and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I sleep walk so often that sometimes the world of the here-and-now and the world of never-never-land sometimes collide, coalesce into a weird bubble-gum/mint-choc-chip sundae swirl in my mind. Odd, I know, but there are memories in my head of places I've been and situations I've dealt with that only exist in my head - because they never actually happened. This, in itself, is sometimes tough to grasp, but what's worse is when I find myself telling stories of this far-off land to people who have never been there. I don't know what it is about sleepwalking - especially sleepwalking by a dude in his late-twenties.. these things should be grown out of, no? But it would appear to be here to stay, my odd trait, so what's to do but embrace it?

The apartment I live in now is big - really big - 5,000 sq. feet or so, as it is claimed, and it provides quite the landscape for my seussian nocturnal adventures. Long thin hallways make for cathedral trails in dark woods, creaking radiators turn into labrynthine trolls pitter-pattering through the undergrowth and Taz the dog makes for - well - more often then not, just a dog.. if you can believe that.

The strangest bit about sleepwalking is what comes through as real and what comes through as imaginary. Sometimes things are exactly what they seem but more often than not they're skewed, misrepresented, and somewhat slippery. So it is strange indeed that Taz the chocolate lab is always just that - Taz the chocolate lab. She's mostly docile, not too much of a licker, and thankfully doesn't jump on guests but she's excitable and wags her tail with her entire torso as if her whole body were built specifically as a wagging-engine. In the dreams - the ones with trolls in the underbrush and lakes in the kitchen and the white cliffs of dover hanging just on the other side of the apartment wall - Taz is like Tonto or Silver, always the ever-present sidekick - even if she doesn't realize what's going on or where we are.

I've talked to her about it and so I know that she gets confused. She hears me shuffling about in the dark and her head perks up over the edge of the couch and she sees me pointing or talking at something and she sees a microwave - silly dog. It's no microwave at all, it's an animated rock, a cloud, a talking hand-puppet of enormous proportion. Yet Taz comes along for the ride anyway, looking around, confused, trying to make sense of the seemingly-normal scene in front of her. In my sleep I imagine telling her things, explaining the situation, and sometimes I think I see a twinkle in her eye, as if she's figured it all out, but then I wake up, Taz isn't around, I'm in my boxers, and I'm squinting at the fish tank - not the microwave.

In dreamland there is often more than two sides to a coin. In never-never-land dimensions are folded onto themselves, across eachother, over-and-under and twisted around into knots of giant size. In my head I sometimes manage to unfold one only to find another two inside. Most of the time, though, as I unfold these random twists and turns, as I make sense of the curvature of time and the duration of space, everything begins to pop out and up like a self-setting tent that only needs to be pulled from it's bag and then, with the acceleration of the universe itself, I am hit with clarity and I find myself no longer in the forest or floating in the ocean or even standing in my room with the building crumbled beneath me - I find myself standing, in my boxers, talking to a house plant. I find myself staring at my computer chair piled with clothes where once, not more than a second ago, there was Madonna. I find myself not putting on galooshes with which to wade through the lava flow but putting on my adidas with which to, well, I just don't know.

Coming out of a dream can be a discombobulating thing but in my mind it makes me quicker, faster, smoother, and more ready for the 25th century. With each suddenly-strange transition, I become more prepared for the unreality of real life. After you see a cat-like squid-creature scuddle under your kitchen counter something so strange as the split of Pitt and Aniston seems fairly banal. When your apartment ceiling is transformed into an upside-down bog replete with serpents and swamp-things, giant asian tsunamis seem fairly believable. When the world is shaped like a torus in danger of imploding in on itself, well, water on mars seems entirely plausible. Entirely Plausible.