Last night I had a dream that someone I haven’t seen in years, an old friend turned non-friend turned lost ghost, stole my Satipo machete and first tried to kill me with it, then ran away so I couldn’t get the machete back. I chased her to a restaurant where she worked. She had hid the machete in the industrial kitchen, and I tried to fight her to get it back. I was really nuts without my machete. Perhaps this is the kind of dream you have when you hang a very large weapon/tool next to your bed.

And now I have to make an August to-do list, which will illustrate exactly how sickeningly academic my life has become, not that I am complaining in the least:

• Contact a host for Humboldt Fellowship application
• Submit Peru project proposal
• Nail down thesis topic on m-governance, prepare presentation for Sept.
• Write article for CMS magazine
• Finish organizing Peru video clips, edit a cut for C4
• Write paper or propose workshop for Berlin technology & society conference
• Update on PE web development, including design, to NYC partners pre-Thailand trip
• Skype conference with P. in Lima re: video interview with CEO
• Glass Lab documentary: post to MIT Tech TV and other sites
• Come up with syllabus amendments for Digital Poetry class
• Clean bathroom

This is drastically different from one year ago, when my to-do list consisted of eating cookies and buying flip flops. How far we’ve come!

But what was interesting about this dream, like many others, was that the kids were so real. They were about 6 and 8 in the dream, and I remember during the dream thinking, whoa, they really look and SOUND like they did at that age, and I haven’t seen them like this in so long. It’s like their child selves still exist in a parallel unconscious universe. W.’s voice was always distinctive; A.’s as well. I could see their white-blonde hair and the way W.’s eyebrows would wrinkle when she became intense about something. It was one of those vortex moments, when you’re not here but not there either, reliving something that never actually happened, but almost, almost…

Meanwhile, last night I had a dream that my brother landed in a tiny spaceship that looked like one of those tiny M&M-esque European cars, and we flew over a not-quite-real world en route to some sporting event. This might be partially explained by a documentary I watched the night before, which included an aerial helicopter flight over central London, and partly by my longing to play sports.

Meanwhile, Burma is completely without water or electricity and I’m hoping my former colleagues returned from their Burma trip already, and are not in fact stuck in Rangoon. I get so mad when I read how the military claims the cyclone wrecked internet connections, when in fact the regime cut all internet access months ago as a means of media control. You can’t get online in Burma without a satellite connection, and right now you can’t get on at all. I’ll post updates if I get any.

In other news, I had an “Overheard in Beantown” moment this afternoon, at the corner of Boylston and Exeter Streets: two tough-looking men were walking past me, and one of them said to the other, “I know it sounds kind of corny, but I really believe that–” and then they were out of earshot. I wish I could go back in time to hear the rest of that conversation. Sigh.

Here’s one example of a dream I had a few weeks ago:

Click to play

her face. this was meant
to save us both, the future,
etc. still,

she smiled and turned,
used large words she didn’t yet
understand the way

i used to at that
age. makes sense, right? she was me –
polysyllabic,

too sarcastic in
ways funny only to her.
endearingly gauche.

what a small, coy thing
you are, i didn’t say, and
noticed the way her

hair parted, scalp showed,
the incessant talking and
how her braids bended.

behind her stood some
others: the 80s version
of my mother, plus a

dear old friend, now gone.
much like our waking dream will,
the night dream ended.

In other news,

I keep having nightmares about octopus. The moral of that story is never watch your friend eat baby octopus — whole — at a sushi bar, or anywhere else for that matter. Last night’s dream was about a girl at a pet shop who took care of this one little octopus and loved it, but I bought it off her, then I didn’t take care of it, then it stung me and crawled on me, then it became a giant spider and the girl picked it up. I returned it to her, told her to keep it and love it because I couldn’t, I didn’t want it after all, it was a scary aggressive octopus for Pete’s sake. [Cue Zak Smith's octopus drawing! Now!]

In self-oriented audio-visual news,
I still can’t think of a valid film idea, and my editor doesn’t want to do the 48-hr film project again, despite our win last year. I’m crying on the inside. On the outside, I’m just freezing.

Last night I had a strange strange dream. It didn’t make enough sense for me to summarize it fully, but I’ll say this much:

There was a party at a house. I was in mud in a stream outside in the darkness, away from the house. I dropped my watch and tried to find it in the mud. There was an ominous feeling, as if if I stayed there too long someone might come and snatch me. Inside, the party waned. People fell asleep. Ry was there, and it was evident he was dying. He kept making jokes even as he lay on a table, immobile, and then the nighttime table became the morning sea, then back into a table. Suddenly a bunch of us were playing a game on paper where we had to guess/predict what shapes should come next in a sequence (clam, sandwich, star…). I was appalled that we were sitting there, letting Ry die, but he was making jokes even still and playing the game with us. I tried to keep my eyes open, watching him, as long as possible. The next morning, everyone woke up and left Ry dead on the table. “He’s got fish swimming around his head,” someone said. This didn’t seem such an illogical notion. I finally looked up when everyone was gone, only to find Ry staring at me, blinking calmly. “You’re not dead!” I screamed. “You’re still alive!” He didn’t say anything, but he smiled.

Weird.

I dreampt I was back in Newburyport. It was 1991 again and I had to babysit for A. and W. at 5p. But I wasn’t 13 anymore — I was 27, as if I’d gone back in time, and the kids were 5 and 7 again. I was hiding in the bushes outside the house, looking up at A. and W., who had climbed a tree. I wasn’t sure if I should let them see me. I knew they’d recognize me, and recognize the fact that I was not the actual me they knew, but the me from the future. I heard their mom inside; she was in a bad mood, still dealing with the separation from her husband. I caught W.’s eye in the tree and I knew she knew who I was. I got up and walked into the house, I think I talked to their mom first but I forget what was said.

Then I talked to the kids. I explained that lots of things were going to happen in the next fourteen years — that their lives would be filled with some really hard times, but things would always get better. I thought of their parents’ divorce, their mom’s next boyfriend, their breakup, then her future husband. I thought of A.’s drunk driving in high school, his car accident after that, his academic trouble in college, his best friend’s impending suicide. I started to cry when I thought of this last one. I couldn’t tell them all of this, but I think somehow they knew I was trying to warn them of something, and in fact I might have been communicating all of this silently. We were supposed to go to their soccer game at the park, and I knew I’d see Jeremy there — A.’s wonderful, gorgeous and brilliant friend who, at 19, would become too sad to stay alive. Then I thought of his wonderful little sister, who would trade her best-friendship with W. for popularity in high school until they virtually became strangers. I thought of how she would look at her brother’s funeral, her face buried in her knees. Now we were all crying. It was terrible.

Why did I have to come back and warn them about the future? I just felt there was a need to tell them that there would always be hard times ahead, but they’d get through them and be fine. That’s what happens to all of us. That’s what life is.

The only really cool part was the sensory aspect of the dream — I could see and feel everything as if it really were 1991 again. W.’s short white-blond hair, how small she was then; her brother’s tendency to really cry when he got angry and stop speaking when he got sad; the way the sidewalk cracked on Orange Street; the bushes in front of their old house; even the tiny white pebbles from the fishbowl which we threw onto their gravel driveway when the fish died — those white pebbles stayed there for years. In the dream I noticed them again, checking to make sure they were still there, spread out in a small circle, and feeling relieved that some omens still exist, that my memory isn’t fictional: that we really lived there then, that we really looked like that and ran around and played in the street, not thinking about such trifles as the future, so mundane and unknown and irrelevant.

It just kind of bothers me that I’ve had nearly the same dream twice. Makes me want to scoop up W., now 19, and together go visit her brother in Vermont. I don’t know why.

Needless to say, I had a long, weird and extended dream. Let me tell you about it:

I died, somehow. Mom died too, and J., and N., and other N., and other friends, and lots more Americans I didn’t know. We found ourselves in a half-world between life and death, where we were cognizant of having bodies but also cognizant of no longer living in the human world. We were in an institution of some sort. It was controlled by Iraqis; I guess they’d won the war, and a lot more than that. We had to file into a large hall, do some manual labor, like jail, and wait around talking. One day I realized some people were disappearing. It was because their purgatorial time was over, and they’d fizz out into Actual Death. I realized this jail-like institution full of other just-dead friends was like an orphanage for lost souls or something [this is all despite the fact that I don't believe in any of this: multiple souls, heaven or hell, purgatory, even death] — but anyway —

Three girls tried to escape. They failed, and were executed. That’s when I understood everything was political. We were POWs, but half-dead POWs. While marching single file into a room, I noticed N. across the way. She had cut all her hair off. “That’s smart,” I thought. “She did that so she wouldn’t have to worry about it getting long and out of control.” [Insert footnote here about my previously recurring dreams regarding hair growing uncontrollably and me trying to chop it off.] Then I realized my hair was long and I hadn’t brushed it in longer than I could remember. Also about that time, I realized Mom was gone. She had fizzled out to the realm of Actual Death, and I started to get really scared. I didn’t want to be in a POW purgatorial deathcamp, but I didn’t want to be alone in the universe, either.

Our guards started getting stricter. I didn’t like how there was political tension, or that Iraqi-US relations were worse than ever. A female guard tried to herald me down a stairwell with a group of others, but I was scared. I grabbed a chocolate bon-bon with strawberry cream (from where?) and handed it to her as a gift. She smiled, thanked me, took the chocolate, and let me go. I ran and hid. Suddenly it was night. I was at a gated swimming pool, hiding in the shadows behind lawn chairs. I could see male guards up above, on the roof with guns.

That’s about all I remember, but the main feeling was an incredible loneliness, or a fear of it. Not of the “today I’m bored and lonely” variety, but in the larger cosmic sense of being alone. Even in the dream, I said to myself: “Wake up! You’re scared of death and you won’t even admit it. I’m going to have to deal with this when I come out of this dream…”

I feel like I’ve gotten stuck in an existential void and the only way out is through metaphysical action. Word.