in Sleep...

In my dreams, though peppered with other logistical fallacies, I’m rarely a hero…

Given the probabilities of an endless horizon, I choose a cluttered cityscape a flood with pieces of people. These are selective tracks of friends and family, reduced to their simplest. They are definable and simple, with motives and an unfaultable consciousness.

In my sleep I build a world that I can’t control.

Machines build impossible things, jutting their impossible beginnings into my comfort zone. Walking will always turn into running will always turn into fear…

The brakes of cars will never work; can only be steered by leaning, or with the cigarette lighter.

I can jump a flight of stairs…

It can feel like I’m floating, flying; even when I run too fast.

I never wake up with a concrete realization. I wake up playing word games, dizzy and confused.

When I was upset for a while, I would play a game where I would read words and break them off into fragments of letters to see if they were odd words or even words. I could do this well into my sleep. It was my OCD.

When I was a child, I had a clothes hamper that was a clown, and you would stuff your dirty clothes into his fabric belly and make him bigger… He would chase me down the steep wooden stairs. That’s when I learned about jumping stairs.

In my dreams, nobody has anything important to say. They don’t even turn into zombies. They are just mad at me.

I always dream in close ups…

I remember an entire city that doesn’t exist, but that I have been silently exploring since I was a child. It has homes and parks, secret basement and a maze of forests, all found in the same place I had left them.

I forget to wear my clothes a lot; they don’t disappear in public; I usually just get on the bus without them. The police always ask me to put them back on. Public Safety!

My perfect companion is always this big gray cat, never a sexy girl. The cat might be a girl, but we haven’t really talked about it. She helps me through… Her and I meditate; but it’s done with wide-open eyes in a live green field or from the bough of a tree.

When I was 8, I dreamt about finding my fathers skeleton at the bottom of our pond and wondering how he became that so fast. My tummy hurt. I told mom, and as she cried she carried him back to the house and put his bleached bones next to her in bed. I sat with my hands crossed on the blankets over his legs. I was trembling… I woke up and checked on them. I snuck down stair and through the open door I could see the tight tan skin of my fathers face. That is when I swore I would never let him die.

I would dip little sticks in cement to make them look like gray match sticks. I would dream they were fireworks…

One time when my father was angry and left for a while, I took his broken shoestring and put it in a can. I dreamt that night that he would come back and I would give his the shoe string and tell him that I was thinking of him always. He came back the next day and I was overjoyed. I still have that shoestring; I still think about you…

I dreamt that when I moved out of my parent’s house, I would be leaving for college and would pack up everything I needed in the back of my truck and give everyone big hugs. I was 16, and lived with my fiancée instead.

Sometimes I have dreams that I just walk into work and tell everybody how they make me feel, I get to swear and then storm off. Sometimes I just do it in real life.

I’ve dreamt about what its like to die.

I would hang batteries off of my little radio antenna. I would dream about Martian signals.

I’ve had dreams that take me through the whole process of committing a crime and being sentenced to prison. Up to this date, I have always woken up a free man. It’s just then, when I lift my hands and touch my face that I cry; without fail, I always cry…