23 Dream).

I’ve met up with my family at a gathering in some large, densely-packed room at a house in Pennsylvania. At some point, I notice Claire is there, too, standing against the wall. I haven’t seen or spoken to her in years. So I walk up to her, and as we talk and interact, her state of body and mind concerns me.

She is incredibly skinny, very frail-looking, and speaks in this sort of baby voice. She doesn’t seem to be all there mentally, either. As we speak, she mostly whispers in my ear to talk. She tells me she’s an alcoholic. That she came down here to get into a program, to go to a special school.

She begins kissing me on the lips, which eventually prompts me to deeply kiss her. This surprises her and she pulls back after a moment, seemingly embarrassed. Behind me, I see some woman, maybe in her 50s, looking in our direction in a very disapproving manner, and I suddenly feel guilty over the public display of affection.

There’s some other guy we both know with us now and suddenly, without warning, Claire tries to reach her hand down his pants, but we both stop her.

“We used to date,” she says, suggesting that, to her mind, this made it okay. I try to make her understand that if she did this, it would be bad, and that it would perhaps me many years before she could look back on it and see it as funny in retrospect.

Then I wake up.

I grab the yellow notebook nearby, and try to commit the dream to writing before the details fade. I get distracted by the actual party, however, and after it’s over and everyone leaves, I leave to walk home. I kept getting lost and trapped, however. I was trapped in a pit surrounded by garbage at some point, trying to get out, and then found myself trapped in fenced-off areas in what seemed to be backyards.

I finally got out my cell and called my dad, but failed the first time. The second time, he picked up, but he speaks in an ominous tone and in a cryptic way that seems to suggest he’s angry that I’ve forgotten something, or have failed to realize something.

I asked if they could pick me up. He asked if it was Wednesday, and then said that maybe we should wait until midnight. As I wake up — again — I’m uttering aloud a perplexed and frustrated, “What?”

A dream within a dream. Again.

I grab the yellow notebook — again.

My mind is a fucking Chinese Box.

Roots of My Distance (9/11/22 Dream).

My mother, who is sitting down around the corner and just out of view, tells me that she had found a letter I wrote to Jimmy in his bedroom. “You mean MY bedroom,” I said, correcting her angrily, and it wasn’t in the tone of a question. I felt possessive of my room and angry that she’d intruded and read the letter. She leans from around the corner to look at me, sort of smiling but saying nothing, as if I’d given her the reaction she was after. So I go into my old bedroom (at my parents house), and some things are still in there. An old dresser with drawers missing and a lot of old writings that I stuff into my book bag to take with me.

It may or may not have been part of this particular dream, but at some point I’m kissing a girl — or rather, what we’re doing would be kissing if either of us had opened our mouths in the midst of our face-mashing. It was “dry-kissing,” I suppose, which would be the lip equivalent to dry-humping. I used to have dry-humping dreams quite frequently, and over time I came to the conclusion that it signified my fears of intimacy despite my simultaneous desperation for it.

Interestingly, interpretations of the more detailed dream resonated with the apparent meaning of this one.

My mother may represent the Jungian anima, the feminine aspect of the male psyche who traditionally guides us through difficult periods. Given the rest of the dream, however, it may have more to do with the fact that my mother and I didn’t really bond in my youth, and in fact fought fairly consistently.

Bedrooms allegedly represent aspects of ourselves that are private and hidden — personal thoughts, emotions, and issues we don’t wish to reveal or discuss. With respect to our childhood bedroom specifically, this suggests that something in our current waking circumstances triggered hidden memories from our childhood.

Understandably, a bedroom intruder is supposed to symbolize a sense of insecurity or fear of trusting people. Given a lot of my insecurity and trust issues likely originated with my relationship with my mother, this may be quite fitting.

While writing in general represents, for me, trapping a moment in amber through self-expression as well as catharsis and psychological alchemy, writing a letter is supposed to represent the desire to establish a connection with someone — Jimmy, my childhood friend, apparently. Yet I didn’t send the letter, but rather left it in my old bedroom, which again, suggests a fear of making such a connection. So again, all signs point to: trust issues and fears of intimacy.

One element of the dream I have yet to understand, however, is why she called my bedroom Jimmy’s bedroom — and why I so angrily corrected her, feeling so possessive of it. My only thought is that she was implying that I was taking on his pain as my own, and so the private, secret, childhood matters my bedroom represented were more his than mine despite the fact that I’d taken them on.

Actually, having written that out, it makes a good deal of sense.

I met Jimmy when I was maybe five years of age. Our mothers worked together at a day care and given we were both the same age and both rather shy, they thought we would hit it off as friends. And we did: in no time I came to consider him the brother I never had.

He had two brothers and a little sister and, at least for awhile, I would often visit him at his house, even sleep over on occasion. The way they lived was quite different than in my own family. All the kids lived in the same room, took showers together. For a time, they had no television, and only had so many toys that they could store in a relatively small chest. Most of all, his parents were insanely religious — and the father was incredibly abusive. I would hide beneath a bed or behind a door, unable to defend my friend and his siblings from their father, who would beat them right in front of me. Most haunting of all was the image of the young sister, a blond and petite girl, face red, wet, and twisted into an expression of absolute terror. It’s haunted me for years.

For years I had buried all memories of Jimmy, and when they emerged in flashbacks back in high school (along with many other, far more bizarre memories), I even questioned if I had made him and those circumstances up.

As it turns out, I had not.

One of the questions that plagued me and, honesty, made me feel guilty and ashamed since remembering it all is why it should effect me so strongly. After all, it didn’t happen to me, so what right do I have being traumatized? It was similar to how I felt regarding how I felt about my relationship with my mother in childhood: I was never physically or sexually abused, so many others have been, so what right did I have to complain about how cold and dismissive my mother was towards me in my youth?

Only when I deduced that I was a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) prone to involuntary empathy did it begin to make sense to me. How I’d described myself as an “emotional sponge” all those years finally had some rational footing.

When I met Angela in my twenties in the fast food joint where we worked, I was quite taken by her, and when I learned of the abuse and mindfuckery inflicted upon her by her parents — really, her fucking family as a whole — I became very emotionally involved. I began having haunting dreams about Jimmy, his family, and most specifically his father around that period and it was all too clear to me what triggered it.

So what triggered this most recent dream?

Well, the evening before the dream was the birthday of my ex-girlfriend, Claire, who I stopped talking to a few years ago. After getting drunk, I started having a text conversation with Angela, who I associate with Claire (which was also revealed in the dreams I had when still working with Angela) as well as Jimmy.

So Claire’s birthday likely triggered me texting Angela, which in turn triggered the dream regarding Jimmy.

In addition, either yesterday or the day before, I considered adding the story of Jimmy to my book on strange, often apparently paranormal experiences. He was associated with at least two strange experiences in my childhood, though we never talked about it and those particular memories, unlike the others regarding him, are nearly impossible to verify as accurate. As it turns out, Angela has also had strange experiences all throughout her life, but like so many, she chooses to ignore them.

In any case, the dream seems to have been exploring why I keep my distance from people and remain afraid of nurturing connections despite my desire to.

Elementary Sadomasochism.

By at least the third grade, girls in my school tended to express their affection for boys by means of chasing them down in a vagina-bearing mob on the playground during recess. Once they got close enough, they would grab the boy’s hair and violently pull until they fell to the ground, where the gaggle of she-devils would then proceed to repeatedly kick or punch him. Stranger still and twisted even further, all the boys seemed to secretly like it, myself included.

Looking back, there can be no hiding it from myself: this was elementary school sadomasochism, plain and simple.

No teacher, from what I can recall, ever said a word about this, but at least one delusional teacher apparently saw into a parallel reality where the roles were reversed. One day at recess, a kid was sent to fetch me, as one of the teachers watching over us on the playground wanted to speak with me. I came up to the building, where the teacher adamantly insisted that I had pushed a girl. I had not, of course, and the girl in question denied it was the case right along with me. Despite this testimony, the woman would not let up. She refused to let it go. She said she had seen it with her own eyes and proceeded to passionately defend the girl, as if she thought she was putting up a front because she was afraid of me or something. Eventually she gave up, as neither the girl nor I would waver from the truth.

It honestly befuddled the ever-living fuck out of me. None of the emotions I sensed from the woman made sense or added up. I mean, the girls would gather together and aggressively chase down targeted boys and give them a gang beating on a daily basis and no one had ever uttered a single word about it. No boys ever complained, not a single supervising teacher seemed to give a single, tootsie-roll-sized shit. Despite that, here was this teacher losing her shit over an incident that never even happened, however committed she was with respect to investing in the delusion.

For most of the time she was accusing me it seemed as though she was trying to convince herself of the reality of the incident as much as she was trying to convince both of us, as if that would somehow make it true, which for some unknown reason she desperately wanted it to be. Eventually, I considered that perhaps she had been recently cheated on or abused by her boyfriend or husband, or perhaps this had happened to someone close to her, and so as a convenient way to vent her anger she had seen what she wanted to see and was consequently able to express what she needed to express. Maybe she had witnessed the pack of prepubescent pink-holes hunting down the age-appropriate sausage-bearing beings on the playground that day but her personal issues had forced her to see it in a gender-reversing manner, as that rendition most easily aligned with her preconceived beliefs regarding the male of the species. Maybe the horrid selfishness inherent in that truth had dawned on her in the midst of her conversation with me, cast as the villain in her story, but by that time she was too committed to the comforting lie, too unwilling to back down for fear of seeming weak before two consenting, sadomasochistic third-graders.

While we’re delving into underlying, psychological influences on perceptions and behavior, maybe the girls at school had picked up their sadistic behavior from their parents, who used violence against one another and perhaps their children in place of empathy, and this was their way of expressing affection. Maybe the boys adopted their masochistic behavior for the same reason.

That didn’t track, however. After all, I happened to be one of these boys and my parents certainly never lifted a hand to my two sisters and I.

While there may have been a brief hiatus, given the teacher’s unfounded accusation, this by no means signaled the end of the wonderfully aggressive girls and their sadistic, circadian, playground rituals. Initially, there were two girls that seemed to lead the pack, too: one was a slender brunette named Kate; the other, a fiery redhead named Angela. They also featured prominently in my fantasies at the time. To call them sexual fantasies would be a bit too extreme, perhaps, as at the time I didn’t recognize them for what they were, and they had evolved from much more innocuous fantasies I’d engaged in slightly earlier in my youth. All these fantasies did undoubtedly generate what I would subsequently recognize as sexual feelings, however.

In any case, the fantasies I had regarding Kate and Angela were always essentially the same. Hidden in the mountains in the midst of a thick forest with ever-blue skies above, far away from civilization, I imagined a building. Inside, it looked like an abandoned school, like we might be in some post-apocalyptic landscape, though I would have had no idea what that meant at the time. Inside there were girls, just like the girls on the playground, but they had a clear objective — they wanted me to join their clan or group. The common image I have regarding how they did this involved being with Kate, their leader, in a dark room. My arms and legs were spread and strapped down to a table that was held at a slant, and Kate would stand right beside me, taunting me, trying to coerce me into becoming one of them, into submitting to her bliss and being her brainwashed slave.

Eventually, my value in both Kate and Angela were downgraded, however, as another, far more adorable and enticing little sadist entered my life, and she outshined them all. A pair of red-headed twins moved into the apartment complex across the street from my house, and they were in my grade. One was rather quiet and reserved, whereas Claire (not to be confused with the Claire I would meet later in life, who shares her true name), the brutal and outspoken one, was the target of my interest. Why I liked her was beyond my comprehension. All I knew was that she elicited a feeling in me that I could neither explain nor deny.

Treating them both like the wild and feral creatures they were, I gazed at Claire, forever with her sister, only at a distance. Even as I stood one day a good distance away from her and behind a tree during recess, the little circle of outcasts that had only recently become my friends were quick to caution me. “Never look such a dangerous creature in the eyes,” went the general message, “for they will take it as a challenge and attack your feeble ass.” Undaunted, I continued to steal quick glimpses from just beyond the vertical horizon of bark. Their recommendation that I talk to her terrified me, so one of my fellow outcasts returned with the suggestion that I write her a letter — a technique that was far more my style, though ultimately I decided to draw her a picture. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go up and hand it to her, however, so the next issue was where in the apartment complex across the street she actually lived, so I could slip it under her door. As could be expected, no one in my newfound gaggle of geeks knew or had so much as a clue. When I began blabbing about how I liked Claire, however, Spitting Mike caught word of it and approached me.

He was this skinny, ugly kid with short black bowl-cut hair and goofy teeth. He spit a lot when he talked. He knew where she lived, he told me, because he followed all the cute girls home. Though I failed to inform him, I found this confession of his to be creepy as fuck, and his beaming pride over his serial stalking made it even creepier. Regardless, it was through this blithering saliva-sprinkler that I learned where she lived, and he offered to take me there himself, so I decided to overlook his rapey aura and let the drooling gremlin guide the way.

Following him home that day after school, he showed me right where her door was. Calmly, he asked if I wanted him to knock, which inspired an instinctive, pleading, “No.” He made like he was going to do it, so I bolted out the door and ran home.

Later that evening, I peddled back over there on my little black bike for some solo recon. Within perhaps a foot or two of reaching the door to the building’s lobby, the door swung open and the twins came barreling out on their bikes, the woman who I would presume to be their mom following close behind. The last thing I wanted was for them to see me, so retreat was reactionary. I was perhaps a bit too frantic about it, however, as I accidentally turned my front tire off the cement patio, hitting both the curb and the bumper of a nearby, rust-bucket of a car. The bumper made this loud, enduring, weird noise when I hit it and threw little rusty metal pieces about in a swiftly-expanding cloud. I turned my back and took off just as I saw the sister look my way, and I couldn’t manage to convince myself she didn’t recognize me as the guy gawking at them from behind the tree on the playground. Yet I soon realized that if she didn’t recognize me from school, she might now recognize me at school as the same weirdo who slammed his bike into a parked car outside their apartment.

In either case, this was not what I wanted my first impression to be. Not at all.

Despite that, I was intent on giving her that picture, so on the following day I returned with it in hand. It was a page from my sketchbook which I had filled with hearts, puppy dogs, and poorly-drawn renditions of Ziggy all about it, unsigned, as I still had some naïve hope she might not presume it was me. I was content enough to simply express my feelings to her anonymously without the threat of rejection or gross bodily harm.

It seemed to have worked in that respect, too, for a day passed and nothing happened. The ever-chatty grapevine on the playground had nothing to contribute. Something seemed wrong, and so the next day I went back to the lobby of her apartment. Finding my picture in the little slot below the mailboxes, where all the misplaced mail goes, I realized that I had put it under the wrong door. Cursing my stupidity, I put it under the right one, which was up the stairs and to the left.

Consultations with the third-grade grapevine on the playground just before school confirmed that not only had she received my drawing but knew that I was the amateur artist in question. Rather than assuming she had made the connection between the drawing and when her sister saw my bike hit that damned bumper, my brain decided to lay blame upon Spitting Mike, who it was easy to believe spilled the beans. To make myself feel less hate for him, I imagined that he had not gone up and told her blatantly, but had rather teased her with knowing who had drawn it but refused to tell her who. I imagined her pinning him to the ground in frustration and kicking him in the groin over and over and over again. I imagined that pathetic kid struggling, drowning in a filthy sea of his own saliva as he begged for mercy, eventually telling her, through his gurgling and bubbling, that it was me.

When I got home that day, it wasn’t even supper when I got what my mother has referred to as my first love letter, hand-delivered to me by a girl who lived across the street and who I had known when younger but had since distanced from. She handed the sealed envelope to me without saying anything and then ran off the porch. With anticipation I opened it to find a letter that read:

“Please don’t write me no more notes.”

Even back then, I could woo a girl.

More persistent now more than ever, the following day I went super-creeper, drew her yet another picture and slid it under her door again. At school the following day, all was silent for a while. This led me to worry that she had not received it, but such worries, I would soon find, were entirely unwarranted.

This I discovered during recess, when I suddenly found a hand drilling my face into the wood chips on the playground. A voice I knew to be Claire then asked if I had drawn her those pictures, and after a pause for dramatic effect, I confessed that I had. She asked me why I’d done it, why I’d made those things for her and I told her, through a storm of wood chips and pain, that it was because I liked her.

She stopped a moment, fist clenched around my shirt, and when that moment inevitably passed, finally spoke.

“That’s gross,” is what she said, and then she punched me in my stupid, fat head.

That summer we moved away and I never saw her again.

When I think of how she might have turned out, I find myself imagining she has become a delicious-looking, latex-skinned, whip-snapping, red-headed dominatrix out there somewhere…

Turning a New Leaf (9/9/20 & 9/11/20 Dreams).

9/11/20

When I awoke, I strove to recall everything about my dream that I could.

I recall hanging out with a girl, primarily in a forest during the daytime. At some point we came up to a tree stump that had been partially carved into and hollowed out, and I think there were things kept inside there, though I’m certainly fuzzy on this point. Elsewhere in the dream, we were lounging around outside, presumably still in the forest, and I was sitting way back, sprawled out in my chair nearby the girl, who was doing essentially her own version of the same thing in her chair. I kept forgetting and then realizing that I wasn’t wearing any pants, just my briefs — which is precisely how I slept last night — but was never concerned about it around her.

The dream itself as a whole reminded me of many of the many dreams I had in my very early teens, which also often took place in the forest, mostly due to the light, joyous, playful and relaxing kind of mood that those dreams embodied. I hadn’t felt that in a dream, so far as I recall — and certainly not in real life — for an unimaginably long period of time.

When trying to discern who the girl was after awakening, which was, aside from the hollowed-out tree stump, the focal point of my curiosity, I focused on how I felt around her. I felt very close to her, very connected and comfortable. I wasn’t trying to hide myself, I wasn’t worrying about how she perceived me or concerned to the level of paranoia regarding how I made her feel. It was just warm, easygoing, natural and nice. I felt calm and happy.

It made me think primarily of my long-time, gothic friend, Terra, though I also thought of Penny, as both make me feel very similar when I’m around them. I don’t think it was either of them, however, and perhaps no one I actually know in my waking life.

A quick search to guide my exploration into the meaning of the potential symbols provided interpretations that were actually quite intuitive and resonated deeply with each other and the overall mood of the dream. Trees are symbols of life and connectivity. With respect to life, the roots wind down into the past, the branches spread outward and upward, towards the future, and the trunk, linking both, represents the present.

To dream of a forest is supposed to represent a desire for connection, which certainly resonates with the mood of the dream and how the girl made me feel. The alleged meaning of the partially hollowed out tree stump was less intuitive to me, but certainly resonates with my waking life, specifically the vague recollection I had of a dream the day before yesterday (9/9/20) and the surrounding events, thoughts and emotions. Its supposed to symbolize something, such as a relationship, having recently come to an end, that something is missing from your life, or both.

I began writing about it on the day it all happened, but felt hesitant about finishing and sharing it, though it seems appropriate enough in this context.

9/9/20

Its been a year and a few months since I spoke with Claire, and though she has crossed my mind now and then, I simply don’t allow myself to engage with the thoughts. I no longer permit myself to care. Its a futile game I simply refuse to play anymore — consciously or, so far as I have been aware, even unconsciously, in the land of dreams, and my dream recall has returned the last few months without any clear sign of Claire’s presence. Even the suggestion of her. Until this morning, September 9th, the day before her fucking birthday.

I didn’t clearly remember the dream, I only recalled vague suggestions, but it didn’t deal with her or I interacting. It did deal with her and I, however. Specifically the apparent fact that she felt the same way about me as I did about her — essentially that the end had come and there was no sense in continuing any emotional investment in the friendship, in even entertaining the thought that it may eventually become something more. To the contrary, we would probably never see or talk to each other ever again.

Roughly 25 years of knowing each other and its simply dead, dead, deadinski.

Though it’s vague, the scene left me with the sense that I was eavesdropping on her having a conversation about me, or eavesdropping on someone else having a conversation about her and I. It seemed like I was viewing it from a distance, too, which reminds me of an element in one of my apparent telepathic experiences with Eva back in the day, though I’m not making the leap in assumption and concluding that’s what happened here.

Though it wasn’t as if there was much to write down regarding this dream, or this vague fragment of a dream, I’ve taken notes on less. Even so, I failed to write a word about it until now. The reason is clear: I honestly didn’t want to write about her ever again. At least not for awhile. I didn’t want to conjure up any potentially buried emotions, open up any healing wounds, or anything of that nature. Just let it stay behind me. Let it be obscured in the dust as I tear down that dirt road, leaving it all in the past, refusing so much as a mere glance in the rearview.

So I ran some erronds, went to work, did my shit, and then, after night fell and the fast food joint was busy as hell, cars wrapped around the drive-thru, as I was taking the gondola full of trash out to the dumpster corral, I hear my name being called.

For whatever reason, this is not unusual. I assumed that it was either a coworker seeking my help or someone in drive thru who saw me and wanted to say hello. It turned out that it was someone in the passenger seat of an SUV, wearing a black winters cap over her black, shoulder-length hair, looking out at me from the open window. I tried to discern the face from the distance. At about the same time I realized who it was, she yells, “Its Kara.”

“You coming back?” I knew damned well she wasn’t.

“Nope,” she said. “Sorry, bud.”

You’re tragically beautiful, I think to myself. I really like you, so go fuck yourself.

“Its nice to see you,” I tell her, and I wasn’t entirely lying, for it was, in a way.

In another way it was utterly maddening, however. Endlessly frustrating. Recently, she abruptly quit her job over the phone, claiming that she was going to admit herself to a mental institution again, and then blocked me (at the very least) on Facebook.

That’s the second time she’s blocked me, and by no fault of my own.

This was also the second time she has quit within the last month or two, though for some reason I felt confident she wouldn’t return as she had done on the previous occasion. I figured our paths had crossed for a time and now the chapter in my life involving her — despite her being in the distance for most if it, save for that week of false hope she gave me — had finally and abruptly come to a close. It hurt at a level, but there was a much more prominent sense of relief.

I was finally holding on to letting go, to moving on, and hopefully learning from past mistakes and former delusions and illusions. I thought that had been the case when I let go of Claire, but then the whole Kara thing happened, and she and my experience of and with her seemed to echo many former women who had been prominent in my life. Perhaps Kara embodied those elements because she was the emotional equivalent to the grand finale of a fire works display on Independence Day.

Finally, it was dead and buried, I naively believed.

Then, within a single day, albeit through different routes, both Claire and Kara, formerly buried, rise like zombies from their deep graves, as if seeking to feed their insatiable hunger for my tired brain once again.

Some damsals, it seems, just won’t stay dead.

Even though their reemergence was jarring and left me feeling like the universe was intent on keeping me bound to the miserable, hopeless cycles they’ve sort of come to represent, I maintained psychological and emotional distance. It was like the body of the problem was no longer there, it was just the residual shadow I had to deal with — and to my surprise I was, at the very least, doing better with respect to the dealing.

And then, on this day that is an anniversary of a tragedy that effected me quite deeply — 9/11 — I awaken, after roughly two months of haunting dreams and cryptic, unnerving imagery erupting during my daily meditation sessions, with a pleasant, beautiful dream, the mood of which followed me into my waking existence.

Despite my skepticism, I truly hope this is a sign that I am turning a new leaf, that this is a sign of better things to come, signs of a new and improved chapter in my life.

Time, waking life, and my dreams, I am reasonably confident, will surely come to tell.