Dreams That I Have Had

Twin Peaks is now on Instant Play on Netflix. Suddenly David Lynch is making a come back, at least with Tumblr screencaps and various bloggerati posts.

Lynch’s films, and Twin Peaks, are entertaining because they capture our terrifying unconscious and put them on the screen. Our most memorable dreams are not the cliche “showing up to school unprepared” ones that show up on Boy Meets World, they’re the ones with doubles and transformations. The dreams where loved ones betray us, where we’re trapped in a world we can’t control, when we find ourselves plummeting to our death and our screams are trapped at the tip of our tongues. They’re the dreams where the homecoming queen is dead and we killed her. Here are the dreams that have stuck with him, years after the fact.

I am shopping with my mother. This was when I was around 5 or 6 years old. My mother is wearing a trench coat, all I can see is her long black hair swishing against the back of her tan coat. For some reason there is a tunnel beneath the shopping mall, we walk into it and suddenly my mother is gone. I am trapped in a long dark tunnel. I realize that the woman who abandoned me was not my mother. She was an agent of some other world sent to make my life miserable (teenage angst at 6 years old). I wander the tunnel for hours and wake up crying.

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I am on the Titanic. I am maybe 13 years old. I have never seen all of the Titanic, I don’t know why it appeared in my dream, I hated that movie. The boat stops in Manhattan. Literally, the boat anchors in mid-town. The streets are broken at the sides of the ship. The Titanic blends in with the sky-scrapers, it’s nearly as tall as The Empire State Building. Everyone on the boat is allowed off to take a tour of New York. I wander around Manhattan with my new friends, The Olsen Twins, and my copy of The Lord of the Rings. We are collecting mozzarella sticks. The siren of the boat rings, it’s time to get on board or we’ll be left in the city. I turn and Mary Kate is gone, along with my copy of LOTR. Ashely runs off to look for her sister while I run to the boat. It’s started to leave so I climb up the sides of the Titanic, clinging onto window sills and dropping mozzarella sticks. As I near the top I see The Olsens on the observation deck with a Frenchman. I beg them for help, the walls of Manhattan are closing in on me and I’m about to lose my grip. The Frenchman says he will help, but he must finish the portrait he is drawing of me. I stare at him in silence. He finishes his drawing and shows it to me with pride, it’s of Eyore. The walls finally close over me, cutting off my tentative grip and I fall to my death on the streets of Manhattan.

I am spending my first night alone in my apartment in Brooklyn. My boyfriend at the time is having a party at his parents’ house in Maryland. I go to sleep after receiving some suspicious text messages from our mutual friends.

In my dream I’m not there. My boyfriend is driving to DC with our friends. They stop at the Washington Monument. It’s close to midnight and Naomi Campbell gives him a blowjob in front of the monument. I wake up immediately and break up with my boyfriend. My mother gives me $20 and a bracelet in the car back to Maryland. I find out a week later he cheated on me that night. I find out months later that when we first started dating a 15 year old gave him head after I left a party.

A few months ago I started having dreams about this guy Zeb. We met nearly 3 years ago, we went to the same parties and always found ourselves dancing to Passion Pit and Lady Gaga.

My first dream about him was a few months after I moved to Bushwick. I went to one of the fried chicken places near my apartment and fell into a black hole. I came to in another dimension. I found Zeb and our friends Patrick and Stan on the other side. I found out that they couldn’t come back to our world because there were warrants out for their arrests. They also didn’t know where the return hole was. Through a variety of adventures I discovered that underneath a rickety bridge, at exactly the right time, the black hole opened up and would return me to Bushwick. I fought Captain Hook on the bridge and fell through the cracks of time with 3 seconds to spare.

It's my birthday!

Zeb once had a dream that the both of us went to Medieval Times. I had my 13th birthday party at Medieval Times. Zeb and I kissed shortly after midnight on January 1, the day after my 19th birthday. There has got to be some sort of cosmic connection, correct?