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I'd be lying if I said I was to blame
by anna at 06:44 PM on July 30, 2003
Kafkaesque, adjective:
Marked by surreal distortion and often a sense of impending danger: "Kafkaesque fantasies of the impassive interrogation, the false trial, the confiscated passport haunt his innocence." (The New Yorker)
A dream, like kids, is something best experienced first-hand. It loses a lot in translation. When someone tells me their dreams I always feel like I do when they try to show me their baby pix. In his current routine, Jerry Seinfeld boldly admits as much. He says he is fascinated by his own children but couldn't care less about other people's.
That said, I had the most perturbing dream last night. I'm sorting through my mail, putting bills and dunning notices in one pile and everything else in the trash. I come across an official looking letter from the Marcus County West Virginia police department. It's a summons to appear on charges of driving while intoxicated.
WTF? To my knowledge I'd never set foot in this place let alone drove drunk there. So I get out a map and look it up. Marcus County is a tiny enclave abutted two sides by Virginia. Driving north you could be in Virginia, spend five minutes in West Virginia and then be back in VA. Sure enough, I had been in the vicinity on the date in question.
But I hadn't been pulled over by the police. So I call one of those "if you've got a phone you've got a lawyer" lines. My attorney agrees to meet me at an outdoor cafe. As I sit there sipping iced tea and picking at rancid tuna salad, he examines the summons with a grave look on his face and blows second hand smoke in mine. "This isn't good, son," he says. When someone calls you son it never is. It's like what follows "we've got to talk." Trepidation coursed through my veins as if some dreaded disease.
Turns out this county has an ordinance that allows police to charge erratic drivers with DWI so long as they gave chase but gave up after their quarry crossed state lines. The onus then falls to the accused to prove he wasn't intoxicated, a strategy which my attorney dismisses as unworkable. He hands me a doctor's business card. Evidently the doc can run a series of tests in the hopes that we could establish that I'm not a problem drinker and plead for leniancy.
This kind of thing isn't without precedence in the non-dream world. Most states have pole-mounted cops that snap photos of speeders. They mail the tickets to scofflaws who as owners of the vehicles are presumed to be both the driver and exceeding the posted speed limit. Most of the accused swallow their pride and mail the assessed fine in. But of course, that isn't an option with DWI.
The phone rings. It's my attorney, sounding distressed. "You're looking at six months in jail and the local prosecutor isn't inclined to cut a deal with you," he informs me. "Why the fuck not? I passed the tests with flying colors," I snap. "It's your two prior convictions," she says. Say what? I've never been convicted of DWI. Both times I was charged, we worked out a deal whereby I'd take classes and plead to a lesser charge of reckless driving. Ah but there's an asterick on my record that reads: "Reduced from DWI." So this slack-jawed hick prosecutor knows about my prior problems and considers me a menace to highway safety. Thus he seeks the maximum penalty of six months in the slammer and a $5,000 fine.
Oh no, this doesn't stink like unwashed ass, not at all. I can just see it now, informing my boss that I need a leave of absence to serve out a prison sentence. Or telling my son I'll be away for a while but he can visit me on the weekends. To say nothing of being gang raped by a bunch of inbred rubes with tattoos. I'm feeling as though I'm caught up in some Kafkaeque web of deceit from which there's no escape.
So I rouse my wife to tell her about this nightmare, which at the time seemed all too real. Indifferent, she shows me her back and commences to snore anew. I get up and start the coffee machine, beset by imagery of those hicks' dicks poised to rip me a brand new asshole. Needless to say, this is hardly the ideal way to start your day.
comments (14)
jeez, that's a bad one anna, but it sure beats dreaming about going down on weezy from the jeffersons only to realize in the post-dream come-down that you're turned on as all get out.
by lajoie at July 30, 2003 7:16 PM
sounds like anxiety or dread from being unjustly villified for something. Did you do anything that might be misconstrued as 'wrong' lately? other than my life, I haven't done anything wrong.
by lockheed at July 30, 2003 9:27 PM
The imagery of weezy writhing as someone goes down on her is a bit more than I can face this early. And no, I don't think I've wronged anyone lately. I've just had this weird feeling of being unjustly accused ever since the police interrogated me about a murder I had nothing to do with. I think there's an archived post about that ordeal.
by anna at July 31, 2003 6:31 AM
my dreams are usually ones of inability to get anything done. regardless of subject. I can't punch, i can't consummate properly, the usual anxieties.
David Lynch is the best director I've ever seen at portraying dreams on screen. none of this fuzzy outlines, black and white or other goofy crap, just dreams the way they are when you dream them. In fact, most of his movies have that very dreamlike quality which is why they aren't trying to tell you anything. its why characters switch identity or different actors are used or why things are not at all what they seem. it's why two guys can sit ina coffee shop and one is scared to death while the other eats his pie. brilliant. if you havent gotten david lynch, try watching his stuff bearing in mind the guy is trying to put his dreams onscreen, and I bet things will become clear, not understood in every element exactly, but not mind-boggling.
by eff at July 31, 2003 9:23 AM
My dreams always leave me feeling strange. And the ones that feel scary never sound scary in the retelling. Weird. I like them usually. Can't remember them often enough.
by Linz at July 31, 2003 12:22 PM
you know what some of the best dreams are? that half-dream where you're just moments from total dream state, but you think you're falling. then you kick the wall or grab your bed. adrenaline wakes you. the fall is slow, but the wake is sudden. better than waffles.
by lajoie at July 31, 2003 2:38 PM
But not as good as blueberry pancakes with granola in them.
I have those dreams all the time! Is that a hyperactivity thing?
by Linz at July 31, 2003 4:08 PM
Selected words : Dreams Of Falling
This is a common dream which usually represents underlying fears and feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. Interpret your dream by considering your primary fears, current difficulties, and situations in your life that seem to be on a downward spiral, especially those situations that seem outside of your control (financial, romantic,etc.). Some people believe that if you keep falling in your dream and don't wake up that you will die at the point of impact. This is absolutely not true. In a falling dream you wake up out of fear and not because of danger of dying. Superstition based dream interpretations say that if you fall a long distance in your dream and get hurt, be prepared for really hard times ahead; but if you fall and are not injured your upsets will be minor and temporary.
I'd take this with a grain of salt, of course.
I used to have a recurring dream when I was a child. I would be in this clearing, in the middle of dense woods, and hear howling from behind me. I would turn around and a pack of large wolves would just be leaving the tree line running at me. I'd take off running and finally make it to the other side, of the clearing, with the wolves closing in. I'd climb a tree just as they get there and shimmy my way up to a large branch well out of their reach. When I looked down they'd be jumping and growling trying to get to me. Then I would look beside me and a huge wolf is sitting there grinning at me. He goes to take my head off and I'd wake up.
I would have that dream about two times a month for almost a year. I usually woke up screaming. In my dream I would know exactly what was going to happen if I looked but couldn't help myself. Fucked up huh?
by Ezy at July 31, 2003 4:43 PM
A little bit, yeah. And speaking of falling from heights, this from the mouths of babes: I am thirty feet up on a real-life ladder, painting. My son asks if it's scary. I didn't want to let on that dad was indeed scared to death so I said no, I'm not afraid of heights. Ian, deadpan: Neither am I. I'm just scared of falling from them.
by anna at July 31, 2003 5:18 PM
You have very detailed dreams. I don't think I've ever had a dream where I've been aware of the (non-immediate) past, let alone known my whole driving history, and if I was afraid of something happening to me, it would just be a hazy kind of dread, rather than knowing I was going to get this exact fine and sentence.
by tim at July 31, 2003 9:06 PM
i was thinking more about the one thats like standing, then just keeling the fuck over. real slow. or maybe sometimes off a skateboard, which shoots out from under me. or some ballbearings maybe. i have no idea why it keeps happening, but its often the little dream i have right before going to bed for real.
then there's also that one about floating. uncontrollable, unbearably slow, ever rising, floating. constant feelings of excitement and dread. always starts out indoors, somewhere familiar, but inevitably you open a door, and you're outside you dumb fuck. and then you know what? you're still floating. but now you're grabbing at branches. but for whatever reason, you're not really holding on and then there's no more grabbies and you're in free float. at this point it is identical to the free fall dream, only backwards. i wake up when i have given up hope of surviving. usually that's pretty high up though. believe me when i say that falling up is just as scary as falling down.
by lajoie at July 31, 2003 11:57 PM
Here's the weirdest thing, Tim. That isn't my driving record. My record is clean other than a lane changing violation or two. And today I read about a real serial drunk driver whom deputies released from jail even though he had a year left to serve. Get this: They charged him with escape, a major felony. Talk about Kafkaesque! What was he supposed to do?
That is some damn intense imagery (again) Lajoie.
by anna at August 1, 2003 6:48 AM
I love the FALLING UP DREAM! I try to go as high as I can, and it sounds like Wind screaming in your ear, picking up, and you go and go, but before you wake up if you keep going up, you end up stopping in stasis... I know when I get these, because the rushing wind sound is so loud, and I try to rise really high, but it always stops before I break out of Earth's atmosphere.
by LOCKHEED at August 1, 2003 7:19 PM
The dream sounds very much like the jail house scene in "Aomething About Mary". In fact, for those who follow college athletics or know anything about Southern colleges, if you look on the wall above Ben Stiller, it says "Go Cocks", a reference to my alma mater, the University of South Carolina.
The idea of the falling down dream has been explained by Freud as the our genetic DNA going back millions of years to when we just figured out what opposable thumbs are; he extrapolates that the falling down is that we are being chased, we are running blindly, and hence, we go tumbling into space much like the coyote did millions of times before.
The notion of genetic DNA is something interesting. Basically, due to the limited and (sometimes, frighteningly) set amount of genetic mutations humans have, we share experiences. The universal condition, as we in the business call it. That is hy everybody has the falling down dream, the dream of being chased (oddly enough, the skin is thickest on our back, once again proving that we did not want some primordial creature to claw us into ribbons); however, the interpretation is up tpo us individuals.
With that said, the book is entitled "On Dreams". He also wrote another seminal volume called "Civilization and its Discontents". The interesting thing about this particualr title is that he takes a much darker look at humanity, goes to the edge and says we aren't worth a damn, and attempts to find a way to civilize us through pyschoanalysis. The kicker of this is that when he was writing this, at the same German resort, a failed Austrain artist was coming up with his own seminal volume in defense of the mind-numbing violence that Freud was arguing against.
If all else fails, just remember that you are unique, like everybody else.
by English at August 2, 2003 12:19 AM