So, I've decided to edit my post that transcribed my hellacious anxiety dream from this morning. After re-reading it this afternoon, I saw too much potential in the post to just leave it as a jumble of run on sentences and extraneous letters. I also am filling in some details I either left out in my rush to type or that I remembered in discussing the dream after I typed it out. I'll also try and give some context to characters in the dream that were only named and not explained in my original post. You can read the original, unedited piece on my myspace blog. I don't know how interesting that would be. But it's there for posterity's sake at least.
I dreamt of a banquet. Huge, sprawling. The outlay of the tables, I could see formed a snake shape. It was on a grassy hillside at dusk. I saw this in a kind of sweeping in shot from a movie. This was the only part of the dream that was outside of myself. A staggering Filet Mignon dish is the appetizer course. You have to travel throughout this serpentine dining area to piece the dish together, though. Steaks here, potatoes there, hollandaise sauce far, far away. There were vegetables and shellfish, the dish was more of a bowl than a plate. Shaped like an oyster shell, it's porcelain.
At each of these tables are people that I’ve known in one way or another throughout my life. Not like major players in my biography, just people I’ve seen or met. When I go to sit down and eat my dish with Amanda, Jim Lovelace tells me that I can’t sit down to eat without the proper attire. I worked for Jim at the now defunct Restaurant Savannah. Everyone who worked there essentially went through all the cliche's of a poorly run restaurant. We waited for four months from the original opening date to actually serve our first customer. The owner of the restaurant had a big coke problem, threw plates at people, fired chefs at will, fired managers with whimsy. In my 9 months there, we had like five or six different managers (two at a time), and five different head chefs. Jim now is at Bogart's, bless his heart.
Despite knowing the brass at this party, I have to leave and buy a proper black suit. So, Amanda and I head off to this suit store, where Lisa is working part time. Though, she's not there at the time. (Lisa is a coworker of mine at Glenwood Grill). The owner knows my dad, which is somehow greasing the wheels for me getting a suit here. The owner of the store has two sons, one my age and one younger, maybe Tyler’s (my youngest brother) age (17). They have a kind of comedic routine. They reenact the scene with the robot tailors in Spaceballs. I buy the suit, but it’s put on dad’s credit card. As we’re leaving out onto this front porch that's two stories from the ground, I see one of the sons getting out of a Ford car that has a special license plate that says it’s one of a kind. Like someone at Ford made this car, which is black and looks like a mix of an old BMW convertible and a Porsche, just a Ford, which seems silly to me. To go through all that spending just to get a Ford, when he could have gotten something nice like either car that this one sorta looks like. The weird part is that this younger son was just in front of me. Then he’s getting out of his car in the parking lot. Oh, before this, the dad leaves for a second in a black car that looks like a Bentley drives off for thirty seconds and then returns.
As we’re leaving, we run into Jay Winfrey. (Jay is a good friend of the two of us, we haven't had the opportunity to hang out with him much lately, due to his working all the time at like seven jobs.) But some thing's wrong with him. He’s quick to tell me he had a brain tumor, and that he’s just recently survived a dangerous surgery. Jay seems weird. His features are changing, but the thing that’s really wrong is that he’s shorter than me. Jay is a very tall guy in real life. So this bothers me. I keep trying to find out about why he's changed so much physiologically, but I'm afraid to ask him directly, I allude to it, talking about how he lost all that weight when he found out he had diabetes. He goes on to tell me about how he’s always been worried that he would get brain cancer, it bothered him for 18 years, that he always knew it would happen to him. As he's leaving, I finally gather up the courage to ask him why he’s lost his height. "It’s because of the surgery" up until this point, Amanda hadn’t noticed Jay. She freaks out, and goes out for a drink with him to find out more and console him. I can’t bear to be around him anymore, it’s too sad. So I recuse myself and go on my own way.Too depressed to go back to the dinner party, I head home. There’s a bed in the computer room, with a small tv, and a vcr, with a bunch of unfamiliar tapes. I rifle through them, put something about the history of flight on, and fall asleep. I get phone calls from my dad and Tyler, which I answer in my sleep. Then, I hear a sound that’s been recurring in my dreams lately. The sound of an airplane landing, but the sound has always been occurring within earshot of the house. This sound has always been a source of nervousness and dread every time I’ve heard it in my dreams, not knowing until the very end of the sound if it’s from a crashing or landing plane. Up until this dream, it’s been all landing, tonight, it was a crash. Before I have time to turn the tv on to the news to see if it really was a crash, and what I should do with this information, Amanda calls me. At least that’s what the cell phone says. Her voice is weird, it’s like she’s talking like a high pitched impersonation of herself, like a little kid is posing as her. She’s asking me to pick her up at the Target, quick. Which is making me more uneasy, because she was nowhere near the Target when I went home. And this doesn’t sound like her. It sounds like a setup. But I can’t not go there. What if it is her, and she’s just drunk out of her mind, speaking in a weird voice? But what if it is someone who’s done her harm, took her phone and called me. To do me harm.* I’m scared. I’m imagining Stringer Bell* has had someone impersonate Amanda, and he’s going to kill me and her when I get to Target. I wake up. I couldn’t think of going back to sleep with the prospect of returning to this dream. So I got up and typed this out. Hopefully, when I get back in bed, I won’t dream this storyline again. Though writing about it is probably going to make this only more prominent in my head..
*So I just figured out what may be the root of the whole Stringer Bell/little kid thing at the end of my dream. I'm reading What Is The What by Dave Eggers. It's the story of a refugee named Valentino, from Sudan, his life on the run in Africa and the trials of his life in America. The story starts out with his house being broken into by a woman and a man while he's there. In my head, I imagined the man as Stringer Bell. After the theft, the couple ties up Valentino, and leaves a little boy to watch over him and the house until the thieves return. So, I think that's where that comes from.*Oh, who's Stringer Bell? He's a character on The Wire. He's a coldblooded, murderous, motherfucker. Though he doesn't kill anyone himself. He gets others to do the deed. Using most notably in two of his commissioned killings, teenagers. Ohh, The Wire is so good. (Stringer Bell is the one closest to the window in this advertisement for The Wire).
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