Category Archives: Diary of a Dreaming Girl

What a strange, unsettling dream:

I died. I can’t remember how. After lingering in a brightly-lit Edwardian mansion (that had been modernized, with stainless steel appliances), I returned to my body, yet I remained in limbo. The house changed: in some rooms, I was in California; in others, my childhood home. I suspect two dreams bled into one another.

Being a ghost wasn’t so bad. I could still talk to everyone. I decided to return to my body, because I wanted to help someone I’ve since forgotten (I think it might have been Frances Bean Cobain, but that is odd). Once inside my body, one thought consumed me: beating the clock. I worried I would run out of time before I began to decompose. When I looked at myself in the mirror (I often look at my reflection in dreams, even though it’s “dangerous”/reveals “the true self;” I’M A REBEL!), my cheeks seemed sunken–my flesh, a bit yellow. I thought I looked bloated. When I left the bathroom (the master bathroom from my childhood home), my parents were waiting for me.

Mommy, I’m rotting.

“I know,” my mom said.

“No, you’re not! You look the same way you did before you died. No one will know the difference,” my dad said.

I’m sure the dream is a metaphor for my body image issues, but it scared me. I thought I could smell myself. Perhaps my subconscious is simply telling me to take a shower?

And after that I would wake up alone at night, sit straight up in bed sweating, with his voice pounding all through me. All day I felt feverish and wounded.

It got kind of sick. I’ve never wanted anyone that much. But it won’t happen again, I tell myself. He’s as fucked up as I am. Can you imagine the two of us together? Fucking each other up.

But when I see him or hear his voice, even on the tape he gave me, I can’t think clearly. I try to understand how I could feel like this, even after a year. A psychic I went to said “soul mates.” Jacaranda once said “sex,” and then, when it didn’t stop–”voodoo.” But I think it’s what happens when he sings. He touches something–the dream place. The land before it was poisoned. There are untainted fish, unbroken birds, clouds without toxins. Dancing palm trees. Choruses of stargazers. His voice like a god with a lyre carrying us up from the dark tunnel to the edge of the meadow. To the edge of the water. To the edge of the moon.

I try to do that too, but I always feel strangled.

If I could be like Joni filling empty rooms with Wurlitzers and silver, baths of blue roses; scream like Patti with the horses rampaging through her veins; like Sinead with her orbit-blue eyes and perfect skull, bringing the elf-lover back from the dead and burying the demon-mother deeper down. I wish I could wear mercury like Polly Jean–landing on the stage from outer space, moving my hands, a cosmic marionette–and make you feel my voice reverberating deep in your pelvis, making you dance, circling your throat like a rosary of tear-shaped beads to press on the glands, to make you weep.

– From “Orpheus,” a short story by Francesca Lia Block

You can tell this woman is a witch, because her ankles are showing. (The brazen hussy! Only a witch would flaunt her ankles.) Even the cat is shocked… but the bat is like, “Hey now!” (Dracula, I presume?)

Ah, Victorians.

Even though I am the tiniest one I am pretty good. Dancing never seems hard to me. It is just what my body likes to do. Izzy says it’s because I am a very centered child. I think it is because Izzy and Anastasia always made me feel like I could be good at whatever I liked to do. Once we were on a bus, and there was a little girl my age with her pinch-mouthed grandmother. The little girl was happy and chattering about how when she grew up she wanted to be “an actress or a writer or a dancer or a violinist.” The grandmother said, “Oh no, you’re too old to be a dancer or a violinist. You would have had to have started years ago when you were little. You’ll never make it now. And you’re too short to be a dancer besides.” That got to me since I’m smaller than the girl was. “What about a writer or an actress?” she asked. You could tell she felt really bad. “It is almost impossible to be successful as a writer,” the grandmother said. “And you have to be very very pretty to make it as an actress these days.” I could see that the little girl had completely changed. She got quiet and smaller. You could just tell that her heart was broken. Izzy was fuming like a dragon. I knew she wanted to say something, but she didn’t want to create a scene. When they got off the bus Izzy smiled at the girl, her big, dazzling, toothy smile, and maybe it helped a little. I was lucky because whenever I mentioned anything I dreamed of doing I always got to see that smile.

- From “Dragons in Manhattan,” a short story by Francesca Lia Block

I bet somebody told the grandmother she would never achieve her dreams. Bitterness is born when individuals do not support the dreams of others.

I dreamt I said “ROFL” in real life:

Me: “ROFL!”
Passing Stranger: “Did you just say ‘waffle?’”
Me: “No, I said ‘ROFL,’ like ‘roffle.’”
Passing Stranger: “It sounds like ‘waffle.’”
Me: “I guess it does!”

26 April 2010 @ 02:46 am

We meet someday, as friends. Perhaps we are roommates. I value my space, so I never intrude upon your own. We get along. I feel as I do now, and then someday…

Perhaps someday…

And then, I wake up.

26 February 2010 @ 08:29 pm

I remembered another dream I had last night: I wanted to return to high school and earn a diploma from the school I attended for nearly three and a half years. (I transferred to a private high school in November 1998, and I graduated from there.) When I enrolled in the school for a short summer session, I was told the session would be like study hall, or an adult G.E.D. course, in that I would simply study for senior finals and take them. However, the principal also told me he had decided to conduct an experiment. He refused to divulge the details, but I discovered what he meant soon enough. One class was essentially a yoga class and an obstacle course, which was fun, but in another class, we were treated like first-graders, in order to “get in touch with [our] inner children.” The teacher wanted to weigh us before we entered the classroom, but I refused. The teacher tried to bully me into stepping onto the scale, but I simply said, “No. This entire situation makes me uncomfortable. Why do we have to pretend as though we are first-graders?” An eighteen-year-old student said, “Yeah! It’d be like having a thirty year-old in our class.” I sank into my chair, but I did say, “Well, I’m almost thirty.” Everyone seemed fascinated by me: “You don’t look thirty.” and “Wow, if you already have a diploma, why come back?”

So, there was a teacher’s aide in the classroom. She flopped on desks and rolled around like a cat (or like a ghost from a Japanese horror film). It was disturbing. She repeated one phrase in a creepy sing-song voice: “Come on, guys! It’ll be fun!” Then she fell off the desks and broke one of her teeth on the nasty, threadbare carpet (the carpet was blue). She grabbed her tooth and walked out of the room, but before she left, I caught a glimpse of her face. Her eyes looked dead.

Undeterred, the teacher wrote something on the board in super-small handwriting I couldn’t read, then she passed out handouts with shapes on them. She said we were going to play a game, and she passed out another handout. It read:

(1) Look around the room and choose someone who looks like a vampire.
(2) Explain why you think this person would make a good vampire.
(3) Write a three-line story about this vampire.

She told us that the person with the most votes would get to be the class vampire. I don’t even know what that’s about.

26 February 2010 @ 09:37 am

I’ve noticed something strange: my dreams vary from room to room.

Lately, I’ve taken to sleeping in the spare room, because my room is full of fun stuff for Nobi to knock off the shelf and break. (He tends to do that when he’s hungry and I’m asleep.) In the spare room, I dream of fantastic things, like castles with secret passages, or gardens that glow at night.

Five nights ago, I woke to a lightning strike outside the spare room window. I wasn’t afraid–I was half-asleep–but I still possessed the presence of mind to move to my room, which has less windows. (Not that I was afraid lightning would zap me through the window; it was more a matter of less noise in the back of the house.) Come to find out, I don’t sleep well in my room. I dream of monsters, surreal flashes of my childhood home (wherein I’m locked in my house, or I’m alone in my neighborhood), high school, or abandoned hotels. I’m almost always held captive by someone I never see, or I obsess over meaningless details. For instance, last night, I wanted to plant yellow and purple poisonous plants around an invisible pyramid in a college Biology lab. I spent most of the dream scouring the university for seed packets. (As an aside, my dreams were interrupted last night by a train. I haven’t heard a train come through town since I first moved here. Very odd and random. This, of course, led me to move back into the spare room, where I dreamt of a glittering ceiling of stars in an abandoned mansion with an indoor garden.)

Then there are the dreams wherein I have a boyfriend. These dreams are heartbreaking, because I’m aware that I’m asleep. In some way, these dreams are the most realistic dreams I have. If I ever date someone again, I know I’ll feel as though I’m dreaming. I have unrealistic expectations. It’s not that love doesn’t exist, because it does, but it’s more a form of mutual respect and appreciation. I’m too much a true romantic. I’m intense, and I can be moody, detached, or smothering; it depends upon the day. I enjoy being by myself. I love the company of others, but I don’t want someone in my life who will watch me floss my teeth or demand to know where I’m going. I want intensity and passion, and that exists–I know, because I am that way–but I can’t be one person’s world. I’m not the type of girl who can exist as part of a unit. That works in dreams, but it doesn’t work in real life, and it’s strange, because when I like someone, he becomes my world–except I lack the desire for constant “togetherness.” In fact, I loathe it. I very much need my space. So, in dreams, I may want to be someone else’s world, but the reality of it makes me sick.

There is a reason the Depeche Mode song, “Somebody,” sums up my views on love:

“I don’t want to be tied
To anyone’s strings
I’m carefully trying to steer clear
of those things
But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it
And in a place like this
I’ll get away with it”

(“A place like this” = my dreams.)

My point? I think I’ll move back into the spare room. I don’t want to be haunted by dreams of love.

Also, I have a theory about why my dreams are more “personal” in my room. The spare room is sparsely furnished, whereas my bedroom is cluttered with cool stuff. Everyone knows that stuff = memories. When I fall asleep in the midst of so much to look at (especially since I’ve owned most of this stuff since I was fourteen), of course my dreams are going to be more “personal” (weird biology lab dream aside).