. He tries in vain to reason with them but it is no use. They hit him. They throw him against the wall and rip his clothes. It is a feeding frenzy. The climax comes as the largest thug picks up the now-limp auditor and launches him toward the basketball goal. My friend crumples into the basket — nearly lifeless.
Day two. I return to the gym knowing that today is my turn to be harassed. Sure enough, as soon as we get set up, the guys are encircling me menacingly. After a bit of shoving, though, they decide it would be more fun if they let the girls torture me. So three of the schoolgirls saunter over and begin giving me the business. They are making fun of my clothes and my hair, picking at me and laughing. Then one of them gets the idea that it would be really embarrassing for me if they stripped all my clothes off. And so they do. And it is a bit embarrassing. Then, for the next step in the initiation, a girls starts — shall we say… pleasuring me. First manually and then orally. As my colleagues look on (the poor sap from yesterday wearing a mask of astonishment that could only mean "I get bones broken and he gets a blowjob!!?"), the girl… well… completes the task. It is incredibly (and ecstatically) realistic. Not sure why they thought that was some form of torture. It was quite ecstasiating, come to think of it.
And then the scene shifts. Instead of a gymnasium we are at a three-story mansion. We are hiding from a large older woman who is some sort of headmistress here. This house is being used almost like a prison for some six to eight girls. The details of the story are sketchy, but since I just finished The Handmaid’s Tale I am assuming a militaristic, male-centric society has taken over and that these women are little more than things. Why we are there I have no idea, but there is one girl in particular who is seen by the headmistress as a troublemaker. Indeed, she seems to be trying to organize some sort of prison break from the very beginning. We observe. The girls know we are there, but the headmistress and the guards are in the dark. I am seeing things through the troublemaker’s eyes now.
Several days and nights go by with various amounts of activity. Details are sketchy now, but everything reinforced the notion that while these girls lived in a plush house, their lives were strictly controlled. A dark-haired girl tries to escape one night. She has gone up to the third floor and has been caught trying to open a window. The guards on the ground outside alert the headmistress, who ascends the stairs, takes a small pistol out of a box on a bedroom dresser, and executes the offender on the spot. The girls cower and weep, but soon fall silent and return to their rooms, not wanting to suffer the same fate.
Now I… or should I say — the troublesome girl is more determined than ever to escape. She feigns forcing the upstairs window open like the first girl, but when the headmistress catches her and goes for her gun, it is gone. I have the gun. I aim at her head and fire. The entrance wound is tiny, but the shot is true. She is dead before she hits the floor. I make a break for it, taking all the remaining girls with me. We run out the back of the house and into the dark, rainy streets. I do not know where we are going, but we run to get far away from that place. And then……
We are back in the mansion. Everything that just occurred has not happened. The headmistress is still alive. I am no longer the girl, but she is there. This time she wants me — the actual me — to help her kill the headmistress. Having watched the last scenario unfold in the first person, I assume it will be no problem to simply recreate the same scenario. I am on the third floor with the troublemaker. She forces the window open and the guards and headmistress storm the house and begin to ascend the stairs. I leap out of the bedroom with the pistol in my hand, point it at the advancing madam, and pull the trigger. Nothing but a hollow click. I have not loaded the gun. The headmistress grabs the girl and the guards drag me to the floor.
The troublemaker is executed in the same fashion as the first, dark-haired girl. I am confined inside the house while the higher-ups decide what is to be done with me. I do not have much time. The next morning I see a large number of uniformed guards marching toward the house. The remaining girls have caused a disturbance in order to distract the guards long enough for me to escape. When I reach the back door, however, I find more guards waiting outside. I rush up the stairs and look for a place to hide, knowing that they will kill me if they find me. I think I have bought myself time by retreating to the third floor, but that is the first place the headmistress looks when she enters the house. I am trapped. She climbs the stairs, pistol drawn. There is nowhere for me to run.
…
This was one of the most lucid dreams I have had in recent memory. It was like being in a high-def movie. Everything was sharp and colorful. With the exception of the random time and location shifts, it would have been hard to tell the dream from reality. Well, that and most of the time our high school audits do not turn out that way. I had a Whole Foods chocolate truffle around 2:15 last night — about fifteen minutes before I went to bed. I think I will be having the same thing tonight.
by doug | November 20th, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
Early this morning – around 3:30 a.m. – I used my bedside dream notebook for the first time. The results were surprising. I figured that, with just a few written hints, I would be able to recall most of a dream I would have otherwise lost somewhere between waking up and hitting the shower. As it turns out, though, I still do not have the depth of memory I was after. What I do know is this:
The basic dream-plot was that someone had murdered two of my ex-girlfriends (I know… psycho) and was trying to pin it on me. I was, apparently, on assignment in Los Angeles – a city I have never been to before. My boss had sent me there and was checking in on me periodically. Eventually he came to visit me and directed me to the various school buildings where I would be conducting audits. He also showed me to my hotel, which was ludicrously tall and almost entirely glass. The elevator was a hellish ride.
The girlfriends in question: one I remember clearly, the other I’m not sure if it was a fictitious girlfriend or one who actually existed in real, waking life. The second one murdered – the one based on a real live person – is the one I remember. I think there was some sort of church connection with both of them, though. I got a call – from my father, I think – telling me about it. I was in LA, all the way across the country at the time, but somehow I knew that someone was trying to pin the killings on me. Sadly (and disturbingly) I was more concerned about being blamed than I was about the actual death. I couldn’t get my wife to understand why I was so panicked about the whole thing.
What brutal murder – the second girl was killed with a screwdriver, if memory serves me right – and accounting have to do with one another I have no idea. The whole dream ended in a chase through the hotel and out onto the Los Angeles freeways. Barack Obama and a couple of new cabinet members also made an appearance, but I have no explanation as to that connection either.
The notebook scrawl reads something like this:
someone framing me for killing
ex girlfriends [name redacted] & ? fm church
also –> wife
california interstate & LA
Halloween?
obama whitehouse
in officials girlfriend
—————————-||—-
[boss’s name redacted]
ass frethsih LA hawling out
electrons bul digg glass
What do you want from me? I was half-asleep and writing in total darkness.
The process needs some practice, I admit, but the premise is still plenty entertaining, if nothing else.
by doug | November 17th, 2008 @ 9:24 pm
Several nights ago I had a particularly interesting dream. This will, alas, be a brief retelling since I have waited so long to write about it and have thus lost many of the details that were once fresh in my mind. (I have taken measures to prevent the memory loss from happening again by placing a pen and notebook on the bedside table. No sense in doing this half-assed.)
The overall theme of the dream was one of searching for something. Often I am alone in these “lost” dreams, but this time my wife and a couple of friends were there too. Miles, my dog, also figured prominently. I distinctly remember at one point taking a string of teabags out of the pantry and, after separating all the mango flavored tea, throwing Miles the leftovers. Not sure if that has any significance or not.
There was a lot of wandering around outside – I believe it was Halloween and we were all trick-or-treating. Then there was trouble finding out way back to the house. It was incredibly dark, but we finally found our way home. The house – and this is the recurring portion of the dream – is two stories, and the upper floor has a large hole in the middle. We have to tip-toe around it, and I always feel perilously close to falling through.
I have had many variations on this dream over the past few months – the only constant being the hole in the floor and the danger associated with it. Once I was back in college and sharing a quad-plex with a bunch of young coeds. At other times, I am alone in a gigantic Addams Family type house, with hole in floor, in the middle of a vast expanse of wasteland.
It is a bleak dream… one that no amount of teabags fed to dogs can brighten up completely. At the same time, though, it is always fascinating to have dreams that stay so vividly burned in my consciousness long after the dreaming is done. I think I’d rather have the disturbing dreams than not have them at all. It makes life a little more exciting, I think.
by doug | November 9th, 2008 @ 11:56 pm
This is the first installment of what I hope will be a grammaticastic new feature on this blog o’ mine: a dream journal. I experimented with the concept about five years ago during one of my first (unsuccessful) attempts to quit smoking. My method of choice was the nicotine patch which, when worn at night, produced some hyper-realistic episodes from my apparently over-stimulated unconscious mind. It made for an interesting read. I’d also hoped to one day parlay those random nocturnal journeys into larger or more thought-out pieces of art – paintings, poems, stories, etc. And so, here we go again. Maybe I will stick with this one. Feel free, dear readers, to go all Freudian on these odd narratives.
The patches eventually worked, by the way. The third time was the charm.
…
The record begins with me in prison (I say record because, a full sixteen hours or so removed from the actual dream, my memory of things has started to fade). It is obviously a prison, but I do not know how long I have been there or what my crime was exactly. I live in a solitary cell with pale yellow walls and an iron door. The room is small, but the bed is not uncomfortable. I have no time to get accustomed to the place, though, because an official of some kind eventually comes around and shows me the way to the cafeteria – which leads through what looks suspiciously like a hotel lobby. There is even a hotel-style restaurant/bar – dark lighting, lots of dark green vinyl. There are people eating there who are not prisoners. The restaurant is not our mess hall. We pass out a set of double doors and walk up at least two flights of narrow stairs to the prison cafeteria. On the stairs – which are irregular, like the ruins of an old medieval mountaintop castle, and have no handrails to speak of – I get a sense of the enormity of the prison/hotel grounds.
Cut to the next scene. It is sometime after the meal, and I am searching for the way back to my room. I can find my way to the non-prison restaurant, but I cannot get to the door that goes to the hallway where my cell is located. Every door leads to some part of the hotel, not the prison. And I, in my prison garb, am very aware of how out of place I am among the non-prisoners. I might add that I am unaccompanied by any prison guard, so there is some apprehension that I will get in trouble for being out of my cell. Eventually I meet up with my best friend and his wife (it is uncertain whether they are hotel clients or prisoners) who show me the way to the prison door.
Next scene. I am still in prison, but I have made my way up the mountain (via more precarious stairways) to a little cave-like cliff-side room. There is a fellow there who is mixing up a poisonous concoction. There are a couple of cats in this guy’s room, and it becomes clear that the poison is meant for them. So I am trying to make conversation with this guy while trying to figure out a way to sneak the cats out of there. Finally the poisoner is distracted for enough time for me to grab one of the cats – I think this one is my cat – and scamper outside. I try to catch the other cat, too, but he runs under the staircase and I cannot escape and save him at the same time. Meanwhile, the dude spills the bowl of poison trying to chase me, and the liquid runs down the staircase and is lapped up by the second cat. I am horrified, and grab the now limp feline and run further up the mountainside. Eventually I get to another prison yard on top of the mountain, several flights above my cell. I let the live cat go, and place the lifeless cat on the ground. Then the dead cat starts moving. It seems the poison was only some sort of anesthetic. I am relieved and the cat storyline is over.
Still in the new prison yard, I enter a community building where other prisoners, male and female, are working and attending classes. I am ushered to some sort of group-therapy room with a bunch of other inmates – mostly very attractive girl prisoners. I am not sure what the discussion is about, but it has a definite sexual theme. After the group session is over, I make my way to a room where some inmates and guards are cooking a meal on the floor – large birds – chickens or turkeys – in crude metal pans over an open fire. There is a lot of blood. They want me to help them cook, but instead I steal a couple of birds and run back to my room (which is now, by some miracle, in the top prison yard in a trailer). The trailer-cell has a stove where I begin to use the poison-anesthetic to season the poultry. My wife appears and confronts me about consorting with one of the young, blonde girl prisoners. I try explaining to her that I am in prison, and I have no control over who I am thrown into rooms with. I don’t think that argument goes very well. Nonetheless, I go to sleep in my new cell and when I wake up I am alone again – and back in the community building.
They are searching for the prisoner who stole the chickens the night before, so I try to be inconspicuous. They round a group of us up, though, and have us form a line. We are inspected at a door and then led, slowly, into a small square room with an impossibly high ceiling. There is one window, with bars, but it is way up at the top of the room. There are maybe twenty of us in there, standing body to body. The young blonde inmate is there, and we make small talk while waiting to find out what is going to happen to us.
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