the first dream...

came the night after my 20th birthday. My birthday is February 20th, 2/20, for those who might be numerically inclined. Not that I'm saying numbers had anything to do with it, but maybe they did, and that night I had the first dream. 

In the dream my two girlfriends and I were in Mexico. We were lying on our beds and laughing and talking until one by one we slowly nodded away. Right before I fell asleep, I remembered we had forgotten to lock the doors.

Then it was too late and the room was changing into my childhood bedroom. My parents were sleeping down the hall. The windowshade was up and along with the moonlight something evil entered the room, sweeping across the pane and into my body.

I tried to move, to shake it off, but I was paralyzed. I tried to scream out for help, but my tongue curled back in my throat, choking me. I was convulsing now, involuntarily, and worst of all, I was thinking.

"I'm having a seizure," I thought, which meant I was no longer dreaming.

And I was certain at that moment that I was going to die.

more existential.

My car's name is Adelaide. She is a 2001 Honda Accord. We've been through a lot together, Adelaide and I.

The first time she was stolen was at the "David Bowie, Booze, and Placenta Mice Babies" party. I needed to get my sunglasses out of her glove compartment, because I was wearing a blue wig, and it was dark, and I was very drunk and very high. My friend Simon, who was wearing tinsel on his head, and who was also very drunk and very high, came with me. There is a picture of us on the lawn; him in his tinsel, and me in my sunglasses and blue wig. My arm is draped jauntily over his shoulder, and the car keys are dangling from my fingers.

That was the last anyone saw of Adelaide for a good long while.


My friend Barbara saw her briefly, when she was being driven away early that next morning. Barbara was returning from the house of a man with a glass eye, and maybe it was in thinking about the glass eye that she failed to recognize Adelaide until it was too late. She thought the two men in the front seats did not look like people who had my permission to be driving Adelaide, and so she hurried to find me.

I was in my bed, still very high and very drunk and very sick and having nightmares. I dreamed that I was in my childhood bedroom again. I was trying very innocently to plug a cord into an outlet.

But sparks started flying and before I could stop it, a flame had spread onto the floor. I doused the flame in water, but now a huge, soggy circle was spreading across the rug. When I touched the circle, the walls of the house shook in a loud rumbling noise and the entire wet part of the floor disintegrated, crumbling downwards into the dining room and leaving behind a huge, gaping hole.

In shock, I stood and stared at it. One small action had spiraled out of control, and now my home was destroyed. How was I ever going to tell my parents?

It was out of that thought that I was awoken to Barbara's frantic knocking on the door.

in the garden.

I was dying and all I could do was watch the lines of poetry scrolling long in front of me. Long and white and cursive they scrolled, one after another.

"In the garden..." one began, but it was scrolling too fast for me to read the rest. Frozen, shaking, unable to speak for fear of choking on my tongue, I lay and shook and watched the poetry go by, until I woke up.

I could not believe it when I was awake. I kept feeling myself to make sure, and I was still shaking. Then I sat in my bed in that early L.A. morning wondering what it meant and where to go and what to do.

My room-mate at the time was very Christian. 

I did not tell her about the dream.