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My most frequently recurring dream by far is what I refer to as “the packing dream.” These dreams vary widely, but they always involve me having to pack a small bag and leave somewhere very quickly, presumably never to return again. Failure to complete this talk will result in dire consequences, so this dream is always a nightmare, and often causes me to wake sitting bolt upright, sweating in the night.

Last night, I thought I was having this dream, but instead it morphed into something else. Something I’ll call, for lack of a better title, “the packing dream 2.0.” In this dream I was in a house I didn’t recognize, and LCF came bursting in to the room where I was and said he was in trouble and that we had to move to Europe right now. Like, NOW! I didn’t ask any questions, I just stuffed whatever random shit was lying on the floor into a small duffel and headed out with him to the airport. This is the first time ever, having suffered through this dream probably hundreds of times, that I haven’t agonized over what to pack. I honestly didn’t even look at what I was packing. I just grabbed what was within reach, and when the bag was full, I was done.

The dream then fast-forwarded, as mine often do, and I found myself in Europe. No country in particular, just Europe. The first thing LCF and I did when we arrived was go, luggage and all, to a tiki bar where a mostly naked girl was flirting with the male customers, and where our English-speaking waitress was flirting with LCF. Between flirtatious interludes with the waitress, LCF made sure to tell me that I was awesome for leaving with him on such short notice, and told me he couldn’t have done it without me. But all the flirting in the bar was making me feel awkward and ugly and scummy after the long trip, so I told him I was going up to our apartment to change. “Our apartment” was a tiny little tenement room above the tiki bar with a shared bathroom down the hall. I opened my duffel, and realized I had only packed the most useless and embarrassing clothes from my past (I won’t go into detail, but a couple items were procured at the Maryland Renaissance Festival in the early ’90s. ‘Nuff said.) Literally, there was nothing in the whole bag I could use. I was left with only the scummy clothes on my back. I felt tired. Overwhelmed. I went to find the bathroom down the hall and passed an African woman with braids whose kids were roughhousing in front of my room. I found the bathroom, locked myself inside, and looked outside the bathroom window at the dirty, smoggy, nondescript city below. I felt hollow. Empty. My life was now a blank slate and my mind was also a blank. I was about to use the toilet, when I woke up and had to make a dash for the bathroom.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.