A: 3/11/03

Work Diary, 3/11/03

Last night I dreamed a friend and I were visiting an old schoolmate in
some South American country. As dreams are wont to do, this one became
a nightmare of trying to find a place to sleep while naked fat men
roared by on jet skis. Apparently we were someplace by the water. When
another old schoolmate showed up and proceeded to copy Jack Kerouac's
"On the Road" - word for word, by hand - and then pass it off as her
new novel, I woke up.

In college, while training for a mini-triathlon (which is just like the
real thing, only without the agony), I would bike between cities while
repeating to myself, "Are you awake? Are you awake? Are you awake?" I'd
read an article in the local leftwing rag about lucid dreaming. The
trick to lucid dreaming, I felt, was to drive your conscious self
insane with the "Are you awake?" question, thus spurring your
unconscious self to set things right by answering. Once asleep, you
might answer "No" to the question, opening yourself up to a world
controlled dreams. My goal with lucid dreaming was to create an
internal kindgdom staffed by willing serfs, a kingdom completely under
my thumb and my dreadful temper. But I never woke up unconsciously,
despite logging hundreds of miles and thousands of "Are you
awakes?"

One of my earliest memories is waking up from a dream after I'd fallen
asleep in the bathtub. My ratio of fat to muscle is surely what kept me
alive in all that water. I remember dreaming of a hammer hitting a
concrete sidewalk, the noise of which was probably just my head slowly
hitting the bathtub porcelain?ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk. After
waking I kept my ears submerged, enjoying the muted sounds. It might
have been womb-like had I not already known my mother's stomach was a
repository for my father's fists and those disgusting pink Hostess
Snoball snack treats she always craved.

One year, some fellow teachers and I taught a required
interdisciplinary unit on civil rights. For seven straight hours I
listened to Martin Luther King's "I Had a Dream" speech. The next day,
it was seven straight hours of student speeches, each and every one
incorporating the "I Had a Dream" theme. I had a dream all right, but
it had more to do with some well-placed explosives than civil rights.
Personally, I felt we teachers were being punished for the prior year,
in which the students re-enacted the Rosa Parks story. Rosa Parks, a
black woman in Alabama, refused to give up her seat on the bus, got
arrested, and sparked a boycott of the mass transit system. My school's
re-enactment of this turning point in American history was to put a
blue-eyed white girl in blackface and send her out onto the stage
wearing an old curly wig, from which sprouted several strands of the
girl's blond hair.

At age thirteen, I sat in the passenger seat of my Colorado cousin's
Ford Pinto as he sped down the road leading to the prison. The prison
road was off limits to the public, but my cousin was determined to
skirt around the traffic on the main road. As the security trucks came
into view and begin blocking the road, a song started coming out of the
car speakers, low and tinny but still full of violins and, finally, a
milky voice that gave me goosebumps and made my legs itch. In a rare
act of assertiveness, I stopped my cousin's hand when he reached down
towards the radio. "I want to hear this," I said - this being "Sweet
Dreams" by the Eurythmics. I'd never heard anything like it, and
couldn't bear for the music to disappear. I was hearing proof of
something beyond my cousin's curses, beyond the road, beyond even the
static panorama of the Rocky Mountains in front of us.
Sweet dreams, indeed, of escaping the hot, dusty confines of a Ford
Pinto; the ache; the dirty bubble of solitude I was suddenly ready to
bust wide open.

Even if I couldn't understand all of the words.