Searching Buddha

Last night I dreamt that I had a new boss. I was talking to the new boss, who was a real slick trickster, and teaching him the ropes of the new position. We were in a hotel lobby. Everything was marble in browns; slick and sleek.

Out of nowhere burst men in long black trenchcoats. They pulled out comicbookesque tommy guns and with a rat-a-tat...shot my new boss down.

"Damn," says I. "Now we'll have to hire another one."

I've been having trouble remembering my dreams again, so to deviate from the theme, I'll share a dream that I put into a piece of fiction that I wrote over the past month. Obviously my writing about dreams has been influenced by this class...I never used to put dreams into my fiction, but now I find that it's hard to write a story without them showing up.

The character in this piece believes she has seen a selkie and that she has a ring that belonged to the selkie. She is looking for him as she falls asleep:

After an hour or so, I began to nod off. I fought the waves of sleepiness, jerking my head upright when I noticed it falling, but it was inevitable. My dreams took over and then I was running on the beach, heading out to sea like a mother seal on a charge to protect her offspring. I heard a loud bang and I turned, suddenly, my whiskers twitching as I threw my head back and barked in joy. I saw him then, his hair more green than ever in the moonlight. He ran toward me, dropping to all fours as he came, his bulk increasing with each step until his belly dragged a heavy path in the sand.

I laughed in joy! I howled out my pleasure to him and he answered in barks. “You have my ring,” he said, his voice low and wild, rich with the memories of hunting and freedom along the cold waves.

I held out my hand to him to show him my thumb and we both looked down at my flipper. The ring glowed green underneath the skin, trapped. I began to feel panicked and I wondered if I was trapped too, my heart pounding under my newly heavy body. My selkie laughed as he rubbed his head against my neck, his whiskers tickling down my back. I pressed harder against him, but then he barked and ran off into the sea. I tried to follow him, my heart breaking as my feet refused to move from their spot in the sand.

Time passed, as it does in dreams, and the sand blew against me with the wind, piling into dunes that covered my immobile body. I screamed, but my mouth did not move. I ran, inside my heart, but my body did not budge from the statue I had become. My selkie did not come back, even as the sand piled as high as my neck, then my chin, past my mouth and over my eyes. I could see no more.

In discussing poetry this week, it seemed to me like a lot of people really don't enjoy poetry. Personally, I love poetry if it's something I can identify with, something I can connect with on a very emotional level.

I thought I'd share two more modern pieces that I really connect to emotionally. I appreciate e.e. cummings and Keats for their artistry and the beauty of their pieces, but I don't react to them viscerally the way that I react to the two below.

I am in a grocery store doing my weekly shopping. It is a big store, a proper suburban grocery store, with live lobsters and brooms and cat food all neatly organized and sprawled over many square feet.

I come around the corner and run into a coworker of mine that I do not know well, but like a lot. We smile and exchange pleasantries. She is here for the same reason I am -- we both need to stock up on groceries before we really buckle down and start studying for a big upcoming test. I wander back to the ice cream counter, where I simply must have Breyers mint chocolate chip ice cream, but they haven't got any in stock, so they have to mix it. My coworker asks me what the big deal is and I tell her to watch. The man behind the counter (who is exactly the sort you'd expect to work at an ice cream parlor) turns and mixes up the ingredients in this huge machine on the wall. We can watch the mix aerate and become fluffy ice cream. He stuffs it into a tub for me and hands to me.

I wake up - no ice cream at hand.

My life has been really chaotic lately, with my various obligations overlapping in terms of time and some personal drama. I've been having a hard time finding a balance and peace of mind and it's really showing up in my dreams.

I haven't been remembering my dreams particularly well, but I have been waking up with a general sense of busy in the dreams -- too many people doing too many things in a tension with each other. Lots of conflict, lots of anger and stress, no order, no control.

The one snippet I remember is an argument with my Other Half, but surprisingly, he was accusing me of all the things that frustrate me about him. I don't remember the specifics, but I found the role reversal really interesting. Perhaps I needed to feel what it was like to be him in order to understand the effect of my own frustrations?

It was enlightening, if somewhat confusing.

American Literature: Prose to 1700

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I can't remember the beginning of the dream, other than to know that I was on a long journey (think Scrooge and his ghosts) with an old friend/coworker of mine from several companies ago. I liked this fellow a lot, admired his intelligence and perspective on the world, so I believe he was a guide in the dream.

I only remember the end, where we bumped into another coworker from the same company. He was spinning music, which is something he was into when I knew him, and we asked him to recommend some songs. We got to talking to him for a long time, until the dream ended, though I can't remember what we said.

Perhaps it was influenced by having a taste of parsnips in my dinner, but last night I dreamt that I had been accepted into a graduate program in Australia. I was meeting with a faculty adviser (no idea who he actualy was) and he handed me a plane ticket and convinced me to at least visit the school and check it out. Then I'm at the school and he's there and we're talking, but there's a commercial break where there's a server outage. Why? Because someone unauthorized has been giving tours in the server room and unplugged something, which took our core switch down (and the entire network). So I run into the server room and fix it, then lie panting on the ground while someone else makes the announcements to the staff that everything is back up and running.

Then I'm back at the school in Australia, where I'm walking around. I walk into the ladies room, where a man in a clown suit walks out, while a bunch of young women giggle at him.

"Don't you hate that?" I ask. "What do you do once you've realized you're in the mens room? Do you make a fuss? How do you walk out gracefully?"

"I don't know," says a young woman, "but I don't do THAT."

There was a long and complicated dream sequence, but the part I remember is at the end. I'm a cop on a sting operation. I'm waiting for my partner, who is my SO. I know he's coming and he'll be the one to answer the door when our contact, who is delivering us a pizza.

So I'm waiting and waiting, but my SO hasn't shown up. The doorbell rings and I go to answer it, but I don't have a shirt on. I know it's the pizza delivery, so I hide my chest behind the door and try to pay for the pizza. My SO comes up the stairwell behind the pizza guy and takes over and suddenly I find myself wrapped in a towel.

I stayed up way late last night to work on my essay and have it to a point where I've waiting for my SO to go over it for final editing. Metaphor anyone?

Harlem Renaissance Overview

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