thu 22 aug 1996 02:00:00 — brookline, ma
infidelity & wood splinters
[a long convoluted dream] begins when i am talking to a woman — she's a small woman with dark longish hair, someone who it is clear likes me and would be receptive to me. she's a bit like "little pat" i knew when i lived with stephanie. not pat h but the other one. or maybe like someone else again. anyway she is someone who would be not unattainable.
i think this is a dream about infidelity.
she is about to take me someplace, and i am ready to go with her. it's like we've just come from a movie or something and i feel like i need to call d first before i go. she tells me go ahead, call her. and tell her ________. she has this advice what i should say, at the time i can't comprehend it but it sounds a lot like i'll be home when i'm done. so i go back into the building to get to the phone. or actually i guess maybe we are still both in the building and i am gonna meet her at the exit. she'll wait for me right here. i remember how i made her promise to wait for me right here.
now i start remembering this stuff. the feeling is that i have had this dream before, what ever that means — i don't really remember having dreamed it, but in the dream this has happened before. likewise i remember the woman from earlier such experiences, she's not new to me, we've been down this road before.
[in the dream] there are a lot of young people in the building. for a time it is places in buffalo where i recognize some of the hippies from annie's party. i remember that the phone is like way upstairs someplace. then there are times when i realize i am inside the lobby of the orson welles cinema, which does not exist any more. but the lobby is steep with stepped terracing. old concrete. other parts are like those old houses where the hippies came to live. my trouble is i have to keep ducking around back and forth through this people that are having a party it seems, and i need to get upstairs, but i can't find the stairs. i go to the back and the front and back again, then i find the stairs, i go up but then i come down again and have to go up again, and each time i have to search hard for the stairway itself. also i am a bit drunk and bumping into things, almost knocking over expensive stereo equipment.
finally i go up the stairs and i remember the secret annexe of the DAR building and how we used to go hang out there when nobody else was home, it was a place of sophistication and worldliness. big ceilings. (there was no secret annexe at the DAR building but this is something which in the dream i feel i have dreamed before.)
but this is not where the phone is, i think — i have to go into that weird little shed. i cross the roof. a huge rat comes running straight at me, i kick and it seems to disappear then i realize it's hovering right behind me. then i don't know what i do. somehow the time when i find the phone is ellipsed out, but i think i do find the phone. and then everything's okay and i am coming back down to find my "date", she's not in the lobby where i left her. it becomes more like the movie theater lobby and less like a house party. i try going this way and that.
i seem to be near a concessionaire's counter, (it really is a movie theater lobby now) and he calls out to me by saying "dave, come over here." and comments to his friends that dave is gonna sleep with so and so. the dark haired one. he wants to give me an ice cream. but i don't think i take ice cream. the other people waiting there laugh when i say something like,
"she must be two-timing me, cuz i'm not dave."
(this plays out a couple of ways in my memory. in one, i am trying not to pay attention to the ice cream guy, but he is saying to the waiting people, if anyone wants to order the large, 40 ounce custard, you get some extra ice cream. and demonstrates by packing more of it in to the same size cup. the thing i remember is that as he packed it in, it still filled the same space, it seemed like the ice cream was fluffy enough that it just kinda melted as you packed it in, so i wondered what the great "extra" was.)
anyway the thing is i am having trouble finding her, the small dark haired woman who was willing to take me as a lover. and i am saying to myself, i blew it again, because this has happened before. something about my conservatism. or lack of courage. because i had to go make the phone call, i've missed my opportunity again. and i am not exactly despairing because this does not surprise me — and yet i continue my search. i think i go back and forth through the house some more. again i feel more awkward, as if some thing i drank has finally hit me and i am drunk.
then it occurs to me she might be waiting for me outside, so i go outside onto the street. get away from the crowd.
it is here that i notice i have something in my mouth which i'm about to swallow and choke on. i've got some old wood splinters in my mouth and i spit them out, coughing a little to get them out of the back of my mouth, realizing i must have chewed on them while i was navigating that old building, with the rats. i have been unknowingly chewing wood the whole time. must have picked it up in that blank spot when i was making my phone call. and i'm thinking, wood splinters in my mouth again? in the dream this has all happened (or been dreamt) before.
but i realize then that she will come, that must be her in the distance. that all i had to do was spit out this wood. and that's when i wake up.
[note 2007: looking back, i could say this dream was ever so slightly prophetic. sgc]