Craziest Dreams

I am trying to get to a birthday party for my friend Tito. I'm in Brooklyn, I think, though Tito lives in Long Beach, CA.
And I have these six eggs in a paper bag and they're more fragile than regular eggs, and Tito needs the eggs, and I want to get them to him before the birthday dinner at P.F. Chang's (dear lord why is his birthday party at P.F. Chang's?) so I'm trying to get to his apartment.

I must be driving, but maybe I'm driving my dad's car, and I'm in a parking lot and I get stuck doing some family thing where I have to drive some distant cousins of mine somewhere. There are runny noses and someone crying and there might be a small infant. And I am really frustrated because I am just trying to get to Tito's and I accidentally break one of the eggs or maybe one of my family members breaks the egg.

And when we finally drop them off at some baseball field or something in a park I am miffed because they sort-of don't say thank you or anything; they just get up and leave the car. They are angry at each other or something like that and they are not thinking of me and my need to get to Tito's.

Of course, I am not really sure why I can't give Tito the eggs at the restaurant (such as it is), but the urgency of trying to get the eggs to Tito's begins to really overwhelm me. And now my dad is driving the car, but he's going really slowly and I am getting frustrated with him, but he is telling jokes and being funny and not trying to be annoying he just is. We finally get to the car. (I guess we must've been in dad's car and the car we needed to get to was mine?? I have no idea.) And I rush to Tito's. I make it in time. I see him. I show him the broken egg. We chat. I say goodbye because we all have to get ready for the party.

But I had left the other five eggs in the brown bag in the car beneath my seat. It was all for nothing.

***

My other dream last night involved my aunt (who is now deceased) becoming a really hot sixty-year old woman, wearing spandex and lots of jewelry like she was from South Miami. And we were having these parties at her house where we were meeting all sorts of family. I must've been in a bad mood because the first time I met this transwoman who was introduced as someone's girlfriend, I wasn't as friendly as I could've been, and she was already nervous so I wasn't really helping things (and what is the point of being LGBT if we don't really create solidarity between L, G, B, and T people?). 

There are more parties at this house. There is this strange black man with a wig. He introduces himself to me. We shake hands and then he introduces his girlfriend: this same transwoman whose name I have obviously forgotten. He makes a very big deal about how to be polite I should say her name out loud. She kindly reminds me of her name and I hold her hand for a very long time and tell her I won't forget it. Her hands are incredibly soft. We speak for a little bit.

At some point during all of this I end up in a small shower/tub with two other people. My friend Michael F. might have been one of them. I think we are actually showering, but there is a problem with the water. It is being blocked by feathers. They are somehow falling down from the wall into the path of the stream of water. Everyone makes a point of giving me a towel with a frog on it (or maybe it's just green).

I have forgotten the transwoman's name this morning. Sigh.

Scary Dream

Last night I dreamt I was acting in a show.

It has been a very long time since I did that.

I think it was a production of Ubu Roi. Funnily enough, I loved the show. I knew it was a totally brilliant show, but we hadn't had a single rehearsal and I didn't know even one of my lines. All of the other actors (including my friend Michael Stablein) knew all their lines and were performing the show fine, but I didn't know mine. It was like I had only read the script a single time and had no idea what I was supposed to say.

In the dream I was able to get through act one by faking it. And then it was intermission and I was searching everywhere backstage (the performance space was actually a kind of warehouse or something) for a script so that I could memorize my lines for act two.

I think the worst part of the dream was how disappointed in me my friend Michael was. While I was scrounging around backstage he wouldn't even look me in the eyes. It was kind of devastating.

In collaboration, and I guess in life in general, it is important that we do our own work and do it well. So many other people depend on the work that we do. So many other people depend on any one of us. We ought not to disappoint them.

(Of course, my dream is about performance anxiety and the fact that I am going to a conference to present a paper next week. I am obviously feeling like it is less than brilliant, or that I am not very smart, or something. Silly to worry about things like that, though. I just have to do my best.)

Tel Aviv?

I had this interesting dream last night. In it, I had gone on a bunch of job-interviews before getting accepted to the PhD program. Two of these interviews—for some reason—had happened in Israel (this part of the dream was in the past). In the dream itself, I was talking to a woman who was offering me a job for the U.S. government. It was related to Israel in some way, but I wasn't going to have to move to Tel Aviv or anything. The job they were offering me was in Mobile, Alabama. And they were going to offer me an enormous salary. And I was considering it.

Here's where the dream kinda went off the rails. The woman offering me the job was a kind of older, heavier woman à la Miriam Margolyes, but with a more butch haircut. She had also brought a kind of entourage with her, which included at least one man who looked like Craig T. Nelson—this man might have been her husband, but I'm not sure; she could easily have been a lesbian. At some point, though, all these people, as well as my parents (oh yeah, my parents were there) dressed up like characters in The Rocky Horror Show. Then they danced for me. And then they danced for the camera. By this, I mean, that my point of view in the dream shifted and it was as though I were watching a musical episode of television. I wasn't watching an episode of television, but the staging of the musical number resembled television musicals so much that I immediately recognized it as such. Strangely, I can't remember what song they sang.

Then Craig T. Nelson and my dad got into a huge physical brawl. Both men were wearing fishnets and hideous silver lamé dresses. There was biting involved. And my dad tried to tie Craig T. Nelson's wrists with zipline, but Craig T. Nelson overpowered my dad (he was from the U.S. government, so I assume he was some kind of CIA agent or something).

Craig T. Nelson left my dad on the dining room floor and went to go start up his cessna, which was parked in the backyard. And in order to start his cessna, he had to spell words using tiles from a game of scrabble.

And then I woke up.

Evelyn Waugh Dream

Lat night I dreamed I was part of a doomed (but passionate) love-affair in an Evelyn Waugh novel. We were sneaking around, trying not to get caught by our parents (I was in college or whatever it is those boys did when they went to Eton or Oxford or whatever... why don't I actually know that information?). This part was the good part: I would be delighted to be in a passionate love-affair, even if it were a doomed one. The weird part is that I knew the ending of the novel or at least I knew part of the future. I could see us getting caught in bed together at his parents' house (by which I mean mansion, of course). I knew that we would get caught and that we would be separated forever.
So when I got caught by the butler/security guard person while I was sneaking into the house, I was relieved because I knew then that I really should leave. This way I would leave and our affair could continue and neither he nor I would get caught for anything serious. The security guard kicked me out. (They didn't really have security in early 1900s England, did they? Surely not. This security guard was black, too... just like the movies.) But as I was sitting in the snow, thinking about what I was going to do, I saw that my lover threw a letter out of his window and I ran to get it, but it fell down into the hands of these two guys who also went to school with me and whoever I was in love with (I have no idea what he looked like). I ran to grab the letter from them, but before I got it away from them, they read enough to learn our secret.

Then I woke up.

It's rather clear to me what this dream likely means, which means that I am obviously delusional. I am not having a passionate-but-doomed love-affair with anyone.

Waking Up Scared

I've been having a series of dreams where I worry. Last night I was back at the old accounting office in Monrovia (before I worked at the airport) making some extra money--something that will never ever happen again. But I was supposed to leave the office at 5:00p in order to make a 6:00p rehearsal call. So I leave the office on time and get in my car and the clock says 6:47p. I am already an hour and 45 minutes late. And I have no idea how that happened or what the dream was about.

The night before that I dreamt someone had rifled through my wallet and stolen all of my money. I woke up and checked my wallet as though it were real.

Maybe I'm moving into a paranoid phase.

You Should See My Nectarines!

I had a strange dream about greens last night. I was making something... some sort of food and I was grocery shopping for it.I found the spinach, but I needed mustard greens and collards and I couldn't find them in the grocery. There was one more kind of green I wanted but I can't remember what it was (turnip greens?) In the end I did find the collards and the mustard greens, but I couldn't find that last one. And it's so random that I remembered this dream, too. I was reading a play called My Name Is Rachel Corrie and she said the word "spinach" and I remembered the dream all of a sudden. Weird.

WTF?

Look what I found!

I'm packing everything today (whatever is left to pack) and I'm going through the documents in my bedroom and I keep finding these totally random pieces of paper with dreams scrawled all over them. This particular one I found on an orange folder. It's written in pencil and has no date on it. I assume that the date of this dream is sometime in 2000. Anyway, I'm throwing the folder away, so I thought I'd transcribe the dream...

Today I had a very vivid dream. It was very heavily involved with the ring of Doom. I don't remember all of what it entailed but me and 2 others, a man and a woman escaped an evil force in this house-sort of location. The name Vitoria was linked to the evil spirit and the 3 of us all had rings of power. We stepped through human guts to escape. I remember that specifically, and I was an actor still, and not disenchanted. We escaped solely because of my will, even though the girl and guy had both given up and I had given up as well. The only way evil could win is if we stayed there and drove ourselves mad, but we escaped, and on our way out we cursed his evil presence, especially the girl, who called him "fucker" twice. The guy had a more powerful ring than I, but it was I, still, who had saved him, we had actually escaped first, but went back in to get my watch and wallet. We were looking for something in the house, and it was that that was driving us mad. It's really vivid. The house was a version of my aunt's house mixed with a school classroom, the front of the house was the corner of Foothill & Indian Hill. I think the girl might've been black. At the end, though I knew it was over and we'd escaped, the evil force came out to address us, even though it was over. He/she (I think now that it was both sexes) asked to hear who had defeated her. We said our names: the guy first, with his lineage or home or something, and attaching the ring to his title. Then I did the same thing, and then, the girl, who called him many insults. Then we left. We had won. I woke up. There was definitely a bloodbath inside, too, bt we were all staying. We were all looking for the answer, even though the answer was to leave.

Note the Lord of the Rings imagery. Also, all of my dreams used to involve the house I call "my aunt's house." They never do any more, but that house definitely represents my childhood home, which is what I always considered it. The Indian Hill/Foothill thing is important too. I spent most of my free time in college near there with my friends Jaime and Derek. Also note how I always forget my wallet and keys, even in my dreams. Geez.

In Dreams

My nightly dreams lately have been all about frustration: Not being able to find what I want at the grocery, using the wrong keys at work, etc. This is a trend and has been for a week or two now. As I go through my day, vague snatches of images or thoughts about these dreams will come back to me, and while I don't remember the dreams in the morning, they come to me vague but vivid in the middle of the day at the airport or at a sushi bar in Hollywood. It's so strange.
And my theory about dreams in general is that the mind wants to remind us about things we're suppressing in our waking lives. Now, I don't know what opinions you all out there have formed of me, but I doubt any of you would say that I'm suppressing my frustration. "Frustrated" is probably the first word that comes to your mind when you think of me (after "gay.")

Who knows.

Okay, off to an HOA meeting. Maybe I'll get voted off the board.


I can only hope I do.

Crazy Dream That I Actually Remember

After the barbecue at my parents' house for my sister's birthday I came home about 5:30p and decided to fucking sleep.

(My HP6 came in the mail, by the way... no Tuesday bullshit for the Pasadena Post Office.)

I had a dream that I decided it would be easier for someone to pick me up at the airport (KLAX) than for me to finish driving all the way home. Perhaps it was fears about my car, but I don't think so. I think that I had reasoned in my head that it would be out of my way to continue on whatever road I was already on and it would just make so much more sense if a cab picked me up at Los Angeles International. So I parked the car on the side of the freeway. It didn't look like I-405, in fact it didn't look like a California freeway at all. It looked more like one of those Eastern two-tier jobs. Anyway, I ditch the car, lock it and get into the airport the back way (?... I guess that means across the tarmac.) So I'm in the airport and I realize that I've left my wallet in the car (something I do all the time) and I have no way to pay for the cab ride home. I have my new cell phone, so I'm okay for contact, but not so okay for money. So I call my friend Jaime and I am telling her this story as I walk through LAX, which looks a lot like the casino floor of the Imperial Palace, Las Vegas, having no identification (a scary thing at an airport) and no money... and I can't find the way out of this place!

Then I woke up.

This Journal Entry Not Appropriate for Children...

So, after this dream, someone actually did get fired from my work today... someone in my department even. Scandale! This man missed his third day of work today and decided he didn't need to call in sick. Whatever. I was really glad I didn't call in sick today, though, because three of the five people who are on my level in my department called in sick. Four out of five would've looked really bad.

No movies tonight, even though a couple came in the mail.

Brittney was telling me that I should come to Rick Tabor's wedding, and I would really like to, but I am planning on painting the condo this weekend and driving up north to go to a wedding is not on the agenda. Worse yet, Brittney was telling me about the wedding and (I was really drunk) my mind wandered off to imagining having sex with Rick. At some point I shook myself out of my daydream and had to ask her to repeat what she had said. Oops.

Quote of the night (in reference to a CSUP student we call "Wood"): "I just want to defacate on his face."
Now, I don't normally support discussion of fecal matter even in jest, but this shit had me rolling.

State of the Union

I had a horrifying dream last night that I got fired from Avjet and I had to go work at another aircraft charter company. I was really sad in the dream.

Last night I visited my friends Madison and Brantley in Valencia. Maddie and I went shopping after we watched the State of the Union address (which I didn't completely hate.) I bought another print for my house. I have three now, guys. This new one is beautiful, too. Hooray... oh yeah, and it was $40. Cheers.

As for Mr. Bush: while he was talking I kept thinking about the audio I always hear of the Parliament in UK, where the senators (or whatever they're called) make so much noise: boo the PM and stuff. I love that: people actually being sincere about their politics and making some noise about it. While Bush spoke to a house full of admirers, I was in Valencia booing or disagreeing or whatever, and yet none of the people I voted for did that. You know? But then Bush said some lie about Social Security and they did in fact boo at him! I was so happy!
Okay, I love the idea about him re-vamping Social Security, and I completely support this idea of private accounts (which he explained quite succinctly last night), but he still hasn't explained how he's going to close this enormous gap he is predicting. I don't really believe in the gap, and obviously most of the Democrats think he's full of hogwash when he talks about the system being bankrupt in 2055, but even if there is such a thing, private accounts won't close it. Only cutting benefits or raising the retirement age will do that. And why can't we raise the retirement age like Clinton suggested ten years ago? I think it's a fine idea, and most of the other people my age will tell you they think it is too. He's talking about changing absolutely nothing for anyone over 55 years of age anyway (typically, he protects his gigantic AARP constituancy. I hate them.)

He supports an amendment to keep marriage between a man and a woman. (Amendment won't pass, so I don't even know why he brings it up.)
He is opposed to stem cell research. ("Harvesting human embryos," he called it.)
Then he started talking about Iraq and Syria and I had to shut it off. I hate when he talks about his international agenda. It just makes me cringe.

He also said something about clean, safe nucular [sic] power, but I didn't know what he was talking about. Maybe I was drunk that day in my high school Physics class.

I hate him so very much.

Las Sueñas

Last night I dreamed I was an A.D. again, this time for a woman—not a bitch like Karen, though. We got chauffeured around in town cars and limos. Matt Guerra was there. I think he was in the show. We kept holding these really weird auditions in darkly lit elementary schools. This wasn't weird to me at the time, though. Then the director told me that I should always wear gray to the auditions, but then the casting director said "he's alright" and then the director said, "well if [so-and-so] says you're alright then I guess you are."
As it turned out, we were holding our auditions in the classroom of an A.C.E. school. But the P.A.C.E.s were smaller, about half the size of normal. I was gonna tell my mom all about it and then I woke up.

There was this whole other part at Disneyland waiting in a line and eating ice cream. I don't know. It was mostly madness, but I think the A.D. section and the A.C.E. sections may have something to them.

Ideas...?

Two Dreams

Dream #1
I had a date with Rufus Wainwright, but he was very cute, much cuter than he is in actual, real life. We kept looking for a coffee shop in Duarte and never finding one: just car dealerships, etc. Then we ran into the guy who plays Stanford on Sex and the City and some other gay guy who I knew. Strange. But at least I was dating again. Rufus and I didn't get on as well as I would have thought. He kept talking about the songs he wanted to put on Want Two. He wasn't too crazy about his ballads and anthems. He wanted more upbeat stuff. (Which, of course, I can usually do without.) In the end I had tickets to something at the Orpheum. It was some one-word name Cirque show or something. I don't know how I got the tickets, but we had time to get to the show and Rufus made up some excuse about having to meet his sisters (who was the chick who is the sister of the White Stripes guy--I'm bad with music guys, sorry), and I didn't want to go by myself to the Orpheum show, so I woke up.

Dream #2
There was an enormous snake and I was in this huge room/loft with 2 sides to it really. I had to keep going from side to side like in some video game where they make you keep doing the same thing for a little while to add hours to their "such-and-such hours of play" claim on the front of the game. The only person I can remember in the dream was Anthony from Shrew. Weird. There was this enormous fucking snake in this dream and it kept chasing me and Anthony, who had started to really hate one another being cooped up in this enormous room with a snake the length of a city block. Eventually we realized there were other people--5 or 6--at the top of the room on top of the wall that separated the sides. But I woke up to the sound of my alarm before anything happened of huge import. I was a bit of an action hero in this dream: never scared of the snake, just wary of its presence at all times.

Gillespie Dream

I don't remember too much about this dream.  I think it starts with me taking a final.  I was writing an in-class paper (the best kind) and my desk reference was an edition of Vanity Fair magazine.  I am sharing a desk with a gorgeous boy, who I am assuming is older than me.  We are in a Theatre MfA program somewhere (maybe even CSUP), and I ask him if this is his second or third year.  He says it's his first and I'm excited because that means he and I will be together next year.  The paper is supposed to be about Dizzy Gillespie... something about his improvisational style or something.  I finish the paper and then hand it in to either Matt or Jensen (?) and then I decide to complain.  This test has been far too easy.  This is supposed to be an MfA program and we are writing papers based upon articles in Vanity Fair (it is a good magazine, but not that good).  I revolt.  The teacher isn't there... there is no teacher to revolt against.  I just start riffing on the paper and the class and the educational system and it becomes this performance piece I am doing as I hand in my paper that I realize (as I'm speaking) takes the form of a Gillespie improv.  And I have this bizarre moment of superb genius where I am riffing on my own education in the style of Gillespie in front of thirty people.

I guess I am thinking about the PhD again.

I think I will call Josh and see what he thinks about the PhD/MfA question.  He probably has an opinion.

This morning I woke up with Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" playing in my head. I haven't listened to that song in a damn long time, so I'm not sure why.
I had a dream last night... an anxious dream about the Shrew. I guess I always have anxious dreams right before I am about to begin something. That is because I don't really worry too much about it while I'm awake, but my body really wants me to hold my breath.
Jaime is so perfect sometimes. Last night after I went home from Found Space I didn't really have anything to do. I went somewhere and had a Cobb Salad and read Act One again. When Jaime got me on the phone she asked how I was and she could tell in my voice that I was having a pity party of one. She said "I'm sorry" and she told me she loved me. It was great. I smile at her knowledge of my moods. They're never very severe—this one was particularly mild, in fact—but it's good to know she understands them.

I heard a twenty-something use the phrase "do it" in reference to sex yesterday. I wonder if she refers to urination as "wee wee."

Last night I dreamed that I was on the Jenny Jones set (don't know if she still has a show or not, but she does in my dream). For some reason Susan Lucci was on the show too but she was dressed like the green chick from Wicked with the makeup and everything. Then we were all on the set of All My Children and I was telling someone... they recognized me and I was saying that yes I had been on the show a while back, and then I said that my real show had been One Life to Live and that I was on that show for a long time. "Didn't you play Joey Buchanan?" someone asked and I said yes I did for a day or two, but I eventually played a character who I wrote myself... I did this for a long time. The dream ended with me and Robin Strasser on live TV... weird.

What's weirder is that in the dream this was all true. I mean, I had been on One Life. When I woke up I had to remind myself that I was never actually on the show, I just watched it everyday.

I am so sore today. This is my body telling me I ought to do yoga more often.

I don't know what I shall do today, but I am thinking of visiting Bed Bath and Beyond to shop for curtains.