I was at a family gathering, and I was so sleepy I missed most of it. When I woke up I was in a room, which seemed to be in a huge mansion owned by nana. Closets were full of dozens of pairs of her slippers. As I looked among the clothes I chose a pair of her slippers to have and wear to remember her, when I have a baby. They were dark blue velvet slippers, and new, among many identical pairs in the closet.

I still felt so tired but was afraid I was missing everything.

I got up and tried to find something to wear. I found dresses I used to own in the 80s, which now seemed to belong to my mother. I found many clothes which in the dream reality I used to own. A beautiful and elaborate pale blue corset, looking more like a foundation garment than anything, a shirt laced together in the back which was made of a fabric printed with a glam shot of me in a small oval in a pattern down the front. In the dream I remembered someone gifting that to me. There were some new relatives, a lot of babies, too. One was a woman who was named nina, married to a black lawyer, who had just had her third at age 48. I found my mother and asked her what I missed, and she said nothing.

People were moving into the kitchen, the whole house and grounds was becoming a mall with fast food outlets set up all around the kitchen.

In this dream, I was at Burning Man. My friends were scattered around, but the festival was now inside a huge, enormous convention center. Our cell phones worked, so I could reach people when I wanted to find them. I spent my days wandering around...each day seemed to go by in an hour or so of dream-time.

One day, I found a mother with a five-year-old boy I started playing with and we had some adventures. Another day I discovered that a lot of attendees were having mini-garage sales.

Suddenly, my unconscious mind seemed to embroider on this theme of shopping at Burning Man and more and more booths seemed to appear, many of them carrying gorgeous sample sales and antique furniture which I knew somehow the booth-master would happily handle shipping to me free. I don't know how I knew this, but it was true!

So there I was in this shopping wonderland; vintage coats, gorgeous antiques, handcrafted ironwork, beautiful rich-hippie clothes, all priced reasonably. The futher out I walked the more stalls there seemed to be. A loudspeaker pealed out that it was the "burn" in a few hours, and booths were closing so I had to reach my friends and go back to my camp.

Strangely, as I made my way back I only wandered into more and more sections I had never imagined. A huge outdoor movie theater with velvet curtains and cinema seating. Another area seemed to be a Las-Vegas-style casino, larger than life, with dozens of normally dressed people. I wandered in what seemed to be the right direction and ended up in the hills above the festival. Every time I let my mind slip, I would drop the bag of gorgeous rich-hippie clothes I had already bought. I kept trying to remember not to drop it, somehow in my deluded sleeping state, I believed that I could keep these clothes into reality.

I had picked out a black-embroidered sheer white gypsy blouse and a couple of other things. As I walked around I kept seeing more great clothes. At one point, I just grabbed a vintage jacket without paying. Fuck it! It's a dream and I did believe that I would be putting these clothes into my closet when I woke up, so I guess I figured morality was flexible at the moment.

I ended up flagging down a ride in a car, though I was having a hard time keeping the driver's hands off me. Even with me in the back seat and her in the driver's seat. Well, Burning Man, I figured. Everyone gets wild here. I phoned up Hallie and was answered by some anonymous nerd on a kind of rigged system who said that she would call me back. I tried to call John but that was equally frustrating. We drove in hills above the festival and I could see steam above a huge forest, not smoke. Finally, I insisted we drive back to where I jumped into the car, since we weren't getting anywhere useful.

I got out and entered this enormous shopping mecca again, still searching for my camp when the dream ended. I was thinking to myself as I woke "maybe I SHOULD go to Burning Man again, the shopping is the perfect touch!".

Here's a recurring dream I've had a lot. It involves being in one place, usually across the country, with my car, full of my possessions, and somehow only being there on a visit, with a plane ticket leaving the next day. The problem of - how to get my car and stuff home emerges, more slowly than one would think.

In this dream, it doesn't occur to me until late the night before I am due to fly home. It suddenly occurs to me and I start to make half-baked plans. Can I ship this stuff? Ok. So I start to pack. Uh oh. The car. What about the damn car? I can't ship the car.

I start waking up people who are sleeping in the house I am staying at, they seem to be mostly young punk rockers. I make a brilliant plan with one of them. Maybe he can drive my car out, don't they want to tour the west coast?

The stuff in my car seems random and even as I wake up, still trying to solve the problem, I am scolding myself for making such poor plans for this trip.

I was dreaming about being at a computer seminar, where for some reason they were giving away a number of sleek, encased laptop computers and other paraphernalia. For some reason, while everyone was in attendance and no one was looking, I managed to collect a fair number of computers.

To the chagrin of leaving my old one behind in the process of arranging and moving the new ones to a table, where they might not be recognized as the seminar let out, and as the seminar let out and there were people everywhere again going through and taking whatever wasn’t tied down, I realized that the device I was left with turned out to be one of those thermal paper word processors and at that point, I knew I was duped.

And so now that I had lost my computer that contained my hard drive and potentially all my data from a time when I was seeing a flight attendant among other long-winded memories, I was now faced with that loss and the thought of someone else looking down at the machine that due to a broken power supply, fried CPU, or perhaps even a broken hard drive, was frozen in time.

When I look back at the lesson I am supposed to be learning in this life that the dream is alluding to, I sense that it isn’t to horde empty technological vehicles, but to do with what you’ve created or better still if you haven’t done something by now, its time to kiss it goodbye. Maybe someone else can make use of what you seem unable.

It’s odd how the truth of a complicated relationship that really shouldn’t see the light of day, kind of like The Notebook, which made for an interesting read, but to have actually lived it as the story of the flight attendant revealed as a tragedy from start to finish and not something I should have been proud of anyway.

And to think that I knew a collector of typewriters, those hollow instruments that have absolutely no memory and can only serve to document truth if they are fed a sheet of paper, and even then it’s the paper we should cherish and perhaps not the memories.

I was offered a job at an ad agency. The first meeting consisted of a brief, fun meeting with two women who wanted to know what I did well, and then structured the job to fit me. There was a playground/test market center for children on site, and so I had contact with toddlers every day. The women handed me a packet of five logo shirts to wear at work. On first glance they seemed to be very normal looking, but when I unwrapped the package they all seemed very different sizes and strange looking - one was green with wide lace trim on the sleeves, several were too small, and when I went to put one on I got flustered and put on my jeans backwards.

keep dreaming of a two story house with those all-around balconies in the middle of the Midwest with snow outside and I am living there writing or painting. I am alone, but I am productive if not in creation than in mood. It is weird but I thrive by maudlin means. I have everything I need there.

I believe I am also a teacher of literature, but I don't know where or at what level. I see myself in class reading works from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, literary journals or talking about students' works. I take each line and let them act as diving boards out into the world and relate their thoughts to what they conjure. I also play music and project images on the screen and ask the students to write the thoughts that come to them without interference. I also ask them to do what my Photography professor used to do. She would ask us strange questions that we would have to illustrate in photographs. I show them movies and ask them to talk about them either on paper or I encourage them to speak without care for what might come out but that they are careful to stay with their streams of consciousness. In fact, I ask them all to begin in a crescendo of words. They can have conversations with each other too. It is a cacophony of words. It is wondrous. You should hear them. They are free with me. I let them become the words in their heads.

Otherwise, I wait out the winters writing for hours and hours. I stare out into the blank view. I have a tea kettle that I frequently fill and pour myself tea. I don't worry about cleaning, except of course the food. I keep a tight noose on the dishes and the trash, but I like how clothes fall and where they rest, or how the stacks of paper on my desk are indicative of layers of time and what I was conscious of in those moments. Still, if I sense people are coming over; I spend the entire time trying to organize and clean.

I went to teach at my old college and was feeling nostalgic. Found myself at my horse stable, it was a bit old but still usable. In the corral were a white unicorn and a red phoenix, galloping in tracks.The phoenix stopped and ate from my hand. Above the corral on the wall was a gift sign that read I won $750.

Just then my ex husband’s fiancée came in and we chatted about the animals, about my son, etc. Got more comfortable with each other. She saw the mural of the phoenix above the corral and we both saw the mural come to life like a blazing image on fire.

Then, I took that money I had won and bought a motor home with it. A nice, clean beige one with lots of room and very nice inside. My recent ex-fiancée was there and excited we could use it for his band. I said it was mine, not his and he could use it occasionally, but not claim ownership.

Then we were traveling down the road on a voyage. I saw cattle grazing in the fields peacefully. Then we went over a river and I saw dead cows in the river, more and more of them. It was startling and sad to see so many. I hoped nobody was drinking the water from that river.

As we journeyed on, and came to a home, we parked the motor home in a garage. I was still admiring it inside. Then we were in the house and my recent ex fiancée was the “dad and husband” I brought home to my family. They did not like him because he wasn’t being attentive and was self-absorbed and rude. I saw a “family scene” playing out where the pretty mother was tip-toeing around the agitated sleeping father, calling her son to breakfast and trying to be as little-noticed as possible as to not stir things up.

Then I was a single mom with two kids. The kids were up high on this steep metal staircase. I was so afraid they were going to fall. My young son made it down one step at a time. My younger daughter came down a few steps, hopped on the rail and then jumped all the way down the side, landing perfectly like a monkey from a tree. I was relieved. I felt they were going to make it, using their own methods. And I felt I was going to make it, being brave.

I couldn't sleep last night after at least two travel anxiety dreams-I forgot my passport and discovered it was almost illegible after having been washed; the train I stole went off the tracks and down a street where it was hijacked by a(nother) psychopath who eventually took the train to the airport ... that sort of thing. Wide awake, I couldn't go back to sleep until I spent what seemed like an hour imagining I was sleeping on a bed of marshmallows. And even that didn't work: I woke up with sugar-sticky hands. The rest of the day promises further misery.

(Later there were minor peanut butter burns.)

I was in London, and managed to find some time to get into a shoe store. It seemed to be a Birkenstock store and somehow the prices were extremely low. I started trying on the strangest and most interesting boots, knee high, and made of suede, with a zillion lacings. I was very frustrated that they took so long to lace up and my friend was trying to rush me out of there. As I started to grab things for purchase, since time was growing shorter, I found the coolest socks ever, glittery tights with cartoons all over them. I knew they would look horrible on me, but I couldn't resist them. I had to leave but there was so much beautiful stuff I wanted. It was insanely frustrating.

8/2/01
I was given a kid. It birthed from a jelly sac like a kitten. It grew before my eyes. Unfortunately, there seemed to be seven others in there that I was expected to take care of. Having a baby sucked. Plus, once my family came around, they divided up into two camps.

One camp was Pam Anderson. She wanted the baby to call her mommy. I talked to her other three kids, one other of whom was mine, about it. They just preferred her neighborhood.

I went crazy trying to find info about a lawyer, I had no idea what to do. I went through phone books and looked on the internet.

The kids had talks with me about it. They explained that Pam had told them that she was their mommy, not me, and they were interested because her apartment was in a much cooler part of town.

I wasn't that unhappy, because it seemed like an easy way out of forced motherhood but asked that they call me Aunty I. This put an interesting spin on the legal problem of having too many kids who had been basically dumped on me.