October 30, 2004

  • I slept for 18 hours, to get my body back on a more normal day/night routine. Sleeping is easier than staying up for me.

    I dreamed a lot. I dreamed a whole hell of a lot, but here's part of it that I think is amusing. Keep in mind that I'm planning a road trip to Texas.

    There's a fad of walking really long distances. It's like a pilgrimage, but since this is the US we all determine our own pilgrimage, and what degree of difficulty we want.

    I set out to walk from Houston to a mysterious national park in the west, somewhere north of Tennessee. This mysterious national park is a recurring destination in a lot of dreams. When I set out to walk, though, the geography is like Washington state, with mountains and narrow farm roads under evergreens.

    I've only got the clothes I'm wearing and a book. It's a travel book. I keep meeting fellow pilgrims who are wearing only jogging clothes, and powerwalking their dogs along hundred-mile stretches of empty highway. I want to say hi to the dogs, who are more interested in the world around them than their owners, but this annoys the owners who pull the dogs along.

    After about a year of wandering around with only my clothes and a book, and I mean an actual year here, I get to a gas station. I see some friends there. They're walking, too, and they got there just ahead of me. We exchange pleasantries. They look around nervously... "Are you coming with us?" I decide to, and they hop into a car that has just come out of the car wash. We peel out, leaving tire smoke.

    "Is this your car?" I ask. "That depends on what you mean by 'ownership.'" We're out of the parking lot by now, and we immediately hit gridlock. We're in a stolen car, a few yards away from its owner, stuck in traffic. We all look at each other. One of my friends says, "Well, *that* was a fun joyride." We all get out and resume walking.

    We come to an ancient village, one that's carved into the rocks. We're in the middle of a jungle, but the red rocks underneath it have been exposed and carved into huge, distorted human faces. A million other tourists are there, too. I'm reading my guidebook, and it's telling me that these faces are 1,200 years old, and that people still live in them. I read about one of the houses that's covered with gold leaf, the ultimate in the local keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competition. There's a picture of it. I take the book down from my face, and I'm standing in front of it. The view is identical to that in the picture. A brown-skinned woman in white clothes is on the path in front of me. She's carrying a huge basket of laundry on her head. I'm in her way. I step aside and smile, and she smiles, and I decide to toss the book into the river.

Comments (4)

  • Your dream almost reminds me of the book "Pilgrims Progress".

    And I canNOT imagine you going on a joy ride with friends. HAH! But I suppose after walking for a year, ANY amount of car travel must've been welcome. LOL

    I do wish that walking was a good way to actually get from place to place. Unfortunately, I really don't have a YEAR to walk around, exploring America. Which reminds me of the book "Walk Across America", which some guy actually DID. (Bless his heart.) Oh, and he had a dog!!!

  • wow. I need to hire your subconscious.

  • I think the dogs have the right idea of not missing the world around us and you walking...to me is somehting inside of yourself telling you to take your time and enjoy life...dreams tell us many things that we don't hear ourselves saying I think...this has many interesting aspects to it...tossing the book into the river might mean not to follow what we think is the way all the time and the woman on the road that your were blocking might have been you in a different life telling you to change your path (get out of the way so to speak) I don't know...these are simply just my thoughts and mean nothing but I really enjoyed reading this...I love reading about dreams...many huggs my xanga freind...Sassy

  • Dreams are play. Some play is deep and profound, and some is just... well, exactly what it is. I think a lot of people train themselves to see profundity in their dreams, and thus their dream-self learns to communicate deep things to their waking-self.

    The dogs are from the fact that I want to get a dog. The traveling is from the fact that I'm going traveling in Nov. The walking is from the fact that I'm going to travel slowly from place to place, taking a lot of time. The woman on the path is a local, exposing the artifice of my tourism. Tossing the book in the river is abandoning the artifice for the genuine experience.

    Nothing really deep to it.

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