Dreams

The ancient Greeks believed dreams enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.

I still have vivid dreams that my mother is still alive; I find her sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house by the sea, living under an assumed name.

These have been long days of hanging vinyl and caressing air bubbles with a squeegee as C. and I finished installing a situation in the atrium of a school. Over the past four weeks, we’ve collected over one thousand dreams from students ranging from kindergarten through high school. It’

The photograph of my mom refuses to leave the auditorium. We jiggle the cords, but she’s still there, twenty feet tall and gazing at the water.

Record-breaking wind swept across England yesterday, closing bridges, train lines, and attractions. The nation tuned in to watch a livestream of airplanes struggling to land at Heathrow, and a gust of wind punched open the roof of an arena. The trains started running again late last night. I know this

I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.

Sunset: 6:20pm. A first-quarter moon. A high of 72 and another humid night that feels like the wrong season. Last night I dreamt that I painted a picture and could not tell if it was god or the devil because the image was too big for its frame. Then

The philosopher Herbert Spencer believed the first gods appeared in our dreams. These visions gradually became ghosts that haunted our stories. After all, the word spirit applies to ghosts as well as gods. And in the beginning, God was only “a permanently existing ghost.” Last night I dreamt about a

The first leaves are falling, and I’m eager for early dusk and deeper nights. Last night I dreamt of hammerhead sharks. I was swimming away from a burning airplane and they swarmed around me, biting away pieces of my back and arms until I woke up. I don’t

This journal will probably begin to decay through August. I’ve lost the thread of this nightly exercise. Maybe it will disintegrate into fragments, stray factoids, and orphaned sentences. Like how the other night I had a dream with an unseen voice saying come here and give god a kiss.

Last night I dreamt that I discovered a substance called ‘onesium’, which is the substance used to clean the soul and wipe away difficult memories. I also dreamed that each finger has its own consciousness. There were more important things I wanted to write about tonight, but I’ve forgotten

New Hampshire. I dreamed such vivid dreams last night in the White Mountains, a series of bizarre scenes that arrived with the force of revelation. A world without the color green. A man who repainted all the seashells on the beach. My parents appearing and disappearing in a parking garage

Sometimes I dream about tollbooth operators, the half-glimpsed faces with cigarettes nodding on their lips, their left hands forever clutching a quarter and a dime in change. They are the interstate’s guardians, the nation’s unmoved movers among the restless current of people going someplace else. After looking into

Last night I dreamt that I was on a massive ship with skyscrapers. We could not leave and we would never reach our destination. Every so often, new people would arrive and they were terrified when I approached, for I was a ghost, haunting them. Where does the vocabulary of

Last night I dreamt that I could not read. Every book was filled with gibberish. The words shape-shifted and flickered between shades of red, white, and blue. My mom appeared and handed me a small paper bag of medicine and told me it would help. We were the same age.

Scene from last night’s dream: I told my beloved if she gave me a fork and a knife, I’d follow her straight to hell. She handed me a spoon. More Americans have died from the coronavirus in two months than in the Vietnam War. Because we measure everything

Last night I dreamt about a god who was angry because the noise of humanity prevented him from sleeping. This dream followed me into the vacant streets today, a city shuttered and hushed with only the occasional masked figure. I stood in the middle of First Avenue for a moment,

Sitting by the river on god-only-knows which day of this pandemic season, I watch a little boy say hello to a bird before it flies away. Then I dig the old lady who cut a tiny hole into her surgical mask so she can keep smoking her Benson & Hedges.

These are long days of suspension. Brittle energy fills the city as we retreat inside for safety. Yet there are no storm clouds in the sky, no soldiers in the streets. Standing at the window, I watch the skyscrapers glint in the late afternoon light. For a moment I’m

Woke from a dream that I was pounding on a counter demanding a cash-back rebate because my soul was damaged. This surreal sensation continued when I stepped outside. Ash Wednesday and people walked the streets with smudged crosses on their foreheads. A beautiful ritual, ancient and haunted. Remember that you

Woke with a yelp from a tense dream of standing on a Russian coastline while pieces of my life washed onto the shore. Will I ever believe in god? If so, it will probably begin in my dreams. The first gods must have been born while we slept. How else

Three recurring dreams: 1) a murderer who creates traffic jams in front of ambulances; 2) The “dishwasher episode” of a critically acclaimed drama; and 3) being told I’ve contracted a rare disease and no matter where I walk from now on, it will take one hour and eleventy-two minutes.

We took a ship through the Finnish archipelago towards a small island in the Baltic Sea.