A Waste of Time

The other night.  A dream.  I’m drifting off to sleep, and I don’t realize that I’ve fallen there yet, so when I see myself walking down a sidewalk.  I think it’s real at first even though it looks a little bit like one of those first person shots in Being John Malkovich where they’re inside Malkovich looking out, as opposed to really being the person that’s walking.  I realize it must be a dream when I see what’s on the sidewalk.  There’s a horse lying there, a horse definitely and not a pony, in proportion and detail, although it’s only about three feet long, maybe as big as a largish medium-sized dog.  The dog comparison is uncomfortable, because half of the horse is ground into the pavement, smashed paper-thin as though it has the consistency of a pile of dog shit and has been stepped in by a giant shoe.  The only portion of the horse to retain its original dimensionality is the left front leg and everything above going to the neck and head.  These parts are flailing about feebly, like the antenna of a roach that’s been sprayed but hasn’t quite given up yet.  The horse’s eyes roll up in their sockets, but I couldn’t claim it was looking at me.

This is when I realize that it’s all a little too weird, I must be dreaming, and I think that I wake up.  I’m in my room., although the light is strange and soft and diffused, like how they tried to photograph a woman’s bedroom in the early days of three-strip technicolor.  I’m not yet concerned that the aesthetic qualities of my imaginative landscapes so often are easily compared to the techniques employed in old films.  There’s somebody next to me, but I don’t quite see him.  He’s in my peripheral vision, just barely though, and I’m telling him that I just had the strangest dream, but I never remember my dreams.  That part is true, because I really rarely do.  So, I insist that he has to help me remember the horse, because it was too interesting to waste.  I think he’s nodding a little bit, but he doesn’t say much in the way of an answer.  I decide that he’s not trustworthy, and I tell myself that it’s up to me to remember this dream.  I insist again and again that I have to record every detail.  I think this is why I remember most of what happened afterward.  I start to realize that there’s something strange about this as well, and that there might not be another person in my peripheral vision at all, and that’s when I “wake up” again.

I’m lying in my bed now, which seems about right because I’m supposed to have just snapped out of a bad dream.  Looking down, I discover that there’s a boy there, going down on me, green t-shirt and brown skin.  He’s beautiful, and I recognize him from my escapades, even though I can’t see his face.  It seems hazy, though, and I can’t feel his mouth on me like I should, and some part of my brain starts to suspect that I never did wake up, after all.

Now I’m standing up at the foot of my bed, and I think I’ve woken up again.  But for some reason the door between my room and my roommate’s is open, which it never should be.  I think it’s actually taped shut.  There’s something profoundly disturbing to me about it being open.  I can’t recall the last time that it was.  Then I notice that the light in the room isn’t natural, it’s a deep blue with no conceivable logical origin within the room.  I think in the box of crayolas I had when I was little, that blue was called cornflower blue.  I start to step toward the door, but I feel like I shouldn’t.  The steps I take toward it don’t actually bring me any closer, until I finally notice a shadowy figure in the room.  It’s headed toward me, and for some reason I’m afraid of it, even though my suspicion is that it’s the boy from a minute ago, still in his green t-shirt and without pants, just walking at a casual pace.  Suddenly, another figure rushes me from my right side and grabs me, which is when I realize it’s all just too improbable, I must be dreaming, and I “wake up” again.

Now I’m lying back in my bed, but I feel paralyzed and I can’t move.  There are two figures standing over me.

“It doesn’t really matter.  He can’t hear you,” one of them says.

They continue discussing me for a few moments.  What’s disturbing me even more than my paralysis is the fact that one of them looks exactly like a drawing I had done, only that drawing wasn’t of anybody in particular.  It was as though the guy was from the drawing, rather than the other way around.  They keep discussing me for a few more minutes before I snap awake again

This time, I lay with my eyes closed for a few minutes.  I think about the sounds in the room and the feeling of my cheek on the pillow.   I’m trying to figure out how I can tell that this is any different than being asleep, and zero in on the exact indications that tell me the difference.  I feel unsettled, because in the last portion of the dream I had been convinced that I really was awake finally, and that I was in an asylum or something, imagining these walking versions of my drawings looking over me.  I had finally snapped.

It took me a few minutes, but I did convince myself that it was a real pillow against my cheek.  I opened my eyes.