Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Dreams
Again with the dreams
It’s our wedding day, only it’s a special wedding day. Not only am I marrying Karen, but I’m also marrying the gal who married my college roommate, Roger. Which would never happen in real life, since that woman (from what I could tell after a few minutes’ exposure to her and her family) was prudish and cold. And tall and blonde. Not my type. But hey, we’re talking dreams, right?
So, yes, it’s a double marriage, meaning I’m getting a two-fer here. My most pressing concern is, with whom will I spend the wedding night? Because no way no how is the Ice Queen gonna go for a threesome.
After the ceremony, they both manage to get me alone and both are flashing their nubile li’l boobs at me. Oh, the conflict. Whatever will I do? (And why can’t my problems in real life be so angst-provoking?) But I don’t have to worry for long, since in the midst of an embrace the Ice Queen discovers I’ve been dying my hair, and that I’m much older than she thought I was.
Seems the dream machine put me back in time with a 20-something Karen and a 20-something Ice Queen, but failed to put me into an age-appropriate Doug-body. Or something like that. And now the Ice Queen is screaming bloody murder about getting tricked into marriage, and I’m wondering: if we’ve only been married a matter of hours, will she still get half my property in the divorce settlement?
Or would it be a third?
And wouldn’t you know it, I wake up before I even get the chance to consummate the marriage with Karen. Typical.
D.
East Infection
Tonight, this hit the spot.
I used to have dreams of levitation and flight. For it to work, my body had to adopt a particular posture, and there was something specific I had to do with my hands and feet. Like swimming through air. Like alchemy. Come morning, I could remember the motions, but what was missing was dream physics.
My body always remembered what to do. So too do I remember what it’s like to dance (not surprising; I haven’t danced in thirty years, but there was a time when I danced with great enthusiasm, if little talent).
And somewhere inside me, something remembers accordion, and sweat, and beer bottles on the back of the head, and a good hard shagging. Call it another life.
D.
Pride of the savannah
Last night, I dreamed I had become some sort of naturalist, a fieldworker in the African savannah, sent to a nature preserve to study lions in the wild. I was fresh off the boat and raring to go, and without any special instruction or preparation I began hiking my way across the preserve. Say what you will about me, I’m not shy.
Within a matter of minutes, I realized I had been spotted by a lion and lioness, who were heading over to greet eat me. I also realized I was dreaming, but I still didn’t relish the thought of experiencing this, even in dream land. So I hit the ground and pretended to play dead.
The two came loped over, sniffed me. And then the male mounted the female and they went at it.
One word for what followed: messy.
Interpretations, anyone?
D.
The surprising thing is that it never happened before.
I think I’ve pointed out previously that my subconscious hates me. Just the other night, I dreamed I was at a party where not one but two women offered to take me home with them, with promise of better things to come. I had made my choice and was about to leave with the cuter of the two when my subconscious executed a very sloppy edit and put me into a soup kitchen ladling out food for the poor. Oh, the unfairness of it all.
I’ve dreamed of atomic bomb explosions in the past, but always at a distance. I see the flash reflected off the buildings around me, I see the mushroom clouds, I wonder if I’m far enough away to escape the shock wave. Can I find my car fast enough to escape the blast, to dodge the fallout? “No” would be the answer in real life, but in the dream, there’s always a chance. The world will never be the same but maybe I’ll live to see the other side of the changes.
This morning, though, I was at ground zero. With my wife.
The setting was the usual phantasmagoric admixture of military installation, my home, and my elementary school. Karen and I were watching an assault on this base. Behind a cordon lay a crate beneath a canvas shroud. Men with rifles stood guard. We watched the action as if it were a movie. The opposing force advanced, there were flashes and gunfire, and suddenly the canvas-covered crate began making noise.
Somehow, we knew this was a Bad Thing. Karen ran for a short distance and then I picked her up and ran with her across a field to some concrete-sided buildings that looked like they might provide some cover. Still, we would be less than quarter mile from the bomb. Oh, and we were in our underwear (don’t you just love dreams?), so I found myself wondering: if we survive the explosion, will we die from exposure come morning?
We made it to the building and found clothes. I pulled on some jeans that were way too long for me and too big in the waist. We were still barefoot but there wasn’t anything to be done for that. Before we could continue our flight, we heard the explosion.
Of course, it’s a good question how much time (if any) one would have between hearing the explosion and getting hit with the shock wave, since I suspect these are one and the same. But in the dream we had time to hit the deck and hold hands. I told her that I loved her. (My subconscious digs Hollywood endings, apparently.) Then the blast rolled in and it was like hot air from an open oven: unpleasant but not intolerable; and I had time to think, “Oh, great, we’ve survived the blast only to die in a day or two from the radiation.” But then I noticed that all of Karen’s hair was gone, and I woke up, so I guess we didn’t survive after all.
So my question to my subconscious is: WTF, man?
D.
What does this mean?
Yes, comments are enabled again. You don’t have to be a registered user, or whatever, and I’m not sure how that even happened. I blame gremlins.
Carmela, my woulda-been* college girlfriend, once told me she had a running dream of ancient Rome or Greece, wherein her former self married at an early age, lost her husband to some foreign war, and spent her spinsterly existence working a loom, looking out upon the fields beyond her window. As Carmela matured, her dream self matured, too. The two moved forward together in time’s river. Sometimes I wonder what they’re both up to.
I’ve written before about my recurring dream: a sandstone landscape to the northwest, a narrow passage through steep-sided rocky hillsides. There was a time when this region would draw me in, but the last time I saw it, I drove past, thinking wistful thoughts about a time when I would have stopped and had myself a little hike. See, there was always someplace “in there” I never quite reached. Once, I made it as far as a cave among cliffs where other pilgrims had gathered, but I didn’t get to see inside the cave.
Last night, I was back. As before, I viewed the region from a distance, and I was surprised to see my cave — it’s been 20 years or more since that dream. It had changed, somehow, and it took me a while to recognize the difference.
Someone had built a hotel at the top of the cliff face.
I thought: For a price, I could stay there tonight.
But I moved on.
D.
*Woulda been, if her longshoreman father hadn’t vowed to execute any non-Catholic who dared court his daughter.
It’s a burl!
That’s the name of a place on Highway 199 that sells, you guessed it, burls. Burls are redwood tree tumors — um, I think. I never did find out the skinny on that. They’re hard wood, they take a nice polish, and folks love to make tables out of them. They’re not common, so they can be expensive. Anyway, I figure It’s A Burl would appreciate this dream I had last night.
Karen and I were back up north, and we had decided to look at the most expensive home on the market. (We did that for real once. The home was on the market for something like $1.2 million, WELL outside of our comfort zone, but the realtor didn’t know that. Everyone thinks doctors make a fortune, so this guy must have assumed we were qualified buyers. The home wasn’t much except for the view, which was about as dramatic as 270 degrees of California oceanfront can get, on a “little” 10 acre spit of land which, for $2 million, would come included with the house. Great investment, if we’d had the money.)
You know how the asking price on overpriced homes will sometimes drop like a rock? This place (in my dream) was doing the opposite. $1.2 million initial asking price . . . then $3 million . . . now $5 million! We had to see what was so damned special; I figured the house had to come with its own harem.
What it had was burls. Each and every cabinet was a polished burl, the counter tops were burl, the island was a burl.
I thought, that’s a lot of burls.
And I thought, maybe too much of a good thing.
Sometimes prices don’t have much correspondence to reality. That’s one of the things we’ve noticed while looking at Bakersfield homes on the internet — the same quality home might sell for $150/square foot as a foreclosure, $400/square foot as a new offering. We’ve discovered that “pricier” does not necessarily correspond to “better.”
Oh, well. We don’t want burl-fronted cabinetry. All we want is our killer kitchen. And our killer master bathroom. And a large master bedroom. Oh, and a harem. Can’t forget the harem.
D.
Fantasy Baseball
It’s a damn good thing my subconscious doesn’t rule my life, because it comes up with some of the most hare-brained schemes.
This morning, I woke up convinced I had a multimillion dollar idea, if only I could find a venture capitalist willing to stake me. The concept is a marriage of batting cages and fantasy baseball. Picture this: the customer (and maybe some of his pals) would go online and put himself on a fantasy baseball team. There he is with his teammates Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth and Willie Mays and that about exhausts my knowledge of famous ballplayers. Sandy Koufax, I suppose. And Mannie Mota.
On the designated day, he shows up at the batting cage. The system tests him out first — how well can he hit? How fast can he run the bases? Because this cage would have have a whole damn infield. Meanwhile, his friends would do the same. The system would handicap itself in accordance with the players’ skills; it wouldn’t be much fun batting against Nolan Ryan* if you have zero chance of hitting Ryan’s fast ball, now would it?
You’d have to have one humongous flat screen TV up somewhere (protected from pop flies, of course) where the computer would show the simulated action. And then the game is on, you and your pals taking turns with famous players, working your way through a nine-inning game. Or four innings. Whatever!
The problem with this plan, aside from the fact I don’t know jack about baseball (but how weird is it to wake up thinking, “What is the infield fly rule?”) is what do you do when it’s no longer your team’s turn at bat? How do you play a defensive position with virtual infielders? On the other hand, if it’s a couple of friends playing on opposite sides, maybe the one guy sits it out drinking his beer and watching the big screen while his pal comes up to bat.
It took most of the morning to shake this weird notion. And why is my subconscious bothering with baseball, anyway?
D.
*I had to look that one up.
Gauze
In childhood, in dreams, there was always a different world, a safe place: a kid-sized door in the back of a closet leading to a toy-filled, sunlit room; a gingerbread village hidden among foothills that formerly hosted only chaparral scrub; a turn from a desolate road leading to lush grassy meadows and laughing children.
Sometimes I think that’s where our notions of heaven come from. Populate those landscapes with dead relatives and voila, there you are. You’re safe, you’re warm, you’re with people who love you.
Sometimes I wish I could pull away the gauze that keeps me from seeing it here on Earth.
D.
Job worries
In my dreams last night, I kept going back to University of Texas. The chairman offered me a job some time ago, and (assuming he’s serious) that’s the only solid job offer I have for the moment. Maybe that’s why I kept dreaming about UT.
We’ve vowed never to go back to Texas, of course, and I’ve given up my license there, too, so it ain’t gonna happen. But tell that to my subconscious.
Hypnagogia
Was it that old fraud Carlos Castaneda whose brujo, Don Juan, warned his apprentice of the risks of staring at running water? The spirit catches the current and floats away like a twig, like a wisp of algae. If the spirit strays too far, it may never find its way home.
Wind can do the same.
I’m sitting in a car feeling the reality of gravity, my butt, and the vinyl underneath, and I’m thinking of all those other times in cars, and how that same sensation of weight had to have been there before, but it’s never recorded in memory. Few sensations receive such an honor. I can remember, for example, a time when my then-teenaged brother drove us down to some Atlantic beach. The day was warm, the salt air breathed summer. The memory merges with all of my other beach memories of childhood: hot sand beneath me, sun orange against my closed eyelids, tinny music from my green plastic Realistic AM radio from Radio Shack. Shrieks of laughter. The pulse of the surf. And, yes, gravity, as I wriggle my body, trying to hollow out a comfortable bed from the sand.
We’ve crossed the Dumbarton Bridge many times. I can never remember which direction is the toll crossing, but I remember the colored drying pools, the KGO tower, the dry grasses on the eastern hills which flow with the wind making swirls like hair on a dog’s belly.
We missed seeing the dirigible.
Last dirigible to cruise American airspace? The Hindenburg, and we all know that turned out. This time around, things went smoother.
You would think I’d have a better memory for food. I remember the childhood horrors, of course, and I know I’ve blogged that before, too. But what about the good stuff? Let’s see, I remember
the first time I ate rumaki
first scampi
first cantaloupe
first abalone
not all happy memories.
Driving, windows down, it’s sort of like wind and like wind if you don’t pay attention you might suddenly find your spirit quite far from your body.
I remember countless times as a passenger, drifting off to sleep, the road noise would cut in and out with my varying level of consciousness. The little scientist in me took note and was fascinated. The white noise of wind and road had become an instrument to probe the mysterious black box of mind. How could hearing simply shut itself down? But it did.
There’s laughter in the car and now I’m awake. To my brother’s extreme amusement, I’ve fallen asleep using my mother’s ass as a pillow. Now my mother and I are both awake, both grumpy. Are we there yet? No, we’re not there yet. But at least my brother has something to laugh about.
D.