I've been dreaming lately of stealing cars all over the country and taking them for joyrides. I have a partner in crime, a sharp young man in a baseball cap. We take these cars - usually large cars, like vans or trucks - on long rides on freeways or highways, and we are careless with them. We bang them up against other cars or on the sides of medians. We have such a good time. At the end we feel awful about what we've done, and swear that we'll never do it again, that the last time is always the last time, until, of course, we do it all over again.

I should add we are always on the verge of getting caught. The dream I had early this morning (I am in fact writing this at 6:30 AM. I was so disturbed I couldn't fall back to sleep.) ended with me and my compatriot sitting on the steps of some sort of universal travel station (you could catch the bus, plane, subway, and train there) talking about how we always fall into this trouble, how we can never resist. We are detailed about our crimes, essentially providing complete confessions. When we start talking we think we're alone, but when I look up again behind him, I realize there's a middle-aged Latina sheriff (yea I don't know why either) standing near us. It's my fault if we get caught, I think. I whisper for him to turn around. He does. He looks back and shakes his head at me. He is disappointed. We decided to walk in separate directions, and hope to cross paths again in the future.

This is clearly a guilt dream of some kind. And also a what the fuck am I doing with my life dream. And probably a couple of other kinds of dream shoved in there for good measure. There is nothing about it that makes me feel good. It makes me wake up in shock, the combination of those feelings at once, and it takes me an hour to talk myself out of it all. I lay up in the loft and put my feet up on the wall and try to create the sensation of lying upside down even though I am mostly lying flat. I am trying to dangle myself over the edge but my reality prevents me from doing so. On the flipside, I wish I could sleep better, but I am never going to sleep completely right.

I have an aunt who had a sad childhood. I think it has kind of made her a sad adult. (I don't think you ever get over certain things.) Once when I was taking a long plane ride with her, she took a nap in the seat next to me. When I looked at her, I noticed that her lips were formed into a sad expression, like the way lips might look the moment before crying. She slept with that look on her face the entire time. I asked her about it later and she said she always looked that way when she slept. An entire lifetime of sad dreams. I can't imagine what that would be like. At least sometimes I have fun in my dreams. There is always the joyride before the guilt.

archives | w-w home | mail