Dream Animals

I seem to dream a lot about animals (also ghouls and monsters but I've never posted about that).

I just found a dream I jotted down a few years ago. In this dream there was a hurricane that changed the terrain, and I am caught on a sandbar that used to be Lime Cay waiting for a boat to come and get me.

Many boats come and go, and still mine doesn't show so I decide I'm gonna just jump on the next one that comes in. Instead of taking me back to the mainland I end up picking my way across a craggy landscape. As navigate the sharp rocks dark and shiny with the sea water, in the distance I notice a spray erupting from the surface of the water. At first I think it's oil but suddenly I am with people and one of them says "no that's a fissure, air is escaping from the earth". As we continue across the rocks we see a network of pipes that suggest the fissure is man-made. The instinct to follow the pipes rises, but as I move towards them a boat comes. As I wait to board the boat I am suddenly aware that I have a pin and a needle driven horizontally into my heel, but I cannot get them out because my heel is frozen.

Standing at the side of the boat I ask for a container for the finless tailless fish I have in my pocket. The fish had been terrorizing my mother and I don't want it to die because I want to gift its fate to her. I knew I couldn't put it anywhere near the water at the risk of it escaping, so I'd put it in my pocket and poured some water in. As if it were magic to the fish the water made my pocket larger and gave the fish so much room to move around I was afraid it might escape.

I am aboard the boat and almost ashore when I check my heel; it has thawed and there is only a pin, the edges of which I can see sticking out so I try to catch a hold of it as the boat sways. The driver says to me "doesn't that hurt? Why don't you wait til you get to the shore to take it out? The boat's jostling." I yank it out anyway and say "Nah, it doesn't hurt".

He seems impressed by my bravado, as the boat pulls up the dock I double check that there's nothing else in my heel, check my pocket for Mummy's fish and step onto the sandy shack-lined terrain.

Dolphin skinned ducks

I just rose from a dream. My head is still thick with a dispute with my landlord, who in real life is a difficult friend. I was a student and we had a quarter to quarter lease, I was having trouble coming up with my rent for the quarter and explained to him that by the end of the week he would be paid. I went out with friends and returned after a few hours to find that my room looked completely different, devoid of signs I'd ever lived there and was rented to someone else. I had come in out of a downpour and headed straight there to remove my drenched clothes, the new tenant had to lend me somethings to put on before I could go downstairs to confront him.

He had a flat beneath us, the wooden stairs that led from my room ended in a small space which was enclosed by a wall 5 feet in front of me, to the right a passage with a frosted glass paned window looking out onto the street, and to the left was his door. As I came to the end of the staircase I saw him sitting beneath the window on a nest of rugs and pillows with my longtime friend, who was apparently now dating him and had helped him to get rid of my stuff. I thought of my friend "Oh it's just like you to be that opportunistic" but instead addressed him.
"Where is my stuff?!" "How can you do that? Did you throw them away?"
He hesitated just to be difficult, then said slowly uninterested in my pique, "Where is my rent? You promised me I would have it on Tuesday"
"I told you you'd have it this week, how can you do something like that without letting me know?" "I'm not paying you now! Clearly I can't pay you rent for someplace I can't live. Please use my deposit, take what I owe you up to today and let me have the rest back."
"Fine." he said.
I turned to my friend who'd found the walls and whatever activity she should see on the street through the frosted panes riveting and said "You know that's not right, how could you let him do this?"

The dream is a little muddled after that, I learned where my stuff was but could not access it, I tried to steal towels from him to make up for the money he was holding for me, and followed him around to try and steal my money from his wallet. An old family friend, a man I often wished had been my dad came to speak with him about giving me my money back. Our apartment was adjoining a mall, and as we crossed the pathway to the mall to look for him we end up going in circles which lead us to a deeply sloped canal of moss green water that eased silkily between the walls and disappeared under a square tunnel.

There was a competition of two teams sliding down the canal, and we jumped in on the team against him. I slide down a narrowing lip that emerges from the right wall of the canal. I am afraid I might crash into the wall, but I am ok as the lip narrows to deposit me into the larger body of water, then reunites with the wall. We emerge from the canal on the street in front of our building. We have not found him, and somehow I am alone again. I feel as though I have found something of value of his to hold on to and now he is willing to negotiate.

He says, "Ok. You can have your money, how much do you think you should get back. I said "You'd said $40", I was optimistic though I thought he might only owe me $20. He looked at me as though he knew something I didn't. "Add the days of the quarter that have passed and let me know if I really owe you $40." I do the math and realise he owes me nothing.

We were sitting on the stoop capitulating and we looked up to see a glistening flock of mammoth ducks. Someone remarked "it looks like they just came out of the water". Hundreds of feet into the sky, they were featherless with thick skin drawn tight like a dolphins and so large we could see the coat of water that shimmered on their gun metal grey skin. As they powered in flight above us, we could feel feel the weight of them shift the air, and see the compacted muscles flex beneath heir glistening skin. Their back ends starting behind their wings were formed by whorls of skin folding around and around like a danish to form the shape of a turtles head. Their flight seemed to be held back by the brilliance of the sky, and looking up, the whole thing seemed framed in slow motion.

the colour of my dream

This morning I dreamt I had a little boy. A son with copper skin and curly hair whose velvet baby skin felt right against mine.

My story starts among the rumpled white sheets of the bed of my boyfriend who is an ex in waking life - but I am maybe 23 in that dream, still past the time he and I were together. We are lying in his twin bed which is tucked into a 90° angle of the room facing a window. The sun pours across our idle conversation and unrushed intermittent make out sessions when suddenly a flood of memory comes to me. I had been pregnant. "Do you remember me being pregnant?" I ask him. "Did we have a baby?" "Suddenly I am sure sure I was pregnant, but where is my baby?"

Sitting on the out side of the bed, the white wall against my back him against my left side and the sheet resting around my legs, I search my memory and feel a trauma that blocks the release of any details beyond a baby bump noone knew to look for because I hadn't told; being in a yard when my labour pains started. Not knowing what was wrong but trying to get away from my family before an investigation revealed my condition Being asked "What's wrong?" Then "Oh my God she's pregnant!" Then nothing. No story I must have told or the decisions that had been made.

The dream segues to a beach. I am standing in front of a roughly constructed wooden stall that sells beads laid out on a counter, hanging from hooks, and from lengths of cord strung end to end in every available space, about 100 yards to my left I can see the deserted beach. The vendor is rastafarian, his locks are coiled around his head, his dark skin, smooth and shiny from the heat makes me think of an eggplant. He smiles at me from where he is leaning with his arms and legs crossed in the far right corner of the stall, but says nothing as I browse his selection. An SUV pulls up behind me parallel to the stall. I turn to see it is driven by my best friend from high school and inside is her daughter and a little boy who reaches for me and calls me mummy. "This is your son" she says as I reach for him. As soon as he is held against me I am drenched in the certainty he is mine. But where was he all this time? Who is his father? Who knows what happened to me?

I am wearing three strands of beads around my neck that hang almost to my navel and he loves them, my best friend says "He loves beads". He calls them something unusual but fitting (I can't remember.. maybe stacks), so I take him back to the bead stall because I want to make him happy. He looks like me and my family and the bead man says "that's a beautiful baby, is he your son?"

All the beaded jewelery is laid out or hung unclasped, so he doesn't understand that worn a lot of them are shorter than they appear. I shower his cheeks and the top of his curly head with kisses and he scans the beads and selects a short multi stranded women's necklace made of delicate pink translucent beads, I pick it up between kisses and explain while I clasp it "Look sweetie this is not the type you like, it's too short". I also can't afford the $32 it costs so I scan the selection for something he might like better that's also in my price range. Hugging him against my right hip I reach for a necklace of bamboo beads that's hanging on a cord strung from end to end of the stall and ask him... don't you like these much better?

I can't remember if he does, but I walk towards the water with him, and lying beneath us in the sand us are two oversized necklaces with beads as large as my head placed about a foot apart, one coral coloured with each divided by a smaller gold bead, I point to the other made of irregularly shaped jade hued beads and say "See don't you prefer these?"

In the distance I see a black shape gliding on the water, perpendicular to my gaze, it looks like shadow so I raise my gaze to what looks like an oversized black bird large enough to be a small plane flying low to the water. The black material flapping behind it reminds me of the plastic I used to use for making kites as a child. The shape hurtles towards the beach, the wind pulls back the black material to reveal a blue van which lands on its wheels revs a hard left, splashing the waterline down the beach.

I am back in bed with my boyfriend who is trying to make love, he is showering my with kisses that have no effect. I am still on the outside of the bed and he moves to stand facing me so his dick is pointing at my face, then smiles expectantly. "No, I'm sorry, I can't do that" he seems puzzled but gets back into bed and reassures me "You don't have to, it's ok"

He starts to deliver more kisses that have no effect and suddenly I am crying "Do you know what happened to my baby?" "How can I find him?" I look forward, to a life marked by the longing I feel sitting in this bed and repeat "I need to find him. I have to, I cannot live without him". "Where is my son?"

parasitic egg pods

I dreamt last night that I went someplace - a field perhaps - and when I left I discovered I was covered in hundreds and hundreds of pods of bugs eggs. Perhaps nothing I'd encounter in real life, each pod was an about .2X.4X.2 mm (wxlxh) rectangular shape that was flat where it ahered to my skin, with each of the four corners rounded, and curved top as though it's contents were stretching for optimum room. The first I discovered on my shoulder as I scratched what felt too hard and too symetrical to be a bump, a run of my fingers revealed my arm was covered and further probing revealed my entire body was covered in a rash of the parasites.

I do not remember who else was in the dream and offered the advice I should let them mature and fall off because to try to pick them off tear away my skin. I was completely panicked and disgusted, and woke as dream me was trying to work one loose from my shoulder.

My dreams are so vivid that when I wake I sometimes have to check my memory for any signs it was only a dream, luckily dreams as extreme as this are easy to dispel, but sometimes the more mundane are question marks that follow me for days. I digress, I forgot everything leading up to leaving the field, but if I could I wonder what interpretation there is for this dream.