in through the out door

The day following a dream in which I die never feels like it's fitting quite right. Like walking around with a sock that has half-slipped off inside a boot.

a dream of falling

When I was a kid I used to have a repeating dream of falling from a great height. The start of the dream was always different but it usually involved me tripping and falling into a hole of some kind. I was forever slipping into spaces between things - between an elevator and the shaft, or the subway car and the platform, or the moving steps of an escalator. Once the back door flipped open on a station wagon that I was riding in as it drove down a white staircase and I fell out the back. (I have no idea what that was all about.)

Regardless of how I got there I always ended up in the same place; falling through a vast featureless white space for several long tense minutes and then slamming into the white surface at the bottom. It hurt. Sometimes I saw bones, always I felt blood pooling around me. Occasionally I would hear sirens. Slowly everything would go dark and then I would wake up in my bed. I would lie there in the dark until I would eventually go back to sleep and go through the whole thing all over again.

I don't know how old I was when the dreams started. It's one of my earliest memories. I don't know how old I was when they stopped either. I do know that I had them every night for many years.

Lat night I had a dream that I went to a Convergence that took place in some high mountains. I had travelled there in a pick-up truck with a couple of alt.gothic folks from back in the day. When we left for home we were all sleep-deprived and hung-over, two people in the front with the driver and me sitting in the flat bed. The highway took us over a bridge that crossed from one high peak to another and at that exact moment the driver fell asleep, just for a split second. The truck veered off the road.

There was a town in the valley and I could see the buildings spread out below me as the truck started to tumble in the air. I could hear the driver sobbing, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," over and over again. There was nothing to the sides, nothing below us but empty space and hard ground. Nothing to break our fall.

I braced my feet against the flatbed and as the truck tilted I pushed myself away so that we drifted slowly apart from each other as we fell. The wind was deafening, the force of it felt like hands pushing on me. I spread my arms out like wings to the sides and smiled at the ground rushing up towards me. For the last few seconds of my life; flying, open, free.







Then I woke up. And got out of bed. And found a little pile of mouse turds next to the toaster.