Tag Archives: sleep

Writing, Dreaming, Remembering

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I wish I didn’t have to write like I do. I wish I would just think in a narrative and the words would form on the paper. Or, at least I wish I could write as fast as I think. So many stories and ideas I think up are left unrecorded. My mind seems to be most active right before I go to sleep. It’s the only time where there’s nothing else I can or should be doing. It’s the only time I don’t have to think of anything, so I’m allowed to think at my own leisure. All of what goes on in my head while I sleep I’ll never be able to record. I seldom remember what I dream. All I can remember is how strange or extraordinary or amazing it was. Even if I do remember, I don’t remember it enough to write it all down. I don’t remember things as they initially were when I thought them up. I will think of something and it will be forgotten, maybe because I think too much. One thought comes after the next, piling up quickly and soon they replace the previous, lost forever.It will probably never be thought of again. There are too many things to think of. My thoughts are story ideas, sayings, analyzing, poems, songs, what I need to do, what I want to do. Thank god for paper or I would never remember anything. Events slip away. I would really have to think if you asked me what I did yesterday. I remember routine, but only because it is routine. The things I do remember, I can’t always remember the order when they happened.

10 Random Things

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So, apparently I’ve been tagged which means I have to blog with ten weird, random things, little known facts, or habits about myself. I could ignore this like a chain letter, but then I deprive the world of these ten things, and why would I punish all of you for someone elses’ crimes? ;)

1. I like to sleep in beds that are against walls, especially in corners.
2. I have a pet peeve about people putting their feet up on things. I find it gross for people to do that on couches you’re sharing, or on coffee tables you’re sitting at with them. It’s not that feet are gross, it’s that I don’t feel I should have to share their company or have them near my glass of water.
3. I hate coconut and don’t care for vanilla flavored anything. I like beets.
4. I used to play softball. I was pretty good at it too, and I can still probably kick your but at wiffle ball.
5. I don’t have cable television. This is not little known to the people I work with who I remind whenever they ask about me watching the whatever last whatever.
6. Most things about me are weird. That is not little known at all. :) However, I love cats, which is pretty normal and girly, which makes it weird for me.
7. When I was in second grade I developed a habit and fascination with pulling out my eyelashes until a teacher caught me doing it and said, “What are you doing pulling out your eyelashes, girl?”. It was a sudden revelation and short lived habit.
8. I was very into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I never liked the Power Rangers.
9. I have never been out of the country. (Yet.)
10. I’m not a numbers person, which is why I am using this as number 10, and I laugh at people around my age who are making a big deal about approaching and turning 30.

I’m supposed to tag people now to do this now. I’ll maybe… yea… do… that… sure… maybe…

Sorry I haven’t been around guys. Life is never simple, and often it’s hard to express or at least find the time to do it with the proper words. This blog deserves a real post sometime soon.

Dreams – Trick or Treat

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I dream a lot- every night- more than once every night. I have nightmares frequently, and sometimes they’re so bad that upon waking it feels like I never slept. Sometimes they wake me up, or me shaking and gasping for air wakes me up. One night it’s one long dream, and others it’s channel flipping experience. Sometimes it’s the same dream repeating with different middles or endings. Sometimes I have a recurring dream I originally had years ago. Often I die in my dreams. Sometimes I die more than once (probably from growing up with a ‘multiple guys’ video game concept). Often it’s violent and on purpose. There are times I know I’m dreaming. I can control the dream after realizing I’m dreaming, or I wake up. I dream I’m me, someone I know, a character, a third person disembodied watcher, and I even occasionally play more than one character in my dream (switching from time to time). I fly, lose my teeth, go to school naked, save the world, meet aliens, forget my locker combination, run away from infested humans, make love, eat brownies, turn blue, and more.

I dream, and then I spend all morning trying to forget about the bits and pieces that stick with me. Sometimes I write or type them down.

—–

It’s Halloween and all I want to do is go trick or treating, but my pillow case is empty and I’m going through the arcade first. On Halloween you get candy from games too, but sometimes it’s hard waiting your turn to get on some of the machines. I’m excited, and I’m here with friends laughing, moving from roped-off machine to machine. I put my bag near the coin slot where candy will come out if I score high enough. The lights are dim and tinted green and red. Fake cobwebs adorn the place. The place is set up like an arcade maze, machines against machines in zig-zagging patterns.

We have to leave (don’t remember why). We’re driving to find houses to trick or treat at, but there aren’t any. There’s just empty roads and countryside. We found a lone house on top of a hill, but they had no candy, only water and a bathroom. None of us know how to drive in the dream, but we do anyways because we want to trick or treat. I wish we could have just stayed at the arcade. One of my friends broke their arm because one of us drove so badly. There was no accident, they just got one from being in the van while it was swerving and stopping sharply.

I didn’t want anything to do with the bad driving, so I left, walking to the center of town. There was a club/bar with two floors and a patio in the back. It was open and packed. The tables were round and everything was wooden and stained- the tables, floor, walls, bar- and there weren’t any decorations unless you count the umbrellaed patio furniture outside. In this dream I’m not old enough to drink (even though I am) but I get served anyways. An old couple looks at me accusingly. I go outside to the patio with the Christmas lights because it’s so crowded inside and my dad was in there being loud and embarrassing. I tried to tell him about the lack of houses, but he didn’t care about my trick or treat woes. On the patio I found my friend with the broken arm. He had a green cast. He sat on the stairs outside alone. The night was clear and crisp. We breathed fog and looked at the moon.

Recovery

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a studio mouseTwo months after living in a tent and communal ceramics studio, it didn’t take me all that long to get used to sleeping indoors and in a bed again. When people ask me about what happened, starting off with a “…so, I hear it was pretty ridiculous down there,” I reply with, “Yeah, but it’s water under the bridge now.”

Is it? I’ve been berating myself for not getting as much done as I used to: looking for a job, taking classes, building a studio, and selling work. I feel guilty for giving myself a bit of a break- traveling, spending time with friends and family. I also haven’t been doing much talking about my experience in Virginia.

If you know me, you would think that I’ve been thinking about it a lot, obsessing even. I’m avoiding thinking about it. I have been downplaying it to everyone because I needed to downplay it to myself to deal with it bit by bit, an sometimes, not at all.

I somehow don’t feel like I’m allowed to be hurt by that experience. There are people down there still living in tents and at least making a little bit of art- and they somehow deal with it. Don’t they?

Out of six, one lives in a nice apartment nearby.

Two is from Virginia and has family and a boyfriend that she can visit anytime (and talk to at length). Every time things got really bad down there, she was gone in her car for a weekend that had a habit of turning into a week.

Three is not from Virginia and doesn’t have family there. However, he spent about half the time I was in Virginia traveling. Sometimes he’d leave to go up north without telling anyone.

Four came to ‘look at the place to consider it and be considered for a residency’ with a dufflebag containing all his worldly possessions. He came on a bus, walked the rest of the way, and stayed.

Five came burnt out making production ceramics and with baggage he hopes to unload through drinking and burning things. When I left he still had not even tried to make the one idea he’d been talking excitedly about since I got there. He has built a tee pee and adopted an abandoned puppy.

Six has been there a long time. He’s a passive aggressive mask living in the kiln shed on a couch where he watches the Simpsons on dvd, smokes, drinks, eats, and leaves the communal dishes.

These people, as far as I know, are still there and getting by. So I feel like I can’t act like it was such a bad experience if people are still there and surviving. But then I remember what it was like. People are getting by at the post-college club for wayward kids who may be ambitious and want to make art. For the ones that do want to be serious artists, it’s a fight against those who just want to feel as good as they can doing whatever. More than living in a tent, that was the real issue that made living there hard. I blamed the tent because I thought that if there was a quiet room somewhere to relieve my stress, I could deal with the struggle in the “mentally and creatively rich studio environment (ha)”. It was hostile, tense, immature, and lawless most of the time. One of the residents, I think it was Three, called it Lord of the Flies. That’s the easiest and most accurate way I’ve ever heard it described.

The reason I left was a sudden lack of income. It was also a final breach of trust. Most things I was told while I was there, I believed. Most things I was told were said to me to put me off and make me: go down there, deal with it for another little while, wait for it to get better, and just wait because you have so much invested. I even paid for three months of rent on the studio and then left because the news on my lack of income was at the same time as when rent was due.

Living in a place where you can’t trust that people aren’t deceiving you, eating your food, taking your things, breaking your things, talking about you, going to yell at you, and invading what little space and privacy you do have is not living. It’s surviving.

I survived, but I’m not myself. This past summer in Maine I lived in a space I didn’t feel safe or welcome in. I held in there and saved money, pinched pennies, to go to another place that was supposed to be better, yet was somehow worse. I didn’t feel like myself at the end of the summer. I’m just starting to feel like myself again. I don’t know that I’m ready to think or talk about it much in any real way. I can put people off with jokes about the south versus the north (and how some people think that Virginia isn’t even really the south). Silly tid-bits come easily enough.

Not being myself means I’m not working like I used to. I know that in me, I have the ability to finish up my novel. I know I have the ability to get my studio together faster and get some work made. I know I could have a near perfect score in the it course I’m taking. I know I could have more posts and more site updates. I could have a few more web programming languages under my belt. I could be looking for that perfect job more aggressively.

Would any of that help if I’m not myself? Working harder isn’t going to help me concentrate on doing a better job. I feel like everything I’ve done since I’ve got back has been sub-par. I see the bar that I normally meet or exceed and stare at it. I don’t know why I’m not up there. I tell myself I’m lazy. I am starting to realize that is an easier answer compared to admitting that I took a big blow these past several months. I let things not just get to me, but actually push me down.

I’m going to get up. The sooner I can admit these things and sort through them, the sooner I can be me again. Regardless, I think it’s going to take me some time. I’m relearning how to live and strive again rather than just survive.