Last night, like every night for the past two weeks, I woke up every hour, stayed awake long enough to roll into a different position, allow my cat to find a new comfortable spot along some curve of my body, and finally fell back asleep. One of those times, I woke up from a dream that I was a skirt-suit wearing door-to-door salesperson peddling vhs tapes that were supposed to teach conflict resolution to infants via weird, narrated manipulations of miniature dolls. I had a clipboard with the family name and address of every home within a 50-mile radius housing a newborn, and I would visit these homes hoping to wow exhausted but eager new parents with this incredible research-based program designed to teach YOUR child highly evolved skills from birth! When I woke up, I was leaving a home after a successful sale. I lined up every video tape I had with me out of its case, on the ground from the front door of the house to my car, and as I went to leave, I stomped on every single tape until all that was left on the ground was shards of broken plastic and crumpled film.

A few nights ago, I had a dream that my older sister went to the market and came home with a 4 week old pitbull instead of groceries. She walked in the door and explained that there was a family standing in front of the store who had been trying without success to sell this puppy all day. By the time my sister got there, the family was tired and frustrated and told her that if she didn’t take it, they would simply leave it in the parking lot because they couldn’t/wouldn’t care for it & didn’t know what else to do with it. My sister, like anyone with a semblance of a soul, couldn’t bear the thought of the puppy dying in the parking lot of a grocery store, so she brought it home. 

When she set the puppy down on the floor, a flood of fleas the size of ticks scattered like cockroaches from the tiny dog’s body all over the tile. My niece screamed & I grabbed the puppy & rushed it to the kitchen sink to wash it in Dawn dish soap (a real life, readily available [albeit harsh] flea treatment). As I scrubbed the poor puppy, countless fleas jumped and crawled all over my hands and arms, and blood poured from hundreds of tiny bites all over me. 

When I was finally done, the sink was full of dead fleas and soapy, bloody water, and the anemic dog was licking all of the little bites on my arms and wagging its tail.

I woke up out of breath.

(via ceedling)

I just woke up from a nap during which I dreamt that I was hanging out at home, while my mom made waffles for a bunch of guys that I don’t know in real life, but was familiar with then. My home was a very large, mostly white two-story house in the suburbs. Jaimie called me. She told me that no one was going to be home at her place that night & asked me to come over to swim and watch movies with her. I agreed. While we continued to talk on the phone, I walked upstairs & stood in the middle of a little bridge that connected the main house to the side house, where my bedroom was. I stood at the edge while talking to Jaimie, looking at the night sky over the pool in the backyard. The sky was especially clear & I immediately started identifying constellations. Then I noticed a shooting star. Anyone who’s been around me when I’ve seen a shooting star can rest assured that I was just as giddy about it in my dream. I squeezed my eyes shut & tried to think of a wish as quickly as I could. When I opened my eyes, I saw more & more white trails through the sky, & realized that this must be a meteor shower I was unaware of. I asked Jaimie to come to my place instead, not wanting to miss any chances for wishes.

When Jaimie got to my house, I had changed into my bathing suit & brought out some wine. We went to the pool & watched the meteor shower together. There was a family there, which neither surprised nor bothered me. The mother and father sat by the pool under the soft glow of the moon while two adolescent boys competed for the most impressive jumps into the water at the far end. By the time the clouds had slowly covered the sky, I was all wished-out, & we floated near the shallow end. One of the boys came over and started talking to us about his broken arm. He told us that he broke it in a bike accident, and that when he was in the water, he didn’t have to wear a cast. For this reason, he tried to spend all of his time in a body of water of some sort. Jaimie asked a question about the boy’s brother & he corrected her, saying that the other boy was his cousin. “I’m 12 and a half and Joey’s 13. It’s impossible for us to be brothers,” he explained. He also told us that his parents had taken Joey in, without telling us the reason. We didn’t ask. I told him that I wanted to draw a comic strip about him and his cousin, and he was excited about the idea. He gave me his email address so I could send it to him when I finished. I promised that I’d have it to him soon. 

The family left, and we lay down on the cement, which was still warm though the sun had set hours ago. 

I dreamt the other night that I slept with a boy that I used to hook up with in high school. In the middle of it, I thought about how it was a bad idea, but didn’t stop. Afterward, he wanted to cuddle & I wanted him to leave, but I fell asleep before I could figure out how to say that without being a total asshole. In the morning, he wanted to have breakfast together & with little tact, I said no. He left & just before I woke up, I was feeling a little guilty, but mostly just hoping he wouldn’t tell anyone that we’d had sex or call me again.

The thing is that this is not unlike things I have done before. Dream Me & Real Me are total jerks.

A couple of nights ago, I dreamt that I woke up in my ex-boyfriend’s bed & found a fire ant crawling on the sheet. I smashed it against the bed & a bunch of clearish red liquid that looked like artificial hummingbird nectar came out & soaked the sheet. My thumb burned. 

Last night I had a dream that I was still on tour with Religious Girls. We were in Japan. It was daytime & we were sitting on a dock while a middle-aged man told us about the animals who lived in the water. We were drinking & he was teaching us Japanese phrases that don’t translate concisely into English.

All of the sudden the water started moving really violently & the sky turned a really shimmery shade of blue-gray. The man looked up at the sky for a minute & the next thing I knew, we were all getting into his little speed boat that was docked nearby. He tried to drive away as quickly as possible. The sky kept getting darker & the waves bigger, & the boat was barely able to move forward. We were trapped in some gnarly tsunami/hurricane winds that were so strong that the little glass enclosure we sat below in the boat shattered. Little shards of glass flew everywhere & we were all drenched in a mixture of blood & warm rainwater. There was a brief moment when we reached the eye when the sky was so brightly yellow that it hurt to see & the only sound we could hear was the motor of the boat.

We kept going through the storm until we reached land again. The man rushed us into a huge building. When we got inside, despite the chaos outside, everything seemed as if nothing unusual was going on. We were in a large movie theater with posters from American films from the 40s and 50s covering the high-vaulted walls. And while we were soaking wet, dirty, bloody, out of breath, & scared shitless, no one inside seemed to notice.

I woke up just as we were about to sit down for a movie. Chris was holding popcorn & Nick had a giant cup of soda. I remember thinking that there was still a lot of glass in my hair.