i had a dream last night that threw me out of sync for the rest of the day.
i was in a room full of people, as if it was the last remnants of a much larger gathering, left in this more relaxed and intimate afterglow. everyone slouching and cuddling in chairs, on the floor. the room covered in pillows and various blankets.
i kept looking to these two girls, one of whom i was immensely attracted to. they kept talking softly to each other, occasionally looking in my direction. and i wished with everything i had that they were talking about me. and the more i wished, the more they would look over to me.
she had on a tight black shirt, jeans. her hair was a kind of unnatural orange or red. she may or may not have had a piercing in her lip or eyebrow or nose. actually, no, definately not the lip.
she came over to me and i became overwhelmed; i was crushing.
i was under a blanket and she slid in with me and i felt the largest relief i've ever felt when the weight of her body settled on mine. i just layed there and felt that weight and i was satisfied beyond comment.

consider these words when dealing with a lover or just someone close:
weight, mass, gravity, pressure, density, depth.
the way your cat lays against your leg as you're about to fall asleep. the way a lover weighs on your thoughts, how they feel with their arms squeezing you or draped across you during rest. the way a leg forms around your waist, a shape all its own in certain circumstance.

after the initial bliss of this girl, the dream crept forward at a dizzying speed. the sky was falling. literally. we were running through ruins that looked like the buildings of Mogadishu in the film Black Hawk Down. in many of my dreams, time and reality start to distort into a non-linear episode. i became aware that i had met this girl at another time, much earlier than the afterparty. she graded some writing that i did, and i frantically began flipping through a notebook trying to find her there. she and the falling sky, and the ruins were beginning to fade out, becoming more transparent in a super-speeding slow-motion that can only happen in a dream or a large dose of a hallucinogenic substance, flickering and threatening to depart from existence. i believe the sheer desire for her, or fear of losing her asserted itself, as i again was back under the blanket with her and we began to kiss. gloriously. and then she was gone, and the notebook began to fade and i managed to find her there before that too was lost. her name was Julie.

i don't know a Julie. i hope you're out there waiting for me to find you, and i beg for you not to be some ghost, haunting me night after night.
an odd thing i have to mention, dear reader, is the fact that in all my nightmares and dreams that carry on their feeling into my waking hours have the following feature in common: war on film. some strangely, direly placed pop-culture war movie or battle sequence reference. here is another example. this was a dream i had around three years ago. i wrote it down in the format i tell it to you in. it is completely true, in as much as dreams are. stylized yes, but not embellished at all. the Colonel Kurtz refered to at the end is of course from Apocolypse Now. and yes, absolutely, i heard his voice at the end of it.

I dreamed about you
last night.
We were in bed,
in your bed holding
each other tight
like a vice.
Butterflies threatening to burst from my belly,
from the very bed beneath us.
Looking into each other's eyes
and I was lost in those
deep dark irises
hypnotized by those pools.
Your gaze punishing me
with delerious luminosity.
I was a drowning sailor
swept overboard to become
lost at sea. Drowning.
A man who's accepted his watery fate,
reconciles his life
and slips happily into the depths.
Fear and hypothermia conquored
by a final endorphin release,
supersaturation of pain inhibitors rushing,
carrying death on pillows,
dispelling hardness
in the final moments.Synchronous flooding bliss
and your face
beaming supernova appeasement.
The moment suspended like a liquid picture.
Glacial velocity like glass and gravity
oozing through motion imperceptably.
You said, looking at me,
stripping ambiguities away,
you said yes, finally yes
you knew what love, true love was.
I know what it is too,
and i proclaim this mutual spiritual mergence.
Yes, i nearly cry,
it's a hot pleasant bubbling
inside of you, burning joyfully
and vigorously and holding you fast
in its mandibles
plying you with intoxicants.
You yearn with a
constant need of it.
Think of it obsessively.
Let it fill you with the profoundest of reckonings.
Borderline danger of letting
your shields plummet in a
nosedive of vulnerability.
Letting the sponge of your soul
risk its fragility
in an impetus of absorption.

Your expression falls
like a piledriver with my dreams attached.
A shattering collision, fatal fragmentation.
This visage now stormclouds
horizontally impending doom.
A crushing juggernaut you're driving
over my bones and you say
"I guess I don't know it, then. What love is."
Innocent confusion on your face
and that ignorance you have of my
losing war for your love
sweeping the remnants of hope
away to some abyss.
And that's when the
full scope of this demented tragedy
imparts itself upon me.
A wrecking ball devestating the flimsy
walls of my spirit.
I know how Orpheus must've felt
when he turned around to see
his precious Eurydice pulled back to Hades
at the last possible moment.
Lost again forever.

I crumble defeated and stricken.
I can only stare as
you can only stare back,

and I bolt up, alone, in my own bed.
Awake now and shivering terrified,
sweating hard like a captive.
Is it a premonition that plagues like termites?
Eating away, eating away?
Or is it just a hideous
affirmation of what i should already know and accept.
Stunned, unable to move,
trying to choke down that dream
back down to the unknown place
inside me I can't see.
Standing on the precipice of emotional apocalypse.
Kurtz's measured chilling voice
echoing endless in my ears.
"Oh the horror.....the horror."

i was a bit of a mess for a few days after this one, reader. and i wouldn't trade the experience. it's far too personal and satisfying on a level you just cannot buy. bittersweet.