DREAM CHRIS

Dream University

2011-05-04T19:22:00.001-07:00

Naked in the backseat, trying to put on some gym shorts before we pull into the gas station, I noticed there was a weird, glowing mark on my dick. We bought some cherry sodas at the gas station and kept driving through the night.

Finally we arrived at my new University and I went to my first class, which was a Screenwriting / Fiction Writing combo. Everyone was having a really good time, and I knew the professor already, and she put me in charge of taking attendance. Suddenly I got a bloody nose and went to the utility sink in a side room to get cleaned up, but all sorts of weird stuff poured out of my nose—black, thick, bubbly mucus. And the whole time, girls kept coming up to me telling me they were leaving for the day, or that they’d miss the next class and I was unsuccessfully trying to keep track of all this in a little notebook.

As I was cleaning the blood out of my shirt, a security guard (who was planted as a mole in our class in order to steal our ideas and report back to the Hollywood production company that hired him) accused me of being on drugs. I may or may not have been high on marijuana, but I knew that couldn’t have been the cause of my nosebleed, so as he was trying to shine a flashlight in my eyes, I started cussing up a storm which mad him angrier, and told him I’d been clean and sober for six months, and finally he left me alone.

Then I met this girl from my childhood, L. We were chatting and catching up when the fire alarm went off.

Everyone scattered and I still had the classroom attendance sheet, so I walked all over campus trying to round everyone up. It felt like everyone knew me, like I was a local celebrity. Eventually I found everyone, but by then the fire drill was over and it was time to go to our next class.

On the walk to my next class (Anthropology) I met up with my sister, and we talked shit about some of the not-so-good writers from Screenwriting, and also about our aspirations for our own writing, ideas and story arcs, etc. When I got to Anthro., L. was already in the classroom as was a premature baby, abandoned in one of the desk chairs. I quickly called 911 and gave very specific directions and paramedics came took the baby down the hall where they hooked it up to an incubator. It started to grow very quickly; when I checked in on it 20 minutes later, it already had a full head of blonde hair and could stand on its own.

Students started to come into the Anthropology classroom. This girl, A. sat next to me and we started talking and joking around. Someone said she smelled like old photographs, but all I could smell was carrots, an overwhelming scent of freshly excavated carrots. We had to take a test, and she sat on my lap, squeezed into the desk. We were huddled together, and we only wrote down one answer (Geronimo) before we started making out. Then she rubbed my dick and it sent little lightning bolts traveling down my thighs and up into my stomach.

We were draped over each other when the professor told us that we couldn’t take the test together. I figured I’d have to talk to him after class regarding retaking the test and I left to use the restroom. But where I thought the bathrooms would be, there was an arcade instead. I went in and played skee-ball, but there were rutabagas and cabbages and potatoes on the incline lane, which made it very difficult, plus several loud girls standing very close behind me were restricting my swing and making jokes every time I missed a shot. I asked them to please back the fuck off, and they did. After a few rounds I collected all the tickets I’d won, and was wondering what A. might like from the prize counter.

Revolution 1

2009-07-28T21:33:00.000-07:00

I was living on the second story of a little beach hut when the Revolution broke out, and I became best friends with the man who I assumed began the Revolution, a young man with houlder-length hair and really tan skin. Two battles took place in my little apartment, the second battle being fairly gruesome. We won the battle, cleaned the blood from our swords and ceremoniously cut open a watermelon with our swords, but in the middle of the watermelon was soil and we ate soil, as a rite of marrying ourselves with the earth. Just then, the General we had been revolting against showed up with all sorts of back up troops and captured us. He was trying to interrogate us, but it didn’t work because he was being kind of melodramatic and saying things that didn’t really make sense, like “I know what you dream about” or “You dream of being King David,” which wasn’t true.

They took us to a garage and tied us to a car and then rigged a bomb to some cell phones so the car would blow us up. We started to wriggle out of the ropes, leaving slack in all the right places so that when our guards came over to tie us back down, we did this maneuver that somehow left them tied by their necks and left us completely freed. We were making up little rhymes about what we were doing as were doing it. However, it didn’t leave us with enough time to get away and when the cell phone bombs were supposed to off, we were crouched in both sides of the garage, thinking we were going to get hit with all sorts of shrapnel. But the cell phones were old, and they failed, and so when nothing happened we snuck back to the beach hut, but other guards came in and soon enough they were chasing us. We hurried up the stairs, grabbed our gear, ran through the apartment and jumped off the back porch.

But the General knew we might escape and he was waiting for us, blocking our only passage, aiming his gun at us. I started to shoot at him, while running towards him, and shot him in the head. Which didn’t kill him. When he saw our surprise, he started jogging along next to us, because he wanted to explain why we hadn’t been able to kill him, before he shot both of us. Apparently he was immortal and when shot at, bullets just left small welts on his skin. This is when I stole his gun. He pulled out another gun, but there were not bullets in that one. But he informed us that his ammunition regenerated itself, and it was inevitable that he would kill us. Before I could ask why he wanted to kill us, another man with a beard and long hair and loose, ripped clothes started jogging along with us. Dangling from all over his body were Nalgene bottles, and I knew instantly that this Jesus of Hydration, this angel Sherpa was here to help us and not the man who had vowed to kill us, so I said, Well let’s see if your bullets regenerate before you keel over from dehydration.

And so we kept jogging and I was singing a song about what came first, the bullets or dehydration and then the sun started to set and orange light was catching in the mangroves branches along the coast, and insects were buzzing and pulsing in the palm fronds and the four of us kept jogging, waiting. As we made our way across town, everyone was moving into new houses, carrying boxes of their stuff and we were hollering and waving at everyone and they would wave back. It seemed like the revolution had worked out well for most people. And at this point, the man who had vowed to kill us started to fall back, and before he completely disappeared I shouted whether this meant we weren’t ever going to see him again, and he said, no, we wouldn’t. Maybe due to dehydration, but more likely because during our hours of jogging, we had become friends with him and he couldn’t bring himself to kill us now.

At the edge of town we stopped at a saloon with a deck overlooking the path we had to continue to follow. After a couple drinks, we were trying to lower ourselves off the deck with a crude repelling system, so it wouldn’t be too much of a fall into the rocky-bottomed creek. There was a giant from Estonia who offered his help, but it was obvious he wanted to rob us. I landed in the creek, and all our stuff dumped out and the Estonian started threatening us so I pulled out my gun and then he pulled out an axe, and was about to throw it at us but he somehow hit himself in the forehead with it and cracked his head open and so we bolted before any of his friends came after us, leaving half of our stuff on the shore of the creek. We could hear him screaming as we were on the other side of the creek, running along a fenced off swamp, and then out of nowhere, the axe was flung and stuck into the fence, right in between both us, which made us burst into laughter.

We crossed an old wooden bridge, and the sun was setting and all these cop cars were passing us and we were still laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing and we were so haggard, our shoes worn down, our clothes ripped and bloodied and dirty, and even over the laughter and sirens, we could hear the frogs and the crickets in the swamp beneath us. Even though we had crossed to the other side of the bridge which was a new county and a new jurisdiction, we kept jogging quickly, and in the darkness we saw all these small and agile people, crossing the road, scampering off onto a sandy covered path, and we decided to join them. In the moonlight we could see they looked as haggard as us, and more or less all of them were barefoot, and their shadows stretched out so large on the sand and we kept following them towards a mysterious forest because the Revolutionary and I both knew that this was exactly what we were supposed to be doing.

Jet Skis Again

2009-07-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

I was on jet ski going about 100mph on the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida when I realized that I hadn’t put any sun screen on, which was idiotic because I had just recovered from a really bad sun burn. I dug my t-shirt out of the storage compartment on the jet ski. While I was stopped, swordfish were jumping out of the water all around me and I tried to grab and hug them as they would leap up in the air but I couldn’t, so I sped away. I was going so fast that the jet ski started to skip across the water, and each time it would stay in the air a little bit longer until the jet ski smacked back down against the surface of the ocean really hard which launched it into the air, except it didn’t come down and I so just flew around for hours.

The Ambassador's Daughters

2009-06-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

I was deep in the woods with a bunch of people I didn’t know, going from cabin to cabin, in an amazing rainstorm. At one of the cabins, there was a check-point and a convoluted numbering system. I was trying to check myself in and while waiting I wandered into the basement, where everyone was drying off around fireplaces or reading books or chatting with each other.

I passed through a room with several pianos, and I really wanted to play, but they were all occupied, and everyone was playing something different, which was really cacophonous and annoying up close, but the further away from the pianos I went, it became more lovely and hypnotizing.

Further along in the cavernous basement, I met two beautiful girls, who were the daughters of the Australian Ambassador to Singapore and a young man from Sweden. I sat down with them and we talked for a while until all of a sudden it was the next day, and so we jogged upstairs to watch the sunrise and as it did, it became so bright so quickly, and so we decided to take off in an old Volkswagen beetle.

We traveled sleepily until we arrived at a cleared-out area of forest with a tall, white pyramid in the middle. The sun reflecting off the pyramid was almost blinding. We walked around the pyramid and behind it was gleaming swimming pool.

There were a few people, sun bathing and pulling themselves out of the pool very slowly and seductively whenever they would get out. No one seemed bothered that we had just stumbled upon their secret paradise and joined them. But then a group of people with Downs syndrome showed up on some field trip from a school for retarded people and they were doing cannon balls into the pool, splashing each other and laughing and so we joined in, doing cannonballs as well and goofing around.

And in all our revelry, we hadn’t noticed that everybody had left: the original patrons gradually leaving, at this point slightly annoyed, and the students with Downs quietly shepherded back to their school bus. And so when the older sister and the Swedish guy went to lie out on folding chairs, it was just the younger sister and I facing each other and treading water; our bodies slowly pulled closer to each other, like planets losing control of their orbits, until we were very close, kissing each other while still treading water.

Post-Hike

2009-06-24T07:57:00.000-07:00

In Costa Rica, coming down the mountain at dusk. Except dusk had lasted for hours, purple smears of Astronomical twilight barely lingering in the skies now. I had brought a wild cat with me, a baby jaguarondi, and she slept, wrapped in a towel and held against my chest.

The group of hikers I was with had kind of dispersed and regrouped several times over the course of the long hike through the wilderness and now we were coming together again at the very end, gathered and hushed.

Back at the house where we were staying that night, I was cleaning myself up: shaving my face, taking a bath, patching my clothes, disinfecting my scrapes.

After I got in bed, the cat woke up and was darting around the bedroom, so I went after her, listening for her commotion, eventually following her all over the house. And then, in the complete darkness, having not tripped over anything or bumped into any walls, I realized I was strangely familiar with this house— I realized that this was the house where I lived as a child.

The Gospel According to Mark

2009-02-27T18:45:00.000-08:00

We were never exactly sure what we were accused of or why we were being chased, me and Mark and this girl. The three of us holed-up in some pre-fab house, moving quickly, trying to figure out what to do next while the sun set. When we heard helicopters approaching, we guessed that they found our location by tracing where we were picking up Wi-fi.

We thought maybe we could evade the police by just hopping fences and running through backyards, but we knew we’d get worn out on that endless, suburban obstacle course and we’d be caught. So we ran out to the front yard, and in the hour or two that we were inside, several feet of snow had covered everything, including my car which was buried beneath a mountain of snow. Some of the folks from the neighborhood were running toward us, trying to stall us until the cops arrived.

That’s when I dove into the snow and burrowed down to my car and a few seconds later, I put it in reverse and busted out of the mountain of snow and everyone was in disbelief. I said to Mark and the girl, Hop In! She didn’t stay with us long though. She asked to be dropped off once we got into the city.

After that we drove to the airport, and bought tickets to some city in the Ukraine. The hispanic guy at security wanted to know why we didn’t have any luggage, and I was like, we’re going to visit his grandparents and they have everything we need at their house, and anyway, we’re just going for a three day weekend, and we’re going to buy suitcases there and probably buy clothes, because we love those European fashions. Mark was like, Nice save.

On the way to the gate though, Mark and I got separated. I went in the wrong direction for a really long time, and almost got on a plane to Portugal and I called Mark and was like, Where are you? Apparently I was quite a ways off, but I figured out how to get back to the gate where he was, and then suddenly I was very tired and weighed down and I wasn’t sure I could keep jogging back to the gate. I was using the hand rail to pull myself forward, and finally I was nearing the gate but I could see police swarming the area around where the plane was boarding, and I had the feeling that Mark was hiding somewhere, waiting for me.

Revolutionary War

2009-01-29T18:52:00.000-08:00

I guess I was a high ranking officer. We were winning the battle when their back up troops arrived and we were really outnumbered, but our guns were better than theirs, and we killed the back up as well. But one guy got into our barracks and was firing at me close range, leaning out over a balcony firing up at me. I would lean over the railing and fire down at him, and we sort of took turns doing this for a while until he was kind of injured and captured.

They took him to a bed and I covered his head with a pillow and shot him through the pillow 2 or 3 times. I thought, Wow, even though we've been slaughtering men all day, this one's gonna really haunt me for a while, and I sat down on the bed and stayed there, holding his body while it deflated.

Blowfish

2009-01-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

I parked the van I stole behind the pizza restaurant. I brought in a 24 pack of beer and asked for a sack to keep it in, and ordered a pizza, some bar-b-que wings and a Dr. Pepper. The woman taking my order at the counter kept talking about being on the beach. I was like, "Yeah that does sound good, but how long until the food's ready?" because I knew I had to take my food and steal another car in the parking lot and drive forever because the cops were looking for me.

But before this happened, I was in a boarding school somewhere strange. A friend told me that this woman wanted to meet me, and so I found her in the cafeteria which was in the basement. There were rumors going around that maybe she was a vampire, which started to make sense to me when I started to notice how her skin was real blotchy, like she was trying to cover her bloodless flesh with foundation and blush, but missed whole sections of her face and neck. So then I started to powder my face too, and soon enough there was colored dust suspended in the air everywhere, kind of like in India when they celebrate the Holi festival. Eventually I kissed the woman, just barely, and my lips started to sting, and for a second I thought maybe she had cayenne on her lips, but then my whole mouth started to go numb.

Trans-Atlantic

2008-12-29T12:30:00.001-08:00

Taking my clothes off, putting them into a pile on the rocky shore, I was saying to the little dog, Hey, there’s nothing funny about running away with my clothes, so don’t even try it. Then I lowered myself down into the river, and the current was like a jet stream, and I was swimming as hard as I could but just stayed in place.

Then the dog got in and was swept away and so I swam after him and finally he got stuck in a patch of monkey grass or something that jutted out into the river, so I pulled him out and carried him around with me and waded in the rushing river.

After a little while a old car full of hippies showed up. I knew one of them. They had been traveling forever they said. I left the puppy with them at the river.

Shortly after this, I took a plane to Helsinki and made it there in record time. I went to Markku’s office and found him asleep in his chair, super exhausted. He told me that I was putting on some weight, and I was like, Yeah I know, but at least I went swimming earlier today and got a good work out.

After checking in at the office, I changed into some jeans and made my way to the train station. I was late for the train so I started running, but inside the train station, there was an antique collection on display or something. There was this piano that had nearly-invisible wires that curved up from the keys, so that you could push down on the wire and it would play the key for you, in effect letting you play the piano without your hands ever touching the actual instrument.

Eventually I came back to the states, and I went to a party and Keith Man and I were playing a show, but we were making all sorts of weird sounds, playing with the knobs of strange machines, generating this weird haze of sound, and after a while the sound started pulsing and eventually it was like the music was making itself. We stopped playing because it was really late and we thought the cops were going to come and shut it down anyway, so everyone was like “Let’s just go to the bar.”

After packing up though, this girl came up to me and I realized she was my girlfriend. She was saying, “I’m so glad that you’re here. And that finally we’re together.” I guess after we met, she had gone away for a while to some distant and exotic country, and when she came back, we met again and fell in love, but something else happened. And then finally we were together, and I think we were making out a little bit in the hallway.

The show had been at her house, and downstairs in her bathroom, she had all these oils and soaps really high up on a shelf, so that I had to stand on a chair to get soap to wash my hands, kind of like how a person in a wheel chair would think that counters seem really high. By this point the sun was rising and I was like, Well, I guess I’m not going to meet anyone at the bar.

So then my sister called and asked if I wanted to meet up for breakfast, so we were walking downtown, and it was really sunny, and then this guy runs by yelling for someone named Athena, but he jogs past us really quickly. My sister and I keep walking towards the café and then we see this little girl who’s crying and looks really lost, so I say “Athena?” and it’s her, and I say, Your dad’s looking for you, how about we call the police from the café and tell them you’re found.

So we go in to this little bistro and do that. It’s like this little coffee and sandwich place where I used to work. We’re all feeling a little bit better about the situation, and I ask Athena if she wants anything to eat or drink, and she says she'd like some juice.

Jail Birds / Love Birds

2008-12-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

The feeling you get when you're released from jail maybe. We took the car for a drive and then decided to head out to some place that's almost unimaginably remote. Right over the border, there's an outpost, and a little general store where you can pick up firewood or bottles of water or whatever, (the currency they use is more or less 1/10th of the USD, kind of like the peso). I bought a pair of pants but dropped them in the parking lot and got oil on the waist that had leaked from one of those monster trucks that you can see in the middle of arenas driving over smaller cars.

But before going out into the parking lot and getting oil on my new pants, my sister and I were in the general store watching the news about the quarterback we loved. Something bad happened to him, some sort of freak accident, and so I start elegizing, remembering that time he let us onto the field after practice, the empty stadium, the thickest fog moving towards us, but still we kicked field goal after field goal, each time turning the football into geese and sometimes baby ostriches-- little wings sprouting from the footballs, meandering, leaving crescent-shaped jet streams of feathers in the air.

Northeast of the general store, there's a series of islands mapped half-heartedly by satellites and navigated so rarely by the inuits that actually live there that when recounting stories about sea-creatures or giving directions, they get all perplexed and embarrassed. We lived a few lifetimes in and around those islands before any time had really passed, and then we came back.

My sister went home but I stopped in Burlington, Vermont to visit my friend Erin. We spent some time together which was so lovely, and just when I thought I was ready to leave, just when I had pulled onto the highway, I realized I had to go back. But going back into town became so difficult. I had to get out of my car and run through alleys and pull myself onto rooftops and I got yelled at by bar owners and I had to climb scaffolding and sneak into windows and buy rock climbing shoes at a sporting goods store that were covered in rubber so I could run down the sides of buildings. And when I was running down the side of her building I tripped on some electrical wires which transported me back in time. So there I was, in front of her apartment door, a few years ago, just having had the daylights nearly knocked out of myself, and when she answered the door she didn't know who I was.

But after a while, I had convinced her that she knew me in the future. I told her what her middle name was, I told her how the miniature airplane her dead grandfather made out of pepsi cans hung from her ceiling, about the road named after her family, snowshoeing on the trails in the woods around her house. I told her what I knew about her body (we had been lovers once), and about the cliff she loved to jump off of way out in the woods, into the swimming hole. I told her, "Once, when you had just had your heartbroken, early December, I helped you shovel your car out of the snow and then I fell in love with you" (and by this time a crowd had gathered to meet the time-traveler) and so of course everyone was dying to know if in the future she had loved me back and before I could answer, purple flowers with waxy petals started sprouting from in between the floor boards.

Life's a Beach

2008-11-12T05:46:00.000-08:00

I had to go back to high school for some reason-- a new high school in a town that I had an amazingly hard time navigating around. Luckily, some of the people I went to high school with years ago were still there, like Sarah. And then before I knew it, we were doing all these things, like a science project which blew up and filled the science lab with smoke, and hanging out on the rooftop, and driving the wrong way down a one way street, and smoking cigarettes and pulling the ash off the cigarette and molding it into dinosaur bones. Real dinosaur bones. And we had to buy stuff at a drug store I think. But then finally, we went back to her house, and took our clothes off. At first we were just naked and sweaty, but then we started to shine, so we grabbed each other's bodies, bathing ourselves in our own light, and the sheets on the bed were pulled and pushed in a bunch of directions, until it looked like an aerial photo of the ocean. Then we laid around, waiting for the light in our bodies to die down, and we just talked about haircuts and her small breasts and other stuffffff I can't remember.

Our bodies stopped glowing and so I was like, let's get the fuck out of here. We checked into a beach resort and we took our jet skis through this canal and some dude helped us carry them across the dunes and we gave him a tip later on, back at the resort. When we got our jet skis into the ocean, the waves grew to be about 25 feet tall and threw us around and covered us up, so we raced the huge waves back to the beach, and laid the jet skis down and stood around with a bunch of other people, shooting the shit about how big the waves were.

Providence

2008-11-09T21:31:00.000-08:00

It was like Lake Ave., all screen doors and gravel parking lots. This complex situation of angles where I could see a man's reflection in the window in front of me, even though he was behind me, in the parking lot. And as I'm watching him, he pulls a gun out and shoots once, off to his side, and as he's bringing his arm toward my house, I dive for cover just before he fires seven shots right where I was. (Later I count the bullets stuck into the splintered wood of my chair and the wall in front of the kitchen table.) That was the second time I has almost been shot that day? Or that week? So by this point, I'm like, Fuck this, I'm moving to the town called Providence. Just the idea of it was calming.

After my announcement, we were back in the driveway having a going away party. The girl I loved and I were fighting, angry about something. She was throwing water balloons filled with juice at me, from the second floor window of our house. I started catching the juice-filled balloons before they would burst, and all of a sudden I was jumping so high, slam dunking the balloons back into the open window.

After all of that excitement died down and I guess all the balloons were popped, cranberry and apple and grape juice spilled everywhere, all the people who were there for the party seemed so exhausted, so we just sat around, like how everyone waits at the top of the Pyramid del Sol, waiting to touch the magical stone in the center of the peak.

And then, the girl I love is carried out by a dozen little girls, washed in serenity and forgiveness, wearing a ceremonial dress: waterfall of beads from her wrists, feathers in her headdress, a deerskin gown. When they put her down, she starts hugging me, and I guess I was the last person to realize I should have been proposing, because everyone's watching us and finally she whispers in my ear "Just ask me." Suddenly I was growing a beard, about to cry because I was so happy.