innately surrealist.

Went to the Magritte exhibit with my class today.  I'm realising more and more how relevant the Surrealists are to me.  My writing mentor told me my writing is very Surrealist.  Surrealism is a superreality that includes both reality and dream.  I try living in that superreality, harvesting my dreams like they're valuable to reality.  I woke up from a bad dream this morning, for instance, where my fish Opprobrium was dead and bloated because she ate a cricket.  And then it came out of her and she seemed better.  When I woke up I anxiously jumped up and ran into the living to feed Kalu.  And this is not the first time a dream has functioned as a wake-up call, so to speak, to get something done.  All in all, my dreams might be a better indicator of my life in the past few months than my waking experiences.  I mean, after all, they're a history of what I've been doing the other eight-to-ten hours of the day.  In fact, think of these as a blog of my reality and it's very telling.  The following are some delectable recent excerpts from my dream diary, kept in the exact format that I originally typed out upon waking.  Note that I wasn't fully awake from the dreaming state yet when I wrote some of these.  (Also read this, this, this, this and this from previous entries.  There are more like these, but I don't have the time to search through three years of entries to find them.)

February 25, 2007:
Stephen:  i just had a dream that alex castle's name was "alex bulldozer castle" and then i told him "maybe you should just go by "alex castle."
Katie:  hahaha
Stephen:  except "bulldozer" is a stand-in for any machinery.  i can't remember if it was "powertool" or "carpet remover."
Katie: i like "carpet remover," personally.
Stephen:  i think it might have been.  i'm thinking it had something to do with carpets.

February 20, 2007:  I was at a party with a lot of straight white friends, and we were playing a game where everyone had to balance hot dogs on their penises.  One guy who was doing it had a really nice body, and a hot cock.  And I thought it was Birch, but when I looked at his face, it wasn’t.  And my friend Emily was there, and we talked for a while.

February 11, 2007:  Phil from my MFA program was asking me for my family tree so that he could market his concerts to my family.

February 9, 2007:  I had a dream that my father and I and a younger brother were living in the house in Albuquerque, and a bunch of old people came over, almost like a procession for my mother.  And for some reason we all sat in the garage, and then my father told me we had some kind of mango tree just outside the garage, and then I went and looked at it, and it had huge mangos.  Then I came back in and all the people had left, the last car was pulling out from the parking along San Bernardino across the road.  My father was melting styrofoam and my little brother got covered in it, and then he got me covered in it.  When it melted, it turned into brown water, and it smelt kind of like a papermill.  It was disgusting, so we took a shower together, which turned erotic.  I kept asking my father where the lower levels of the house were, because I missed them.  (I often have dreams about these levels that don't exist.)

January ?, 2007:  I don’t know whose house I was in, but my nephew Jamie was there, as were many children and parents, like a public pool.  Jamie had just won some award at Yale, so he left it in the minivan, and my sister-in-law Amy kept mentioning it, too.  The children around us were whiny and crying.  Everyone looked at me as though I was dirty, and when a child pooped in the full bathtub, everyone assumed it was me.  Amy was downstairs in the pool.  The bathroom was as though we were in a master bedroom.  I had just been walking a long ways down I-15.  I was carrying all my blankets with me.  Cars almost hit me on both sides, and I was also maybe 4-feet underwater.  And there was something about the fault line.

January ?, 2007:  Moving out of beach house.  I go to las vegas on the way back to new mexico.  on the side of the freeway just outside city, I see random people swinging on a body, and I join them.  you can hear the man who died, his thoughts, still.  there’s a whole group of people who want to commit suicide, and I end up meeting them all in new mexico.  at natey’s, I keep losing teeth.  all the suicidal people die in a collective suicide instead of learning to deal with it.  I return to los angeles moving into a large mansion with satin walls.  my teeth never get fixed.

December ?, 2006:  I went on a date with someone where the fetish (like most) was to get scared, except, in this one, the guy had a fetish for haunting people.  so, in the night, I would be scared and awoken, by him, escorted to his father’s house, and then, he told me, I would wake up thinking it was a very cold night even though it wasn’t.

December 6, 2006:  My mother and I were going through my clothes, even though we both knew she hadn’t been around for a long while, to see what was worth keeping for memories.  I would show like a sports vest that I never wore and say “this was from the era where I was trying to look masculine” and she’d tell me not to save it.  (Since I never wore it.)  And I asked her if she still remembered how at one point she was led to wear my clothes when I decided I didn’t want them, and she said she did remember.  (I don’t think much of that really happened.)  I also dreamt about being far out at sea in the ocean, and my parents (two people whose equivalents in reality were never stable) kept trying to make me go under from waves.  Except this was a mere reenactment of how it supposedly was in my childhood.  And maybe we were at the family reunion, because Aunt Irene and my cousins Richard and Evan were there, telling me what a proud life Ernie led, and then I swam into a harbor while hearing Ernie’s voice overhead narrate the brave story of his younger years and the war and how he swam into this harbor himself.  The pace of the story decided how fast I could swim.  The whole dream started with me following this girl up a hiking path at night in the warm rain, and then I think we made out or were supposed to.  It might have been for a music video.  The girl might have been my mother.  Or me.

December 1, 2006:  Ronnie and I were watching a really weird show where people had to pee in a hose at others, and it was in a game set up like teams, and sometimes men additionally had to cum.  And this one black man had to cum at this young Indian girl in front of the camera, and as the cum made its way through the hose, Ronnie was like, “she’s not going to handle it!”  And before that I had a dream that my mother came back, and my parents were nostalgic of the 70s together, and for some reason they couldn’t live together.  And then I was living in a trailer with ten cats, and one was named “FDR” and I had to drive from Wichita to Calgary for school, and I think there were villains involved.  I also remember a freeway that went across the Santa Monica mountains.  For some reason, my father and I were living in Wichita, or just west of it.  And cats kept escaping the trailer, because the walls were made of chickenwire.

November 30, 2006:  I dreamt that Matthew with the dreadlocks in my MFA program was in a music video, but he had blond short hair for some reason.  And something about my parents.  My mother and father were together and seemed very happy.  They each interacted with a random guy that I used to date (not real ones).  I tried smelling my mother.  Then I was suddenly on my way to a hospital in “northeast LA” (in the dream) which was an area I wasn’t used to going to, maybe near Lincoln Heights?  I also recall a section of the dream where the tides were rising slowly, and everyone kept running up the beach, and I climbed on some party stuff, and the waves kept rising.  I wasn’t afraid, but I knew people were going to die.

November 29, 2006:  I said to someone that when I hear the word “place” I can either have a sense of place or think of the Japanese word “playss” (spelling showed up in the dream).  We went to a place with a hot tub, and for some reason my body temperature was 81 while everyone else’s was 75 or less.  A few people had been delivering money to other people through me, and I asked this one fellow why, and he said “because he owed it.”  And someone played the Eurythmics song “Aqua” and then I was ranting about how much I loved it, and my father comes up and says, “This is Annie Lennox.”  And he’s surprised.  Quinn rented my old room and sublet a room in my new house.  I think one was in Albuquerque, one in LA.

August 28, 2006:  This morning I awoke to the shaking of an earthquake; extremely intense.  And then something really hard landed on me, and I couldn't move.  I couldn't even lift my head to see my body.  I struggled with all my might.  The floor above me had collapsed onto me, and I was dying.  Then I awoke again, but this time, realised the earthquake was actually the feeling of being squeeze-hugged in my sleep.  I insisted on making people look up earthquake reports anyway.

May 15, 2006:  This afternoon, during my nap, I dreamt that I was stuck in a poorly designed railroad track-turned-walking trail and was informed by someone who was a combination of Jennifer Logan (my professor) and Janet Jackson that I would have to crawl out through guano.  But I didn't.