Portrait With Pig; Singing In Public; The Skeleton Game

12/27/09

I was reading a book and it was coming apart at the spine but I saw it as a movie. A Bruce Willis character is saving a child or a small animal. Lots of dull, snowy landscape.

I was researching the early life of a mysterious woman. There was a book on her famous escape, and the book had black and white pictures of the important people in her life, posed in tableaux with elaborate costumes and hair styles. In one of them, a tall elderly woman with long white hair in braids stands on a stone terrace. At her feet is a large pig.

P and I are talking about our writing projects. He's off to work with his brother. We're all standing on a subway platform that's across from a big suburban supermarket. He offers me something from a big bag that I think is a potato chip but it turns out to be a kind of crisp chocolate chip cookie called a "Ladybug". We get onto the train which is arranged in tiers like the seats of an outdoor stadium and we arrange all of our crap around--backbacks and cookies and bottles. We go to an outdoor restaurant where someone invites a slender black woman with platinum blond hair and a long cigarette holder to step out of her black and white picture and sing. I feel awkward. I haven't practiced and I'm worried about horning in, but everyone is singing. I join in briefly but I don't even know the words. I stand next to a tall girl who is singing the harmony part and I think glumly that I don't even know what notes I would sing.

There's a preview for a new video game based on those plastic hanging monkeys that link together. It has two clayamation boys, one black and one white, playing basketball in the clay tropics. One of them lies down on the court and peels off his own skin, revealing his clay skeleton. The other boy does the same and the skeletons get up and link together through rib cages and jaws. Suddenly it's a pile of tiny, real bones and I'm working with someone to sort them out. It's very frustrating. The bones are blobby rectangles, except for the skull bones, which snap together along the jaws.

I'm rubbing lotion onto my hands. They're very dry and covered with veins of white cracks. I can't feel the lotion but I watch it erase the dry flaking white streaks.

I climb into the bed in the basement in VA. Other people keep coming in and interrupting me as I try to nap.

This was a very visually beautiful dream. The elements probably come from the last couple of days in Virginia. I made chocolate chip cookies with some special chips my step-father had, which were extra large and on the cookies that came out symmetrical they looked like ladybugs.

We also saw Sherlock Holmes yesterday which had a scene with pigs in a slaughterhouse and of course ladies with elaborate hair. I only realized at the end of the movie that it was directed by Guy Ritchie, which would explain the pigs, the bareknuckle boxing, and the jump cuts that made me want to hurl. But it was a pretty entertaining movie.

The thing that impressed me most about this dream was that I could pick out both the melody and the harmony of the chorus that was singing. It's strange that I wasn't able to sing along. Where did the words come from? I can't remember if it was a real song that I recognized. Was it Blue Skies?

I Can't Leave China; Extra Hell; Hey That's Not Tom Petty

12-16-09

I was trying to leave China and it was nearly impossible. I had a packed suitcase and I was waiting with my brother. We were children. I bought trail mix at the corner store and the shopkeeper asked me to give the English translation of a set of directions written in sort of mangled han zi characters. I said I could only recognize one, mountain.

We finally seemed to leave but got taken to Hell instead. I had to play cards, competing with a glamorous woman and grizzled man. The face cards were decorated with very realistic looking people, wearing rubies and diamonds. We each played with six cards and had to match up pairs against each other and I had a jack, queen and king. I knew the man had queens, kings and aces. He offered a trip to a casino to see a show and I quipped back at him that if he wanted to leave his hand must not be good. There was an advertisement for the show in big letters made of cacti.

Still in hell- walking down a carpeted hall and a man and woman decide to go to "Extra Hell" so they can always be together. Men gets head cut off (I don't watch) and girl bravely, stupidly, decides to drwon herself in the giant jar of formalin that she will be preserved in (I don't watch but I see the result.)

Also in the club, I meet Tom Petty and we flirt. He asks me about my romantic past and we run into my ex at the subway and I babble awkwardly and introduce them.

My friend B. and I get snacks and drinks together. I excuse myself to the restroom only to find the toilet overflowing with garbage, including an empty ice cream carton. I have to clean it out some.

I don't remember much of this dream five days later. I remember the woman's body crammed awkwardly in the giant jar, and what the cards looked like. I knew I was going to lose at the card game but I didn't care, which usually isn't the case--I'm not great at games but I hate losing.

I lived in China for almost a year and although it was a perfectly straightforward, prebooked flight home, I couldn't quite believe I'd be able to get back. The character for mountain in the dream was actually pretty accurate.

My brother and I did travel a lot unaccompanied when we were little. Our first solo international flight was when I was five and he was six.

I had been reading about Tom Petty in Rolling Stone before sleeping that night. The guy in my dream wasn't Tom Petty, though. He looked more like Matthew Sweet, who was on the radio a lot when I was hearing Tom Petty for the first time when I was about fourteen.