Dream 3/13/2009

I gave myself a quite gnarly haircut. I cut my beard first, and the pieces I cut were color coded. The closer I got to the skin, the darker blue the hair would become. This allowed me to know when to stop shearing. The cabeza caused quite a bit more trouble. I didn´t have the luxury of color code, and consequently, made many errors.

Then I was playing basketball indoors. The league was the NBA´s summer league. I was on the blue team. It wasn´t the Magic, becuase they were playing the Lakers. They were destroying the Lakers, so said the paper scoresheet. At one point, it was 30-11. I assumed Dwight Howard was having a monster game. I was really abominable at basketball. This was the most realistic part of the dream. The basketball was cold and dense as a ball of clay. I knew that this represented my low skill level. I was slower than most people, but surprisingly, could post-up quite easily. We were playing the Celtics, though they wore pink uniforms.

Then there was a gorilla. I was in my old backyard of the house on Sir Philip. I was carving his face out of a collection of carrot sticks. All that was visible to me was the base of the carrot sticks, all of which were beautifully geometrical. Each stick was longer than I could imagine, and the space between each stick was minimal. I was first carving a tiger. I really thought I nailed his upper lip. Then, when I was shaving the area for the eyes, the piece became a gorilla. The carrots turned black. Amongst the planes of the black sticks opened the eye of the gorilla. It was so dear. I told him, through body language, that I loved and respected him.

I began to talk or think about bridges. I was very concerned that those to whom I was speaking would be stuck in the literal, unable to consider the concept of a symbolic bridge. I remember hearing what sounded like an echo, that someone understood this concept. In an ill-thought out attempt to show the aforementioned symbolism, I jumped on a white rope ladder. As I climbed up the rope, I collected the rope in my arms so that no one could follow me. I climbed 41 feet. This was sufficient, I thought. A bengal tiger appeared. This might have been the bengal tiger that Don Rodrigo killed in the jungles of Ecuador, but I´m not so sure.

The tiger wanted to get me. This was clear when he made a lunge for the rope ladder. I was spared by a measure of inches, which is to say not many inches. I looked forward, and found that there was a treehouse just feet in front of me, which is to say not many feet. Clearly, it had become my destination. Here comes the tiger again. This time, he makes the 41 foot jump, and grasps the rope. I´m reaching for the treehouse, and find that I have a difficult time pulling myself onto the platform. (I was doing pullups all day yesterday, each time I entered or left my room at the hostel. Possible.)

Next, I´m under the awning of ivy by the back door of the Sir Philip house. There is a bioengineering experiment on display. It has something to do with engineering the DNA of bugs in such a way that they cannot leave what has become their homes. The first piece of evidence for the efficacy of said engineering involves a praying mantis who looks metallic. A scientist, I assume, takes the little feller from his cage and drops him to the ground about 8 feet away. As expected, the little sucker screams back to his cage. The second example is a lady bug in a bowl. The bowl has about an inch of water in the bottom. The lady bug is unable to climb to the precipice of the bowl after 24 tries.

I´m upset by all of this. My neighbor seems to feel that I´m uncomfortable, and tells me that his research was the beginning of all of this. He seems to regret that now. He wears a sucky khaki hat and a jean jacket. His face is similar to that of Bill Ayers, and he wears thin, silver, wire-rimmed spectacles. He tells me his experiments began with corn meal and that he never thought it would come this far.