dream

The Dream

There are sometimes when you sink slowly into a soft chair and sigh and stare. Stare away into space, drifting slowly in the unknown, into the wall in front of you.  But you don’t see the wall.  Your eyes are blind while your mind imagines things far away.  Pictures, images, flowing on and on solidifying as they go forming stories…

It’s a pretty nice day.  You start laughing.  People all around you, people you like.  Playing cards or trying to. Smoking cigarettes.  More people.  You want to move.  Dark clouds slowly appear and surround you emptying themselves noisily, flashing out at you in a split second.  The lightening touches a telephone pole, people start to panic, but it isn’t real.  The pictures of the mind not letting you see.  Seemingly worthless pieces of cloth weigh you down as you manipulate your body outside the door.  Wandering picture by picture up the pavement into the lush green, colorful mountains where you see for miles and the trees make patterns in the distance.  Rolling in the grass and laughing.  Water seeping through onto every part of your body.  You don’t even notice.  You fall into a ditch and can’t stop laughing.  Roses.  Wet, rainbow roses watching you.  They are magnetic, you kill them and take them home watching them all the way, skipping, running, trudging.  The sun is coming out.

The room is a mess.  trunks on beds, toilet paper everywhere, shoes on the ceiling.  People walking around inside not seeming to notice.  running up the road there is nothing you can do.  You run around making noise and lose yourself.  You sit on the steps watching the rain and the trees in the distance.  Beings cleaning up the room, painting themselves, putting on their best clothes.  Prom night and you think you should throw a dress on.  Which dress? Orange brown butterfly dress.

Floating through the dining room wishing you were someplace else. The bathroom lights are bright, somebody hands you something, you take it.  The water tastes good.  You wonder what it is but don’t really care.  Everybody is dancing and dancing and things start getting wild and so do you.  You are the last to get home, stumbling in. They are talking about the lizards.  They’ve been watching them all night playing in the rafters.  Friendly little things.   It reminds you of the airport in Milan after a long trip that wasn’t quite over.

Things slowly come into focus, the wall is there in front of you and everything is like it was before or seems to be as far as you can remember but you don’t really think about it.  You just pull yourself up and move along.

The Commute

I got off work and was dead tired.  I’d been up since 5 am, caught the 6:30 bus and was at work at 7.  It was now 4:15 pm and I was hoping to catch the 4:35 express home.  I sat down on the bus stop metal bench to wait.  I closed my eyes and started to decompress.  Drifting through thoughts, reliving moments from the day, striving for emptiness.

I felt somebody sit down next to me briefly.  That brief moment of consciousness, coming to the moment in time.  Then the shock of impact.  I opened my eyes and looked down.  A drunk homeless guy had landed his head in my lap.  The greasy hair sitting like a pool.  I didn’t want to touch it.  I didn’t know what to do.  I froze.  I had to do something.  I decided he was probably feeling no pain so I just got up.  His head fell to the bench.  He readjusted himself and started to snore.  He had gotten the better of me.  I was now alert and standing and he was comfortable in his new space.

Ugh, the perfect end to my day.

The bus was crowded.  There was one seat next to the driver in the front.  I started to relax.  A couple of stops later an elderly women got on the bus.  Her umbrella became a weapon.  I was young and she was old.  Get up! Get up!!  I gave her my seat and dangled on the overhead bar.

Home beckoned me.

Ahhh, the joy of the commute.  Such interesting and colorful people.

To sleep, perchance to dream….