It’s a tiled room. The tile was probably once white but now it’s grimy and dirty and vaguely nicotine yellow. The room is big, big enough so that it fades into the darkness about twenty feet from me in all directions. There are some half-high walls that seem to surround individual showers and rusty drains in the floor and bits and pieces of dark, broken grout everywhere.
The light is as though it’s coming from me, like I’m carrying a naked 25 watt incandescent bulb and it’s not tossing out much light at all. What light there is is dark and dank and somehow mirrors the room.
And I’m the only one. Standing alone, wondering what in hell I’m doing there.
At some point, I realize I’m standing ankle deep in blood. The entire floor is covered four inches deep in blood. It trails off into the darkness but I know it’s there, I can just tell.
And I keep repeating, in a voice that is sometimes scream and sometimes anxious and all times terrified, “It all counts. It all counts.”
My life was pretty full just about that time, and it was all stress and obviously I felt as though the world was bleeding me. There’s a great Metallica song, “Yeeeeaaahhhh, it’s blee – ding meeeee.”
Ah, the delusions of the self-centered.
See, I love dreams. I love how cockeyed they are and how odd and disconnected. ‘What the hell did THAT part mean?’ They’re sort of like foreign films. No, they’re like foreign, art-house films. They obviously mean something, but who the hell knows what…just like a foreign art house film done in black and white with subtitles and lots of anthropomorphizing about animals and cars and a stick or whatever.
So, a few weeks later, I have another dream. This time, I’m on duty and I go to a house to take a report. I start asking the wife questions and she, being the snippy bitch that I somehow know – with that semi-complete dream knowledge you get – tells me she’s not making the report, her husband is.
“Fine, where is he?”
“I’m right here, asshole.”
The voice is extremely high pitched, like fucking Alvin and the Chipmunks of something. And it seems to be coming from below me so I look down, expecting a short guy I just hadn’t seen…like a bad Vaudeville routine, right?
Yeah, he’s waaaaaaaaaay shorter than that.
And he’s not quite all there. Not mentally, but physically. He’s missing some parts.
Like…everything
Okay, not technically true. He’s still got his nose. And the top of his skull. Other than that? Nada.
He’s talking to me, with no mouth, and I can hear him breathing, with no lungs, and he’s moving around, with no legs or feet, and I’m thinking, “Why would she marry him? She’s pretty cute, she could do better.”
And this guy, who seems to be moving around on a roller skate of some sort, is pissing and moaning and trying to give me some information and all I can think about is ‘What the hell kinda roller skate is he on?”
Blink, I’m awake and that one’s over and we move on to the next.
I’m driving with LuAnn’s father. He’s 84 or something and his driving’s starting to suck. We’re driving up a huge hill on a dirt road and Othmar keeps pulling to the right. The car’s about halfway off the road and I’m afraid we’re going to tumble off the side of this hill.
So I grab the wheel and put us back on the road and he just laughs and laughs and then we’re at the top.
And we just keep going. Right over the crown of that fucker and down the other side.
The other side is like a roller coaster. The front of the car keeps dipping and dipping now we’re free falling straight down. The view is just like the Christ Redeemer statue in Rio. You know it. You see pictures from behind the statue all the time, looking 2,300 feet straight down at Rio de Janeiro. Yeah, THAT angle.
That’s what we’re falling. Straight down. Scared me so badly I woke up and thought I’d peed the bed.
So LuAnn says, “Well, it means that even when you’re in control, you’re not.”
See, I took the wheel to make sure we didn’t crash off the side of the mountain. Instead, with me in control, we crashed off the front of the mountain. So even if I have control, I’m going to fuck things up.
How’s that for an upbeat assessment? Take the wheel, crash anyway.
So the lesson is what? Let an 84 year old man drive? Or maybe I can drive, just do it with no hands on the wheel?
Or maybe just take the fucking bus.