Monday, November 16, 2009

Dark Dreams on Repeat


Some dreams stick around all day. Some of them make you question reality. You wake up and think, "where did I bury that body?" or "somebody's gonna find them and think I killed them".

Your whole day turns into one of those creepy fugue states where you start to question reality, wondering if you're another one of those creepy rural serial killers/grave robbers until about five o'clock in the afternoon before you come back to what you're pretty sure is your reality.

I used to live in a big, ugly ranch house on Highway 45 up in northern Wisconsin, and for a few months when my two house mates were gone off to rehab, it got creepy at night, the rumble of cars and trucks keeping my brain stirred up enough that I'd drift in and out of a deep dream state, often waking up just enough to start the same dream cycle over again, the creepifying and morbid dreams picking up all over again.

Sometimes I'd get up and move around the house, read a while and try and shake off the dreams, but too often they'd start right up again, my brain rebooting the near nightmare until I let it run all the way through.

I'm pretty sure that's why the dreams were so vivid, and why they made the day seem so disjointed. I still sometimes get anxious dreams that I have to let run out to the end, but they're not about hiding bodies anymore.

I think it's because it's so much easier being different these days than it was back in the ugly 1980's. I think hiding a part of yourself to a lot of the world makes you feel like you are hiding a body, one's own.It's just easier being one's queer self now, in spite of all the frothing right wingers screaming about how dangerous us queers are.

Oddly enough, me and Sweetie are dangerous in a sort of a "don't fuck with us, because we're a combined 400 pounds of strong and easily angered mammals". We're the sort of pacifist who shoots back, the kind of folks who don't start a fight but usually make sure that it's finished one way or another.

Now I write songs about hiding bodies, getting pushed down wells or junkyard lovers instead of dreaming about them. It's more fun than dreaming about it.

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"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." Ralph Waldo Emerson