What Dreams May Come

My sleep patterns have been hosed for quite some time. I get very little sleep during the week (6 hours or less most nights), then oversleep on the weekends (10-12 hours each Saturday and Sunday, not including afternoon naps).

The last couple of nights, I've tried going to bed a lot earlier than usual. That way, I get the pre-sleep reading, tossing and turning out of the way and have a better chance at a full night's rest. Monday night, I went down just after eight; Tuesday, perhaps an hour later. Both nights, I fell asleep pretty quickly and very deeply.

When I fall asleep deeply, I dream. And because I went to bed so early, I had more than one highly detailed dream each night.

Some of the dreams I could do without, like the zombie nightmares or the "woman I used to love or lust or whatever" inscapes. (Anytime you want to do me a big wet favor and shut your trap, subconscious, I'd greatly appreciate it.) Others, however, are entertaining, if only because of their random weirdness, like the one I had last night about Kristy McNichol.

Kristy McNichol was a TV/movie star back in the '70s and '80s, when she won an Emmy for her role on Family, appeared in a Christmas episode of Starsky & Hutch and struggled to get a big-screen career on track with efforts like Little Darlings (a teen sex dramidy also starring Tatem O'Neal and Matt Dillon), The Pirate Movie (a blatant ripoff of The Pirates of Penzance) and White Dog (a Sam Fuller film that, because of its exploration of racism through the story of the titular canine, who's been trained to kill black people, was never properly released in the U.S. and only last year came out on DVD--thank you, Criterion Collection!). She was last seen as the youngest daughter on the sitcom Empty Nest; rumor has it that she's taught acting in the Los Angeles area.

I had a massive crush on Kristy back in the day. (What can I say--I went through a tomboy phase). I had a poster of her up in my bedroom, and yes, I had impure thoughts about her--teenage boys rarely have thoughts that are anything but. But I don't recall ever dreaming about her before--last night, though, I did.

Kristy was in one of those vertical malls--the kind that spread up rather than out--and was at a table on the ground level of the mall, signing photos and CDs advertising her comeback not as an actress, but as a singer. (Like nearly every other '70s teen actor, Kristy put out an album--in conjunction with her older brother, Jimmy--and like nearly other '70s teen-actor album, it's bloody awful.) I was riding down the escalators one by one, working my way toward the table where Kristy labored away at a pile of 8x10s with a black Sharpie all by herself--there was no one in line, and indeed no one else on that level of the mall but her--but I never quite reached the bottom before waking up.

What does the dream mean? Does it mean anything? Don't know. Don't care. It was just refreshing to have a guest star bopping around my nigh-nigh noggin who was actually welcome there.

No More Eating Before Bed. EVER.

Last night, I had a sex dream involving Sarah Jessica Parker and...Ernest Borgnine. And yes, both were naked. My eyes may never recover.

In Dreams

Since yesterday was a long, trying day--in fact, this whole month has been something to be quickly and gratefully forgotten--I ate a brief, hastily prepared dinner upon my arrival at La Casa del Terror, watched a little bit of television and, at 8 p.m., gave up on the day and crawed off to bed.

If only the day ended there.

Somebody once said, "No one has more tortured dreams than the creative mind." (That someone may have been me, but I'm certain somebody else has said the very same thing, only more eloquently.) And when I have a lot on my mind--sometimes good, but usually (like yesterday) bad--I tend to have more detailed, intricate or flat-out weird dreams.

Last night (or was it this morning?) fell into that last category.

I don't remember all of it--a dream has to be really vivid or really freaky (or both) for me to retain the whole thing upon awakening--but the jist, as I recall, was this:

I was to attend a memorial reading for Lorri Jackson and compose a poem for the event. (Why I'd need attend--since she's been dead for 17 years--and write a tribute poem when I wrote one back then, I don't know.)

I arrive with JB at what I think is a meeting to discuss the memorial, take a seat on a folding chair in what looks like an American Legion hall and start to write lines in a spiral-bound notebook. (The only fragment I can recall from the verse-in-progress is "cancerous traffic"--which I actually rather like; maybe I'll use in a poem or haiku somewhere down the line.) Then somebody tells me that this isn't a meeting to discuss the memorial--this is the memorial.

Panic is setting in rapidly when a short man wearing a bowling shirt and jeans approaches me, lays his small, soft hands upon my troubled shoulders and urges me calm down and have a seat. I recognize him imediately, even without the "flowing robes" Carl the groundskeeper so eloquently described in Caddyshack, as the Dalai Lama. He directs my attention to the stage, where a Lorri Jackson lookalike is doing a vigorous dance. She's a dead ringer for Lorri, with many colorful tattoos and piercings shining in the stage lights...except she was naked...and had a fully erect dick.

When the Dalai Lama himself takes the stage to say a few kind words, the audience breaks out into an apparently well-rehearsed song-and-dance routine in tribute to him. I don't know the words or moves, so I look at the young man on my left--a blond kid in a crisp white shirt and tie, like the kind you see going door to door on Saturday afternoons, asking you whether or not you've accepted Jesus as your personal savior--and just do what he does, only maybe a beat or two behind.

When the number ends, the Dalai Lama begins to speak...at which point I wake up and vow never, ever to eat turkey chili right before bedtime.