In a dream last night, I was ushered up a series of long and narrow staircases made of brown wood. They stopped and turned in switchbacks like those in a cheap apartment complex and by the time I reached the top there were holes in each floor I had to jump up and pull myself through. I was extremely high up and had a nauseous, sinking feeling. There was a red carpet and lines of women in furs and men in tuxedos, many of whom were my Composition I students from when I taught in New York. I walked into the theater where everyone was sitting and the lights dimmed. First, there was a teaser trailer for an unnamed movie that was just a loop of a moth flying out of a garbage can in a dark alley, and then a negative of that same image. Famed voice-over dramatist Don LeFontaine said: "Moths are a super cool dead animal thing...and thing." The movie started, and what was being shown was called "The Laurel and Hardy Movie." It was just a montage of explosions, people in Victorian garb falling down, and home video recordings of people on roller coasters screaming. It was only a few minutes long, and afterwards I left the theater laughing.

I woke up and realized I was laughing. My face hurt.

But I feel back asleep and dreamed I was in my neighbor's house where I used to hang out in the forest. I came in through the darkened woods and it was a different friend's house inside with a small staircase that led down to a big open TV room with a wraparound couch that covered 3 of the 4 walls. My grandfather, who passed away two summers ago, sat in his trademark cardigan smirking at me. I looked down and the professional wrestler Rey Mysterio, a luchadore in a colorful mask, was grabbing ahold of my leg and laying on the ground. I looked up at my grandfather and he smiled. I was hit with this overwhelming feeling of satisfaction, like he was happy that most of the possessions I had been given from him my grandmother were mine to do with what I pleased, and that only the memory of family matters, not the fact that I sold a lot of his clothes and coins to pay my rent. He told me, "you can't have everything you want, unless you want it."

I was punished with a nightmare from the culinary gods last night because I ate a cream cheese and cranberry sandwich very late. In my dream I was with some weird woman small with dark hair who very much wanted to be my friend. She begged me to go to dinner with her it seemed urgent. I told her I was a vegetarian I made it very clear. We were then in some old part of the city shadowy and dangerous and climbed up a bunch of stairs to a dark night club. We sat at a table and I felt something by my foot. It was a black corrective shoe the kind misshapen with cracked leather and I had to lift it to the table to get my dinner. Once I did that I was brought a drink in a shot glass bourbon I think and I drank it quick then I a oily man brought a platter of what looked like sushi but some of it had orange fringes like sea creatures and some looked vegetable in nature. I ate part of one and it seemed okay. The next course was a cat lying on a bed of rice. It was a black cat looked exactly like Paris the Genius Cat. The chef came out and insisted it was dead because I was stroking him. His one golden eye was open staring at me in pain but he couldn't make any noise. I got up and started a fight with the cashier telling them I was going to report them to the police.

I dreamed of my grandfather's boathouse last night like a little log cabin on Lake Pend Oreille with the boat slip attached the boat rocking in green lights and the giant carp underneath. I was in a feather bed in the house with a beautiful man with light shooting out of his blue blue eyes (a family trait) I was holding his face in both my hands (this is the second time I've done this in a dream in two weeks) telling him how beautiful he was and he was telling me we were some kind of cousins and the boathouse belonged to him now but it was okay for us to have sex. Creepy except I loved that boathouse with my whole goddamned heart and still do and I can recall every inch of it and the boat slip and the boat every inch is like a slide show in my head and that boathouse is a place I go when I am falling.

In my dreams this morning, fitful rolling dreams, one after the other, my house was in chaos, mess everywhere, the mess of years.  I woke from my dream, still dreaming and heard my sister and aunt arrive after a long trip.  They were in my kitchen.  I wanted to join them but it was hard to open my eyes.  They were stuck fast with sleep.

I had tried to tidy my consulting room in my dreams.  My children who were still young had been playing there.  The accumulation of years of toys and dolls and dress-ups spread across the room, behind cupboards and on chairs.

No sooner did I manage to clear one pile than I found another.  There was so much to sort, so much to pack away, so much to dispose of.  The piles were endless.  On my way down to the kitchen I noticed other rooms in the house in similar disarray, including the hallway itself and the kitchen.  It was as if all the toys and objects from my children’s childhood through a span of twenty years were still accumulating in my house and there was no more storage space.

I spoke to my aunt and sister, tidying around them as I offered cups of tea.  They had brought with them my uncle’s dog, a yappy dachshund with paralysed back legs that he dragged along behind him on two makeshift wheels.  The dog pulled at the edge of my skirt, harmless but irritating.  Besides I worried for my youngest daughter who in my dream was still only a toddler.

At one point I opened a door off the corridor and discovered a room I had forgotten over the years.  It had only half a floor laid down and I concluded this was the reason that we had kept the door closed, but then realised the non-floored section was in fact a water feature and deliberate, a pool in which fish swam and on whose surface, strangely, despite the absence of natural light, water lilies grew.

The walls were surrounded by fat books, books from my husband’s past, and my father before him, books we might never read now, the type of books you might see lining a Victorian library from floor to ceiling, grey with dust.

In the centre of one bookshelf there was a glass cabinet in which on the centre shelf my husband had laid out his toy soldiers, miniatures, meticulously painted, with rifles, swords and bayonets and fixed in the postures of war.

Strange I thought that I should have forgotten this.  It was like the discovery of a secret cave.

I rejoiced in the room's presence but knew immediately it would be a danger to my daughter who toddled in as I stood admiring the books.  She hovered at the edge of the pool and I scooped her up into my arms knowing I would need to close the door onto this room again until she was old enough to resist the temptation to drown.

Last night I dreamed for the entire night that I was sewing. Red satin dresses. Blue silk dresses. I was sewing them all by hand tiny perfect stitches. Right before I woke I dreamed I was sewing an intricate deep chocolate brown velvet Victorian hat. I was busy busy busy. I believe this dream means prosperity is coming my way that I can make it happen by believing.

Yesterday after visiting the hospital twice in a week to give blood I decided I would like an Advocate. I'm not sure what they are but lots of people in queue to give blood had them. I wrote about it extensively last night then deleted the post. Last night I dreamed my Advocate appeared and she was a chubby cross between Patty Duke from the Patty Duke Show including the headband and June Cleaver except she wasn't sweet as she appeared she was all business with had a soft speaking voice and a sweet demeanor. She was my Janus coming to visit. She had a huge book with plastic pages a scrap book that I never got to peek into but apparently it held the story of my life or a version of the story. Before I knew it I was on trial for being broke. My mother was there my father and his wife my step father and they were to be my jury. I asked my son to go hide in the closet and the Patty Duke/June Cleaver Advocate Janus began to question me. I answered her honestly but the screaming from the jury overtook my words every time I defended myself the jury screamed and shouted and fought. Finally  my Advocate asked me what about music? And I started to answer and realized my clock radio had gone off. I considered hitting the snooze button and sleeping another half hour but I was afraid to go back into that version of home sweet home. I woke in tears which sucks when you have a cold got up made some tea and crawled back into bed to watch Inspector Gadget on one of the invisible channels that come through at odd times when you don't have cable television. When I got out of bed to go to work I hugged my son who was not raised in a screamy house. I told him the dream. It made me cry again so  I'm putting it here to let it grow leathery awful wings and fly away.

Last night I had no dreams

and woke up with no worries

The night before last I dreamed about "her"
and that morning when I awoke I had many worries

There must be a lesson in this  that is as I re:call

November 8, 2010

Last night I dreamed of rolling in snow like a puppy.

November 3, 2010

Last night I had two dreams that felt important. In the first I was painting women in blue dresses on a large canvas and every time I'd finish a woman she'd float off the canvas and up to the sky. Pretty obvious I guess. In the second dream there were two men in tuxedos side by side. The man on the left was holding a gold plate full of bees. The man was on the right was playing a viola de gamba. The music coming from the viola de gamba was the sound the bees were making a deep earth abiding hum. This dream was joyful.

October 25, 2010

Last night as I slept I kept dreaming that I figured out the trick to staying asleep and I did stay asleep the entire night using the trick which I couldn’t remember when I woke.

October 13, 2010

Last night I dreamed there was a period like this . exactly that size floating around in my left eye. I wanted to rub my eyelid but I knew if I did so more punctuation would show up and eventually start spewing out tons of it like flies on a rotten potato.

September 26, 2010

Last night I dreamed I was at the Poet House (always the same house with poets a beautiful huge house in forest with giant windows looking out) again only this time I was there with Peter Pereira. I was attempting with his help to put toothpicks in an avocado seed so I could plant it in water something my son did in elementary school. The toothpicks kept breaking and finally I found some Pick-Up-Sticks the kind I had when I was a child and they seemed to be working but the seed slipped out of my hands and fell into the glass of water and suddenly exploded into bright colorful flowers (the colors of the Pick-Up-Sticks) strung together like a Hawaiian lei. Peter and I were stunned by its beauty.

The room in my dream served several functions: as a consulting room, a classroom and a conference centre.  It was raining outside, and seemingly within.  There must have been several gaps in the tiles on the roof that let in what looked like waterfalls in every corner of the room and even in places in the centre, yet somehow the various people who used this room managed to stay dry.

It was only a matter of time I thought before someone cops a gush of water.  I drank a cup of tea and worried that the water from the ceiling might collect inside my cup and dilute my warm drink into tepid slops.  I worried that the old therapist in the corner who was conducting a session, a man I recognised from my past who is now long dead, might get angry when he found a wet patch on his chair. I worried that the nun taking the small group of primary school children at their desks might turn on me instead of the children she rebuked.  I worried that the people at the conference might ignore me.

Instead, one man, a Canadian came by and passed me a handwritten letter.  I tried to read the words but they were indecipherable. I could only make out that he had been friendly at the last conference and wanted now to send me his good wishes.  His wife had not been able to come this time because of their children.  That much I could tease out.  Perhaps she was pregnant again.

Before I knew it I was in a car accident.  I was a back passenger in a white Volvo station wagon, driven by another of conference participant, this time an American woman and she was now in a state of shock.  Her husband leapt out from the front passenger seat to assess the damage.  The rear passengers joined him.  No one was seriously hurt though a woman who had sat beside me in the car kept asking me to massage her back.  I could not quite get to the right place on her back to give her relief but I kept trying.

Meanwhile the driver and her husband and some other helpers managed to un-crumple the roof of the car so that we could drive off again.  It looked almost as if no damage had been done, though the driver was still in a state of shock and I sensed she blamed the accident on the quality of roads in Australia.

I was about to give a talk to my colleagues.  It was to be held out in an open field.  I was unprepared.  I stood near my car with its bonnet open and started to prepare from the few notes I had taken on an article by a writer whose name was Engel.  The book dealt with the way we attach and grow.

I had read Engel’s book some time ago and had taken copious notes but I had not pulled it together.  I had thought I might have more time to do this but then realised too late that my talk was about to begin.

The convenor clapped his hands for silence and was ready to introduce me.  I would need to bluff my way through, I thought.  I could ask the audience to join in and help.

Engel’s book included images from a series of films and photographs that suggest a link between what is real and unreal.  The way toys can have personalities. A doll, for instance, a Mirka Mora image can have a face full of expression, even with buttons for eyes.

Still I could not remember the names of the films to which Engel refers or events in much detail.  I had not had enough time.

I woke as I flicked through the book still trying to prepare myself as the convenor waffled on about trivia.  I wished I could go elsewhere and pluck out some meaningful quotes to make sense of the book.  But it was too late.

Last night I dreamed there was a bear on a rampage in a carnival. People were panicking and running and screaming. I thought the best thing to do would be to trap the bear in a room and let it calm down. It was impossible so I grabbed a baseball bat (there were multiple baseball games going on at the same time as the carnival) and went to look for the bear. When I reached it it was lying in a carnival booth enclosure. Someone had taken a shovel and had chopped off its hands and feet (paws?). It was awful, and the bear was in terrible pain, but couldn't get up and run away. Then whoever it was who had the shovel took the shovel and gashed its neck and it started to bleed profusely and we all knew it would be dead soon. I felt terrible for the bear, because all it had done was wander into a place where it didn't belong, and even if it had to be killed so that people wouldn't be killed, it didn't deserve to be mutilated, terrorized and humiliated.

The only dreams I seem to remember are the gruesome ones that wake me up gasping.