Nightmares

I wonder which is better, cold-sweat nightmares or lying awake for hours on end with your eyes closed thinking about many many things.  Everything you can possibly think of — good, bad, or otherwise. 

I wonder which is better and which a person would choose, to be good at what they’d love to do, or great at something that they don’t mind doing, but would rather be doing something else.

I’ve decided on another great name I would love to give one of my daughters: Charlotte.  It just has resonated with me as of late.  I get an image in my mind when I think about my daughters.  I don’t know why.  I’ve never thought of myself as someone to be a father….not as in I wouldn’t be good…I know that my passion and my love is very strong and that I would be a very good father….I just never seem to feel like it’s going to happen….not that it won’t….just that I don’t feel it happening yet.  In the past I’ve had glimpses and moments and even short periods where I thought to myself that it could be in my future….but not now.  In fact, when I really think about marriage, I’ve yet to actually feel that my future yet held it.  I’m much more reserved and introverted than anyone gives me credit for being, probably since it would seem strange that someone so outgoing and open would keep things secret, but I do.  To everyone I keep some things secret.  It is a necessity.  A lot of people say they want in…they want in that deep….but very few mean it and are ready for such things.  Very few if any at all.  Although, I feel everyday like I could handle that, but nobody has ever let me in to find out.

Trial and error is life.  Choice is all important.  Choice is everything.  We may be islands unto ourselves, but we comprise a chain, or perhaps a world….and that world has rules that influence us all and thus connect us….if we continue to make choices simply aimed for only ourselves, well we will soon destroy ourselves.  This is all coming from my dreams and my thoughts last night as I lay in delirious cold sweats on my couch in my room.  I feel ok about that.

I’m not a psychopath.  I’m disillusioned.  I don’t really know when it all started, but it basically has ended up making me rush towards the light of every promise and every word…and spill my guts out everytime I hurt or am thoughtful…to spill out a lot of me….and to appear like I’m spilling everything….but I’m always holding back.  I’m holding back a part of me that I now know wants desperately to be let out and hurt people as much as I hurt because of them.  All of them.  Not one person or another, but all. 

I am a good person.  And that should be enough for the world.  But it isn’t.  The world does not believe you really when you say it.  Last night I dreamt that I was standing in a room and these various people, not strangers, they felt familiar, but I think my optimistic side blurred their faces into unrecognizable ones so that I wouldn’t be really hurt….but they came up to me and they reached inside me and pulled out something….I kept wanting to see what it was, but I couldn’t because they wouldn’t let me. 

And there were so many people in the room, and I’m standing in the center of it and I’m happy to see them all, but one by one, after they take from me, they walk away and they leave.  And soon I am alone and it is very dark.  I dreamt there were wolves just outside the door and I could hear them howling and I knew they were waiting for me to leave.  But I didn’t leave.  I called people, not out loud but on a phone, I kept calling people but I got only busy signals….I kept searching for someone to come get me….but there was no one…and so I tried to explore the place that I was in, but it was barren and empty and dark and there was nothing.  So I just laid down in the middle of the room and closed my eyes.  And then I woke up.

I dreamt another dream about spiders crawling all over the world, they were latching onto people and everyone that they attacked turned into a withered husk of a person.  And it was happening in a large city I didn’t live in, but I knew I had to save the people inside, so I rushed in as others were rushing out and I began to fight the spiders here and there and watch as people turned to husks.  It was nothing less than awful.  As awful feeling these people die as feeling something taken from myself and run off with.  I didn’t know the people I was saving or the ones I failed to save….but there they were nevertheless.  Most were women.  Go figure.

I had a dream about Kate.  About us standing on a wharf looking out at the ocean.  It was a grey day, my second favorite kind in Wisconsin.  The ones during spring or Fall that feel like walking through a living dream.  The water was frothy and the wind was biting and I was alone on the wharf looking out at the ocean.  And Kate came and put her hand on my shoulder and I told her I was sorry and she believed me.  And then I woke up.  My mind knew too well that people just don’t heal from bad things, whether they were meant to be done that way or not.  Which is funny, because I heal like that.  i heal when I feel someone is truly sorry for hurting me….and I pray that they heal because I’m truly sorry for hurting them.  But I don’t generally feel that anyone I meet, or most, are truly sorry when they hurt me.  I believe Marie is, but Marie doesn’t hurt me.  I believe Jess is, and Jess did hurt me a few times long ago, and there is the problem.  With Jess, she hurt me, she has felt so bad about many things that I know she is good and wonderful and I don’t even think about that shit as shit anymore, I think about it as something that just happened.  There are others too, but I’m not naming all the names, I’m keeping this to myself….I’ve talked with Marie and Jess about this so I can include them as such.  I guess then I can say that I don’t believe Dana is sorry for what she’s done against me….but I’m hoping she will realize that people aren’t horrible people and that being sorry isn’t a bad thing.  Even when you haven’t done much wrong….that sympathy is a blessing to have….not a fucking weakness.  That to be strong is to not cut people off or drive them away or yell at them for their pity and misery….but Dana I don’t think understands this.  She says she doesnt’ know how to give sympathy and, like a lot of people, believes that that makes up for the fact that she really barely tries to give it.

It’s unfair, when I think about my life and my attitude, that I have to quallify with proof that I am not like what I don’t like.  I know I’m not this way, but people can spin anything in our world….everything is about spin.  I know it.  I’ve got a sharp eye for spin….I know how to use it but I don’t.  I recognize it clearly in everyone.  I know when people aren’t saying things, I know when they’re lying…I’m a very good card player.  But like in cards, a lot is just dumb fucking luck and no matter your skill, there is a very significant chance that you’ll be beaten by someone less talented, someone worse th

an you, who just has dumb luck on his side.  There is such a thing as luck. 

I dreamt another dream last night about fighting skeletons with a blowdryer….but I think that had something to do with my roommate primping himself after a night out….why he primps himself to go to bed don’t ask me.  I thought I’d lighten the mood for a moment.

This is a day to take advantage of me.  Not as in a day to pull one over, but a day to partake in me, because this day is the grey day of waking dreams.  They do not happen often here in California.  But these are the days of Wisconsin that I miss.  The days where things are still and silent, you can feel the bristling life underneath, they are not dead, they are waiting silently for the miracle.  They are reflections of my hopes and aspirations.  They are saying, now we are barren, but come a day of light, we will be fruitful and beautiful and perfect. 

I had another dream.  To me it was an important one but I’m not going to explain it, I’m just going to describe it.

I was standing in the yard in front of a house I had never seen before but which I felt was home.  I saw myself as aged a bit, but not much.  Just a little.  The house was beautiful, it was my imagination’s favorite kind.  It was in Wisconsin, I don’t know how I knew that but that’s what I knew.  It was on a lake.  It was a lot like the house in Wisconsin we have now in terms of surroundings…but the house itself was very different.  I was in the yard, I was dressed in a beautiful white suit.  I was digging with my hands  in the soft dirt in a corner where the house jutted like an L, and in that crook I was digging into soft soil and letting it sift through my fingers in a pile to the right.  And there in the hole I placed a seed. 

I buried it and sat down in a chair and watched it.  It rained hard on me and mud splattered my suit and I was upset and impatient but I stayed.  There was the sound of wolves again in the distance but though I could see them prowling around the edges as the day grew dark, I stood my ground and waited.  They attacked and bit me and drew my blood and I beat them off.  They remained just outside until the day came again and then they were gone.  But the day disappeared quickly and it began to hail and the wolves attacked.  And this time the fight lasted long and it was terrible and they bit at me and drew blood and I thought I was going to die.  But I didn’t.  Lightning in the sky frightened them off.   Day came as I got to my feet and I turned around and the seed had grown into a tree covered with flowers of red and white, there were vines that wound their way through the porch railings and creeped up the side of the house and the tree leaned against the house, nestled in the crook of the L. 

It was a fantastic dream.  Something out of a novel….or a movie.  It was perfect.  It was how  I woke up this morning.  I don’t know why wolves haunt my dreams so constantly as of late.  But they do.  I should do some work now.