Hospital Nights

image courtesy of my own bad self

Late night in the hospital. Sunday morning my wife went into the hospital. She's ok, but they're keeping her for a few days. Thus, I spent the night and will be spending subsequent nights laying at her side on a strange fold-out faux-leather sofa bed thingy. It's not comfortable, but it's not uncomfortable either, so take that to mean whatever. It's strange. Hospitals are big buildings, and I've always harbored a strange fascination/excitement at the prospect of what goes on in large, modern buildings in the middle of the night. Last night I was fairly out of it so other than penning what I now believe was probably a completely incoherent message to the inimitable Chester Whelks I pretty much just passed out. But I dreamt. Boy did I dream...

In the first 'episode' of the dream I was in a small, possibly New England town. There was a lot of running around. I got the impression that there were people I knew there and also people who were recovering from something. I am unsure whether this was recovery from something that happened to them or something they did to themselves. At some point I believe I ventured off from the others - I was in an old New England style house, real old, as in run down. I was running through the house. Then other people were there as well, but I don't think it was the same people. I take this to me an overturning of acquaintances? Or perhaps, because I've been in contact with quite a few people I've not talked to in a while of late that could factor in here as well. These new people were also running, only behind me. Not quite sure if they were running with me from something or chasing me. Either way the tone was the same - there was something terrifying behind me/us.

I had tried to take someone out of using what I believe was an old book (of course!) to conjure the devil. It may have been my good friend The Goatchild. He did not listen and the next thing I can remember after the frantic chasing is running alone, up a broken, dilapidated and gently curving staircase. There were pieces of the balustrade missing, and the stairs themselves, while solid enough below my feet, looked a lot like the rest of the house in that it was old, dusty and unkept. Suddenly from behind and above me a crazy, screeching, evil monkey swung out over my head and attacked me. It bit my right hand on the top, opposite where my palm would be. I screamed and grabbed the monkey. It jumped back toward the underside of the floor above and I caught its head with a ball pein hammer, grinding its skull so that I could actually feel the bones break and the brains squish.

It was disgusting.

The monkey was a representation of the devil (which I should point out I don't believe in in the traditional sense, except for about three hours after I watch The Exorcist) and I had the feeling I was marked. I woke up stretched out on the little chair-thing, buzzing like a live wire from the fear that carried over from my dream. There's a window just in front of where my head was. It looks like this during the day:

Not too scary, right? Well, I woke up sleeping on my stomach, facing out the window. Along with the fear, when I surfaced out of the dream I brought with me this little voice that insisted that I had had similar dreams before, and that I was marked by the devil (who again, I don't believe in in this Christian/Hollywood way) and that these occasional dreams were his way of manifesting to me. While all this was running through my head I scanned the darkness outside the window. Across the street, beneath a tree there was something that looked more than a little like a human-shaped dark shadow...

Drumcondra, Ireland You're Haunting My Dreams...

Image courtesy of geograph.ie

It's been nearly ten years since I was out of the country. I've never traveled abroad as much as I would have liked to, however I've done a small amount. Problem is (not really a problem though) when I do get out there's really only three places I like to go. There's other places I want to see, but only three places I go: England, Ireland and Scotland.

Now, this morning I dreamt seemingly non-stop about Ireland. Specifically for some reason I dreamt of Drumcondra, a suburb of Dublin. I don't know much about Drumcondra - I was there during the earliest days of 2002 with my friends Grez and his cousin Tony and a certain other person who, well, scared the hell out of me and almost inadvertently got me killed. In a nutshell, she was crazy. Beautiful, but crazy. And I paid for that.

Anyway... I didn't dream about any of this; none of these people, none of the places I was at while I was there. What I dreamt about were a bunch of places and people I never encountered before in 'consensual' reality but in the dream felt like I'd met and now somehow stumbled into a very pained remembrance. I was with my wife and my folks, we were walking the green streets of Drumcondra, and suddenly I wandered away or fell behind for a moment and then lost them, only to enter a place and recognize it immediately. From there it seemed I climbed and descended endless staircases, on almost each level re-meeting people I had somehow forgotten and only just then remembered, but remembered in a way that made them very important to me. New bonds were established and then somehow there was someone following me - chasing me even - and I was trying to avoid them. When a confrontation eventually happened it was for naught, and then this older dude at work who I don't particularly care for (nothing against him - just keep my distance for perceived reasons) showed up and whisked me back to where my wife and family waited.

What the hell?

Some Thoughts on Remembering Dreams

Another completely insane dream this morning - its vivid, ethereal strands clung to me as Thompson woke me up with soft purrs for a second feeding this morning. Now, one thing I've learned is that even though they say we dream every night I myself only remember them in chunks. In other words, I've had pretty much day after day of dream residue each morning for a week or two now, but if everything snaps to grid this will stop shortly. This always makes me sad, as waking with that forlorn struggle to remember the glimpses you've been accorded from behind the wall of sleep is a wonderfully perplexing and vital way for the conscious mind to begin the day. Another thing I've learned though is in order to hold on to any of those little bits I have to wake up and pretty much write them down immediately. And this morning I did not.

So I lost it.

Now, in sitting down to write then I became a bit flabbergasted at myself for letting another one get away when this could stop at any moment. Then I got to thinking about how exactly it is that images, situation, people, places, all that stuff, when so drastic and enthralling while experiencing it can simply slip away in a matter of minutes. Obviously the unconscious and the conscious don't mingle very well. Or do they?

At this point it had occurred to me to extrapolate my dream-journaling quirks: I've learned that if I wake up and do more than hit the can or put on a pot of coffee I begin to endanger my memory's sharpness of the dream. I can't read anything and I certainly cannot talk to anyone. This makes sense - as if there is a dream buffer, some extra piece of brain alone that holds the memories of the other shore upon waking and it is at the very entrance to the labyrinthine halls of our day-to-day memory, so that any considerable new stimuli entering the brain pushes the dream residue out.

What does that tell us?

Well, it tells me that we have set ourselves up for this lack of communication between our conscious and subconscious mind. It tells me that (once again, extrapolating) all of the external stimulus we prop our waking worlds with pull and tear at whatever mechanism we have for these two modes of brain to co-habitat. Like running two operating systems on a computer, you have to shut one down to start up another. That may be a necessity for a computer, but for a brain? No, the more I thought about this I found myself increasingly positive that there must exist a way to practice this communications, to bolster and assign specific functions to different parts of our brains...

and then I realized there is. "Of Course!!!" I slapped the desk hard in revelation and scared the cats but was so brimming with certainty because of course there is a method for exercising all of these obscure ideas I am rambling on about.

It's called meditation.

The House In My Dreams

So, when I woke up from this beautifully restorative (and slightly incapacitating) slumber I had been so deep in REM state that it took me a few moments to be able to stand-up and walk around, and when I did so I moved more akin to a rubbery drunkard than myself. So where was I? Let me try and set it up:

Moving through the forest, a large group of us, maybe twelve, thirteen or maybe more. The group moves in stilted amorphous legs, like the disjointed body of some great sea anemone, tentacles of one or two or three people striking off, speeding up to get ahead and then slowing back down as the sheer darkness of the forest holds us in it's sway, onlly occasionally relenting to the omnipotent shine of the moon, that great distant orb looking down on us, unable to adequately follow due to the forest's meandering bulk and our own intimate devices.

We're searching for something.

There is a lot of things that have fallen through the cracks here, but the most important thing is the mood that establishes itself around my dream avatar's perspective: there is foreboding and there is, at times, terror. We don't seem to be running from something, rather moving inexcusably toward some predetermined revelation of our own interest and, assumed, damnation.

Then it's there: The House.

The House is a massive, sprawling piece of Midwestern faux Victorian. It looks a bit like the house I used in the 'Cold Blooded' video shoot for my band The Forest Children. Except that house, my wife's grandparents', is an actual Civil War era job. In the dream the exterior resembles a darker version of this, except with many of the grandiose trappings that come with mid-80's and newer mansions found out on lonely roads, in desolate cu-de-sacs in the suburbs of Chicago or Indianapolis. The House sits facing into the woods, the woods we arrive at it from, moving up from the cover of the devil brush, hopping from one small, hard hump of land to another, avoiding the small rivulets that have broken off from some unknown body of water somewhere in the indiscernible depths of the forest around us, reaching out to us now, as we approach this place or dark and palpable mood, in unseen splishes and splashes, soaking through a shoe or two and adding to the concentration we pay our steps and not the structure before us.

And then, we're on land. I recognize some people here. Recognize them all, actually, only I can name but a few. Fellow travelers in the realms of dream that I have encountered before? Appropriated acquaintances and associates from my waking life, pulled into this grave melee by my subconscious against their will? Whatever the case with the others, I sense my good friend JFK* and my wife. I keep them close...

We approach the house with caution. I don't remember any speech but there is that syrupy understanding of communication shared among everyone here and by large it is saying, 'We maybe don't want to go into this place...' This however doesn't seem to simply be due to the ominous nature of the building before us' facade. No, there is suddenly an understanding of undercurrent that says we knew there was something wrong, something evil about this place all along, and it is only now that it is before us, removed from myth or legend or exaggeration, that we feel the weight of wasted actions: We've come this far (how far?) but do we dare enter?

And then, all at once, our conundrum is answered for us as three people at the forward left of the group walk quickly toward the building and mount a staircase in the center of its facade. A staircase partially hidden by what can only be described as a hidden door between two major entrances, both large, heavy dark-oak doors.

The impression is we are not entering a house or mansion, but a Keep.

Tentatively, one by one we follow. My wife and I are somewhere near the last of the group to enter. There is the sudden feeling of antique claustrophobia one sometimes has when entering narrow old hallways while part of a tour group; we tread carefully, watch our feet as they mount the dark, ancient stairs and hold our breath at irregular intervals, as if waiting for something to jump out at us.

After an interminable amount of time we arrive at the top of the stairs. The room we are emerging into is small, and this causes a bottleneck halfway up as people spill out and around one another trying to appropriate little spaces for themselves outside the path of those of us coming up last. Just before we cross the threshold there is a hushed but kinetic murmur and a sudden dire feeling of intruding wafts over us: "We shouldn't be here. Get out! Turn around and get out!" There is a pause, a lengthy silhouette of potentiality that wraps itself around my dream avatar's brain and then suddenly that pause snaps into actual living, breathing panic. A single word is heard, not so much shouted by the others in the group but emitted into our brains by the structure itself:

Evil.

There is a dash, the proverbial camera swings wildly and all I see are flashes of wood-paneled wall, musty brown and green carpet, a grandfather clock that must predate most of the world I know. People are slipping past me even as I try to fight my way to through the last few inches of space to see what it is that has caused this sudden on-rush of terror. Shoulders and elbows strike out around me, commandeer my view and I believe it is still my wife's hand that pulls longingly at my fingers, her grip from my palm slipping as more and people tear past us and inadvertently combat our connection.

Then I see it.

My parents, old, feeble, wrinkled. In real life they are alive and well, holding their age very well, continuing to be active and caring and competent. Here, in the dream house they are bent and shriveled and... confused? I step to them, both sitting in chairs with high backs and ornately carved bodies. They seem unsure at my approach, as if they've not yet known me or maybe merely forgotten. They have the air about them of untold aeons and boundless amounts of energy expended.

"Evil? Are we evil?" It is my father who speaks first. Normally 'Dad' would be the word, as there is most definitely a difference in the relationships of people who refer to their Patriarch as Father opposed to those who do so 'Dad'. But here and now, it's Father.

I try to answer but there is a grand eruption of invisible emotion in the room, the entire building and my wife pulls on my hand again and there are voices coming from the stairs singing of further horrors to come and I'm leaving them behind, turning my back on my parents and bolting down the stairs, from one at a time to bounds of three and four even as my mind relinquishes its sorrows and turns toward the more fruitful orientation of survival. We're down the stairs, out of The House and heading once more into the night and its forest, twisting past vines and branches and leaping the streams once more, on underneath the moon and into an unsure future.

And then I wake up.

In Dreams You're Mine, For All Of Time...

Interesting the things that transpire in our heads when our consciousness turns off for a while. Moments ago I awoke from a morning filled with a strange effluvium of events that has me a bit paranoid and dare I say it, buzzed as I sit here drinking my fourth cup of coffee in ten minutes. I've been re-reading Grant Morrison's Batman run, from the beginning, and as with everything else the man writes it has most definitely been affecting my nervous system. The Invisibles rolled into one caped-crusading icon. Here's what's collating within the residue...

In my place, making coffee but unable to turn the coffee pot off. Surprised that I had never tried to do this before (a subliminal message that I imbibe too much java? Doubtful, I've waned in quantity lately and feel somewhat guilty about it) Comic Scribe Warren Ellis talks me through trying to turn it off. He is not in the room, nor on the phone. In the dream I seem to interact/communicate with Mr. Ellis as I do in normal life, one of many who occasionally participate in discussion threads on his Whitechapel forum. However, in the dream there is that strange and ever-endearing dream logic that works so well when weaving around physics as we now it, so that the communication takes place without either one of us sitting at a computer, typing. It is almost as if a word balloon appears next to me in the dream (do I become 2D?) and Warren floats inside it, a psychic apparition scoffing and surprised that I've never tried to turn off an appliance I use everyday.

From the coffee pot incident it is somewhat unclear what transpires next. I believe I was folding in and out of sleep's various stages, losing that gloriously technicolor REM where dreaming occurs, and as such the 'plot' of the dream becomes jagged and unclear in its continuity. This happens often, where the movement that connects the juicer points of the dream becomes blurred (as in, "How did I get from Mom and Dad's to Siberia wearing a chicken suit?") and I truly believe it is this interruption in the dream state that does it. Imagine having a hand of cards during a game that every few minutes or so requires you to have to toss them back in, reshuffle, re-deal and then re-acclimate? Static pictures reprocessed or remixed every so often. Interesting idea for a card game, eh? Makes it very attractive to want to assign a quasi-human persona to our architect, no?*

Anyway, the next thing that happens is a malevolence begins to pepper the house (still my house) In the dream I seem to identify it alternately as a 'presence' and an 'unknown agent' – as if one moment it's an exorcism I require and the next a gas mask. I know the word 'Nerve Gas' flits through my dream-avatar's consciousness at some point. Nerve Gas possessed of a malevolent, undead personality? A Gas Ghost, or a Ghost who has learned to manifest itself in a particularly desired atomic makeup? All this is unclear, what is clear however is that Mr. Ellis is now apparently my neighbor (I don't care how loud you play your stereo sir, just turn the sub-woofer down so it doesn't rattle the pictures off my wall thanyouverymuch. I'd hate to get Gravel on your ass) and I run outside to save my cats from the encroaching danger. Only Tom and Lily, two full grown felines, are more akin to tiny newborn kittens. I gather them up into an open-topped cardboard box and rush them outside only to find Mr. Ellis walking by. I ask him to watch my cats as I run back in and suddenly, at some point I am calling the police (or did they call me?) and setting the cash register drawers out for opening at the store where I work.

???

There' that trans-location logic again, this time remixed in a manner so that my location doesn't change, it simply acquires attributes of another, inexplicably so.**

So now the front door is open, Warren Ellis is outside watching my cats and the police are arriving, asking me questions that pretty openly say both A) they think I'm either crazy or high on goofballs (am I sweating at this point? Yeah, I probably look high.) and B) they realize that something is indeed wrong with the very air or atmosphere in the room we currently occupy. As I speak to the officers (two of them, one a early-forties caucasian woman wearing her brown hair in a braided ponytail, the other a mid-to-late thirties black man with short-sheered hair and a reassuring air of calm about him) I feel as though I am trying to explain something I most assuredly know but somehow just cannot express. The room continues to swell with toxic environment and I glance to my right, over my shoulder and see the front door, propped open. A moment later I do the same and it is closed. Still speaking ineffectually I move over to the door, pushing it open and see the two money-filled tills sitting on the stoop just to the right of the threshold. A woman goes by on the sidewalk two steps down, calling for her child. I lean down and assess the tills, suspicious that someone (the woman?) gently pushed the door closed and took money. In the top till there appears to be a lesser amount of change than there should be and the slots for most bills are empty. Then I see a fifty dollar bill, no two fifty dollar bills where the five's should be. Warren is still watching my cats, the police are still speaking to me (are their guns drawn all of a sudden?) and I find myself wondering if I am being purposely distracted...


...................

* Unfortunately though, that is not a good enough reason for me to do so.

** How can you not become resentful of work when you spend so much of your waking life there that it often follows you into your unconscious? Bastard!!!

the Nite club in my dreams...

I originally 'published' this one the other morning on theirspace, anxious just after awakening to streamline the swirling chaos of the dreaming into something someone could help me understand.

I just woke up a bit ago from one of the best sleep's I've had in I don't know how long. Woke up once at 9:53AM, still so full of the dream I was having I almost killed myself trying to stand and run down the stairs to make a dentist appointment I was subsequently A) pleased, B) relieved, C) grateful Sara had canclled for me (thank You Sara!!!) Went back to sleep and resumed the dream, or more appropriately returned to the location of the previous dream, as, You see, I believe I have located a niteclub in the vast land of dreams.

Let me explain.



I have long thought, due to various reading I have done and things I have experienced, that the place we go when we dream is a sort of vast uber-world all of us have access to. You know Jung's Collective Unconscious? Same kinda thing. It's a world made out of bits and pieces of this world, as translated there by the impressions and meanings of the dreamer bringing them over, plus imagination, various frequencies of thought and maybe even action (remember EVERYTHING is energy, and energy has a wavelength, even if we can't detect it, and of course, everybody now, Energy Cannot Be Destroyed. Things we do say and think travel in invisible patterns all over the place, and since they're invisible, it would make sense that they would have access to the invisible realms) and a bunch of stuff we don't (or I don't at this point) know about. So, based on that assessment of dreams and the 'dreamland' it makes sense that you would be able to, if you could continue rational presence of mind while there, map the place, or at least parts of it, through experience.

Part of the problem with this mapping idea of course is because it is such an endless place, and because there are none of the dimensions man has made to map (and ruin) this world I'm writing from, how does one apply any degree of quantification to its terrain, if you will? Also, its not like a state or a house or a backyard where you enter it from a certain fixed point, or points, everytime. In your dreams you might be in bangladesh one night, Palos Park the next and venus the following two. We enter based on something we don't understand. Mind frame at the time of sleep onset? REM frequency pattern at the point of access? That bean and cheese burrito you ate before bed? Point is, we do not know. 



Okay, I'm going somewhere I swear.



Reading Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012 The Return of Quetzacoatl last night I came into a lot of dissertation on the Mayan scholar Jose Arguelles' theories of Harmonic Resonance - basically when the energy vibrations that comprise 'us' synch with other, cosmic frequencies and something bigger than ourselves occur. This could be a moment of insight, ecstasy or, perhaps, entering the land of dreams. 

So we harmonize with whatever ineffable property gains us entrance to whatever particular 'area' of the dreamscape. Now, if we could do that again, learn how to 'tune' ourselves before sleep to hit that same invisible pitch, well, theoretically we could re-access that same 'area'.



Okay, with all that in mind, here's my tale.



First dream I awoke from was one that combined a sense of the hotel I used to bartend at, people I worked with or waited on there, and, amusingly, the Sopranos cast. I was bartending, I can still picture the lavish layout of the bar as juxtaposed with the staqe for the entertainment, the foyer, the stockroom, kitchen and lobby complete with grand open wooden staircase curving up to the first floor. It was all dated, as if it had been built in the 1950's. My activities are pointless to the plot of this, suffice it to say as tending bar for the myriad of guests (Sopranos included. Lotta manhattans where I'd have thought it'd be cognac) my duties took me all over this place. Then something happened to upset me in the dream and suddenly, and I remember this plain as day, my dream self became somewhat lucid and actually thought, 'why continue to be upset. Just wake up and leave it lay'. 

I did.

And I after the aforementioned running around I returned sleepily to bed and began to think about what had just happened. I realized that for someone who can remember lucid dreaming all of two times in his life, this sense of being able to 'just wake up' had been present in my dream self often - like a fail safe.

I also realized I had been in that same nite club before, working. The same place.

Before I had gone to bed in the first place my mind had been sparkling with ideas of that harmonic resonance - perhaps tuning me to a certain frequency. As I thought of these things I drifted back to sleep, apparently still in tune, and re-entered that nite club again. Not really a continuation of the last dream, but a re-visit to what sure as shit seems to me to be an actual 'place' in the vast and amorphous land of dreams. Far from a map, or even the tiniest segment of a map, but a point. And that's how all maps begin, at one place or another, and the rest is discovered relative to that starting point.

Guess where I'm going tonight when I sleep? I'll be thinking, literally, along the same lines, or lengths (wave) and if I get back to my nite club, I guess I'll try to walk out the front door and see who the neighbors are.