A good dream

I was leaving a Radiohead concert with a favorite student as the band was playing their last song, Faust Arp. I could hear the song as he (favorite student) and I stumbled upon an outdoor bazaar with studios in back. I found a studio with all of these incredible fabrics laid out on tables. The woman there told me she could make me anything I wanted out of any of the fabrics. I nodded and went back outside. My student told me he was going to go home and make some homemade "crisps" and read into the night. He pointed out that he was wearing his favorite pants, with a pocket just the right size for his copy of Macbeth, which he had never read but would read tonight. He said he had just finished re-reading Hamlet, and "the thing that no one gets" is that Ophelia, he said, "meets her death with a credible lexical self." I smiled, waved goodbye, and went up to a balcony to watch the crowd. I found Johnny Depp* there, leaning against the railing and smoking. I bummed two cigarettes from him and smoked them slowly, one after the other. He smoked with me. I told him that I wasn't really smoking, that this was a dream. He inhaled, squinted, smiled, nodded, and then laughed the loveliest laugh. I woke up.

*As far as I know, I have never dream-smoked with Johnny Depp before. I think I have to thank Heidi for this bit of subconscious awesomeness, as she is responsible for bringing Depp into my psyche on a weekly (at least) basis.

Poetry Friday, a Medusa original

Joy Drop

I spent a soft night with you distilled
Into your simple rich sweetness
The stuff of you I imagine was the child you
The whisper shimmer joy of you
(Held so tight so close to you in waking life)
Made full, let go to laugh, to talk with me
In hushed conspiratorial tones
About joy joy joy scandalous joy
And the promising transparency of masks
Always wavering, allowing me to see you
Like this, even as day breaks.

8-10-07

This was inspired by a happy dream I had just before waking this morning. In it, I was hanging out with some friends and family in a gorgeous old seaside house, made all of mahogany inside but full of rich light. I went from room to room, talking with all of these people I love. All of them--my mother, a friend from college, More Fun, my sister--were as content and happy and bright and calm as I had every seen them. I had this incredible feeling that I was having a conversation with the most essential part of each person, the most basic and joyous and untouched by any troubling thing in this world.

In the last part of the dream, the part most specifically referenced in the poem, I was rolling around in bed (not like that) with my friend, Feste, giggling and chatting about nothing. I woke up missing him and all the people in the house but feeling very content and happy and lucky indeed.

Dream proof of media overload (and all manner of other issues)

I know I am in danger of becoming that boring person who posts only pictures of her pet on her blog, so I will instead risk becoming the annoying person who blogs only about dreams. This week's dream log also serves as evidence that I have been spending entirely too much of Februrary watching television and reading blogs:

Monday night: While passing by a cafe in a hotel where I was attending a conference, I noticed a man gesturing toward me. It was Larry King, eating a bowl of a oatmeal. (Some of the oatmeal was falling down his chin and into the folds of his jowls. Ewww.) So he says, in his exact Larry King voice, "Yeah, so sit down. Let me tell you something. Stop dieting. You're looking gaunt, here and here [gesturing toward each side of face]. You don't look good. And watch it with the booze, will ya? Now go." He goes back to eating his oatmeal, and I walk away with the distinct feeling that he had somehow mistaken me for Lindsay Lohan. I was upset not at what he had said but at the idea that he had not really said it to me.

Wednesday night: Matt Lauer totally felt me up. He was ostensibly measuring me for a bra for a segment on the Today show, but there was OVERT fondling.

Friday night: Last night's was the most detailed and emotional dream. Heather Armstrong decided to give me her life, complete with husband and child. I was to take over as her, to live in her house as her husband's wife and her daughter's mother. I kept trying to explain to her that I could not just fill in for her, because her child and her husband loved her. But every time I told her that she could not just be replaced, she would shake her head and give me this "you are so so naive or perhaps even slightly retarded" look. As she was training me, guiding me around the house (which was really quite spectacular, with all kinds of hidden spaces like a huge underground grotto with hot spring-fed baths), and telling me what to do, she kept saying, "You are going to have snap out of it and pay attention." I had this overwhelming feeling of complete inadequacy, not with the child or even with the impossible necessity of having to be a lapsed Mormon but with the idea that I would be a terribly inferior partner in the marriage.

So, yes, I think we can all agree that it's a good thing I will be seeing my new shrink again next week. I think I will just walk in, sit down, and bust out with, "Larry King thinks I'm too skinny, Matt Lauer and I got to second base, and I am a bad wife."