She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).

- Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Friday, July 31, 2009

Dreams I Had Last Night

I dyed my hair black again yesterday. I don't know why I enjoy it so much, but I think it's better when it's longer and black. Then it makes me feel Celtic for some reason. Mostly I just like the smell; it reminds me of cherries.


It's Friday and I just finished my last exam for UGA - the courtesy of a split-level course on Shakespeare. I walked out of the class on Monday in silent protest to having my time wasted. Then I realized that I had nothing better to do, so I suppose I should have stayed and watched my professor hunt for his page number a little longer. I've decided that I like him. I probably shouldn't have walked out. It wasn't so much that the class was boring (it wasn't), I was just in a bad mood and I realized I didn't need to be at school. I don't normally do that, because I know you should stick things out. But I think this was one of those cases where it was alright to leave. Sometimes you just have to.

I had two dreams last night that were extremely vivid, visceral, and slightly disturbing to me. After thinking about it I'm just going to post the second one.

In the second dream, I was a child, and my family (not my real family, of course) lived in a wooded area in a cabin, sometime in the early eighteenth-century, in a place reminiscent of Salem, Massachusetts. It was winter, and it was night time, and I was scared because there were these things floating in the air that looked like tiny crossworks of fiber or flax, so thin you could only see them when the light was right. They were actually people, aliens, I think, but I was afraid, even though my dad told me not to hurt them; I tried to hit them out of the air and break them apart. I sucked them into my lungs and in reparation for that they started to kill me by cutting me up from the inside. Eventually they scratched my face off.

After that I wasn't the child, but I saw what happened to her. The aliens, in a larger, more human-like form, dressed in long robes that remind me of the judge's robes the puritans wear, brought a platter to our house. The platter had the face of a man on it, skinned off of his head, but his face could talk even without a body, and move a little bit. He talked a lot and shouted about wanting his body back and that it wasn't fair. They told my mother that they would save my (the child's) life if she agreed to let them put this man's face on my (the child's) body. My mother (who was a very old Michelle Pfeiffer) looked at the man beside her who wasn't my dad (I think he was her lover even though they looked remarkably similar), and she smiled at the alien men.

And they put that man's face on the girl's body. She was grown up by now. I could see in this double mirror reflection what she would have looked like with her own face. She looked like Drew Barrymore and had beautiful red hair. But the man wasn't happy and neither was the girl. They could hear each other, but they shared one body. Eventually they somehow fell in love with each other.

I assume that it ended happily. The whole thing struck me, upon waking, as a perfect analogy for how I think about marriage. But also, I realize that a lot of this was reminiscent of North and South (Gaskell) with the whole flax floating through the air and the lung damage.

The End.