Dream Journal
I sat at the computer and opened Michael’s cam page. He was sitting at a dining room table and I knew he was using his new laptop. I said something aloud to him and he walked over to my computer; he had been in the other room. He sat with his back to my computer at another dining room table and Melissa stood on the other side talking to us.
I turned my chair to engage in the conversation, and while explaining something to Melissa I somehow grabbed Michael’s hand. Not missing a beat, I dropped his hand and continued my explanation. I knew that I could grab his hand again below the edge of the table and Melissa wouldn’t be able to see, but I couldn’t get his attention so that he would move his hand closer to me.
The three of us decided to go to the state fair. We stepped through the gates and the skies were overcast. Melissa decided to go off on her own and I linked my hand with Michael’s. I had heard that he had won some award for his writing, and I suggested we go find that.
We went into a small building and were approached by three male workers. They all knew Michael and congratulated him on the award. I browsed the items on the walls and shelves while the four men all sat down in plush chairs.
Michael was now B and had worked with the three men before. They talked about whether anything had changed at the shop, and B asked if the trash was being taken out. He was assured that it was, but he and I went around to all the trash cans, emptied them into large garbage bags, and then put the bags into the alley behind the store.
I was to be on a game show with three other women and four men. it was explained to us that we would get paired up, one man and one woman. The men would go into a separate room while the women got dressed. The women would get whipped cream applied around their pubic hair. When their partners returned, he was to eat the whipped cream off of her and the first man done would be the winner.
The men went through a door and us women were presented with a box of approved attire to change into. The other women made their selections and changed quickly. I pulled a few skimpy things out and looked at the male emcee who stood watching us. I was uncomfortable to change in front of him, but knew it was how things were to be done.
The articles of clothing I picked were very loose and flowing, but not in any pretty way. The colors were faded and looked almost stained. I lounged on a large pile of pillows with the girls and felt an overwhelming sense of ennui coming from them.
I did not like the man with whom I had been paired. I worried that he wouldn’t stop at the whipped cream and realized that he might even try to rape me. I told the other women that I was worried about getting raped and they didn’t seem to care.
I decided that I didn’t want to take my chances and told the women that I wouldn’t play; they hardly looked up. When the men came out from behind their door, I stood and announced that I would not be taking part in the game.
My partner stormed over to me and grabbed my wrist. He demanded that I participate, and when I told everyone that I was scared of being raped, he yanked me away from the group and got a bit violent. I knew that I had been right about him, and thought that he might rape me anyway. I wondered how I would escape.
Themes: Sex
I woke up on the couch in my grandmother’s living room. The couch had been pulled into the center of the room and faced the southern bay windows. I sat up and started to fold my blankets before I wondered where everyone was at. The house was silent and empty. The sun streamed into the windows, and I wondered why my grandma had let me sleep so late.
I finished folding my blankets and, still sitting in the sun on the couch, I gathered my stuff together into my bag. I heard the back door open and commotion in the back hallway and knew my grandmother had returned.
I turned on the couch to get a better view of the hall so I could see her when she walked in and ask her some questions.
I sat at my parents’ dining room table in their basement. My mother, sister-in-law Jen, brother John and I were mass-producing a large number of cupcakes. I had brought a few cans of spray frosting to make the process go faster. I handed one can of frosting to my mother and I took another. The frosting came out of the cans very fancy and pretty. I frosted a few cupcakes when my frosting can sputtered and splattered frosting everywhere. I said, “Fuck!” and knew immediately that I shouldn’t have said that in front of my mother, but chose to not say anything or look guilty so as to draw any more attention to it.
Since that had been the last can of spray frosting, I announced that I would make another run to town and get more frosting cans since they seemed to be working nicely. I ran up the stairs and out to my car in the parking spot next to my mom’s car, the one I used in high school. Melissa was sitting in the passenger’s seat of my car ready to go.
My dad was leaning into the open driver’s side door. I saw him grab a plastic container about the size of a piece of paper and had a bubble at one end to hold one of my new contacts. From the porch I could see him place the bubble up to his eye and push the contact onto it. Then he turned and ran off.
I was angry that he had taken one of my contacts. Melissa stood out of the car and asked me to run back inside and grab the jacket she left on the pool table upstairs.
Back inside I walked towards an upright piano that sat on stage in a concert hall. I sat down at it and fingered the ivory keys. I needed to urinate on the keys, but before I was able to even stand I heard someone tell me to play something. I looked up and Bjorn was sitting in the third row. He was leaned forward, anxious to hear me play.
I turned back toward the piano and tried to remember one of the songs I had memorized back in high school. I could hear them in my head but could not remember where to put my fingers. I wished I had my sheet music with me.
I picked Michael up at the airport. As we drove away from the airport I shifted my car into third gear and dropped my hand to the base of the gearshift. His hand rested on his leg, and my hand ended up on top of his.
We didn’t look at each other or acknowledge that we were toughing. We hadn’t tried to purposefully touch hands, but there my hand was on top of his. We left our hands, stiff and still, just as they were so we could be touching each other while pretending we weren’t.
I moved my thumb back and forth ever so slightly, rubbing the back of his hand. His hand was very smooth.
Themes: Michael
I stepped into my mother’s Sunday School classroom and caught my mom’s eye. Sitting at a short table, she nodded at me for encouragement and then looked across the room. I followed her gaze and saw Melissa standing with her back to the door helping a child with the day’s project. She was dressed very nicely in a pair of slacks and her hair was pulled up on her head and very curly.
I stepped back into the hall and pulled two preteens into the room with me. One of the kids with me was my niece T, and I helped her walk over to Melissa. She said, “Aunt Melissa?” and Melissa turned to face us. She was so happy to see T and gave her a really big hug. I noticed that T was almost as tall as Melissa and their hair looked almost identical.
I went back over to the door to talk with my mom when Dave, my youth pastor, opened the door and came into the room, pinning me behind the door. He wore kneepads and wrist guards and immediately apologized for nearly hitting me with the door.
He asked how I was doing and I told him, pointing towards T and Melissa, that I had brought my niece and my nephew who stood closer to my mother. He was distracted by the day’s craft and didn’t look up. “Is he the retarded one?” Dave asked. I was angry that he would not only call my nephew that word in a public situation, but also that he was so flippant about it.
T, my nephew, and Melissa had all gone through the same tests that were supposed to help them, and they all suffered in different degrees from the testing. I turned to leave with Heidi, the children’s mother, and she wondered aloud if those tests were what have been causing Melissa’s insistent headaches.
Themes: Melissa
Bob handed me a gum ball as big as an apple and announced to the room full of children that it was the adults’ turn to run the relay. I was happy that the children were so excited about seeing us running around the circle with giant gum balls.
Bob stuffed his into his mouth as far as it could and bit down. “Makes it easier to eat while running,” he explained. I liked that idea but knew I couldn’t fit the gum ball into my mouth, so I squished it with my hands and the hard shell cracked satisfyingly until the shape was nicely elongated.
The buzzer sounded and around the circle we went. I stuffed the end of my squished gum ball into my mouth and tore off a large piece. The inside of the ball was hollow, and I felt confident that I would finish before the others.
The running path along the circle was narrow and I was able to keep others from passing me. I finished my three required laps in front of everyone else, but had only taken two bites of my gum ball. Looking behind me, I could tell the others were in a similar position. I wasn’t sure if I could stop after the three laps or if I had to finish the gum ball first, so I kept running. As the adults we had created the rules, but hadn’t planned for every contingency.
I stood in a long line with Rachael outside a large bus or trailer. Rachael was first in line and I was second. A woman, the owner, guarded the entrance and was wanting to get rid of all of her stuff.
In order to do this, she handed each of us a pack of 26 small, colored sticky notes. When I stepped inside just after Rachael, I could see she had laid out each of her items very cleanly and spaciously, one to a chair. We were to browse through her items and place one of our sticky notes on the chair of an item that we wanted. Each person got a different color of sticky notes, and after everyone had used their sticky notes we would be allowed to go back through the items and take only three things that had our sticky note color on its chair. This was to facilitate a fair distribution of the items.
I wandered through the aisles of chairs and placed one of my bright pink sticky notes on a chair that held a nice sweater. Only then did I notice the chair already had a bright sticky note. Rachael had gotten pink sticky notes as well, and I knew that would confuse things greatly. I hollered to Rachael who browsed a few aisles away and told her that she needed to put her initials on her sticky notes so as to not confuse them with mine.
I continued browsing and found, back against the far wall, the woman’s large Blue Flower porcelain collection. I was certain that she wouldn’t be trying to get rid of the porcelain items, but then saw a sticky note on one of the pieces and figured I might as well try.
B and some of his coworkers came over to look at the porcelain, and he told me that he hoped we got the porcelain bassinet for our baby. I agreed it would be perfect. Above the porcelain collection hung a large glass windshield perhaps three inches thick. B and his coworkers were immediately interested and the woman came over to talk about it with them.
Outside, I got into the driver’s seat of one of B’s work vans and headed out towards his work site. I went a ways out of town and came to a large, muddy piece of land that had many large and dangerous metal things sticking out of the ground. It looked like a bleak wasteland. I pulled the van into a place where I couldn’t easily swing around, so I did a three-point turn and turned off the engine.
I jumped out of the van and walked over to B who started laughing at me. He told me that no one had ever had to back up a work van in the history of the glass company. I was hurt that I had tried to do something nice for him and he made fun of me, so I walked back to the van and left.
The van then became my car and Melissa was sitting in the passenger’s seat. She had her window rolled down and the midday sun warmed us. I drove down Baycrest Hill towards Homer and we passed a group of teenagers just let out of school.
Shelby ran over and jumped onto the running board of the car. Melissa chatted with her for a bit and then turned to me and asked if we could give Shelby a ride. I agreed and told them that I didn’t have time to stop but that I would slow the car down. While going 20mph, Shelby managed to get the back door open and herself into the car safely.
At the bottom of Baycrest after riding my brakes the whole way, Melissa asked me if I had realized we went through a school zone at 20mph when we were supposed to go 8mph. I hadn’t realized that.
A long way from my home I either sneaked or broke into Michael’s small apartment. It was very dark outside, and quite dark inside, but there was a soft glow coming from the bedroom. I tip-toed toward the light and saw it was coming from a computer monitor.
Michael was lying in bed near the computer. I crawled under the covers beside him and spooned myself around him. I slid my arms around his waist and buried my face in the small of his neck. His body was very warm and I could tell he had been asleep for some time; he didn’t even move.
Themes: Michael
I was sitting with my coworkers on a playground merry-go-round, the kind that someone has to run alongside and push to get spinning. There were calendars propped up along the edge of the merry-go-round and I held a large handful of red dry-erase markers.
I tried writing on the calendars, but someone kept spinning the merry-go-round faster and faster and I couldn’t hang onto the pens. I kept dropping the markers and had a hard time picking them back up while we spun around and around.
Ken laughed every time I dropped a marker, and that made me upset because he wasn’t the one getting dizzy.
I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant with my parents looking over the menu. I sat across from them, my mother at my right and my father at my left. I faced the entrance and all of the other patrons were behind me.
I had been to this restaurant a few hours earlier for appetizers with two friends, and the waiter told us that our meals were free because of the appetizers we had chosen. So I had brought my parents to the restaurant for some good, and free, food.
We had placed our order with the waiter when two women — they were possibly waitresses, but definitely worked for the restaurant — entered the main area of the restaurant and began interacting with the patrons. Only these two women were completely naked.
One of the women sat down at our table on my parent’s side. My father had switched places with my mother so that he was to my right and she was to my left, placing the naked woman directly next to him. She was very chatty and perhaps a few years younger than me. She wasn’t acting sexy or talking about sexual things, but instead was a very pleasant woman.
My father leered at her and we heard an announcement over the loudspeaker above the tables reminding the customers that touching the women was strictly forbidden. My father, acting drunk even though he had not drank anything save water while at the restaurant, leaned over the woman and asked her if he could fondle her breast. “Better yet,” he asked, “can I fondle your mama’s breasts?”
The naked woman looked worried and couldn’t get away from him easily. I told him to knock it off and sit back, which he did but not before grabbing the naked woman’s wrist. She got a panicked look in her eyes. I stood up and, coming to the other side of the table, pulled her up and away from him. Only his grip on her wrist was solid and he wasn’t going to let her go. I pried his fingers off of her wrist and ushered her into the safety of one of her coworkers.
After watching them go into the back to make sure she made it to safety, I turned back toward our table and yelled at my father. I pointed fiercely at him and demanded that he behave himself. He shrunk back against my mother and appeared to be sorry.
I sat back down across from them disgusted at his behavior. I saw the menu sitting on the table and knew he had ordered the most expensive thing at the restaurant at $998. I was furious that he would try to take advantage of first the girl and then the restaurant for providing a free meal, so I got up and left.
On my way out I passed through a hallway with an modern open lounge area at one end. In it were a bunch of people in their early 20s sitting on the couches, laughing and having a great time.
The naked woman who had been assaulted by my father was sitting on one couch, still naked, and quite enjoying herself. It seemed that she hadn’t been affected by his behavior at all.
Themes: Dad
I said goodbye to Melissa and the moment she walked away I remembered that I was holding a present I had forgotten to give her. I had wanted to give her an oval American flag belt buckle, but it was too late. She was gone.
Themes: Melissa
I called two women into my photography studio to take their portraits. I positioned them lying, naked, so that their arms and legs were bent at angles opposite to each other. The positions made their bodies quite lovely and unique; I had never seen it done before.
After the shooting was over, I was then one of the models. I and the other girl languidly stretched out on the mats beneath us and took a nap.
When I woke from my nap the other girl was gone, but the photographer was lying behind me reading. I rolled over to tell him something and rolled directly onto his paper soda cup. The straw plunged into my vagina and I stopped, very surprised.
He was very surprised and very sorry for the intrusion into my body, but as he started to pull out the straw I stopped him. The straw felt very good inside of me. I rocked my hips back and forth and rather enjoyed being penetrated.
I had forgotten the photographer was there.
Themes: Sex