I’ve never been much of a dreamer, unless you count starving- and loss-of-blood-induced hallucinations. Erica, when we first met, for some reason thought I would enjoy a dream dictionary. “There’s interesting stuff in there,” she’d told me, trying to defend her gift. “A creative writing major ought to be interested in what his subconscious is trying to tell him when he’s asleep.”
This was before she’d known me for too long. This was before she’d realized I’m not as deep as all that.
I kept the book, of course, but only flipped through it every now and again in search of archetypes I could use in some shitty poem or short story. This was when I was still writing. This was before I had more serious things to dedicate my time to.
This was when I was still the old Travis. This was when I was still worried about getting my dick wet. This was when I’d research sports statistics and the weight limit of dynamic nylon ropes as opposed to serial killers and poisonous chemicals. This was when the only people who knew who I was were my friends. This was before I ate my friends, but not too long before.
But let’s get back to the dream book.
It was three-hundred pages of pure rubbish. Water had something to do with cleansing, with purity. A locked door meant you felt trapped. A chicken with a lion’s head meant your desire to get pregnant, or some other happy horse shit like that. The book was crap.
So, let’s get back to me not dreaming. Or, as the shrinks had corrected me when I told them I didn’t dream, not remembering my dreams. They said everybody dreams, and if you don’t remember them it just means that you’re subconsciously blocking out your subconscious. Whatever.
Anyway, I remembered my dream Wednesday morning. Part of it, at least. It was Angela, prettier and more like porcelain than she is in real life (although I don’t know how that’s possible, even in a dream), sitting on a deep red sofa, holding a glass of deep red wine, swirling it around the glass and smiling at me, who I couldn’t see, but could feel.
And that’s it. That’s all I remembered, but it was vivid as I awoke, like it was happening in the space between my face and the ceiling.
And that feeling – the way I couldn’t see myself but could still feel that I was there – that feeling hung around a while, too. Longer than the vision of Angela and the couch and the wine.
I think it’s pretty clear that I put no stock whatsoever in dream definitions or meanings, but I’d have loved to see what that stupid little “dictionary” would have had to say about all this. Of course, I’m pretty sure that just about anyone could make a fairly accurate guess.
I thought about it over a bowl of Apple Jacks, and some more while I sat at the kitchen window, blowing smoke out into the city. I thought about it, this little snippet of a dream, while I was in the shower. I started to think about it after I brushed my teeth, but realized this might be the last day that LT and I would have together, so I spent some quality time with him. (My recent diet had brought him out of his latest funk, and I apologized for ignoring him this past week.) And I thought about this dream as I got dressed.
I decided that it’s not the images in the dream that are important, it’s the lingering feeling in the morning. It’s like a hangover. It’s like the sore hip and ass muscles you get after having sex for the first time in what seems like an eternity. Those feelings will stick with you the rest of the day. The dream is usually gone after an hour or so.
And the feeling I had that morning was surprisingly empty considering how much shit I’d been filling myself with recently. I should have been anxious or scared or excited or, at the very least, a little confused.
But I was calm and well-rested. And really, I wasn’t even calm. I wasn’t anything. Just some sort of vague presence. The afternoon smell of bread baked in the morning. The itch of an amputated limb.
I imagine it’s something like what they mean when they say an “out of body” experience, only without watching yourself.
Hell, I don’t know. I guess I just felt a little weird.
All day, I felt a little weird. Something about where I was, what I was doing – none of it seemed real. It was just a movie. Or I was just broken, malfunctioning. I was talking to the stars again, even though I couldn’t see them through the blue of the atmosphere.
One of the ways hydrogen cyanide can kill you is if you absorb it through your skin. It can actually kill you more quickly this way than if you inhale or ingest it. Fascinating stuff.
As I spent the late morning hours dissolving my stolen goods in boiling water, a fan in the window set to exhaust, a fine particle mask over my mouth and nose, I was a bit dazed, daydreaming, thinking about things from the past that happened to somebody else, but were somehow still floating around in my head.
It was pleasant, this reel of short films. Days at the pool before you cared what was under all those bikinis. Getting stoned in college, munching on Reese’s Pieces and guzzling a can of generic grape soda. Sex in the hot tub while the girl’s parents were inside, watching Stargate on the Sci-Fi channel.
The person in all these scenes, he looks a lot like you, but maybe you’re just projecting yourself into them. Maybe you just wish those things had happened to you. Maybe you just envy this person his sense of invulnerability and the way he knows the future is going to be a great place to be. You envy the way he’s so into everything, so involved, instead of just observing.
You envy him. As you’re cooking up a pot of death, you envy him. He’d never have to do what you’re doing now, and he knows it, this doppelganger inside your head. That lucky bastard. And what happened to that lucky bastard, anyway?
You can’t let yourself think about that for too long because if you start to remember who you used to be, who you are now becomes jeopardized, and you need to be this new guy. You need to.
You’re a new man.
That kid you think about while you’re preparing to do very, very bad things, he’s not real. He doesn’t exist.
He never existed.
And you still envy him.