dreamattack | a dialogue in pictures

will be on semi-hiatus for the next several weeks. the convergence of potentially serious medical problems, a dramatic sleep debt, and preparations for the impending move all demand i focus elsewhere for the time being.

i will still be available via email - and will do my best to answer as quickly as possible. i’ll continue to read all of your writings (when I’m at work — what else do i have to do besides interview teenagers for our empty page position, and avoid the wrath of the powers that be?) I’ll try to comment as I am able.

John is my favorite person in the world with whom to interview potential hires. he’s the veritable ping to my pong.

“one should not increase,
beyond what is necessary,
the number of entities required
to explain anything”

it will be another week before they crack my
head open like the funny little egg it is.
not literally, of course. not yet, anyway.
we’ll get to see, then, what is broken.

will it be what is behind:

curtain A

or will it be what is behind

curtain B

who knows.

The Jabberwocky

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought–
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

– Lewis Carroll

give me plasma, make it soon,
the love is not enough.
I’ve got you in my heart,
but I want you in my veins,
and I’ll meet you at the blood bank,
they can pump you into me…
it’s only fair cos you know I like
pumping into you.

give me plasma, be my plasma doll,
my plasma lady fair…
it’s nice to know we’re always sharing;
a love like ours is rare.
yeah, I’ll show you all my muscles
if you give me your corpuscles,
I’ll have your blood,
and you’ll have my seed.

we’ll grow together,
the plasma twins…
the plasma twins…

you won’t feel a thing.
we’re the plasma twins…
that’s us!

the plasma twins (orig. version) / legendary pink dots

this is the hour when the mysteries emerge.
a strangeness so hard to reflect.
a moment so moving, goes straight to your heart,
the vision has never been met.
the attraction is held like a weight deep inside,
something I’ll never forget.

the pattern is set, her reaction will start,
complete but rejected too soon.
looking ahead in the grip of each fear,
recalls the life that we knew.
the shadow that stood by the side of the road,
always reminds me of you.

how can I find the right way to control,
all the conflicts inside, all the problems beside,
as the questions arise, and the answers don’t fit,
into my way of things,
into my way of things.

komakino / joy division

me.

the way the street looked
dim and polluted
so have i felt when i walked upon
the way the air seemed
grey fog diluted
so do i feel when i’m breathed upon
ominous head spoke
you ain’t so good
poorly the sow joked
trashed and words muttered

i want to be mothered
i want you to give
attention to my belly button
mother
i want to have
bobby pins stuck in my ears

and drown away the endless days
ridding soon the troubled ways

embedded down with a warm frown
in a wrong and impure dream
anchored down with a mermaid
in sound halcyon sea
lure me in her salt
liquid canyon far beneath
my mother savior
with her goddess touch
brushes hands through my hair

mother / red house painters

When I listen to this song, my fragile head is the breaking glass, my will is the violent whipping shots, my soul is the spinning metal disc at the end.

Today would have beeen a shit day if it weren’t for the early morning goodness in my inbox (thank you, I will reply soon), the welcoming smile of J., and the persistent but flagging positivity of sweet K.

That being so, I found it difficult to make it to the end.

I am not enjoying the decline.

The day didn’t help. While I try not to allow things to affect me, they do. I don’t always enjoy the reminder of how brokenly human I am.

- All the wonderful crazy people on the phone.
- Oppressively freakish, jack-booted policemen filling in for the empty hole of our security department, in which en masse firings recently took place (it’s a scandal!)
- Eighty-plus applications for an $17 - $18Kpy position — who gets to sort and reject them? me. Nothing beats filtering through applications to create an interview pool that has 5 times more formal education than me.
- My inability to get caught up with my work - having lost 2.5 months of my life to this pain.
- My boss, my boss, my boss. He’s a Psych 101 textbook all wrapped up in a 3 Musketeer’s Bar.
- The condescending training seminar this morning by the fat evil one.
- All the whining. A #1 whined, A #2 whined, whine whine whine. Go away you stupid little girls.

I have a hard time having patience with fools. It’s a test - I know. Sometimes I believe that most of the last 3 years at my job have been both an evil pop-quiz, and an exercise in patience. I still have so many lessons left to learn. How is it that others claim to learn from me, when I am so lost, myself? What could I possibly know that could be of use to anyone?

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job - just not all the circumstances contained within. And the deeper I am sucked into the admino-sphere, the more I loathe the upper eschalons of human resources.

Public Service Announcement #1132

female ejaculation is not a myth.

“All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”
~~ Elias Canetti The Human Province

I love to sleep. I love to dream. I can sleep anywhere, anytime, as long as I’m not being distracted by other things (which happens all too frequently.) As I child, I was the strange kid on the bus who could fall asleep with her head banging painfully against the window glass. For decades, now (ha!) I have recorded my dreams, wandered them agape with joy and delight. Explored the meaning and myth, dabbled with lucidity, and met some of my favorite souls inside my head. For a time, I believe I was addicted to dreaming. I had convinced myself that I was stepping into an alternate reality when I closed my eyes at night. My dreams were so … episodic, consistent. But they eventuall veered away from that world and entered another, and another … ad infinitum.

The other night something strange and terrifying happened. I got stuck somewhere between here and there. The shuttering landscape that is the reel-to-reel reality of dreams invaded my conscious mind, or was it the other way around?

The void - the emptiness that you flash through like lightning in a hurry, the transition between the last driplets of consciousness - the here and then the there. One has no conscious awareness of the shift. But this was something entirely different. And it awoke a memory within me of similar episodes past.

In bed. On my side, the right one. pillow between my knees, bear between arms, Ivan, the sucker of breath, mere millimeters from my head, par for the course, mama’s boy. Coast-to-coast murmuring in my right ear, B’s familiar sleepful grinding, smacking & mumbling in the left. This is falling asleep. I am falling asleep. Falling, blank blank blank blank…

then awareness: I am awake (I am asleep) or am I? zipped up tight in the belly of a snake? nothing moves, I can’t move I open my mouth, I cannot open my mouth. I cannot open my eyes, but I see the gray and halo through the lids. I’m asleep?

Something is there. someone is coming. the presence is far from benign, it moves closer, no it glides. I am both above and within. blind and watching. My heart pounds, it glides closer, something is coming for me, for my soul, to tear me open and swallow my soul. I struggle, I scream, I cannot move I cannot scream. I feel pressure on all sides, something restrains me, the terror rises and begins to cycle around me.

I struggle against the restraining, I can feel nothing, hear nothing see nothing. paralysed. move nothing. I purse my mind, flexing like physical strength, willing willing willing something to move, my voice to open and break the spell. My arms, move them, Move them, fling them round wildly and strike out at the presence. Scream, scream, screaming screaming, my arms move, my eyes open, B’s hand on my shoulder, stacy! you’re having a bad dream!

but it wasn’t a dream - it was something else. I was trapped and in danger. I was mute and terrified. I couldn’t breathe. It was real, it felt so real. My mind playing tricks? My body ached from the sruggle.

I was afraid. Afraid to fall asleep again. I tried to explain, describe to him what had happened, but he was asleep again [I envy the ease with which the bed embraces him.] Well I wasn’t going to go back to sleep again. No matter … oh fuck, it’s happening again. The same struggle, the same feeling of mummification, surrounded and compressed on all sides. Constricted. In danger, oh fuck in danger. It resumed its slow advance on my imobilized body. I immediately resume willing every muscle in my body to react, to open and swing. I break the surface screaming. B. catches me as I fall. you’re having a bad dream again! no you dont’ understand - I was paralyzed, every atom of my body was paralyzed, but I was there, consciously and subconsciously, above and within. The words didn’t escape my mouth quite this eloquently - he couldn’t understrand my slurred tongue as I tried to make him see.

I couldn’t have remained above the surface long, I dipped and surfaced several more times. Each time paralyzed by unknown forces, mute by unknown means. At some undetectable point, I slipped all the way down the tunnel into the canyon of my dreamworld. I curled up in the ether and spent the night.

The next morning, awake - and contemplative - the phenomenon makes sense. My brain was simply hanging inbetween states, while my body had already initiated the muscular shutdown it must achieve in order to keep us safe while sleeping. I was aware of the paralysis, without the means to understand that it was simply a biological process. In retrospect, it was a fascinating thing, and I hope I won’t react so violently in the future. Sleep Paralysis is a recognized sleep disorder. Now I have four sleep disorder notches on my bedpost.

The rain started in my heart this morning. It filled up that small grey box and spilled over into my insides. It filled me up and escaped through my eyes in great salty rivulets, destined to evaporate on my cheeks and dot the insides of my eyeglass lenses with dry crusty spatters.

I have a very difficult time communicating with my mouth. I am far too cerebral and far too exacting when it comes to language. With my fingertips, I can express the most complicated of emotions and/or thoughts that originate within my tightly coiled brain, but when I attempt to lower that basket from brain to mouth, something critical gets lost in the translation.

This makes me very frustrated, and when I am frustrated it only gets worse. And worse. And sometimes my frustration makes me an Unpleasant Person, but usually the frustration only makes me cry. I am a big crybaby.

It doesn’t help that lately I’ve been experiencing a significant decline in a number of my cognitive abilities. Just more fuel to heap on the burning pile of frustration.

B. confessed this morning, as he drove me to work, that he is a bad person because he believes that he intentionally makes me feel responsible for all our difficulties communicating. He says he does this when we argue, because most, if not all, of our many arguments arise as a result of miscommunication. I didn’t believe him at first, feeling solely responsible for any and all problems which arise as a result of botched talking. But he insisted, and I scowled at him. That’s not very nice. Yeah, he knows that. In fact, he believes that he is a genetically horrible person and that I should run, not walk, away and save myself countless years of misery. Whatever. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, blah blah blah. He’s not a horrible person, by the way. But believing that he is unredeemable makes him more likely to behave in “unredeemable” ways.

B. is a sensitive man, kind and thoughtful, gentle and deliberate, intelligent and playful. He has been a “helper” and a “saver” for most of his life. But he, like so many of us, has darkness and pain in his soul. His dark matter happens to be his misperception of his own perpetual mediocrity, his fear of becoming an uncontrollable neurotic (like his father), and his fear of losing me by driving me away with his incessant worry and paranoia (like his father did his mother.) Most of the time he is fine, but the blackness occasionaly rises to the surface. The fear paralyzes him. It self-fulfills. He begs me to leave him. He tries to explain how miserable it is, for him, to be alive. He thinks he doesn’t have a soul. He’s afraid of losing me. He’s afraid.

So many times I have tried to counsel him, to help him see the beauty, the light. Sometimes I wish I could just plug him into my brain with RCA cables and really show him the way, the tao, the buddha, the endless circle of it all. Change comes from within I tell him. The simplest things are the most difficult, I mumble. Practice makes perfect, I blather. I bring him books, I tell him stories from my own experience with painful self-transformation, I show him the movies that opened my eyes, I try to illustrate principles with the unpredictable nature of ferret parenthood. I hold him. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes the blackness retreats.

But it seems to always return.

I try very hard not to give up on people (unless they put a gun in my face) and I do not want to give up on him. But truly - I don’t know what to do anymore. I am fresh out of ideas. I haven’t tried shaking him by the shoulders & slapping him, though I have often felt like it. Somehow I don’t think that would help things very much.

I just wish I could help him figure out how to find happiness somewhere within himself.

I woke up one cold Chicago night in the fall of 1996. Literally, at first. Metaphorically over the next 5 hours. Things changed. Understanding deepened. Life slapped me in my ignorant face. What I was shown, & what I now firmly believe as truth, is that it all really comes down to making one of two choices.

live - or - die

And get fucking busy. Time moves too fast. There aren’t enough hours in the day. You can’t love your people enough.

Not an original understanding, I know, but what became clear to me that night is that one can essentially be dead, and still go to work, eat, piss, and masturbate. One can also be vibrantly alive, even through the clusterfuck of damage, disease, demons, and pain. You get to choose.

I really dig being alive. I love it. I want to see each and every tomorrow that comes, no matter what it may bring.

What’s kind of sad (& sickly ironic) is that it took having my roommate decide he was going to eat the muzzle of a Walther PPK to shock me out of a disgusting four-year torpor. Under normal circumstances I would have been more concerned about his well-being - he tried on suicide attempts like some women try on clothes. But tonight it wasn’t so much that he wanted to die, but that I woke up cuffed to my bedpost, with him explaining that while this time he was certain that it was time for him to die, he was still scared, & had decided that I needed to accompany him so he wouldn’t be alone.

For hours, I talked like I’ve never talked before. I reasoned, I pleaded, I screamed, I pissed the bed. I lost my composure and wept like a child. Nothing I could say would dissuade him from his intent. He was locked and ready. It was then that something inside me ignited and came to life. I was tackled by the conviction that I was going to do whatever it took, anything necessary to come out of this alive and intact. I understood.

Okay I told him. You’re right. I whispered.

Drawing him to me, I held him and stroked his shaved head.

It’s time for us to go.

But I’m afraid, too. I’m sure you can understand that.

I’m ready to go with you. There’s nothing left here for either of us.

You go first, and I’ll be right behind you to hold your hand.

I held my breath. He agreed. We both started to cry again. He asked me to hold him while he pulled the trigger. He pulled my blankets over his head, very thoughtfully, so as not to make a mess of the apartment. He was always a very polite young man, and would have hated for the landlord to have had to clean bloody, brainy bits off the walls.

He put the gun in his mouth, and started to shake. I held him. And inside, a drill sergeant. YOU WILL FUCKING DEAL WITH THIS. YOU WILL WATCH A MAN KILL HIMSELF AND YOU WILL NOT LET IT DESTROY YOU. YOU WILL DO THESE THINGS, BECAUSE YOU WILL BE ALIVE. YOU WILL LIVE THROUGH THIS. I want to live through this. I want to be alive.

We sat there, a paused VCR, for what seemed hours. I still didn’t breathe.

Several hours earlier I had convinced him to allow me to make one phone call, in his presence, to my best friend K. in Little Rock, Arkansas. Through vocal modulations, and him asking the right questions to which I answered yes and or no, he was able to determine that bad things were happening. When we got off the phone, K. started frantically (in his calm collected Pisces way) calling to get in touch with the Chicago Police Department. After being transfered a dozen times & being hung up on twice, and even laughed at, he finally managed to land in the precinct that patrolled our neighborhood.

When eight police officers, guns drawn, beat on the door, my roommate knew that everything was over. He sighed, put the gun on my dresser, and let them in.

It was one of the longest nights of my life.

Maybe that’s why I don’t like to sleep at night. Maybe that’s why I find myself staying up, alone, until the birds start to sing. Time stretches out & yawns, and each minute feels like it truly belongs to me. At night, I breathe and I remember that I’m alive.