more dreams

had a dream as close to a nightmare as i ever have last night. it actually woke me up at 4:30 AM, something dreams almost never do.

i was hangin' out with Loren, and we got into some long, involved discussion about something. before i knew it, we'd spent all night talking and it was 6 AM- on a school day. i felt really bad for being irresponsible enough to keep him up all night, and sorry for setting him up for a hard day at school, but i still wanted him to go. at first he seemed game, but kept finding ways to wriggle around getting ready, while time ticked away. i tried to keep refocusing him on it, but he kept deflecting it somehow; sometimes he managed to distract me, sometimes made himself scarce but screwed around instead of getting ready...i couldn't seem to get him moving.

i was getting angry with him, but i also knew that i'd presented him with the problem by keeping him up all night, and he was probably really tired. i figured he really wanted to skip school and get some sleep, but didn't want to come out and contradict me. it was only natural that he didn't want to go to school, and i didn't want to really lay into him. i knew he was in for a hard day already, and i didn't want to make it worse right off the bat, especially not immediately following all the time we'd just enjoyed. (i find it interesting how easily i compartmentalized the school day and the time that passed before, as if we'd crossed some arbitrary line, like a border into a new place with different governing rules.)

i tried reasoning with him, telling him he was at the very limit of absences before he started losing credit for classes (which was true in the dream and has often been true in reality, which is both frustrating and mostly beyond my control) and also why, in the dream, i felt so strongly about him going in the first place. i apologized for keeping him up all night, but explained that it didn't change anything. i tried telling him how little time we had left before we had to go. nothing was getting us any closer to leaving. finally i confronted him in his room and bluntly ordered him into the shower, immediately. the direct approach brought on an argument. (i should mention that Loren's developed some pretty respectable debating skills, and he can be surprisingly effective when his objective is to obfuscate an issue, or keep a subject on the table, or avoid complying with instructions.) by now it was 8 AM, and he was already half an hour late for school. i managed to coerce him into the bathroom, but i couldn't get him into the shower.

it finally boiled down to having to physically impose my will on him to enforce my authority. but how do you force a 16 year old to take a shower? in the dream, my answer was to punch him in the chest, hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to do any real damage. it didn't work. a couple more equally-half-hearted attempts at manhandling him didn't work either. by this time i was getting angry. Loren was digging in his heels, prepared for a war. the next thing i knew, i had both hands on his face and i was digging my fingers into his cheeks, distorting his face into a disturbing shape, while he did nothing to resist, and his eyes displayed a completely flat aspect. he gave no ground, no reaction...completely passive resistance. and i snapped awake.

i looked at the clock, rolled over, and went back to sleep, and had a completely different dream, which was more oblique and less unsettling.

this time i was watching some movie footage with Loren, in a living room with the exact same configuration as mine, but larger. it was basically a war movie, something we were both enjoying. i've seen it before, and it seemed like Loren may have, too. while i was giving Loren some background about how it was made, my parents wandered in and settled in the room, listening to me, so i included them in the conversation. i backed the film up so they could see the particular scene i was talking about. the set for the scene was a monumental undertaking of earth work, a huge battlefield with tons of period-specific heavy machinery and hundreds of soldiers, complete with a long, winding river running through it, various plumes of smoke rising from the hills all around, etc. the action of battle was over, and troops were on the move. all of this was recreated in exacting detail on a sound stage, and i was explaining the logistics of this to everyone. (this is interesting, from a real-world perspective, because large groups of soldiers and the presence of bodies of water are recurring themes in my dreams, and in this dream, though they weren't represented in first-person terms they appeared on a TV screen, and the dream events transpired in such a way as to allow me to back this part up and replay it.)

eventually the dream scene changed, and the movie gave way to footage of Joe Satriani playing music, live. (this is probably a dream reference to some youtube footage i was watching before i went to bed last night.) in the dream, my father was standing on the stairs, impressed by a particular song. i was surprised at this, since it's out of character for my dad to enjoy that particular type of music. while i was talking with him about it, my mom came in and asked me to move my truck (as opposed to my SUV, which is only interesting because the truck's actually dead with battery issues in my driveway at the moment) as rearranging the cars in their driveway would allow both her and my father to get out later, without having to jockey the cars around.

then the alarm went off and i was up, to see a rather chilly but gloriously sunny morning :)

add a little coffee and it's a reasonably pleasant start to some job hunting.