The Diary of A Simple Man

The night before last I dreamed once again that I was in a huge house looking into getting an apartment. The place had been drastically modified to add a lot of new apartment spaces. Some weren't much more than plexiglass cubes sticking outside from a wall. Others were whole small houses built inside enormous rooms, some of which seemed to be outdoors somehow.

Once again I spotted my old friend Virgil among the people who were wandering around looking at apartments. I managed to catch up with him, and he admitted that he'd faked his death. I wish that were true.

This morning I was young, fresh out of college. I got a job offer through connections (somehow) that was just amazing: some sort of quasi-official position working in France. It paid a lot of money. And I'd be working for Santa Claus, in his off-season. I wasn't sure what the job involved, but it wasn't toymaking.

The thought of moving overseas was really exciting! I was a little worried, though: I don't speak French. I took French in high school, but did really poorly. Nowadays I can sort of puzzle out the meaning of simple written French (and spoken as well, IF it's well-enunciated and not spoken too quickly). But I certainly don't speak the language.

Not to worry, they told me. They'd be giving me a test on both my English and French skills. "But that's the problem," I said, "I don't really speak French!".

"After a year, you'll be fluent!" they said. I had to agree. And if they could put up me for that year while I learned...well, the money was very good, and the thought of living and working in Paris was extremely appealing.

For the last three nights I've gotten to bed at a much more reasonable hour than usual.

For the last three nights I've had particularly vivid and memorable dreams.

Is there a connection? It seems likely.

I'm in a rush, but here are some quick notes for me to expand on later:

• Gravity school


• Whales


• The post-oil future in Boston

I had an incredibly bad dream this morning.

I woke up. And suddenly I remembered that we had had another child before Sebastian; a little boy, very much like him but without red hair. And for some reason, we'd given him away to an ignorant young couple that could only be described as white trash. They'd taken him away to live with them in Texas. The pain had been so great that for years we simply couldn't bear to think about it...and we'd ended up forgetting about our first son almost completely.

Until, for some reason, I suddenly remembered him.

We hadn't given him away as a baby; he'd been three or four years old, bright and talkative and loving. We'd promised to talk to him and see him again. But we didn't. And I could only wonder what our precious, intelligent little boy had come to in the care of those trashy strangers.

Throughout the dream, I was sobbing uncontrollably. The thought of our little guy in the hands of strangers, wondering what had happened to us or perhaps forgetting us, was more than I could bear.

Sebastian had nightmares two nights in a row, a few days ago. The first time he let out a shriek of absolute terror in the middle of the night. I woke up (Teri slept through it somehow) and asked him what was wrong. He ended up coming over and sleeping in our bed.

The same thing happened the next night, minus the shriek.

Then he begged me to sleep with him all night. Have I talked about this? Maybe not. I read to Sebastian in bed every night. For quite a while, we've been reading the Doctor Dolittle books. Sometimes he falls asleep quickly, sometimes he stays awake for half an hour or more, and sometimes he gets sleepy and asks me to stop reading and sing to him.

Singing almost always puts him to sleep very quickly.

Anyway, he often asks me to sleep in his bed all night, so he won't be "lonely". Recently, he begged so pathetically that I agreed (with Teri's approval, of course). His bed is small, and the canopy-sheet that we rigged up makes me glad that I don't have claustrophobia (it's literally inches above my face; I push it up when I'm reading to him), and Sebastian tends to turn sideways in the bed. I didn't sleep that well. But in the middle of the night I woke up and looked over at him. He looked over at me, smiled, turned over and went back to sleep. He had no nightmares, for the first time in three days.

Then he begged me to sleep in his bed again the next night. I sort of half-agreed - he really does beg in the most affecting way - and read him to sleep. Then I went to bed with Teri...and lay there. I felt guilty. I'd let him think I'd sleep in his bed, but here I was in my much-more-comfortable bed with Teri! How would my poor little boy feel when he woke up?

After fifteen minutes I got up, went over, and got into his bed.

He woke up in the middle of the night and told me (without sounding too upset) that he'd had a nightmare. I passed over his cup of water; he thanked me, took a drink, handed the cup back and went back to sleep.

In the morning when he woke up the first thing he said was "I had a wonderful dream!"

The next night I slept in my own bed, and Sebastian had no nightmares.

Why am I up now?

Because I haven't been sleeping well lately. Lots of dreams, weird ones, and frequent waking.

I just dreamed - very vividly - that I was reading a book. As I "read" it, I saw the images clearly. Somes were book illustrations, others were movie-style.

When I read the end, I said "Not bad. But I could have improved it."

Then I woke up. It was 5 AM on Sunday morning, and pitch dark. Slowly I realized that I hadn't read the story; I'd only dreamed it. And I knew that if I didn't get up right now and jot the idea down, I'd probably forget it by the time I woke up again later.

So I got up, turned on the computer, and wrote the idea down. The only problem is that now I'm awake. This is too damned early, and I'm too short of sleep, so I'm going to go back to bed and do my best to fall asleep again. Good night!

This was one of those crystal-clear ones.

I was young, a teenager. I lived with my friends and family in a village that was vaguely third-world, but with a technocratic elite.

Each evening we teens were ordered to come in to a large central building for special classes. The first half-hour or so was spent doing odd things, and after that, things got confusing...we always found that we'd forgotten what had happened by the next morning, when we woke up in our beds at home.

But snatches of memory started to come back to me; memories of being conditioned, of wires stuck in our heads, of injections and operations and training. Lots of training...with weapons and instruments of torture.

At night, we were a death squad. We roamed the area, killing and torturing innocent people in the name of the government. And during the day, we were our usual selves; teens, relatively happy and carefree.

I think all of us suspected or remembered, somehow, on some level. But none of us wanted to admit it. To drag that horror out of the depths of our minds and into the daylight would make it all real.

One of us was the class clown, a clever young man with a funny name. One evening in the first half-hour, when we were all hanging around in a huge gymnasium-like room in the training facility, he found a hidden switch. It brought down a huge, secret cache of weapons from the ceiling. The automatic rifles and machine guns were disassembled for storage, the parts grouped together by type.

We didn't know what to do, so we laughed. Some of us started to play with the different pieces, half-pretending we didn't know what they were. We were still playing when one of the adults came into the room.

At first we were afraid. But he congratulated the boy who'd found the switch on his cleverness, and told him he'd won a chance to prove himself still further. He and the boy would have a contest of endurance and strength. He (the adult) would be running on a treadmill; the boy would be showing his strength on a strength-testing machine.

The adult put the boy into the machine, which was a cage with a floor and ceiling of incredibly thick steel. The cage was attached by a huge pole to the ceiling. The adult got into the treadmill, and attached wires to himself. As he started to run, the cage holding the boy rose up towards the ceiling.

The adult ran, keeping a steady pace against resistance. As for the boy, the top of the cage started to press down against him. I knew it was a hydraulic press, and I knew with horror what was going to happen next. The government was going to teach us the price of rebellion.

I don't know if the others knew. They cheered the boy, urging him to press up hard against the descending press. I tried to find a way out of the room, but there were no exits. At first I looked down, desperately not wanting to see what would happen. But I was barefoot, and I could feel the drops of his blood splattering wetly on the tops of my feet.

I looked up. There was only a couple of feet left between the top and bottom of the cage; the boy was still alive, still trying to fight back. Part of me was sure that they'd slam the press closed, showering us all with his liquefied body. But they weren't that kind.

The others had stopped laughing and cheering. The press closed more, and more. At six inches it stopped, and opened up again. The boy flailed in the cage, screaming. He no longer seemed human: his skull had been split and flattened, like an orange that had been stepped on. Blood was everywhere.

I woke up.

I had a long drink of water, and then went to the bathroom. I wanted to make damned sure that that dream didn't continue.

And it didn't.

...I'm so short of sleep.

It's my own fault; I've been staying up past midnight almost every night. Lately it's because I've been on Askville a lot. But last night I managed to get into bed by 11:17.

Since my alarm goes off at 5:45 AM, and I need eight hours of sleep to function properly, this is a problem.

What made it worse is that Sebastian came into our bed last night. Teri told him several days ago that he wasn't allowed to any more, and he didn't do it again until tonight. But last night he pushed me all over the place; I didn't totally wake up, I guess (not enough to get up and move to his bed), but I definitely didn't sleep soundly!

I did manage to have a pretty strange dream, though. It was about Buckaroo Banzai. I don't remember a lot of the details, but I did have some conversations with various people from the movie, including a long one with Lord John Worfin. It was definitely a strange experience.

Then I dreamed about being in a labor union long ago...about 100 years ago, perhaps. For some reason I think that part of the dream was influenced by the books I've been reading lately, John Jakes' North and South trilogy. Although unions haven't been mentioned in them so far (I'm in the middle of the second book).

I dreamed about flying when I was in Maine this weekend.

I dream a lot about flying anyway. I love those dreams. But this one was unusual. For one thing, I flew a lot more than I usually do. And for another, I talked about flying a lot in the dream.

You see, I dreamed that I'd been dreaming about flying, and then woke up. My first reaction was "Cool! I really flew! I can't wait to write about this in LiveJournal!".

But I remembered that it had been a dream. And then I realized (still in the dream, mind you) that although I'd just dreamed about flying, I had actually flown the day before...which, of course, I had dreamed in the same dream.

Confused? So was I. Still, it was nice believing for a few minutes that I really could fly. And I think it's amusing that my first thought was that I could write about it here. :D

Has changing the clocks been as hard on you as it has on me? I'd just reached the point where I could wake up naturally at 6 AM, feeling rested and good...and this happened. Once again I have to wake up in the dark, and it's like pulling myself out of my own grave.

Thank you, George W. Bush.

Anyway: what a hell of a dream.

I was half awake, and I had a feeling that something bad was happening. And then I realized that something bad was happening: I was sleepwalking, sort of, and I watched in helpless horror as I started robbing a bank.

What was particularly bizarre was that I knew that the teller I was robbing was actually an undercover policeman. I wasn't even wearing a mask, and he was taking detailed notes about my appearance. After he filled up my bag with cash, I pointed a gun at him with a smile and ordered him to hand over all his notes as well. Then I took off, realizing as I did that I hadn't done anything about the security cameras. They had my picture, and they were sure to get me. Still, this being a nightmare, I went home and went to bed. The thought of a lifetime in prison tormented me. What would happen to Sebastian?

Finally I dozed off, only to wake a bit later wondering if the experience had been a nightmare. So I picked up the bag lying next to my bed, opened it, and with a feeling of utter horror thumbed through the stacks of stolen $5,000 bills.

Later I woke up for real, thank goodness. This isn't the first time that my sleeping brain has played that sort of sick, sick joke on me; I've dreamed that I had leukemia, that the sun was going to go nova, and that I'd helped murder an innocent couple.

Fortunately, most of my dreams are a lot more pleasant.