Slept On

I got home at almost 5am today. It's been a long time since I've done that.

What happened was that I worked at a party from 10 to 2:30 and then spent two hours in a crappy diner talking gender dynamics and generalizations with my boss under dumb fluorescent lights. He is my friend, but we are very different. He has the capacity to be very sweet and open and articulate and gentle. He says he is more Zen. I can't tell, because Buddha and I still aren't on speaking terms.

He lives out in the avenues, so it was another 30 minutes before I dropped him off and got back home. A tired little rabbit in a Princess Leia hairdo. My heels were killing me. I was spent from too many emotional transactions in a single night. I love that monthly party, I really do. But it is four straight hours of Vibe.

I can't always turn it off and on so quickly. I've spent the whole weekend wide open. I could write the book on Oversharing for Dummies at this point, but I'm far too tired.

When I finally did get to sleep it was the sort of half sleep where I had insanely vivid dreams but was fully aware that I was dreaming throughout. I heard the world happening and the rain starting and stopping outside of my bedroom window, I saw the sky get brighter through my eyelids, I had incredible thirst but kept holding off to watch the dream unfold because I loved it so much and didn't want it to stop.

One of the clues that lucid dreamers look for is that you can't quite read anything in a dream. I've found this is true for the most part. Not so in this morning's dream. Words and photos and sketches, everything was extremely vivid.

*********

It started with me meeting my dad. Not exactly for the first time, but it wasn't my Real Life Dad. It was a Movie Dad, a Symbol man. He had some things to teach me. He gave me a vintage Mercedes coupe like that detective couple drove in Hart to Hart. He gave me a picture frame that I opened up to find it contained a whole stack of pictures.

Family stuff. Pretty brown women holding yellow babies. Landscapes with houses in them. And lots of pictures of my Real Dad sitting in offices looking stern and gangsterish. Stuff I have and have not seen before.

There was a whole day running errands. There was a parking garage. There was a punk show and a lead singer hellbent on destroying the idea that anyone anywhere should ever own anything. I spent the rest of my dream with him. He was very playful. Before things got all serious he kept insisting I run around with him in his lair bashing shit to pieces with a baseball bat. I did. It was fun.

I fell in love with where he lived, with the stuff on his walls. In particular I remember a picture he had of a wall painted to look like it was a truck covered in graffiti. Like, a big cargo truck but not an eighteen wheeler or anything. Like the kind of thing that small grocery store owners use to haul produce.

The artist's name was SYKO and he'd used the bottoms of the S and the K to make the wheels of the truck, but the wheels of the truck were actually huge feet. The picture was small. I did not take it off of the wall, but I took a lot of other stuff and for some reason I thought it would still be with me when I woke up.

I was trying to learn something. I was very far underground, my Dream Punk lived beneath Beneath.

He was in love once and told me all about it. Everything on his walls was a dedication to or a memory of Her. She did some horrible things to him. He'd learned a lot of lessons. It seemed like he'd lay out huge sheets of butcher paper and spend a week writing whatever came to mind with whatever he had handy. He'd hang them up when they were full. They were hanging everywhere.

I took some of them down, folded them carefully, put them in my bag for later on. He didn't mind me taking them at all. He felt relieved. But when I tried to take a cassette of some music they'd heard together on one of their first dates he objected, and brought up the very logical point that he could make a copy of it for me or I could even just buy it myself. He insisted on that.

He had almost no furniture. And nothing that it would seem a person could use for sleeping purposes.

It was such a complete experience. I am still longing for that space. I wrote it all down when I woke up a few hours later, but I am still having trouble piecing it all together and getting the Lessons.

*********

The rest of my day felt more like a dream than my dream did. I overshared some more, since I do so love to carry a theme through to the end. I was disappointed that my real life companions weren't nearly as filled with clarity as my Dream Punk. I felt heavy with everything I'd been told in the last 12 hours and it was torture bringing myself into work mode and playing catchup so that tomorrow isn't horrorshow.

But I did. And my manicure is still The Freshest.

I don't want to lose the feelings I had in my dream. I don't want to forget it before I figure it all out. Nina will surely tell me tomorrow that nothing that felt real was actually real at all, I'm going to have to bite my tongue so that I don't waste my money arguing with her.

I'm so tired now. I'm completely spent. I hope the week to come doesn't disappoint me.

Instead of Sayulita I am thinking Hawaii. June, maybe. If I can get my shit together enough to book a flight and plan my accommodations, that is. Is there a word or condition to describe being too tired to even take time off? Whatever that is, it's what I am right now.

Sweet dreams.