Nightmares in White Satin

*gasp*

I woke up last night in a cold sweat, my heart racing from unseen terrors inside of my head.

The dream was cryptic – most likely symbolic.  Perhaps I am too close to it to analyse it properly.  All I know is, it left me weak and trembling, groping for the light to banish the dark shadows where danger seemed to lurk in every corner.

I offer it up to you now – perhaps you can make sense of it and help me understand what warning my own fragile psyche is attempting to send.

The Dream:  I am being prepared for some sort of ritual – a sacrifice, perhaps?  My face is painted, my hair arranged.  I am forced into a ridiculously huge white gown and draped with flowers (premature funerary rites?)

There is a great feast – wine and sweet cakes everywhere (a pagan celebration?  An offering to the gods?)

I am frog-marched by relatives through the mob to an altar.  Small children are frolicking before me, tossing flower petals at my feet, obviously relishing the bloodshed which is about to ensue – it’s like the Children of the Corn, for god’s sake.

I am struggling, demanding that they listen as I protest.  “BUT I’M NOT A VIRGIN!  I SWEAR!  ASK ANYONE!”  But they do not listen.

As the end comes, all goes black.  I wake up screaming.

Thoughts?  Anyone?

Sunsets and Skyscrapers

 

 

There is a photo on my desk that people often ask about.  It’s a photo of a young, tall blonde boy, barechested in low-slung jeans and hiking boots, wearing leather cuff bracelets and a bear-tooth on a thong around his neck, playing guitar, his hair hanging in his eyes.

Most of my boyfriends get very jealous and weird when they see it.

But have you ever been lucky enough to meet someone who was able to show you an upside-down view of the world and make you a better person for it?  That’s what Tim was to me.  I keep his photo there not as a tribute to our relationship, but to remind me of the freedom he helped me find.  I believe that people show up in your life when you need them.  Tim was one of those people.  I sometimes wonder if he was even really real.

I was 24.  Working two jobs.  Sleeping…rarely.  A pre-med student specializing in neuroscience, planning to undertake four more years in a basement laboratory in order to: a) prove to myself that I wasn’t stupid; b) prove to my family that I wasn’t stupid; and c) hopefully, along the way, help others.

I wasn’t happy.  But I’d kind of given up on ‘happy.’ 

It was summer break, and my best friend and I were indulging in a rare night on the town.  We were stumbling up the hill toward our favourite alternative club, Birdland, when Keri grabbed my head and pointed it in his direction.  “Look at that guy!  He looks just like Leonardo DiCaprio!”  

He and a friend, I would later learn was Darrell – also beautiful, with shoulder-length curly auburn hair – were busking with their guitars outside the Art College.

I was wasted.  I wanted to dance.  I could have cared less about Leonardo DiCaprio lookalikes.  But we went over and said hi.  And somehow ended up inviting them to join us at Birdland.  As we walked, we paired up – Keri with Darrell, leaving me to speak to Tim.

He was 20.  He had busked/hitched his way across the continent after spending time in the Mexican rainforests with nothing more than a tent, a blanket, a tin cup and a journal.

By the time we hit the club, Tim and I were in a full-out debate about life in general…and hours later, still at it.  We talked about the western part of the country that I had never seen.  He told me about the mountains I had never seen.  He belonged to another time – he was fresh air and earth, innocence and an old soul.

He moved in with me the next day.

That summer, this younger, much freer man drilled me about myself.  He was my mirror and I was his.  He had grown up the middle child in a middle-class family much like my own, but longed for more.  Unlike me, he had stopped trying to please others long ago.  He went out of his way, in fact, to test people.  In public, he deliberately acted like a jerk to try to offend people.  Later, we analysed one another and when I told him my impression was that he purposely tried to drive people away just to see if they would climb over his hurdles, he became pensive, and admitted I was the first one to ever point that out.  He constantly tested the limits of society.  I was fascinated by the strength of his sense of self; although alone, he was romantic and vulnerable.  When I asked about his travels, envious, “What colour are the Northern Lights?”, he paused for a moment, thinking, and then said, “They’re the same colour as your eyes – green and gold, with bits of blue.”

We read each other’s diaries.  We wrote in each other’s diaries.  He drove me nuts, because he would wake me in the morning, playing Velvet Underground songs on his guitar, singing at the top of his lungs, or he would storm out of bed, dragging the blankets with him.  When I followed, cold, with hands on hips, to demand what he was doing, he would laugh and hold his arms open, saying, “I just wanted to see if you would follow.”  He dug around in my apartment, scanning my bookshelves, pulling out long-abandoned paintings and demanding to know why they weren’t finished.

The moment that changed my life was the night we were heading out of town in my car, with friends in the backseat and Tim riding shotgun.  I was so used to the jaded ‘city’ mentality – keeping up with the Jones’, making fun of anything that wasn’t ‘hip’ and ‘of-the-moment’, that I didn’t get it when we drove past what was obviously someone of a very lower class – wacky wardrobe, slight stagger – and Tim muttered under his breath, “Oh – would you just look at that!” 

A part of me shut down.  I was so disappointed in him.  I had thought he was above making fun of people for how they looked.  I shot him a glare from the driver’s seat and heaved a massive sigh.  He looked at me, mystified.  I began to explain my disappointment, when he said, “Come on – have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”

And I looked where he was pointing – and saw, beyond the skyscrapers, beyond the city skyline – the most gorgeous sunset, magenta and orange, filling the evening sky, that I had ever seen.  He hadn’t even noticed the person on the sidewalk.  That shame remains with me today.

He stayed with me for the summer.  His friend Darrell, after having a brief fling with my best friend Keri, headed off back to Alberta, but Tim decided to stay.  I was torn – I didn’t know how to resume my basement laboratory life with him in it. 

He asked me to come back out west with him.  He said, in his middle-child-afraid-to-commit way, “We should get married on a mountaintop in the Rockies.” 

I couldn’t.  I had responsibilities.  I was committed to finishing school.  I was a grownup. 

One morning, I awoke in a blaze of sunshine and he was watching me.  He said, “I think today is a good day to hit the road.”  And I knew it was the right thing.  I was sad, but it was time.

So we said good-bye.

I’ve never really regretted not going with him…because Tim taught me to accept that there is a part of me that can never tow the line, resign to the status quo, be happy with city skylines. 

A few weeks after he left, I covered my car with painted flowers.  And I did the drive west that we had talked about.

I finished my degree, but opted to defer grad studies.  I had things to do first.  I needed to see the Northern Lights for myself.  Now, I’m pursuing my art for real.

And you know?  The men who come into my life have nothing to fear.  That photo on my desk is not a symbol of my regret.  It’s a talisman, a reminder of who I really am - a reminder to look beyond the skyline and not lose her again in other people’s dreams.

Alarm Clock Tyranny

If you’ve been following along, you already know how I feel about my voicemail.  I assure you, this fear and loathing has nothing on the emotions I feel in regard to my alarm clock.  I harbour serious, deep and lingering resentment toward this evil work of technology.  How the day begins is very important – it can set the tone for the next 24 hours.  Having this nasty little machine blasting me with its horrifying sound is not what I need in my first seconds of consciousness.

When I am Queen of the World, things are going to be different. 

ACCEPTABLE WAYS TO WAKE UP:

• Kisses.  You can never go wrong with kisses.  Similarly, most sex-related options are generally acceptable, as long as they are initiated by someone you intended to be in the bed with you when you awaken.
• Soft, golden sunlight (the summery kind, not the cold, bright white wintery stuff), streaming in through billowing curtains, accompanied by gentle ocean breezes.
• Birds – but the cute, chirpy kind, not the crowing kind (with the possible exception of a properly functioning rooster clock *see below)
• Strawberries, chocolate croissants and freshly-squeezed orange juice being delivered by a personal manservant.
• Publisher’s Clearing House banging on the door to let you know you’ve won the big one.

However, I realize that none of these options are guaranteed on any sort of reliable basis, so another solution to the whole having-to-go-to-work thing must be found.

Now, my friend Pam also has an aversion to screeching buzzy noises and has decided she would rather wake up to the sound of my delightful voice, and because she works days and I work nights, I give her wake-up calls every morning.  Wake-up calls wouldn’t work for me.  Having a rather blurred line between reality and REM, I bear an uncanny ability to incorporate outside stimuli into my dreams.  I can carry on entire phone conversations and then roll right back over and go back to sleep, without remembering a thing about it the next day.  Which has resulted in my mother, while giving me important information over the phone, being prone to randomly shouting out, “Are you awake?!  Are you going to remember this?!” 

I am, in general, a happy and optimistic person – I believe there is no problem in this world that cannot be solved.  So I have gone to great lengths to improve this alarm clock situation.  Years ago, I had a revelation and I threw away my cheap, crappy, screechy digital alarm clock and went on the hunt for The Perfect Alarm Clock.  I bought and returned so many different clocks that the employees of every Eaton’s, Sears, Radio Shack, Hudson’s Bay Company and Circuit City for miles around were on alert to go into lockdown when they saw me coming.

There was the really funky one that sounded like a rooster.  I liked that one.  But it lost five minutes on every hour.  Back it went.

There was the very expensive one that attempts to wake you with increasing levels of (hah!) light.  Don’t even get me started on that one.

Then I saw a cute little retro clock – you know, those cartoony ones with the bells on top?  I was tickled with this, because I love anything vaguely pre-1960.  I imagined myself in an old black and white movie, sleeping gracefully draped with silk sheets, wearing a satin eye mask, with perfectly-arranged hair and makeup, waking to the cute jingle of my cute little retro clock.  HAH!  Have you ever heard one of these things?  Oh.  My.  GOD. 

I contemplated the clock radios…but I am just far too sensitive to tunes to allow someone else to program the soundtrack for my entrance into a new day.

When I was younger, my parents gave me an alarm clock that was built into a baseball – you actually had to chuck it against a wall to make it shut up.  Yeah, whatever.  I busted it on the third day.  Great idea, but they obviously didn’t know about me when they designed it.

But these experiences were not wasted.  Over time, I fine-tuned and refined my idea of The Perfect Alarm Clock.  It had to be analog – none of those glowing red demonic numbers.  It had to be battery-operated (in case of power outages).  It had to fit in my hand, because I have this lame-o thing I do…  When the alarm goes off in the morning, I grab the clock, press snooze and then clutch the clock in my hand to keep myself from falling back asleep too deeply.  And then I keep pressing snooze about 5 or 6 times before I finally peel myself out of bed.  So The Perfect Alarm Clock would also definitely require a snooze button.  And it had to have a light, so that when I wake in panic thinking I’ve overslept, I can light up the clock and see what time it really is.  (Yes, this happens more than I want to admit.)  It also had to have a reasonably pleasant sound.  Beeps, not screams.

Well, I finally found the perfect alarm clock.  I did.  (Bear in mind that all things being relative, this was the best one I could find considering all alarm clocks are the work of Satan.)  It was Perfect.  Even Martha Stewart had rated it The Best.  And it wakes you up with a gentle beepbeepbeepbeep….beepbeepbeepbeep, which gradually increases in volume should you be tempted to ignore it.

Things went great, for almost 10 years.  Then the relationship went sour when I accidentally knocked it off the nightstand and things were never the same after that.  It was a tragic day.  I’m still in therapy.

But, I figured it wouldn’t be so bad – I’d just buy another one.  It was only 10 bucks, for heaven’s sake.  So I went back to the store where I bought it and bought another.  But after a single test run, my new little friend almost wound up in the river.  It was NOT THE SAME CLOCK!  Upon returning to the shop and interrogating the clerk like he was keeping my first-born hostage, the little wanker mumbled something about the company merging with another and discontinuing the original clock. 

ARGH!!

Well, I finally found a substitute.  And though I frequently plot against it, fantasize about it being kidnapped or assassinated, consider taking out a restraining order or suing it for mental anguish, it’s okay.  It’s a Timex.  It’s decoratively pleasing.  But truly, it’s not the same.

In Praise of Sleep

I love sleep. I mean I really, really love sleep. I love sleep like Juliet loved Romeo. I would throw myself in front of a bus for sleep. I need, at minimum, seven hours sleep to be human. I prefer nine or ten. I have been known, on more than one occasion, to sleep up to 15 or 16 hours without so much as a pee break. (And yes, I know that’s obscene in this day and age. Don’t care.)

People often assume that I don’t sleep. People are under this weird assumption that because I am slightly (slightly) type-A, I don’t sleep. People think that because I have a lot of interests and get a fair amount done in the run of my day, I must not be sleeping. People think that because I am energetic, I don’t sleep. People are stupid.

Now, I will confess that there was a time when I didn’t sleep much. When I was in theatre school, it was four or five hours a night, tops. But I managed to supplement this pittance with 10-minute power naps on the smelly couches in the student lounge, massive amounts of 35-cent sludge coffee from the theatre department kitchen, and the occasional doze in the dark of the rehearsal hall. I’ve even taken naps in my car in the Dal parking lot. I didn’t really mind not sleeping then, because I was…well…drunk a lot of the time. At the time, my motto was similar to that of my biodad: “Sleeping is for dead people.”

Then I started developing weird habits. My ex tells me that I used to fall asleep mid-sentence while we were talking in bed. I frequently woke him in the middle of the night with my talking; he would participate in full conversations with me that I wouldn’t remember in the morning because I hadn’t actually been awake. Several times, he caught me walking in my sleep. Once, he found me lying on the kitchen floor in a puddle of blood – in a dream, I’d been cutting the ends off of candles in order to make them fit in the candleholder…and sure enough, on the bloody floor beside me were a tapered candle and a paring knife. My finger healed up okay, though. Doug took a bit longer to recover.

Happily all this strange behavior ended once I was diagnosed with a sleep disorder. I won’t go into all the technical details, but basically, my brain doesn’t make enough sleepy-drug. Most people experience four different levels of sleep, and it’s the fourth phase that makes you feel rested in the morning. I was only going to the third phase (REM sleep, where you experience dreams…and sleep-walking.) So although I was sleeping, I was tired all the time, thus the falling-asleep-mid-sentence thing. Now I take medication that regulates that and I sleep like a normal person.

And OH! How I sleep! Oh, yes, I do.

Sleep is a religious experience for me now. I take it very seriously.

First of all, environment. My bed, I have been told and I truly believe, is the most comfortable bed in the world. It begins with a nice firm mattress. Then you counter the firmness with lots of cush – meaning eggcrate foam topped by a feather bed, topped by crisp white linens (for some reason, sheets must be white for me to be truly, deliciously happy – my favourites being the starched vintage ones trimmed in handmade lace and embroidery inherited from my grandmother.) Sleeping in my bed is like sleeping on a cloud.

Then there is the whole pillow issue. I am quite ridiculous when it comes to my pillow. I panic at the thought of the day my pillow dies and I need to search for a new one. My pillow is light and fluffy and broken in just the right amount. There is no other pillow like my pillow. If a bedmate attempts to use my pillow instead of the three other available pillows, they experience the wrath and quickly learn their place. I have occasionally been tempted to name my pillow, but that would just be silly. Names are for cats and cars and bicycles.

The fact that I work the graveyard shift is not even a problem. My bedroom is equipped with a soft cotton blind that diffuses the sun and simulates dusk. Then I don the all-important black mask that turns the day into night and put in my earplugs, tell myself that I am just like my distant cousin Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (my mask actually has eyelashes, too) and drift off blissfully.

It doesn’t end there, though – oh, no. Sleepy time is when I do some of my best work. In that twilight place before sleep comes, I meditate, I work on my writing (I am able to remember entire chapters the next day, believe it or not), I practice windsurfing maneuvers and skydives and plan my bike routes. I even focus on what I hope to dream about, planting the seeds for good adventures that night.

The only thing I don’t like about sleep is that whole alarm clock thing. I’m still working on that one.

I wish I could marry sleep.

 

REM

Okay – anyone who knows me well knows that I have THE wickedest dreams…dreams of epic proportions. Dreams of high adventure. Dreams that rock my world.

Tonight’s dream:

As a secret operative (I am often a secret agent in my sleep – similar to how I am one in real life…), I was undercover at a Star Trek convention. (No idea.) My partner and I were dressed in the traditional Starship Enterprise uniforms – yellow (I’m not sure what rank that made us…something terribly powerful, though, I’m sure) – which was lucky, due to their similarity to skydiving jumpsuits. (You’ll see…)

When the bad guys left the convention, we followed them in a high-speed chase down a perilously steep and twisting mountain road, until they discovered we were tailing them. The bad guys pulled over and as they exited their vehicle, we could see that they were wearing parachute rigs. In the blink of an eye, they were over the side of the cliff and gone.

“Dammit!” I yelled to my partner, who was now that Data guy from Star Trek (I have no idea what was up with the Star Trek connection.) “They’re BASE-jumping! We could follow them, but [mentally calculating the ratio of distance x falling speed at terminal velocity] in the few seconds it would take us to strap on our rigs, they’ll be long gone!”

“Don’t worry about it!” Data replied. “Just follow me!” And with that, he dove off the cliff, sans parachute.

Freaking out because he forgot his rig, I watched him fall partway down the abyss and then, because of special material that had been grafted onto his fingertips by our tech team, he was able to latch onto the cliff wall – Spidey-style.

Exhilerated by that reassuring news, I immediately followed. And trust me – while I loooove skydiving in real life, NOTHIN’ compares to freefall in dreams! NOTHIN’!

(The special Spiderman finger stuff ate away my nail polish, though. So it still has some bugs to be worked out.)

After a successful parachute-less BASE jump, we went to the ballet. I really like ballet.

(Then I became lucid in the dream, realized I’d forgotten to set my alarm clock – and woke up with exactly enough time to have a shower and go to work.)