Dream
Inventory

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.

Last night I dreamt about a regal bald woman, impossibly tall, who glided above the floor with her back arched like a vacuum. I nodded hello, and she said, “You’re welcome.” No matter what I said, she replied, “You’re welcome.” Then she turned and zoomed away, leaving me alone in a long empty white room.

Last night I dreamt of hammerhead sharks. I was swimming away from a burning airplane and they swarmed around me, biting away pieces of my back and arms until I woke up. I don’t know what this means, but C. says it’s because I’m afraid of hammers, which is true. I have to close my eyes whenever there’s a bludgeoning on television.

I dreamt I painted a picture and could not tell if it was god or the devil because the image was too big for its frame.

A doctor told me I had a rare condition and no matter how far I walked, it would take one hour and twenty-two minutes.

I dreamt about the infamous “dishwasher episode” of a critically acclaimed drama.

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.

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 to play at a wedding. 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.

I was driving over hundreds of dogs, their bodies kerchunking beneath the wheels, and I could hear them howling. I sped up to put them out of their misery. The car veered onto a lawn, where my parents were moving into a new home. They were older than I would ever see them and I stood on the sidewalk, happy but frightened because they were not supposed to be alive.

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.