over the cliff

Before I begin, I’d like to warn you that you might want to skip this entry. It won’t be pretty.

I’m not kidding. It’s about car accidents.

On the way back to Carbondale on Sunday, I was stopped in traffic along I-40 near Asheville. After about 40 minutes of stop stop go… I reached the overpass where I saw maybe two dozen people standing near the railing and watching something. A few more minutes of stop stop go and I saw the ambulances. And the firetrucks. And the car in the woods, burnt to a crisp.

I looked it up that night online, and the next day, and today… to see if I could find any information on the wreck. But I couldn’t. It bothers me that I can’t find out for sure if everyone survived. Maybe that explains why last night I relived the day my brother drove us into the woods and the car burned to a crisp.

Now for the not so pretty part… for some reason in this dream, I became obsessed with my injury. I wanted to see it, and I wanted it to be absolutely horrifying. Thus I was disappointed when everytime I looked in the mirror, it was all stitched up. Then I started running my fingers through my hair–it’s a nervous habit–and for some reason everytime I did that, my hair became more bloody (btw… I was also a blonde for some reason). So I kept doing it. Then I looked in the mirror, and I realized that this action had somehow gotten rid of the stitches, and now where my forehead met my scalp was separated. Oh and I was a brunette again. I stood there, looking at myself, right hand pulling the hair away from my forehead and consequently pulling my scalp away from my forehead. There was… a hole. In my head. Bloody. I wanted to touch it. Then I woke up.

I just had… the most… bizarre dream ever. Don’t believe me? Judge for yourself.

The dream starts as I’m watching an episode of Friends. The character Joey is talking about he wants to run into some girl that he thinks is pretty and how he got in trouble with the city for trespassing on her terrace. So someone says something about a visitation pass–and the next thing I see is Joey climbing up the fire escape until he gets to the terrace of this girl’s apartment and the girl ends up being that blonde lawyer in his spin off show.

So then I’m talking to the blonde chick, and we’re both talking about what a long drive it is from New Orleans (where we are apparently) to… somewhere. And I said ‘well it’s a shame that you have your car down here otherwise you could drive with me.’ She says ‘hmmm’ and all of the sudden we’re driving together–only now this girl is like a cross between the blonde lawyer chick from ‘Joey’ and my old friend Candace Eckstein. And she’s saying that she just doesn’t know what Law school to go to. And she also starts telling me about this organization that I want to say was named ‘Ethos’ only it was like a mix of Satanism and Neoconservatism and how she liked it because it was different but they were too extreme for her. I tell her that when I was looking at MFA programs I visited this school in Madison that had really great diversity–so we go and when we arrive we go in for their information session and we tell the guy that I’ve been there before (for the information session) and told my friend it was great. He says ‘Well they’ve already started and I think what you saw was something different entirely because we’ve changed it’. We leave. I don’t know why.

So we’re walking around this school, whose hallways are eerily similar to Ellot of my old high school, and talking about how the Information guy looked a lot like James Van Derbeek (sp??). In one part of the building they’re filming this movie–like a student film–only they’re filming in Black & White. I don’t mean black and white film, I mean the actors we’re looking at and the small set (office scene, person at desk and two guys talking) are in black and white. And I see one of those big industrial light things that’s pointing at him and think ‘oh, they have some special light that when it shines on them it turns them black & white). So we go back walking the way we came, and suddenly we’re passing through some professor’s bedroom/office and we have to run.

So then I say ‘how about I show you my office’ (so I guess we magically transported back to SIU only not?). And we run into Evon (GA here at SIU) and my friend blonde lawyer chick from ‘Joey’/Candace (in this part she was more Candace) knows Evon and I don’t know why. But happy reunion time. So we head up this stairway and at the top of the stairs is a stack. It’s the old printer from my office and a bunch of my papers. For some reason I know that now my keys won’t work in my office door but I don’t know why–and blonde lawyer chick/Candace is suddenly gone from the dream. I head downstairs and I run into Catherine Powell (girl I went to highschool with) and she says ‘Oh I know why they stacked that–you’ve lost your assistantship.’

‘Why?’ I ask

‘They’ve been going by classrooms to make sure people are teaching’

‘But I’ve been to every class. I may have let them out early some days but I’ve taken attendance’

So she tells me to take the attendance sheets to Dr. Amos. Then I think how nice it was for them to remove all the papers from my office so I can find the attendance folder. So as I’m getting all these things out, I walk to this cafeteria like place where Dr. Amos is eating/talking to… someone. As I’m about to slam the attendance sheets on his desk and chew him out and/or beg for my job back… I wake up.

So… anyone want to interpret that for me?

I had the strangest dream last night. I got engaged. To Adam. I think my reasoning behind it was “Well I have to get married to someone…”

Then the dream changed to something about comparing St. Catherine’s School of Richmond to St. Catherine’s School of somewhere in England for a term paper in Black Lit. There was a line discussing the efficacy of having a religious mascot during sports games. Then the dream shifted to an infomercial for some woman’s singing career… and the woman turned out to be Shawna McCarthy (the editor for Realms of Fantasy for everyone who reads this except Oliver).

If anyone would like to hazard a guess as to the interpretation of this dream… feel free. I left out a few details though… diamonds that kept falling out of their setting, Captain Jack Sparrow, and wrapping up a sled in packing paper.

…Maybe I should go take my medication now.

I had a dream last night that all 3 of my poems were accepted by “Dreams and Nightmares”. This means that they shall all be rejected. I have reverse dream psychic ability, it’s uncanny. It works especially well for tests. Of course my rational mind says that this ability comes from my own reasonable expectations of the result. What intrigues me is how my mind flips the result. Perhaps it’s like how the eyes work. The picture actually comes in upside down, and it’s up to your brain to flip it right side up. Only in this instance, my brain is flipping it instead of righting it. Brains are funny.

I also had a dream about my grandmother last night. It was the same scene over and over again. Putting her in the car. At first she knew what we were doing, then as the scene repeated she got more and more confused. The last dream I had about her was one the night she died. She was just walking towards me. That’s all.