keeping a list of my dreams & other halfhearted things.

dear hill, dear gullet, dear lever,

I do my best sleeping in the late morning, but only recently, and only sometimes.

When some hours have ticked by and my bed is hot (not the room, but my bed itself, warm from the hours of my heart pumping blood at full throttle), I like to flip around on the mattress. I place my feet on top of my pillow, and my toes push up against the headboard as if it could be a springboard into dreamland. My bed is in the corner of my room, and a window splits the wall. When I turn around, I tuck my head on a balled-up mound of comforter and press my nose against the screen. The night air is cool. I listen to the insects chirping, the neighbor's sprinkler running, a dog barking three streets over, and ever so distantly the soft sounds of the stars. I try to watch the stars, too, but with poor vision and my glasses far across the room they are rendered invisible to my eyes.

Doing this usually reminds me of camping. Camping, when you wake near sunrise to warmth on your cheeks as light streams through the curved roof of the tent. Camping, when you sleep mere hours after sundown, when the darkness is more complete and the stars more brilliant. I always sleep well when I'm camping, even though the ground is usually rocky and the sleeping pad thin. Maybe a tiny thread of masochism runs through my romanticism of such seeming discomfort revealing a seemingly more true rest.

If things were wired differently inside my brain, I like to think I would jump up off my bed, open my door and head down the stairs, winding out onto my front porch and around and around in the just-damp grass of my yard. I would step outside the glowing range of the streetlight and sink my bones deep down into the dirt. I would let the sounds of the night wash me clean and the light of the stars put me to the edge of sleep, so that I could stumble back up to my bed almost drunk with tiredness, and collapse into utter relaxation. I never do, though. Too many scenarios clamor over the suggestion and it dims until my thoughts pass on completely. 

There is a note I keep on my phone to record snippets of my dreams. I have been collecting them to make stories out of the stranger ones; I often find myself to be my best inspiration. They are rambling and unclear but are just enough to keep the dream locked down in my mind. Each one is like the tiny cut of my dream being, preserved on a glass slide to be reexamined time and again through the lens of a microscope. Most of them are strange, although some could almost be funny. I'll put a few snippets below and maybe they will mean something to you.

an assignment that becomes a script and i am dressed up like the father with a colored in pencil mustache

walking to the dentist when i start to choke and then i cough up a leathery grey piece of my gums that is as long as my  pointer finger and my mouth is raw (at the dentist i must do stretches before i enter but they are strange & i go in twice. only the second time does the man open a portal so i can return to where i am from & so that my gums will stop falling out) the price of the first dentist i see is a pair of sneakers but she is a child's size medium (whatever that means, it is smaller than the shoes i am suddenly wearing on my feet)

in an auditorium and everything must be made the same again but a strange magic spreads through us, leaping from person to person & i cower

in a train station somewhere in europe and we are making shy movements towards one another & also we are werewolves of a sort that is more mentally transmittable (no fur or claws for me, please). we are separated and i am chasing after and then things all change and it is a repeat dream but not quite but almost. weird gauze bag over my head (but now i'm not me anymore) and mask in place over top, holding it in place. sneaking behind bushes & around large estate (whoever i am they think i am dead; i am just a werewolf).

at an airport and children are overheating and turning into assorted frozen snacks that must be put in tubs of hot water

drinking & laughing & eating & a picture of us sitting that has already happened but also not (we pile into the chair in a mess because i berate them both "it must be just like the picture was") but the picture came from a strange woman who is close to death or something grim (her key was not changed like the rest and there is a minute hole in her door. she feels the prickling sensation but turns the key in the lock anyway and ventures forth). by the end of the night we are all in love with each other which is to say we are entangled viciously and collapsed as one amorphous body into the chair (i think we may be there to solve a crime but this is just a bonding experience)