A distinction with a difference, by Steph Waller:

My personal philosophy is that I am the driver of my body-vehicle, not the vehicle itself. That’s what has made aging easier for me than it was before I really grasped that idea. Like a car, my body ages, but I, the driver inside, am the same age I ever was — I am ageless. My dreams brought this home to me this morning because in my dreams I am never any younger or older than about 30. That means something to me and, as I step into the final phase of my time on this planet, it’s a comfort.

I hadn’t thought about this before, but my own dream experience is similar: unless it’s spelled out early on that it’s the childhood version of me, there’s no real indication of my age in any of my dreams. Certainly the infirmities of age don’t play any role therein.

As for driver vs. vehicle, this sounds something like C. S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” And there are worse things in life than sounding something like C. S. Lewis, whether or not you subscribe to Lewis’ particular faith.

You should read the whole piece; there’s much in it about the place dreams occupy in our lives, and why they’re there in the first place.

Some time in the last week I came up with what I thought was a reasonable idea: start phasing out the tranquilizers I’ve been taking for the last decade or so, on the not-all-that-arguable basis that I’m taking too many drugs, dammit, and it can’t be good for me. Since the stuff is known to be habituating, going cold turkey, even right after Turkey Day, was not an option; instead, I decided, I would simply cut the dosage in half for thirty days, and that would be the end of it.

First night was an abject failure, filled with nightmares not even Uwe Boll would film. I’m somewhere in the Mid-South, in a chamber filled with ill-tempered mutants; most of them are female, some of them are promiscuous, and one of them, identity yet to be determined, seems to want me dead. Things move slowly at first — there’s something playing on the TV that appears to feature Shel Silverstein’s infamous Stacy Brown — but the sense of dread is pronounced, and when one of the mutants details an escape plan, I am there, Jack. Somehow things get to the point where Volkswagens are being stopped at a border crossing, and there’s Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, appropriating all the classic Beetles for himself. “A gift for the Insta-Wife,” he explains.

We continue in a non-VW vehicle and find ourselves defending what looks like a 1920s grade school, albeit with a lot of unfamiliar equipment. Unfamiliar to me, anyway; she knows exactly what this stuff is for. It’s not enough, though: something sizzles through the electrical lines and zaps both of us with some sort of flesh-burning ray. Doesn’t hit much surface area, but it doesn’t have to: the pain passes, but as it goes, it saps our strength, mine worse than hers. And finally, we’re at the point where they’re coming in through the second-story windows, and the best I can do is lob stuff at them.

Whereupon I force myself out of bed and as quickly as possible ingest the second half of the daily dose, and sleep better until 9 am, when the doorbell actually rings. (The nerve of some people.)

Well, not exactly:

[I dreamed] I was a designer. I was producing a line of tracksuits called “Pi Couture.” Featuring, as you might guess, the digits of pi printed on the backside. The number of digits varied with the size of the tracksuit bottoms … so the tiny little ones would be “3.14″ and the ones for someone like me would be “3.141592″ and then there would be some sizes that said “3.141592653589793″.

And of course, that’s a real design FAIL right there (at least in the real world) because (a) very few women are going to want to walk around with an irrational number on their bums and (b) no woman larger than a “3.14″ is going to want to advertise that fact.

Walking around with any number on your bum is irrational, whether or not it can be expressed as a fraction. (Maybe they’d prefer “transcendental.”)

There should, I think, be a companion line for e, and also for i if the Emperor wants to participate.

A couple of times this month, the object of one of my blogcrushes (I’ve had several, most of which don’t go away easily) has had a brief cameo in my dreams. Nothing untoward or even suggestive of anything untoward — that’s not how I, um, sleep — but it did seem odd, since most of the people involved in Tales of Morpheus, Volume XCIX, Expurgated Edition are people I don’t know anyway.

One snippet of story struck me as absurdly amusing. Apparently a passerby, impressed with the appearance of the lady in question but unable to guess her age, like it’s any of his farging business in the first place, stood there dumbstruck for an awkward period of time before sputtering it out: “Just how old are you really, anyway?”

In an absolutely perfect deadpan, she answered: “Sixteen.”

“And a half,” I chimed in.

Damned Ambien will be the death of me yet.

One way you can tell the real world from the dream world is that in the dream world you do things like this:

I dreamed that I was desperately searching for a pair of orange dress shoes. While I was searching I found a very nice pair of soft casual shoes that I wish really did exist but no orange dress shoes. I searched lots of stores, more stores than actually exist in my area but no orange dress shoes. I also started thinking about an orange purse — the purse must match the shoes, after all — and just generally getting a bit angsty about the whole thing. I’m not sure what I was getting dressed up for that required orange shoes.

I missed the Citrus Festival myself. However, I take “go thou and do likewise” very seriously sometimes:

I didn’t think of Endless.com until I woke up but I had to look and, sure enough, when you search for orange women’s shoes you get 520 results including some that could be considered “dress shoes.” Not all of them are what I would call orange. Some are actually tan and some are a peachy pink but there are a lot that are actually orange — bright orange.

So I betook myself to Zappos.com, gathered about 490 results, and there’s a lot of coral and scarlet and mango and some other colors you could take for pomegranate, but not a whole lot of #FFA500 orange, reminding me of my earlier search for green shoes, which turned up a lot of samples that were greenish without being all that green.

Then there was this, not so dressy but otherwise meeting the basic criteria:

This is “Ricky” by Bouquets, a shortish (2¼ inches high) wedge, simulated leather contrasting with presumably genuine burlap, at the $60 price point. It’s also available in black, yellow and green(ish). Probably insubstantial, but then so are our dreams, mostly.

She was, however, a bird, and after a few questions I determined which bird: a sparrow which had been fluttering past my window for a week or two. How it is she came to acquire humanoid form, I never did quite understand, though I do remember the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck being dropped somewhere along the way. Nor did I understand why, in acquiring said form, she used as a model someone we all knew: instant acceptance without question, I’m guessing, and indeed, she was routinely greeted as though she were the one she’d copied, though it proved to be a blessing that the two of them never actually met.

I hung up a set of curtains behind the couch for a nesting area, and she asked me to bring her music, promising to keep the noise down. Her tastes apparently ran to the latter-day big bands: Paul Whiteman didn’t do a thing for her, but Toshiko Akiyoshi did. And vinyl, if possible, instead of CDs; something about the Compact Disc didn’t agree with her hearing.

What? Oh, that. Didn’t happen. I didn’t try. She had said that there were only a few days a month when it was even possible.

And right before one of those days, she became ill. I came back to her darkened corner; she told me to go away. I went to the phone instead.

The ambulance came, and they loaded her onto a gurney. I followed in my car. When we arrived at the ER, the doors were thrown open, and one attendant looked dazed: “I don’t know what happened. She gave out with a cry, and all of a sudden, she was, like, gone.”

I looked up into a tree, its branches nicely framed by the moonlight. I had no reason to think she was there, but the light was better.

[This is what happens when you get up early, cut through a swath of Web work, and go back to bed when the sun comes up.]

That price being some major thrashing between 10:30 pm last night and 8 am this morning.

Storyline 1: Lynn’s screenplay about a rural Oklahoma woman who wants to explore outer space is filmed. In its first week of release, it doesn’t make the box-office top ten and is therefore ignored by television reporters, though Entertainment Weekly gives it a B-plus: “The lack of high-dollar special effects gives it much greater plausibility.” Atypically for new releases, it gains some ground in its second week, a little more in the third, until the media are forced to pronounce it a sleeper hit.

Storyline 2: Both girlfriends, a smattering of hangers-on, and a number of people I’ve never seen before show up at the townhouse I share with K. Kendall Kade, who is sort of a black Jack Black. Kade’s been on the road for months and months, and everyone (except, well, me) is anxious to greet him, but time stretches out farther and farther until half the entourage seems to be playing Vladimir and the other half Estragon.

I blame Tylenol.

When the insomnia started to get bad, I determined, to my surprise and to my doctor’s, that significant physical activity tended to make matters worse: all the endorphins and none of the fatigue. This finding suggested that I should confine the yard work to Friday and Saturday, since I don’t have to get up at six the next day.

Then Thursday evening presented me with 75-degree weather and a front lawn that had grown rather a lot in six days, so I decided to risk it. The results were Not Awful, and gleeful at the prospect of not having to do any of this stuff on a Saturday, I finished my ten-hour work day Friday and attacked the back yard, which is way larger.

Sore, though not especially tired, I betook myself to bed about a quarter to ten, and stayed there eleven and a half hours. And judging by the condition of the bed this morning, it was a rough night indeed. No fewer than three narratives were played out in dreams:

• Cher, of all people, had consented to appear in an online centerfold, on the condition that the photo be impossible to reproduce elsewhere on the Net. I was attempting to do exactly that, and failing: the handy Save As command didn’t work, since the filename kept changing randomly, and none of my graphics tools could get a grip on the file.

• I was attending a session at a Guatemalan bingo hall, hosted by someone who looked a lot like Wink Martindale. I had no problem with the processional, during which we were blindfolded; however, those who wanted a place in the competition area were asked to surrender their shoes temporarily, and I never got mine back for some reason. While searching in the coat-check room, I managed to pull down a set of blinds, and discovered some very un-Bingo-like materials: I’ve played this game before, and no one has ever called out “C-4.”
• A desperately-ill child has undergone an amazing synthesis: the body was allowed to die, and the consciousness was somehow uploaded into a device the size of a Treo. Which wouldn’t be a problem, exactly, except that someone has infected the poor kid with some sort of virus, and Venomous Kate and I are searching the backwoods of northern Missouri for clues to the identity of the perpretrator.

Note to self: Take fewer drugs.

Purely as an experiment, I hit the sack last night having taken none of the usual tablets, capsules, potions, and other alleged sleep aids. Results: ten hours (10:30 pm to 8:30 am), although I woke up nine times in the interim, including one trip to the curb (newspaper retrieval) and one trip to the john.

This also threw off my dream timing, so I can’t fill you in on the details of the story, set in pre-Elvis Memphis, in which Roger Ebert and I are two convent girls caught up in the swirl surrounding a brutal street killing.

I changed out sleep medications last night, opting for the old and formerly reliable instead of the new and possibly habit-forming. I was paid back for this decision by the most bizarre dream I think I’ve ever had.

I’ve driven somewhere to visit family, and I’ve timed my arrival poorly: no one’s home, and what’s more, it’s been raining. There’s something wrapped in plastic on the walk, which turns out to be a Sunday New York Times, already beginning to disintegrate from all the water. I toss it aside, and suddenly I’m somewhere else: the yard looks the same, but the street is totally different. The most salient difference to me, though, is that my car is gone.

I pull out the cell phone: no bars. Figures, I grumble, and start walking. Nothing looks familiar. In about half an hour, I arrive at Shea Stadium, which at least tells me where I am: in the city of New York, borough of Queens. Which explains why nothing looks familiar, since the only time I’ve ever been to Queens was to change planes at JFK, there being no direct flights from Istanbul to Oklahoma City in 1975. Or today.

There’s no reason for me to hang around Shea, so I veer off at an angle, and eventually encounter an expressway of some sort. Traffic is not so heavy, but not moving so quickly either. Across the road, I find what appears to be a bizarre psychological experiment: people are throwing coins onto the shoulder to see if anyone will bother to stop. On foot, I manage to scoop up around $4.

The second storefront on the cross street appears to be a travel agency. I wander in and ask if anyone’s seen my car — they haven’t, of course — and how I can get back to the address I was supposed to be visiting in the first place. After some heated discussion, and a mistake in the production room (“You made how many copies of the itinerary?”), a woman from the agency walks me the first couple of blocks, and says, “From this point, you’re on your own, but it gets easier.” It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier to me: for one thing, I seem to have lost my shoes.

I walk about another quarter-mile, or so it seems, and end up in what looks like an airport gate. For a moment, I sit down, and someone yells something untranslatable yet easily interpreted: “There he is! SEIZE HIM!” Seize this, pal, I say, but no words come out, and so I flee.

Beep! I pull the cell phone from my pocket: incoming text message. I’m in no mood to read a text message, what with goons, or whatever, on my trail, but it occurs to me that if a text message can come in, I must have connectivity of some sort. So I duck into a storefront and push buttons. When finally I get an answer, it’s my ex, and in fact I can see her answering: she’s right across the room.

“What are you doing in New York?” I ask. She looks puzzled. “This isn’t New York.” “About time you two showed up,” says a third voice, and we are confronted by someone who looks like Ralph Edwards, circa This Is Your Life. Worse yet, he has books, and opening one of them, he demands an explanation of an incident.

She speaks first. “That never happened.” I look over the materials, and realize that they pertain to a relative, but not to me. I attempt to say so, but again, no words come out. Ralph continues to press, and I manage to come up with “Enough. We’re leaving.” Which we do; and we get about 50 yards before I am set upon by goons.

I am taken to a warehouse of some sort, and there’s this contraption suspended from the ceiling, a scary blend of M. C. Escher and Rube Goldberg which turns out to be an animated timeline, a simulation of just about everything dumb I’d ever done, in chronological order, complete with badgering voices and the occasional wooden stick to push me back into position. At about age 16, I see an opportunity, and I jump; they of course give chase, but I’m already out of the building.

But not out of the woods. I’m near the bottom of a bowl, an ancient sinkhole that eventually quit sinking. Grass has already grown along the slopes. I can’t possibly make it up those angles. There is, however, a tree; if I can make it halfway up the tree and then along one horizontal branch, I will eventually end up at the original ground level. So I start climbing. The goons aren’t pursuing; they’re watching, waiting for me to fail. Once I reach that horizontal branch, though, the possibility occurs to them that I might not fail at all. But they have further tricks up their sleeve. First, the bark begins to peel off; I have difficulty getting a grip. There is no wind to speak of, but the tree starts to sway just the same. Finally, the very rim of the bowl starts to dissolve into nothingness, random chunks of green just falling away, a cartoon effect that, were you to see it in real life, would not even remind you of cartoons.

It is at this point that the brain commands “That’s it, we’re done,” and I wake up. You wouldn’t think 50 mg of diphenhydramine hydrochloride would cause this much delirium.

I have no idea what that little origami-snowflake toy is properly called; when I was growing up it was a “cootie-catcher,” and after flexing it enough times, you’d pop it open, unfold a section of it, and somehow your fortune would be told.

So when the girl opens up the device in the early moments of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, I had to keep watching no matter how much I might have been put off by the premise. What it says is “Dream is destiny,” and while I’ve always distrusted dreams — my dreams, anyway — I felt I could trust Linklater, if only because he’d given us Before Sunrise, a romance I dearly loved because, unlike the case with almost every other such story, I could identify with either lead.

Linklater didn’t let me down. The structure is something like what I remembered from Slacker, with seemingly-random people coming by, speaking their piece, and then dissolving into the next scene. But the look is wholly different: the thirty or so scenes were shot in live action and then turned into animation, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes sort of realistic, sometimes hyper-unrealistic. If this seems a hodgepodge, well, so do my dreams, and dreams are at the very heart of Waking Life.

About ten minutes in, I was prepared to dismiss the whole thing: “Eye candy,” I thought, “to compensate for the preposterousness of the words.” But that, too, is characteristic of dreams: whether you can learn anything from them is independent of whether you can make sense of the narrative. “There’s no story,” asserts one character, a novelist. “Just people, gestures, moments, bits of rapture, fleeting emotions. In short, the greatest story ever told.” Nothing at all in there about continuity.

So slowly, surely, I was drawn in, marveling at the look of the thing while trying to keep its seemingly-contradictory premises from overwriting my own programming. And I decided that Linklater wasn’t trying to sell me a packaged philosophy: he did, after all, throw in an almost-perfectly serious scene in which a film class on Kurosawa is conducted by a monkey. If there is a philosophy, it’s that of the salad bar: there are plenty of things you’ll like, but if you go for all of them, you’ll quickly discover that there’s too much on your plate. You can call it a “neo-human evolutionary cycle” if you’d rather; for a moment I saw myself as Horatio, being informed by Hamlet that there are more things in heaven or earth than I’d suspected. And the ending, well, isn’t.

Perhaps Waking Life was intended to recapitulate, then extend, Descartes: “I dream, therefore I am.” Dreams and reality might even be somehow interchangeable. We already know that some of our “objective” measurements are affected by our perspectives: accelerate yourself towards the speed of light, and keep one eye on your watch, if you can. Was Linklater trying to anticipate what might be beyond Einstein? I don’t know. I do know this, though: in 2001, when it was released, I couldn’t have sat through Waking Life. My mindset of the moment wasn’t prepared to accept anything that didn’t fit into the structures I’d built for myself; I’d have dismissed it out of hand as Slacker Goes to Grad School. Today, it seems more like an artifact of a life I didn’t know I’d had. Maybe it really was all just a dream.

(Review copy lent me by a friend — thank you, Aero.)

While no one would accuse me of being chipper — unless they expected me to chew up some wood or something — the general tone around here is decidedly more positive than it was six or eight years ago when I was wondering if maybe things wouldn’t improve until I got around to not being around. (Vent #172, which begins “This is a suicide note” and then goes through several paragraphs explaining why technically it isn’t, is a case in point.)

Still, every once in a while something pops into my head to remind me of the Bad Old Days, usually during sleeping hours, where the dream mechanism doesn’t feel compelled to go easy on my sensibilities. This morning, after waking up at six, noting the presence of a newspaper and going out to fetch it, then returning to bed for another couple of hours, I got to “enjoy” a pair of scary scenes played out just above the pillows. (Two of them, anyway: at some point I apparently pitched the third across the room.)

In the first act, after a bogus “tour” that resembled outtakes from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I have somehow been locked up in some sort of “medical” facility for wayward children, and the sadist dietitian on staff has contrived to make sure everyone gets something unpalatable. For me, there was this amalgam of rice cakes and spackle, with things that looked like vegetables but weren’t, and vast quantities of mayonnaise, a true implementation of O’Brien’s Room 101 Diet.

I don’t know how that story ended because a second one followed quickly on its heels. In this one I am researching some arcane tax question, and I duly presented my findings to the couple who had requested my help. The presentation took place at a firing range, where they and several friends were gearing up to blow away a few targets. Informed that I might want to stand back a few feet for the duration, I heard myself saying: “Don’t worry. If you shoot me, I’ll be much happier.” Evidently at the subconscious level I operate on a frequency somewhere between Beck (“I’m a loser, baby, why don’t you kill me?”) and Daffy Duck (“I demand that you shoot me now!”)

Supposedly I have enough sense to avoid reading too much into dreamstuff. On the other hand, I do remember muttering this last week:

Look at the fricking West Coast. They can’t get rain to save their lives and we’re up to here in the stuff. I have to wonder if maybe God hasn’t outsourced the prayer-answering function to some place that doesn’t speak English. Or, in the case of California, Spanish either.

Weather-related stress. Yeah. That’s the ticket.

It’s been a while since I posted a dream up here, and perhaps that’s just as well; rather a lot of my dreams are distinctly uncomfortable to endure, and most of them don’t have the sort of entertaining narrative I’d like to pretend I’m capable of creating.

I have noticed, though, that the better ones seem to come after I’ve gotten up, shrugged, and gone back to bed, so if there’s an actual pattern — but never mind; these things never work if you try to force them.

So I’m bicycling through Seattle. Since I’ve never actually been to Seattle, I have no idea where I’m going, let alone why I’m there in the first place, but two things strike me early on: this is a spectacularly gorgeous place — I’m assuming that the dramatic shadows overhead and the prodigious amounts of greenery actually exist in some parts of town — and while I get rained on for ten or twenty minutes, I don’t seem to get really wet.

My most obvious connection to Seattle, of course, is the fact that guys who live in Oklahoma City now own the Sonics and the Storm. Somewhere by the side of the road, I find what looks like a periscope, sticking two or three feet out of the ground, with a Sonics logo on it. Up close, the lens turns out to be a very shiny bolt; on an impulse, I loosen it a couple of turns. Nothing happens and I ride on; a few minutes later I decide that this was a Bad Idea, and reverse my path toward the mysterious structure, which I never again find.

Random sightings: a person claiming to be the Invisible Man, and certainly he looked the part, though the orange jacket didn’t help; an outdoor lesbian café (and what makes for an outdoor lesbian, anyway?); a very large gas station which, despite its size, had only two pumps.

I am loath to affix any meaning to this other than that I had a rough night — mattress and box spring, when I woke up, were offset fifteen degrees.

It does, however, meet the part of the definition that calls for a dream that makes you sit up and take notice, so I’ll mention it here.

I’m on the periphery of a popular local eatery/takeout joint when I pick up on the crowd buzz, and what I’m picking up is implausible in the extreme: they’ve set up separate entrances marked “Straight” and “Gay.” Shades of the Southern South, I’m thinking, and what the hell for?

On an impulse, I went in through the “Gay” entrance and noticed that no one was checking credentials, assuming such a thing were possible. I walked over to the “Straight” entrance: nobody watching that door either.

And the crowd seemed about twice as big as usual, so obviously the artificial constraints, or whatever they were, weren’t discouraging customers.

I’m still puzzling over what, if anything, I am to make of this brief tale, except to note that people of any description have little use for attempts to pigeonhole them.