I often find my father deep within the labyrinthine architecture of parking structures. I once woke in tears from a dream about hugging him after he told me I could always find him there. I asked him about the afterlife and he smiled. This was the closest I’ve come to experiencing a visitation.
Last night’s dream brought me to the ruins of a university where we played chess with pieces of tandoori meat. “You cannot withdraw from this game without suicide,” said my veiled opponent.
I dreamt that I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Johnson and Ford.
I dreamt that each of my fingers had its own consciousness.
I ducked in and out of tiny record stores, spinning racks of cassettes and flipping through stacks of vinyl, frantically trying to find my favorite song. Turns out I was kneeling on it the whole time. Perhaps this dream was the result of my anxiety about having so many unheard songs in my queue—the lack of connection to an artifact, the impossibility of ever getting my head around music again.
C. and I were walking through a museum that might have been Versailles or the Vatican in the year 3000. Baroque galleries. White cubes. Abstract paintings at precise intervals. Screens in the walls adjusted themselves as we passed. We agreed, quietly and with some pride, that we were lucky to live in a society that could build such a place.
She went to find a bathroom. I waited near the entrance to a gallery. It was one of those finger-wagging exhibits that tells you exactly what to feel, but she was gone a while so I drifted in.
A live satellite feed covered an entire wall, displaying a continent I did not recognize. Along its southern tip, a smear of smoke rose from what had once been cities. The nation above it was pushing downward, pressing these people into the sea. The place had reverted to something older than history.
Further in, there was footage of people hunting animals. Hunting each other. A woman in a lab coat stood at a stainless steel table, consulting a page of instructions. She opened a door and the eye of an enormous crocodile filled the doorway. The scientist said there was a specific way you had to cut the eye, and only this would kill the beast. The incision was intricate, almost calligraphic, and the crocodile howled and people emerged from the undergrowth to tear strips of flesh from its flanks.
Last night I dreamt tangled, deeply plotted dreams about rotted airplanes, teeth in the street, and a gigantic man who knelt down to tell me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. I asked him if I could bum a cigarette and he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock.
C. and I watched a stuttering videotape. Somebody warned us that we shouldn’t watch the ending because it shows how we’ll die. Everyone in the movie had the flu and was laying down to die. We stopped the tape. She sniffled. I coughed. I wanted to run, but she shook her head and took my hand. I put on a favorite record—A Million Miles to Earth—and we laid down.