What dreams. A vast tangle of imagery – I guess it’s just what I get for actually getting enough sleep. A song running and cycling through my head, sunlight beginning to creep around the barricades in my room, slowly stirring – I almost miss the hanging dust in the sunbeams of my old room from high school. No room since has had light like that.
The first couple of dreams were fragmented, mere vignettes. My dreams are usually either shattered images or weird, false memories that I only realize are dreams much later… but the dream last night that Jackson had shat IN the house (he’s very house trained and would never do that) next to the piano (we don’t have a piano) on the new gold carpet (we definitely don’t have gold carpet) was in no danger of being anything but a dream. I did the proper nose-rubbing thing, or at least tried to, but he resisted and in the dream was freakishly stronger than me. Finally he realized where I was trying to point him and far from feeling chastized settled in for a tasty treat… because even DREAM dogs are just GROSS…
and then the scene shifted and I was in what was theoretically MY bedroom but I’d found a big box of stuff that had somehow gotten stashed under my bed – a big box of stuff that had been at the House of Musical Traditions during the move – and Kristen and I start pulling dust-covered stuff out of this box and found the old toy plastic axe that (in my dream) we’d been looking for AND a bunch of little army men AND a Chinese mouth organ AND the Ani Difranco signature Yairi that was a REAL wonder because Kristen had JUST sold it to a guy in South Africa (really) and who KNEW we’d had two!
ilyAIMY performing at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, MD. No longer associated with the New Deal Cafe, this was a slightly weird day – however we had a great time plus or minus the fact that we were all choking on the pollen. Logically we connected this with the Green Men themselves but had to be very, very round-about with our senses of humour. This was by far the worst pollen I’d ever encountered – and singing became very hard, very quickly, despite gulping water like fishes. Or perhaps gulping water like something very thirsty that actually DRINKS the water….
Our searching is interrupted by an angry phone call from our friend Susan in Illinois, informing us that the dates that we’d just posted on our calendar were incompatible with hers and that she was planning to be in Maryland during our next trip to HER neck of the woods…
And then we’re at the store itself where, by coincidence, Heather has run across her physician and they’ve settled in to do a quick check up by the front counter. I don’t know if I’m trying to shelve things in a weird corner or just sitting below her or what, because my viewpoint through this part of the dream is below her and to the right, but her doctor is an old Japanese man with huge eyebrows and he keeps saying “ah, I see the problem now” and pulling things out of her throat.
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These he carelessly drops past her, directly towards me. First I get a long fife, and then an Irish whistle of some sort – these I happily place in the baskets where they belong – but then he starts pulling knives and swords out of her throat and dropping them towards me. They stick in the wood and quiver as the music in the store gets louder and louder…
Heather and I performing at the Reisterstown Bloomin’ Arts Fest in Reisterstown, MD. (thanks Mara for the picture)
I woke up for a moment, thought about staying awake… but must’ve come to a negative conclusion…
I dreamt I was trying to get home. I don’t remember where I was, somewhere in the city, I suppose. But Baltimore on some nights is deadly quiet. Normally the city’s crawling with Life, with sirens and dog barks and cars and yelling, till all hours of the night – but there are some nights, usually after a heavy rain – when the streets are empty and the whole town goes ghost-like. It’s one of the creepiest things ever.
And I dreamt I was driving home on a night like that. Frighteningly dark, I took a wrong turn and started getting that feeling of “turn around now or you’ll GET turned around…” just before I reached where the street had been barricaded by an old car.
I swiftly made a three-point turn at one point suddenly spotlighting a big black dog, it’s eyes glaring in my headlights – and all I could think is that I wanted to be back at MY house with MY big black dog.
I spun my tires and sped out of the dead-end and swiftly found my way back down an abandoned route 40 and back to my house.
Mysteriously, this was now my mother’s house and I crept back into my old basement room there… all was dark, all was silent and I had the creeping edge of terror feeling that you get when things have been a little OFF all night and now you’ve got to creep through the basement where the lights only SORT of work and the one flourescent that turns on is flickering and sputtering. I’m SO ready to retreat to the cozy yellow-light of my bedroom when I accidentally drop my cellphone…
It skitters under the clothes dryer along with God knows what – and so, on this night of ghosts and sudden dogs I have to turn my back to the basement, full of it’s piles and arcane shapes, the half-seen movement of shadows and insects, and go scrabbling beneath the dryer. I easily find the phone, but realize the back’s come off, and I have to edge under further getting a small metal bit and then streeetching for the back, my imagination filling the room behind me with creatures, my belly to the cold concrete floor, my fingers encountering dust and cobweb and FINALLY the back of my cellphone.
I retract swiftly JUST as I hear something creak behind me and spin and pull my knife on one of my mother’s portraits of Abraham Lincoln… his dark sullen eyes stare blankly at me as I decide it’s TIME to be in bed.
I kill the dying flickering light and shut my bedroom door behind me, cocooning myself in high school safety, the warm incandescent banishing all shadows. My floor is covered with the table-top wargames of my childhood and suddenly I hear a horrible wretching from upstairs and I realize I’m back in time again… listening to my father throw up, slowly dying…
And I wake up, disoriented, to explosions. I come out of my CURRENT basement apartment to realize lots of my friends are here, watching television on the couch, staring at the screen at a war documentary… but the sound’s turned off and concussions of distant gunfire is very real. It’s frightening to realize that people are fighting not too far from where we are, wondering if we should be gathering food, wondering if it’s smarter to stay where we are or to pack up and get someplace else. Jackson is whimpering and we figure it’s safe to take him outside for a bit… my friend Joanna asks if we think it’s civil war –
And I wake up, disoriented, to my current basement apartment, and think that my head is too full of strangeness.
