floats

Layers of dreams (as in dreams of being asleep)... I was having a full evening of teaching at home -except it wasn't my tiny flat in North London, it was a big house in several floors; my teaching room was somewhere in one of those upstairs stories but I never went there in the room. There was an improbable queue of pupils both from the present and the distant past. I wasn't going to have enough time for all those lessons and I was running late. But then appeared this beautiful woman who was supposed to be my friend (but I didn't know and she doesn't correspond to anybody in 'real life') and asked me, would I take long? we had to go to the Slimelight together. I'm tired and bored, she said, and leant against me. Our lips met as if by accident and then the pupils and the lessons all disappeared. How irresponsible of dream-flavio...

Cat. It's the Michy, the last one, except he's blacker rather than chocolate now. He'd gone away and been found and I had to take him back home across the city, didn't have the car with me or even a cat-carrying basket. He didn't want to go and was grabbing, clinging on to me, all sharp nails and paws but bolting, trying to escape. The journey across the city towards the West where I lived was long -public transport was full of glaring lights and glaring people with angry faces, the long streets I had to walk were grey and menacing, shrouded in twilight. Finally made it home, walked up the steps and had to juggle between holding the cat -still trying hard to escape- and fiddling in my pockets looking for the keys. Made it inside. It didn't feel like my house, something was not right. The key opened the door, it was the address I remembered but inside the house everything was unknown, strange and with the dust of years covering the old furniture, the fake marble floors, the absurd plaster decorations on the walls. I let the cat down and he ran to hide under the piano. Piano? Since when did I have a piano? As I remembered I was renting this place, sharing it with people but there was nobody in the house. The cat glared at me from under the piano. He still wasn't happy. What place have you brought me to, he seemed to be saying.

After days of turmoil in the real world, the dreams I dream....

Ok, first the dream. I was coming back from somewhere and a gang started shooting at us. With guns. This didn't feel quite as strange as it should have done, seemed to be quite a natural thing in the dream. Even stranger, we had guns too. I was given a handgun by my friend as well as the clip to go in it, which I fumbled with while the guys on the other side kept shooting at us. It finally went in and I started shooting back thinking that this gun was surprisingly light in weight, not at all like a solid metal object at all. Bullets kept ricocheting all around me, making chunks of wood and masonry fly out. I turned around to ask my friend why we were there and in such a situation but my friend was very still, face down on the floor. It had to be a dream and I better wake up, seeing it was daylight and checking the time on my phone to find it was 5:00 am only, too early to get up, too late to try and fall asleep and gain an hour or two more restful sleep.

There were other dreams, one involving the old house in Catia but I remember even less detail from that one. As often happens, I’m moving back after a long time away, I don’t seem to have most of my things with me –not my guitars, or my computers. There is a guitar but it is the old battered guitar I used to have when I started to study music.  I also found a computer, an old Apple Mac Performa with a strangely heavy keyboard with a long coiled cable. I knew I could make it work if I could find a monitor that the machine could drive but it probably was too old to be of any use with modern internet. I mentioned this and somebody in the house told me that wouldn't be a problem as it would receive the Internet of twenty years ago by the day. What, I replied, AOL and Geocitiies? Good grief.

The house seemed to be parceled in rooms and bed-sits each let separately. There was an old man that I thought at first was my granddad but wasn’t. My sisters was present–she didn’t live in the house but she kept rooms there. The roofs were leaky as always and there were buckets of different sizes everywhere catching the falling drops. I sat on the bed in my room wondering how I was going to make a living in this place that I no longer knew. How had this all happened? I couldn't remember at all. 

This time I didn’t realize it was a dream at all –I even fretted about the strange circumstances as I woke up.