Sleep Log

I had a dream that I lived in a prison that was ten-stories high, and every room was a closet, that opened onto another closet. There was a middle aged man above me, who was in for murder, and he kept pounding on his closet doors speaking in his broken English. He was Chinese. The entire facility was. Down in the kitchen there was an old man, and I was there with a little baby, who I think was my sister Nicolette, but as an infant. I was feeding her long, pale blue cellophane noodles. The old man watched a woman learning her craft and became visibly concerned I was going to feed her too much. He didn't speak, though, for so long I didn't think he could. He saw me shaking and realized I was frightened because of the man upstairs.

He smiled and said, "we are actually lucky to have such a sadistic prison warden," Laughing. "Because it means this man would never get free before being punished, severely. You have nothing to worry about."

Just as he said that, I started walking away from the prison, towards the parking lot of a store selling Lebanese food. I suppose I had the privileges to leave intending to return. I was about to close the door when I saw the angry man driving his dusty turquoise Cadillac towards the door. He did not have those privileges, but I realized I would rather have him escape than live next to me any longer. So I left the closet door open. The old man gaping, horrified, and the baby forgotten, the murderer drove through the wide closet doors. I ran, quicker and quicker, wearing high khaki wooden heels, wearing a sparkling blue high-waisted skirt, realizing that because of these things, he might chase me.

The man sped down the street, screaming hoarsely, over his thick Chinese accent,

"AMERICA.
AMERICA.
AMERICA."

Then, as I suspected, his car pulled into the darkened parking lot where I was, leaving no chance of escape -- except waking up. So I woke up.

Although, the celebratory shouting of the name of my country continued to reverberate in my ears, even then.

This followed the cycle of being woken up by a nightmare to return to happier dreams. Later, my brother was accidentally spilling personalized greeting cards he had bought for my mother, with her name misspelled on them the way the electric company misspells it; "LAURIE BROWN."

There was another Sesame-Street style speculation, complete with diagrams of receding roots, that made very real the tradeoff that animals make, between having roots and having mobility. Watching housewives strike deep taproot. Thinking, we really could turn back into plants if we wanted. It would take several million years. But life really is that malleable.