The Mountain Goats - Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1 

I just had a dream where I was in the shower with a woman I loved, naked and singing this song at the top of my lungs, while she giggled the entire time…

“The act of recording a dream or the events or feelings of the day is an act of transferring internal information from the unconscious mind, where it is stored, into the conscious mind, where you can think about it.  In this way patterns can be seen, understanding developed, and perhaps personal change stimulated.

Once you have described a dream to a friend, or written it down in a journal, you have literally moved it out of one mental territory, where it was inaccessible, into another territory (consciousness), where it is accessible. At that point you can think about it.

Entire cultures are based on this process of transferring information from the unconscious to the conscious mind.  The most widely studied are the Senoi people of Malaysia, who begin each day by describing the details of their dreams to each other….Other cultures talk a lot, describing the details of life’s intimate experiences all day long.  Describing the details helps one ‘see’ them and understand them.”

 - Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

I have a few friends who will stop you as soon as you say, “I had this crazy dream—”  They don’t want to hear about it, they think that talking about dreams is the most pointless thing people can do.  ”Why should I care about your dreams?  They don’t mean anything.”

No one knows for sure what exactly dreams are.  But even if dreams are basically just random images thrown out by your brain, they can still be very useful.  Many times I have told a crazy dream story to my mom, and she has explained it back to me in a way that was actually enlightening.  All the elements and “symbols” suddenly made sense.  Or rather, she and I together created their sense.  From reinterpreting the story of the dream, I was able to reinterpret the events of my waking life, such that I suddenly knew how to deal with a problem, or saw my self and my possibilities in a new way.  I took the jumbled mass of events and images and made a cohesive narrative that helped me grow as a person.

So to all you people who refuse to listen to your friends’ dreams or stories: get over yourself.  Consider the possibility that these things must exist for some reason—even if it’s a reason that we have to create.

I also like the idea of people “describing the details of life’s intimate experiences” to each other.  That’s something often called poetry; that’s something most of our lives are severely lacking.

Last night I was able to go to bed earlier than normal, and it felt nice to just be able to lay in bed with no laptop and not be worried about waking up at any certain time.  To just relax.

Well since I was so relaxed I had all sorts of dreams.  Most of them involved situations where I was forced somehow into having to shoot people.  In one instance, I was hunting prisoners who hadn’t really done anything wrong.  In another, I was a cop trying to take down the yakuza but they turned me into a contract killer for them.

In the yakuza dream, there was a baby who was being cared for by some of their women.  This baby was mine, and he had been birthed by a woman who died in the process.  My job didn’t allow for me to care for the baby, so I was resigned to let it be raised by those people.  At one point I picked him up, and embarrassingly shifted him around, trying to figure out how to hold him right.  The gangsters were standing around watching me, their supposed badass killer who didn’t know how to cradle a baby.  I thought about how much I wished I could raise this child myself, but the job wouldn’t let me do it.  I started to cry and I fell to my knees with the baby in my arms.  I was determined to figure out a way to make it work.

It was all very dramatic.

I had a dream last night that I saw a black snake in a pile of leaves that were getting sucked up by a machine.  I grabbed it to rescue it, and let it go after the leaves and debris had been sucked up.  I put it down and watched it go back to the exact spot it was at, where it started slithering around as if confused.  It was at that point that I realized that the tiny black things scattered among the leaves that I hadn’t thought much about were the snake’s babies.  They got sucked up into machine!

So I grabbed the snake again and kept it with me, thinking I didn’t want it to live that lonely life that all parents live after they lose their children.

I was always cautious holding the snake because I wasn’t sure if it was poisonous or not.  I kept trying to get on the internet or look at books to find out for sure, but something or someone was always getting in my way.  I got frustrated, I yelled at people.

Then I laid down and buried my red face in the carpet and forgot about holding the snake securely; it started slithering around on me but it never bit me.  I figured, whether it was poisonous or not, I’m just going to have to trust it.

This girl keeps popping up in my dreams.  I haven’t seen her in real life in over a year, and I’m pretty sure she’s engaged now.  Why is she always in my dreams, and why are we always together, and why is it always so damned wonderful?

I was on a date with this girl who was way out of my league.  The whole time we were at the restaurant I was trying to figure out why the hell she was having anything to do with me.

We left the restaurant, me cautiously holding her hand and she allowing it.  I felt her rings digging into my fingers and it kind of hurt at first but it got better.  We walked down the streets of downtown Charleston having simple conversation while I still wondered how this could even be happening…she being so beautiful and alive, me being me.

She decided the best way to end the date would be to climb up in a tree and sit for a while, so we looked for just the right kind of oak tree with low branches.  Suddenly everything around us was a possibility.

Of course, then it was all ruined as we walked past a fabric shop where a green Honda from North Dakota parked out front with the windows open was being scrutinized by two grimy rasta-punks.  They were debating what to do as they reached their arms through the window and honked the horn.  I said, “What do you mean, ‘What to do?’  You should leave it alone because it’s not yours, that’s what you should do!”

One of them decided to hop in and try to start it.  I walked into the fabric store and yelled, “Hey!  If this is your green car out front, it’s about to get stolen!”  I then tried to persuade the rasta-punks to leave it alone while I waited for the owner to come out.  It was too late, the one guy got it started and the other grudgingly got in the passenger’s seat (as if he had reservations about this whole thing) and they were off.

I called the police and the girl and I waited for them to show up.  I apologized to her, but she said she thought what I did was brave and the right thing to do.  I held my arm around her as she sat next to me on a bench, and she felt just right.

Why does my subconscious do these things?

I had a dream last night that I was in this Athens Creativity Club thing where everyone in a large classroom situation had to perform like in a workshop and be criticized.  It was run by all these “elite” Athens people that had tattoos of stars nested within stars.  I got frustrated because someone was talking on the phone during my exhibition and I left my acoustic guitar on the ground while I went to use the bathroom.  I came back and cuddled with my girlfriend (who?) because I just needed to cuddle, but soon I realized my guitar wasn’t there; I had other guitars there, electrics, and a flying v, but the neck of the flying v was split in half.

I went to the backstage area to look for my acoustic and all those people were back there looking cool with their tattoos and stuff and looking at me like they’d been expecting me.  They brought out my guitar, and they had disassembled it; they claimed they found it broken, but nothing was broken about it: the pieces were all clean as if they’d turned back time to before the guitar was ever assembled in the first place.

Something sinister was going on.  Two of them walked up behind me with guns drawn, saying it was time for my execution.  Well, I bolted out of there and found my girlfriend and told her to run.  We got in a big SUV and made it to a nearby gangbanger’s compound.  We had apparently pissed the leader of this crew off at some point earlier, but he was willing to take us in if we gave him the SUV so that he could pimp it.  Plus, he hated those evil tattooed hipsters.

Soon, the hipsters showed up riding some crazy-ass star-shaped platforms with AK-47s drawn and opened fire on the compound, but the bangers fought them off valiantly.  I finally felt safe.  I woke up.