I dreamt there was a building, recently leased, perhaps after the death of an elderly someone, still filled with furnishings but being rearranged, prepared for new occupants. And so a sigil was removed from a door. And so at this something awoke, something arose from its waiting. Three figures slowly appeared under long swathes of red cloth, rising up from the floor like a magic trick. Without being able to see their faces I knew they were women, very old, so old, but they were the size of children. They were gliding across the floor toward me, I skirted around them to leave the room but they followed. They were whispering about what I had done, some sin I had committed. That wrong, of course, occurred long before I was born, committed not by me but by some other, but here I was to play the part, the sacrifice in some reenactment of justice imagined. It was pointless to deny it; we were all guilty, all. I said the words I was meant to. The three women turned into three small snakes with long fangs. I tried to tangle them in the long red robes, but they would bite me through the cloth. My hands stung, I feared poison, I feared worse. But then somehow, the snakes were becoming pencils, their fangs becoming graphite points, long and sharp. I snapped them into pieces, kept the pieces apart so they would not grow back together. I wrapped them in the red cloth. 

Dream (I don’t usually go for blonds). 2/9/14. 

We are sitting on my bed and talking, although it’s a bed and a room and an apartment that looks nothing like mine, and somehow I’m not sure if it’s in Chicago or somewhere in the Northeast. We had been sitting there a long time not speaking, and then we had been sitting there a long time speaking. The room was dim and it was late. We thought it was maybe 11:00; we looked and it was two in the morning. You said something about getting a cab, holding your phone sort of vaguely in one hand, the other in your hair, letting it spike up between your fingers all blond and kinetic. You sprawl out across the bed.

Somehow I have gone without moving from sitting up to laying down, my face close to yours. And then our lips are touching, this isn’t even kissing yet, just my lips and yours resting lightly against each other. I can feel how yours are chapped, the winter has only just ended, and you move back and forth ever so slightly. We stay this way a long minute, and then we kiss. There is stubble on your face but your mouth is so, so soft, and your spit tastes like honey and coffee and fresh tobacco and something else I can’t quite place or describe. It is so very good. Your body is all around me and it feels like we are slowly turning into silky water, lapping at each other. 

Then we are in a hallway in my actual Chicago apartment. You are asking me a question, and from a doorway I say yes, my answer is yes, for you everything and always is yes. 

dream:

there is a team of us, we are in a compound in the woods, a scientific research station. a group of us had just arrived, traveling a long way from some city, to join the researchers who had been there for some time. perhaps too long. 

stretches of plexiglass, the light through the trees. rows of potted plans inside, with small hand-written labels. we were all introduced, a strange tension running through the room, but he and I were laughing about something, excited to learn some strange new thing from these people who’d been working on growing living tissue that was somewhere between plant and animal. the how of it was murky. 

some argument occurred between the two teams, and then resolved, at which point the leader of the older team, a tall man with a long beard, shoved open one of the plexiglass doors, only for a moment. members of his team instantly panicked. “Vapors will get in!” they were yelling. Our group was confused; the door opened to the outdoor path around the building, where we had walked up on our approach. We had undergone no sterilizing precautions, and had no reason to think the air we had been breathing outside was hazardous. 

somehow, everything became very dangerous and moved very fast. they had been using alien tissue to grow creatures far more ambitious than we had known, and as they were exposed to something from outside, long stretches of vine, hefty spikes of aloe, blooming flowers, they started writhing, moving violently toward us. vines like powerful snakes, and bulbs like blades, driving at our bodies. there was only one snarl, and it attacked us. the thing, or things, pierced through his body like an arrow, low on his chest. I killed it, or he did, we somehow subdued the thing, pulled it into pieces with our hands. My initial thought, and probably his, was that he would die, that one small blade gone straight through. The look on his face. All the things I wanted to say were flowery, were beautiful sentiments that would not help him, so instead I called out instructions to the others, medical equipment, the removal of the beast, calling for outside help, did we have surgical equipment. I had my hands pressed against him to hold the blood in his body, and in that moment of panic, he looked at me and grinned. We stood there, bodies pressed together motionless in a flurry of activity, and grinned at each other like fools. How strange and exciting the world is, how lucky we are to see it and for someone else to get the joke. Then we both knew, with utter certainty, that he would be fine. 

Before I go to sleep, we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. In my dream, we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. I wake up, and we are enjoying each other and saying goodbye. I love you, and will always, always hold you in my heart, awake or dreaming. Bon courage, mon cher. 

I’m arriving late, everyone I know seems to be there, in elaborate costumes. We’re rehearsing for something. I walk through the space, looking for the corner that’s mine. I pass many friends and lovers in the first few steps, the men in dresses and the women in lingerie and wigs. I move to another room and settle on a stool to watch performances rehearsed. A very tall man in a monk’s robes performs with a video monitor, telling confusing jokes that come out funny in the end, when he strips of his robes to reveal glowing beads. 

You’re there, waiting to perform, and as you walk just past me I grab your arm. You grab mine back. We stay this way, muscles tensed and bodies close. A count of ten. You kiss me, long and slow and then again, as we move through the crowd to a tiny kitchen, built into the room, where some of the women are practicing their dances. A song is playing, one we both know. We slow dance, wearing matching white keds. We are very close, I can feel your hips and your cock and your ribs against me. I look at our feet. Our shoes are white but I’ve stepped in rust, or orange paint, and every time I step on your feet because I’m bad at dancing, I can see the mark left. I do not mind, because you do not mind. 

The sensation of slow dancing in a dirty white sneakers in a crowded kitchenette is making my heart bloom, my body fall apart. You kiss me again, and then I see a girl do a backbend right behind you, almost hitting you, and I laugh, and we let go. “I’m gonna go pee,” you say.

“I’m gonna go kill this boner with a notebook,” you say. “I’ll meet you back here later.” You are grinning at me in that way I like. I nod. We walk off in separate directions.

I head to the swimming pool in the basement to cool off, and get entangled in an argument about racial politics with some teenagers, and I wake up before you and I meet back up in the kitchen. 

I realize that in my dream you were clean-shaven, but when I saw you last you had a beard, and you look better with a beard, I think. I wanted so badly to take your photograph.

I have, as ever, unlearned the ways of sleep. I spend my nights slowly turning into sand and digging my way through the mattress. The dawn licks me with her fingers and I am finally comfited, sweet and dry. You were in my dreams last night.

We had set up desks in the mud alongside a pond, old fashioned desks of blonde wood, arranged in columns and rows. You were leading us in something. You made your way to each desk, down the line, and as you paused at each the person seated there would count to three, one two three, each in a different language, some even blending two or three or more. It was not terribly hot, but the sun was bright. You came to me and I was crouching in my desk like an animal, all predator and grace. I lifted myself up on my arms, raising up from the seat, one, two, three times. The counting of time in the strain of the body. I wanted so badly for you to be pleased, so understand exactly what I meant, but when I tried to look at you the sun was in my eyes. So I looked down, and I saw a stream winding its way around our desks, and the sunlight playing on the water.

Somehow it was much later and I was in a rehearsal room in a vast building, done up to look like a boy’s childhood bedroom. The lights were off, the only light came through the windows looking out to the hall, where busy looking people passed by. The man I was with (not you, but he reminded me of someone we know) had lifted me up into the air, and I raised myself up higher one, two, three times.

It was later again and I was navigating through a crowded event, looking for a bathroom, not because I needed one but as an excuse to keep moving through the crowd, to see the whole space despite the many acquaintances I passed. I finally found it; the sign was a woodcut of a woman, dressed as a cowgirl. I looked around for someone to point out the lovely sign to, and you were right next to me among a throng of people. I couldn’t speak, and tried to convey how I was feeling by pushing scraps of torn white paper into a trash can, but wound up dropping my telephone in as well. I got flustered, tried to reach it, and then I looked at you, and you looked back, and I realized I didn’t need it, that I was better off without it. You leaned toward me as if to finally speak, to whisper something to me, but you stayed silent and pressed your mouth against my ear. The corner of your mouth was on my neck. We stayed this way a moment, and then you stepped back and we walked in separate directions, not looking back. I held my hand to the place where you had touched me in your silence, and it was so hot it burned my fingers.

Dream:

The first human child to be born on Mars is coming to earth. In a plan decades in the making, members of the first Earth-to-Mars colonizing mission are due to return. Their ship has been programmed since its construction to make the return journey after twenty-five years, arriving on this exact date.

Contact had been maintained for some time after the departure, but the difficulties of distance and failing equipment eventually lowered the curtain between us, and only faith remained. Debate raged; they had died and would never return, they had gone rogue to found their own anarchist country, the Russians/Koreans/Mexicans/Chinese/etc. had taken over the colony, the theories were ceaseless. But in a quiet, interior way, we had all settled into hoping, hoping they would return, whole, sane, bearing mind-numbing charts of data, and knowing, knowing in our hearts that they had died, with vast swathes of space between their bodies and home.

And so the day is upon us.

I am in a huge building, sprawling halls and white rooms like a hospital, part of the team dedicated to receiving the travellers should they arrive. There is preparation, anticipation, cleanliness and certainty of protocol.

And a door opens, and hell arrives.

She is alone, she is the only one, and though we know she should be grown her face is still a child’s face, peering desperate through the window of her helmet, swollen with fear and anger and making sounds, sounds like words, like the babbling of a baby or a stroke victim but screaming her attempts at speech so loud, so loud, somehow through all walls and skulls and piercing into us. And in a flash we know; they had all died, but this child kept living, a scavenger alone on Martian soil, mutated and deranged, building a world in the dust and the nothing, seeing no one but the memories of a child and whatever mysteries the planet held, perhaps some strange life came to her, or from her, for this was not quite human, and did not understand how she had come to be torn from her home, and she was lashing out like a hurt dog with no master. She stumbled around a corner, reaching for me, and her straight black hair was sticking to her cheeks and I could feel madness blossoming in all the bodies around me. This was a brain-sickness running rampant, spreading at the speed of sound. I ran. I ran. Long hallways, locked doors, shimmying out of windows. But the world outside was no better; madness had everyone in its grip, and I had to find a way to be, like her, utterly alone.