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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
STRANGEST DREAM
Honeydrips
Here Comes the Future
Sincerely Yours : 2007
[Buy It]
LITTLE BROTHER (ELECTRIC)
Grizzly Bear
Friend EP
Warp : 2007
[Buy It]
I KNOW THAT'S NOT REALLY YOU
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
I dreamt that I was dreaming. This in and of itself was somewhat exceptional to me, as I didn't recall ever having a dream within a dream before. Beyond this nested quality, the nature of the dream, and the potency of its feeling, was also a bit beyond the pale. This was a couple weeks ago and some of the details are now blurred. But it is the nature of remembered dreams to take on a waking life of their own as their particulars fade, and certain elements of it remain with me clearly.
In the dream, I woke up in the bed of my childhood home. I woke up restlessly, I didn't remember the dream-within-the-dream, but I felt its texture - I knew that I had dreamed that my romantic partner had died, or was in grave danger of dying, or was simply gone - in the dream, there was no real distinction between the three, just an unsettling presentiment of loss. All I can remember clearly was that it was something to do with her breathing; she couldn't or was having difficulty breathing. I woke into the dream confused about whether this had really happened or I had dreamed it. I got out of the bed and began walking down the stairs. It was early in the morning, that time just before or around sunrise when the whole house was sleeping and I would get up early on Saturdays, as a child, to watch pro wrestling before the cartoons started. As my feet landed on each step, taking me down toward the living room, my sense of dread mounted - each step felt an increment closer to some calamity for which I was not prepared. When I arrived in the living room, my brother was there, sitting on the couch. The television was on, but he wasn't looking at it - his forearms were on his knees as he slumped in a somewhat weary posture. I sat down in the easy chair across from him, with my feeling of dread rising to a nearly unbearable pitch, and then, he looked up at me. His face was affectless, with a great empathy and sadness lurking behind the lack of affect, and as his eyes met mine, I knew with the inexorable certainty of dreams that it was true - she was gone from this world. The certainty came upon me in a feverish rush, and I felt a great cry rising up with in me. My brother came over and took me in his arms as immense sobs wracked my body. The feeling of knowing she was gone was so complex and terrible and real that I can only begin to describe it this way: I did not know what I was going to do. I saw the days and nights without her, getting used to her absence, fanning out impossibly ahead of me, and I repeat: I did not know what I was going to do, how I would possibly be able to go on. At that moment, sobbing in my brother's arms, I woke up, in my partner's bed. She was there, sleeping soundly, breathing easily. Tears rushed into my eyes as my gratitude mingled with the lingering feeling of despair from the dream - it had been so real that it was difficult to snap out of immediately. And also, this: when you've dreamed that you were dreaming, waking up for "the second time" fees much more tenuous than waking from a nightmare normally does; you're left with the lingering suspicion that perhaps you've woken up into another dream, and that you might pass through this one into another.
I spent all of last week in Oslo, reporting on a big music festival there, and I had another disturbing dream, which also involved my brother, in an unfamiliar hotel bed. This one was more complex than the other one, and the details are sketchier, yet I can roughly reconstruct it around the ones that still stand out clearly. I had been shot in the stomach several times. I don't recall how this came to happen, although I have the impression that I'd come across a weapon by accident (no gun appeared in the dream), and that the wounds were self-inflicted. I never pulled up my shirt to look at the wounds, but I was certain they were there - in my mind's eye, I could see holes in my torso, with blood trickling out of them. Sometimes, when I looked down, the front of my shirt was soaked with blood, sometimes it was clean. I'd shoved a notebook down the front of my pants, I guess as a sort of bandage - it was one of those black marbled composition books, the same kind I'd been using to take notes at the festival all week, which has thick, cardboard covers, which made it seem like more of a shield than a bandage. I didn't feel any pain in the dream, just a panicky sense of life draining out of me. I remember making phone calls - I believe trying to get someone to take me to the hospital - but I couldn't get ahold of anyone, and my attempts were accompanied by a mounting sense of frustration, fear, and anger that no one would help me. Then, in one of those uncanny dream shifts, my brother was with me. Where we were is not clear - it was an unfamiliar room, which now strikes me as being evocative of a hotel room, not the one I was sleeping in, but a hotel room nonetheless. Suddenly my brother was standing in the corner of the room, and I lashed out at him angrily, as closely as I can remember I took out my frustration about all my thwarted attempts to get help on him. This time, it was my brother who burst into sobs, as I lashed out at him, and simultaneously, a vile green ooze burst out of his mouth. I'd recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense, which contains that truly horrifying scene where the little boy who sees dead people flees into his tent, his "safe place," and looks over to see a dead girl who'd been poisoned with a similarly greenish, vomity ooze falling out of her mouth; I believe this is where that particular image came from. The effect of my brother's sobs and vomit, in the dream, was accompanied by the feeling that they were manifestations of his pent up sadness or interior trauma rising helplessly to the surface. He said something to me through his sobs and I can't remember exactly what, but it was something along the lines of, "You've been so cruel to me, Brian," which only made me angrier - I was bleeding, I was dying! His sobs redoubled as I began to shout at him along these lines, chastizing him for putting some kind of guilt trip on me when I needed help. At last, I jerked the notebook out of my pants and lifted my shirt to show him the wounds. In fact, there were no holes in my torso - just tracers of blood slicked over the smooth skin of my stomach.Labels: brian, dreams
posted by Brian
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