Tag Archives: dream

2016/10/03

Blatant Self-Plagiarism

By dsholloway

“You know,” she said, curling up in the passenger seat and pressing her cheek against its red leather, “I had this dream last night. You were made of pizza and I ate you.”

She reached across the console and rested her hand on mine, concernedly.

She continued: “It was awful. I felt like calling you, but I knew you were sleeping.”

Bullshit, I thought. She hadn’t called me in months. She only agreed to go out with me tonight because I told her – to my karma’s horror – that I was dying. We drank too much wine, and, in her drunken state, she decided that her dream portended my demise. Then she asked if I thought she had gotten fat.

In our months apart she got a new boyfriend and I got a new car. I stuffed her in the passenger seat and drove her home.

My car idling in her driveway, its headlights glaring at the back of an unfamiliar vehicle, she refused to remove her hand. Her house was dark.

“If K is so great,” I huffed, “where is he tonight?”

She sighed, said nothing. Then she moved to kiss me but sank her teeth into my face instead.

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2016/06/11

The Lamella

By dsholloway

To exorcise your anxieties, you invent a woman, draw her portrait, and then dream about her. You’re supposed to ask her questions, in your dream, and, after you wake, write her responses in your “dream journal.”

 

But when I present her portrait to K, he becomes enraged. “This is your woman? This is your animus?” He balls her up in his left hand and drops her to the floor. “Try again.”

 

I again draw the woman, the locus of my anxieties and erotic fantasies. She is my life’s work, the climax of my existence. I don’t ask K for his approval before I begin dreaming about her.

 

K is jealous of my animus, I feel. He wants to dream about her, ask her questions, and write about her in his own “dream journal.”

 

I dream of K instead of my animus. I ask him where she is. He says that she has left me because I’m “too unstable.” I tell him that’s why I drew an animus, to stabilize. He says that it’s too late and that she’d rather be with a rich guy besides. I can’t disagree.

 

I wake up but don’t bother to write any of that down.

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2016/01/15

The Supposedly Innocent Gaze

By dsholloway

“You have the most charming way of eating,” I cooed on my way past her table. “I don’t mean for that to sound creepy or anything,” I stopped to clarify. “You just caught my eye and I couldn’t look away until you were done with your spaghetti.”

 

She smiled and dabbed the corners of her mouth with her napkin: “Thank you.”

 

She said nothing further so I exited the café.

 

That night I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling and watched her eat her plate of spaghetti. “Is she as dainty when she eats a medium rare hamburger,” I wondered, “or oysters on the half shell?” I closed my eyes and dreamed of the woman.

 

Every night thereafter she infiltrated my dreams, always seated at a table with a white tablecloth and always eating.

 

After a week, I grew concerned that she was growing fat.

 

I returned to the café. “Has the woman who eats spaghetti in a womanly way been in recently,” I asked the maître d.

 

“You’re the eighteenth man to ask of her today,” he scoffed before gesturing to the dining room, which was occupied by single men all waiting for the woman who ate spaghetti.

 

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2014/10/11

As a Real Thing and as a Metaphor

By dsholloway

I love you but I’ve chosen darkness he said to the tree as he chopped it down. He held back tears.

He used to play in the tree as a child. He used to run around it and kiss girls under it. He used to climb it and fall off of it. He used to cry under it when his parents fought. Or cry for it during thunderstorms. He lost a basketball under it. And found a human skull buried near it. He once got stuck in it. Bees built hives in it. He never got stung but his Vietnamese friends did. Birds lived in it and nursed their young in it. The neighbors were always afraid the tree would fall on their homes and expensive cars, temporarily upsetting their upper-middle class suburban dreams until their insurance agents showed up. There had even been a petition signed by half of the members of the neighborhood association demanding its immediate removal. (Two-thirds of the members were required to sign.) He carved haiku into its bark and never read them to anyone. He read them to the tree. He loved the tree. It loved him.

But the lumberjack’s daughter was irresistible.

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2014/09/30

Teach Me to Grieve and Conspire

By dsholloway

K was convinced that she was the one hurting him during the night, that she was the one leaving knives in his body while he slept.

“She’s going to kill me,” he said to a friend once, refusing to elaborate.

She didn’t kill him. But one day she woke to find K dead, his head thoroughly severed from his body and covered in lipstick. She sighed. You men, you have no self control.

K had gone to the Isle of Women again.

He never told her of his dreamscape philandering. But he didn’t need to. Every night he went to the Isle of Women and every night from within her own dreamworld she watched him go.

The police told her he died by his own hand. Which would make since: those marks on his body he attributed to her were also self inflicted. One night she woke to find him pummeling his own face, shouting remorseful things about “the nature of men.” She never brought it up.

So she  believed the police. She also kinda believed he killed himself out of guilt. But she also kinda believed he killed himself so he could stay on the Isle of Women forever.

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