Louis Shalako
Oct
18/19. I'm still analyzing the dream I had a few days ago—that was the one
where there was a secret meeting going on in the back room of some industrial
shop somewhere. All these well-dressed people listening to a man on a dais. His
head was all bandaged up and he was wearing dark oval glasses and a little
black Homburg hat...he looked straight at me, and it struck me that I had
bluffed my way in purely by accident.
And I was
in a lot of trouble—
I got out of there by running down a bunch of
hallways, and then dropping out through a narrow, brightly-lit crack in the
floor, at the base of a wall, and this is how I escaped to another dimension.
With them eyes like a housefly, that guy was not from around here. Also, the zip-sided ankle boots from the seventies. A dead giveaway.
***
When you are asleep, you are unconscious.
People have slept through explosions and violent thunderstorms, and at the same time, some of that does enter the mind or the brain. Some little thing will wake us up—a parent at the sound of a three-year old being sneaky, the soft click of a door—the kid has been known to sneak juice or pop, out of the fridge in the middle of the night. Just for example.
Sometimes, in the case of a siren in the night, an external stimuli will enter into our dreams.
In which case we may dream of a house on fire, or driving in a police car. We might be surfing on top of an ambulance or something strange like that. They don’t always make sense, in fact, that almost seems to be the point—
So where do dreams come from? This is the subconscious mind. It is difficult to see how some few parts of the autonomic system, deep in the primitive forebrain, the parts regulating our heartbeat, our respiration, the hormonal output of our glands, all come together and achieve the level of bizarro cinema. It’s taking bits and pieces of ancient memory and doing something creative with it in some mysterious process. No one can really say why, but somehow, it does just that. When we sleep, it’s like the ‘conscious’ part is shut off, but deep down inside…no one ever really sleeps. There’s always something going on, something incoherent and fragmentary, disjointed, but going on down there nevertheless.
On some level, that shit might still be going on when we’re awake, but being all alert, all conscious, we simply can’t perceive it. It is a faint signal, still running in the background. Still babbling away to itself. And when we are sub-conscious, maybe it’s just that there’s nothing else there to drown it out. Dreams exist somewhere in the borderlands, not quite dead and not quite alive.
Dreams are ephemeral. When you first wake up, it’s there in the short-term memory. I marvel sometimes, I really do. Oh—and there are times when I wish I could go back and run through that one again. I wouldn’t mind getting in a little deeper, just to see what happens in the end.
Dreams could be said to have no beginning, no middle, and no end. It’s just a fragment. Put enough of them together and you have the world’s first plotless novel. Or something like that.
If you want to remember your dreams, this is a good time to write them down. Otherwise it’s gone, and gone for good. For really good results, keep a pen and note-pad on the bedside table, under a small lamp with a switch that’s easy to find. If you’re using Melatonin (a wonderful aid in dreaming), or another mild sleep aid, it’s still pretty easy to go back to sleep.
I have a mug of water there and a couple of more pills, so there is always that. If you really want to remember your dreams, think about one, from time to time, all day long. Write it down. Go back and read it later. At some point, it enters into the long-term memory. Three to five key words should be enough to recall the germ of it.
After that, it's fairly easy to reconstruct.
***
Oct 27/19. Last night's dream was the usual shit. My mother and the chief of police were having tea on the porch. These weren’t dim figures—this was my mother and this was our actual, local chief of police. I was watering the garden when I discovered teeny-tiny pot plants in there, and of course I was concerned about that. All you can do sometimes, is just to carry on. Next scene: they're sort of moving into the back yard, and I 'accidentally' shoot water out of the hose, hopefully soaking them down real good. They were on the other side of a clothes-line with sheets and pillowcases on it, and there was a bush or two so they didn’t see me, and it came down on them from above.
#dreams
I must have gotten back to sleep again, and then awoke with a start—
...the worst dream of all, is the one where the big red light comes on in the dashboard...
That one’s a heart-stopper, and reflective of my circumstances in some way. Symbolic or something.
#fuck
Oct 28/19. Last night's dream. My nephew and I are in a speedboat. My brother is flying a Rogallo-type hang-glider, and we're towing him on a cable. He's up and back a few hundred feet...looking downriver, I see wires...lots and lots of wires, low across the water, and beyond that, a bridge, also not very high up off the water. I'm yelling at my nephew to slow down and he's just laughing. Doesn't seem to see any problem. And my brother hits the first wire, crashes and he ends up hanging, upside down, wrapped up in all these wires...what happens next is rather vague, but now the nephew cracks the throttle, somehow drags him out of all that, and now we're zooming downriver again...and that bridge up ahead is made of stone and mortar. There are several arches and there’s no more than twenty feet of clearance.
#dreams
Oct 29/19.
In the dream last night: I was walking down a street in some crummy little
hamlet in the middle of nowhere, and I found an empty old storefront, built in
pioneer times or maybe a bit later, call it 1910 or so. Looking inside, there
was a young man, so I pushed on the door and went in. The place had been
cleaned out, but it looked like they were doing some work. Talking to a couple
of people, a young woman told me, "I've only got $15,000.00 in it. Give me
that and it's yours."
Next
scene: I've got the place fixed up and painted. There were three or four rooms
in all.
There are some furnishings including a couch...windows and curtains and
it’s all very nice.
Cheap, but nice, and there are a half a dozen of us in
there, drinking wine and someone is rolling a big joint.
And then
my old man gets up from a chair in the corner and says, "This is
bullshit," or something like that, so I promptly abandon the place. We all
pile into a couple of cars and leave...for parts unknown as that's about when I
woke up.
I call it 'the old hardware store dream', a recurring
theme for some reason. I’ve bought or inherited a weird old building. Sometimes
I just rent an apartment there—another symbolic representation. In a previous
iteration of this theme, the actual storefront is narrow, but it’s in behind
adjacent storefronts, (a barber shop on one side and a pizza place on the other
for example). That part almost makes sense. It opens up into what used to be
warehouse space, behind some of the other units, but it’s now a kind of bar,
with tables, games, and a bunch of windows overlooking a river. The sort of
place where they have a Saturday night band and a dance floor, and bowls of
peanuts in the shell on the tables. The tide is out, the river curves back and
forth, and there are mudflats, and on the other side of the river, a couple of
hundred feet away, there are wharves, boats stuck in the mud, and the backs of
commercial and industrial buildings. That’s it—that’s all I remember. Yet I can
honestly say that odd-ball buildings play a big role in my dreams.
Another common theme: tall, skinny, multi-storied
buildings that quake, and wobble back and forth in the lightest wind. This
dream is almost always scary, and you wake up with that little shot of
adrenaline. And I always ask the same question. How in the hell can anyone live
in that fucking place…??? It's like I'm always buying another shit
building, in my dreams that is...always running up and down them stairs. Always
wondering what the hell is going on…
Why would anyone make a single, free-standing building
of what, twenty-four by twenty-four feet, with a staircase going around and
around, and every floor has one single room. It doesn’t make any sense, but my
brain keeps building them in the night.
END
Image. Home Builder Digest.
Editor’s Note. Louis has some really
interesting books and stories over
here on Kobo.
Thank you
for reading.
