the stuff of dreams

I made a sound recording of this piece. You can listen to it, or you can read it, or both. Your choice.

The stuff of dreams

 

Last week, I had a sex dream about a friend of mine. It was vivid and delicious, and when I woke to my cat’s mewling and tromping heavy across my head, I struggled to return to it. The details dribbled away faster than I could recall them. Like an Aboriginal sandpainting in a tornado, it flew apart and slipped into cracks, and all I was left with were a few pastel scraps and orts. An improbable coupling on a mattress in the middle of a medieval courtyard. The breath-warm feeling of joy and completeness and pleasure that suffuses good sex. The sense that in fucking, this friend and I had done something wildly irrational, murderously stupid, and ill conceived, and that we had defied the odds.

I often have sex dreams. I rarely have them about friends. Usually I dream about celebrities or ex-boyfriends, people whose private existences are dwarfed in size by the scale of my own projections about them. When I do dream about friends, I wake wrapped in the disconcerting and weird. It’s one thing when I willfully choose to place friends into my onanistic fantasies, when my inner Candida Royale casts them in the porn narrative that plays as I do the voodoo that I do by myself, so well.

It’s another thing entirely when my despotic unconscious usurps that role and suddenly I’m plunged in the throes of hot, hot, dirty friend-on-erogenous zones action. It is, of course, fine in the dark of the night. Everything is entirely natural in a dream. But by the light of day and naked bulb of conscious thought, I find the lingering dream-shred disconcerting. I find myself mildly haunted, the erotic specter of my platonic relationship poking its head out at inopportune moments. Suddenly, the dreamed about is cast in a new and flattering light. My conscious mind gets hijacked. Thoughts wander. It’s weird and discomfiting.

Then there’s the question of whether I tell the friend. Do I or don’t I? Does he or doesn’t he (or, occasionally, she)? Will this confession lead to further weirdness and discomfiting? Or will it lead to some dreamy land of fulfillment? Or will it, as is and should be most often the case, lead to nothing more than a brief flicker of flattered feeling on the part of the dreamee and the not-unpleasurable frisson of shame and revelation on the part of the dreamer?

This time, I did confess—both to the world at large and to the friend in specific. First, I tweeted that I’d had a sex dream about a friend, and then, I emailed my friend and told him that he was the person about whom I’d dreamt. “Feel flattered or, you know, whatever,” I wrote eloquently and not at all ambivalently. He wrote back and, half-jokingly, asked whether in my dream he’d had a big cock. Sadly, that detail is not one of the grains of sand that stuck. I could not give him an accurate answer. I like to make people feel good about themselves when I legitimately can, but I’m hesitant to conjure details when I can’t.

Later in the week, this friend and I had a drink at a bar in Brooklyn. It was a cold night, and sitting at the bar, talking about Sarah Palin’s blood libel and the smell of my cat’s excrement and Twitter and writing and other sundry subjects, we got waylaid by this assertively drunk guy. This guy, bald and sporting hipster eyewear and hipster facial hair and garbed in hipster black, was double fisting red wine and Couvoisier. When the girls to his right left, he swung and turned on us, inserting himself into our conversation like an f-bomb. My friend patiently and deftly redirected the guy. Almost Mr. Miyagi-like, my friend made the guy wax off into the patient Brooklyn dark, and we were left alone to finish our night.

This friend and I, we have a history of unusual candor. It’s good and it’s interesting, and it’s nice to have men in my life upon whom I don’t project white picket fences and the entire Kama Sutra. I’d like it if my unconscious stepped the fuck off that particular stoop and meandered down the way to furnish me a dream about The Situation or Sherrod Brown, someone healthy and positively silver in his ripeness for projection. Sadly, I don’t have the choice, but that is the point of the unconscious. It visits us in the night and lays the mice we’re not expecting at our feet.

Confession has one clear advantage: unbosomed of the secret, I am no longer the sole bearer of it. Priests, therapists, friends, readers: they all play the same role in this. In telling, we are no longer Atlas shouldering the globe, all lonesome alone. We share and in sharing, we lighten the load. My friend, I think he’s cool with it. We laughed and quick-kissed good-bye. He went to his apartment and his dreams, and I to mine, each to his or her own, never the twain to meet, except as we choose.

Or, you know, not.

 

Comments

[JCP]

Just in time. After an exhausting day, retreating to the sheets early, a perfectly calming bedtime story. Thank you Miss Summers!

[chelsea g. summers]

Thanks so much, JCP. I'm glad you enjoyed.

[Sweat Shop Sissy]

The first time I heard you read, you told the story of fucking a clown. This was the second time and my comment is probably very similar. I adore your voice and your writing and thank you so much for sharing.

[Pete]

CG,
Another vivid read. Keep it up.
Pete

[SF]

Dreams about fucking your friends are the hottest. Provided that the friend is hot of course. :)