god i wish my head would retain more detail from dreams.

I woke up from an elaborate dream – I was on the phone with you, on my cell phone, but describing a scene to you. I was outside, and it was stormy, with an angry gray sky, the scent of rain and a cold wind.

I can’t recall the early details of the story I told you, but it wound up with you, bent over against the side of an old truck (I think I was describing the scene I was in, but inserting you into it.). You were in an worn, faded pair of jeans, and I was threatening you with what I’d do. Then I bagan to spank you, my hand against the worn-smooth denim, I was whispering into the phone, but at the same tie I was now feeling teh story, hearing your moans and gasps, and then sobs.

When you began to sob, I unfasten your jeans and shoved them down, leaving your panties up. I spanked, and then stroked your bottom, and then began to slide my hand between your thighs, feeling how wet you were. I found your clit, and began to rub.

I could hear lightening in the distance, as I made you come for the first time.

I woke up with my cock like an iron bar, wishing I could hear your voice.

I woke up, gasping, my heart pounding. I could hear my own voice as some sort of wordless snarl trailed away; raw, white-hot rage gripped me, brutal, violent, killing rage.

I sat up, breathing hard, sweating, my fists clenching. Needing to hurt the objects of my rage, already out of reach on the other side of the filmy curtain of dream.

even now, I can feel my teeth grind; rage will not dissipate more quickly, more easily, for it’s source being imaginary. Not when that source lives in dreams, real as waking day for only those few moments it has life.

The details of the dream are not important; my sub-conscious mind assembling people and scenarios out of the past, building something rough and new out of them, as with stones from a crumbling castle turned into crude, temporary dwellings.

Small, old hurts and frustrations, angers almost forgotten, dredged up in the dark of night and used to assemble daylight-sharp ‘memories’ of things that never happened.

I can still feel the skin on my knuckles split; I can feel my throat raw from screaming in raw, murderous fury. I can feel my opponent’s nose crack under my fist.

Now, in mid-day sun, what stands clear are the minor, sensory details, not whatever baroque tale my sub-conscious concocted. And I cannot, quite, release the targetless rage with which I woke, sweating and seething.

There is nothing to hit, in the dark, when the dream flees. No target for that impotent rage. Nothing at all.

I lay a while, staring into the glow of my digital clock, trying to let go, or to understand whatever it was that trigged such a dream. I do not know, now, if I got anywhere, but at least, I re-found sleep.

When I woke, hours later, it was to my daughter’s voice – Daddy, I made you coffee.

Some things are better than others at sweeping away night’s cobwebs, That, certainly, was one such.

For some reason of late I’ve been having weird – and weirdly vivid – dreams. Odd, since I’ve been sleeping little (or maybe not so odd, maybe that’s why I’m dreaming this way).

In no particular order, since I can’t recall when I dreamed these:

There was a woman I knew named Laurel, from my tower days. Laurel was the sexy older lady at the time; she knew Lindsay Buckingham, she sun-bathed naked, she danced like a stripper. I realize now that she was in her early thirties, a woman I’d think of as a sexy young thing now; but I was 22 and she was tan, exotic, and incredibly sexy.

I never did fuck her, for all the times I thought I might; all the times we played grab and tickle, all the times it seemed like I’d have wound up in bed with her, it never did happen.

In my dream, we are riding on a bus, or some sort of large, slow-moving vehicle, and talking about how we never did, and how we should have, but now it’s too late since the people who should have aren’t here anymore.

I am having a conversation over drinks with Buck. But for some strange reason, Buck has hair. In real life he has none, of course, but in the dreamy unreal reality, it is known to be him.

When I say hair, I don’t just mean a few days without shaving. His head is crowned with some elaborately tall, almost sculptural thing, a pompadour, a golden whipped topping of hair, high and blond and framed with mighty side-burns.

I’ve no idea what we talk about. It is important, though.

I wake with her beside me – some girl from memory or sub-conscious. Her sweat on me. I can smell myself on her.

I kiss her bare shoulder, stroke from hip to belly, fingers parting her thighs and feeling the wetness of her bald pussy.

I roll her over, kiss her, and straddle her, kneeling between her things. She’s still slick and wet; we’ve already fucked once. Her pussy smells like her come and mine.

I wrap my hand around the base of my cock, working it fully hard. I rub the head against her slit, working her open.

I push into her, wet and welcoming. She whispers my name. I can feel the inside of her; she moans softly, and I begin to growl.

I’m at a planetarium, or a museum. I don’t know what, or where. Maybe los angeles. Maybe not.

Travis Barker is, first figuratively, and then literally, crying on my shoulder.

He weeps, laments; how could she do this to him, when he loves her.

She’s a bitch, he says, how can she do it? He’ll never love anyone else.

He’s drunk, slurring his words. I attempt to comfort him, but he seems on the edge of crazy drunk, like he’ll turn violent of I say the wrong thing. So I speak softly to him, agree with what he says.

The setting gradually morphs to someplace with a bed, and he’s passing out, still fully clothed, including boots, which are filthy.

I tuck him in and leave.

When I wake, I have the name ‘Shanna Moakler’ in my head, and for a moment can’t figure out why.

Ah, it’s too deep
I’m in too deep
Drowning in the fire
Burning in the lake
Dying from desire, dying for desire
Dying from desire, dying for desire
Dying from desire, dying for desire
     —Matthew Sweet, In Too Deep

I know something’s gone off the rails in my head when I start to dream about unusual stuff.

One of the big ones for me is when I dream about work. I almost never do, so when I do I know work’s gotten under my skin in a bad way. I have those dreams rarely and not for a long time.

When I dream about friends, it’s usually a good thing. It usually means I’m feeling positive; I dream pleasant things about pleasant experiences.

Interestingly, when I dream about family – and this has always been true since I was a kid – like as not it’s angry dreams, arguing, fighting, dreams of frustration or sometimes violence. I had that sort of dream often about my brother when I was a teenager. I’d dream about fighting, sometimes about hurting, and once in a while, about killing.

Sex dreams about people I know in real life are all too rare. I can think of only a handful of them (and if I’ve had one about you I’ve told you, I always do) but to a one, they’re wonderful, and I wish oh-so-much that I could tap into them more. Sex dreams are one of my best sources for erotica, and sex dreams about real life friends give me this pleasant feeling when I see them later, like we have a secret.

But the ones that sort of puzzle me are dreams about people I’ve never met. I’ve had a few of them, dreams where my subconscious constructs a person from a few photos or a cartoon drawing, a lot of words or a voice on the phone. Alas, almost never sex dreams, though sometimes romantic. Dreams where a person I know and a person I don’t know at all are collaged into a whole with a heartbeat, breath, facial expressions. I’ve had a few dreams like that about other bloggers, and longer ago, about people I knew from USENET. I had one such last night.

Such dreams leave me puzzled and pleased, wondering how far off my subconscious mind is from reality; wondering if the person I invent exists, or if said person is, like many women in my dreams, almost entirely the product of my own psyche.

Last night, however, I also had an entirely new kind of dream.

I dreamed about video games.

I’ve been playing Resident Evil 4 obsessively for quite a while now; I played it all the way through, then, after obtaining lots of upgraded weapons, played again. Being sick around xmas, I didn’t do a lot else but play and play, working up to super-exclusive weapons, beating the game over and over. Last night, after drinking tequila, I played a particularly difficult sub-game and was up well past midnight losing over and over and over to the final boss (I finally beat it, at almost one am).

I’m immersed. I’m, shall we say, a little too immersed. This became clear when I realized I was dreaming about playing the game, and then later, after waking only enough to wonder what the fuck is wrong with me and then dropping back off, I dreamed about actually being inside the game, with a Striker shotgun in my hands.

I woke up wanting to kill something. Which isn’t really unusual for me I guess, but in this case, I woke up wanting to collect the items they’d drop.

I’m not sure what it means. Maybe it’s something in me finding a way to escape. Maybe lines between reality and unreality are getting blurry. Maybe I just need to feel a gun in my hand again (it’s been too long). Or maybe my subconscious is converting lust and desire into rage and violence in a safe, controlled way (Bam! Bam! Bam!).

I’ll tell you though, it doesn’t make me want to stop playing.

We’ve all woken from nightmares a time or two. Woken, sometimes gasping, sometimes screaming, sometimes just to an awareness, oh thank god that was a dream. The sweaty, sheets-cumppled, heart beating, terror-bleeding-into-relief feeling as dream fades.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the opposite of that.

Have you ever a dream that’s so good, so right, so perfect, that waking up feels like a nightmare? A dream of utter contentment, complete perfection, all-is-right-with-my-world.

A waking moment, floating up from the deep, warm, womb-like pool of dream, to find that all life’s problems and pains and losses and realities are terrifyingly still real, and the dream’s bliss, the dream’s utter perfection and contentment, is lost.

I had that moment a night or two ago. At, of course three am – what I call the worrying hour. How often have I had conversations with friends about middle of the night wakings; the eye of that storm turns around three am. AT that hour, life’s tiniest problems are magnified, life’s sturm und drang blown to operatic proportion. I woke, a little after that hour, from a warm and contented dream. Not a sex dream, nothing so raw, intense and carnal. No, a simple dream of simple uncomplicated pleasure, the details of which were fading away long before the night was over.

I woke, and drank water, and stared at the dark ceiling, and felt warm glow replaced by reality, and it feel like I was starting a nightmare, not waking from a dream. Work, and kid’s school, health, tasks to do. Things lost. Desires that live in my heart all the time, yet which are forever beyond my grasp. Wants and needs and fears. Age and aches and frustrations, like a drowning pool, quicksand closing over my head.

I want my dream back, I thought. I need my dream back.

How I envy people who can lucid dream; who can live out in dreams what they want in waking life. Though I fear if I could do it, I might never wake.

I wound up getting out of bed at three thirty, wobbling into my cold living-room, wrapping myself in a blanket, and finishing a book, Bujold’s Hallowed Hunt. (I’ll post a review shortly, that’s another topic). I was still awake when my kids got up for school, though I managed to slip back into bed for an hour of sleep; dreamless this time, no nightmares, no blissful contentment, just black emptiness, which was what I needed.

I want to find that dream again. Whatever it was, lost now in haze. I want it back.