Strange Dream

I'm in my apartment, but of course it isn't really my apartment, it's some other living space. In my dreams I very often inhabit apartments or homes that are not mine in real life.  In my dreams I've moved a hundred times. Often, I'll dream of being in an apartment that I last dreamt of years before, but have never actually lived in.

So I'm in my apartment.  Everything is fine.

Fade out.

Then I'm in my apartment again, but this time it's all beaten up and there are broken windows and graffiti marks on the walls, and I don't even recognize it..

Back in my apartment again, it's later, and it's cleaned up again. Nice and clean.

Fade out.

In my apatment, and I walk into the kitchen, and there's a woman in there with short dark hair. I don't know her... and in my dream-like state, I just ignore her. Then it happens again that I see her in my apartment, and I ask her what she's doing there. She says she lives there. I ignore her. This same thing happens again, but then I tell her that I live here.. that this is my place. She doesn't believe me and acts agitated.

Fade out.

Later, I'm in the apartment, no one is around. I notice there is a hand trying to get into an open window. I throw something at it, and go up and look out the window. There is a disembodied hand trying to get in. On the flat roof outside there window, there are several disembodied hands and  arms crawing around. I have to take a screw driver and stab a hand to keep it from getting in. I shut the window and lock it. Later, I notice that these ghoulish things must have gotten in, because there are several  half formed bodies walking/floating around my kitchen. I ignore them.

Fade out.

Later, I see that my front door (this time to my current apartment) is open a crack. I sense someone is on the other side. I walk to the door to shut it, and in that eerie sense of forboding you have in dreams, I know I'll arrive to late. I push on the door, and this powerful force pushes back, trying to enter the room. It takes me 3 total efforts in a row to get the door shut, locked, and the chain latch attached. I'm afraid they won't hold. Through a crack in the door, I can see the lower half of a body... a female body I think. It seems innocent enough, but I'm terrified.

Fade out.

Later I'm in the kitchen again, and the short, dark haired woman is back. She yells at me that it is her house and demands that I answer what I'm doing there. I yell back that she's wrong, that I've lived there for sometime. Her two children, whom I hadn't noticed before, are moving about the room. They are a young boy about 12, and another child that I don't see, but feel. She says she lived here since January.

Fade out.

Same dream, but I'm in a department store... something like a Target. Very busy. Everyone is bustling to and fro, buying, looking, waiting in line. I'm sitting by a checkout on top of a bench or something. Suddenly there is a light skinned black girl with me. Somehow we're together, or united in some way that I can't explain. Suddenly, the gay guy who cuts my hair in real life (Butch) shows up right next to me, and starts telling me that I don't even know the latest trends in anything. He tells me about this really popular new type of toast that is made by inserting fat bread slices in a ceramic toast mold. He demonstrates with a ceramic toast mold that was sitting piled up on a display right where I was sitting. I hadn't even noticed. I look at the product, and realize that I had never even heard of this new contraption. I tell him that I'm out of the loop of such things, as my new life has made me blissfully ignorant of such materialistic and consumeristic things.

The black girl and I get up to go. I had shopped for nothing, and was walking out of the store with nothing. The girl is waiting in the checkout line with some item that she picked up, though I don't know what it was. She seemed to have picked it up for no reason. The checkout person exclaims to the black girl about her "really cool" outfit.. how retro it was. Then I, too, notice that, in fact, the black girl is dressed in a really authentic 1970s style outfit. The girl looks confused, and puts the box down and we both wander toward the exit and into the parking lot.

At this point, in the parking lot, it all becomes clear. The short dark haired woman had told me something, and I didn't believe her. But the sense that what she told me was correct started to grow on me. The experiences at the store disturbed me, because I knew the underlying logic to my dissociation from society, and the store, and the people in my house... and the strange facts of the entire dream resolved to one undeniable truth that I had been blind to and didn't want to see... but now felt and understood. And the truth was, that I was dead.

I had died some time ago. I had died back before January. Back before the woman and her kids moved into my vacant apartment. The apartment had been unused and vandalized after my death. But I hadn't left it, and I had scared the new, living occupants. They ghouls were an attempt to exorcise my spirit from the house, but it had failed. The episode at the store exposed the detachment from things, and suggested that some time had passed. I didn't even know how long I had  been dead. When had the ridiculous new type of toast come into vogue? I coudn't say. The light skinned black girl was dead too. Her clothing was indeed authentic. She had been dead since those clothes were first in fashion. 

I recall that even as I sat in the store and played with the idea of being dead, I told the black girl that it wouldn't be so bad if we were dead, since we had somehow been spared the rememberance of how it happened... and that being conscious (such as we were) was a great state of affairs. But even as I thought it, I realized that the real death was the death of the relationships with the people in our lives. I realized that we were both alone. I realized that we had no connection... that we were spectators of the living with a connection that was fading and would continue to fade until there was nothing left we could recognize. That we would never been seen, or included... and even if we were seen it would not be natural. .. that we would always be unwelcome.  I realized that all communications with the living would be empty, since they could communicate nothing to the dead except the remorse and fear they feel toward death, and the dead had nothing to say to the living, except to upset them in a way that they could never be consoled for. And the dead can't talk to the other dead.. for there is nothing but blank stares and emptiness.

So I walked out into the parking lot, and stopped. I extended my arms out to my side, shoulder height... I cleared my head and then... then I started to rise into the air.  I wasn't alone... all around there were people like me rising up.. up. I was happy for a moment, I thought I might be going to heaven. I felt that my life hadn't been pointless, or in vain. Perhaps my struggles had been noted. But then I began to doubt where I was going. I was up higher than the tops of the tall light poles  in the parking lot and rising steadily, when I let my mind be filled again. Filled with sadness, filled with remorse, filled with lonliness and longing. I didn't want to leave someone. I felt unresolved and sorrowful and my  chest began to crush in

I stopped rising. I just floated there, drifting for a moment. I realized I wasn't going to make it... and began to sink back down.


(2005)