Tag Archives: dreaming

Now it’s too late to go skiing

Man, this was the longest winter ever and I don’t feel like I took advantage of it at all. I only went skiing once, and it was in February. Yeah, the snow was great, perfect powder, that’s how real ski people, or the real ski people I’m imagining in my head anyway, that’s how they describe really good snow, powder, some really nice powder. But I only got to go the one time. Whenever it’s summer, fall, when it starts getting really cold but it hasn’t snowed anywhere yet, I always have these visions of me driving up to the mountains every weekend, really taking advantage of that powder, hitting the slopes, getting in some serious downhill time.

But I don’t have a car. And I work every weekend. My days off, well, it’s not the same every week, but it’s Monday, it’s Tuesday. Which, now that I’m thinking about it, those should be great days to go skiing, nobody else on the mountain, all of that powder to myself. But it’s never that easy. My days off finally arrive and then the next thing I know, it’s Saturday again, which, to you, the average reader, is like Wednesday. And I’m like, man, half the week behind me, half of it in front. Where is all of my free time? How am I ever going to find a minute to sneak away to the mountains?

And so when I did finally go this winter, I was pretty conscious that it was probably going to be my only time up there. Or, I was half conscious. The talking part of my brain was just yapping really loud and fast in my head, saying nonsense like, “Wow! This is terrific! Powder! It’s only February! There’ll still be powder in March! I can still go skiing in March! I’ll definitely go skiing in March! So what if there’s no more powder, they make pretty decent snow! It’ll be great!” all while I’m handing over my credit card to pay for the seventy dollar lift ticket, the calculating reptile number part of my brain, it’s not saying anything out loud, it doesn’t have to, that’s not how that side of the brain works. But if I had to translate the thoughts going on in there to English, it would be something like, “Ha. Powder. Please. He’s lucky I allowed him this one weekend. Work. Money. That’s all I care about!”

No car, no other weekends. It’s April already. As of writing this right now, right this second, I’m told that it’s the first day of spring. That’s what they say, anyway. I haven’t left the house yet. I already got fooled once last week with some alleged promise of spring-like weather. My days off were, yup, Monday and Tuesday. And everything for that week’s forecast said fifty, fifty-five degrees. Better break out the windbreaker. I got up that Monday and did my writing, told myself I’d take the dog for an hour long, two-hour long walk, to the park, to just bask in the springtime, finally.

And I made it outside and, yeah, it was slightly warmer, but not what I would really consider warm. I thought about skiing, how in previous winters I’ve been up at the mountains and have had actual days of skiing, dressed in wool socks and down jackets, in temperatures about the same as it was this day. Then the sky got really gray. Once the dog and I got about forty-five minutes away from the house, it started raining, a cold rain. The temperature dropped. I tried to hoof it back home, but the dog had to shake himself dry every five seconds. I was like, “Hey dog! Less shaking and more walking! Shaking isn’t going to do anything because you’re still going to be wet, it’s still raining,” but that’s when you know you’re in a bad spot, when you’re just yelling at your dog, him not understanding anything, his thought process must have been like, “Man, what did I do to be dragged out of my warm house and subjected to this water torture?”

We got home. The temperature dropped even more that night. The thermostat kicked in but I already had a chill in my body. That night I went to sleep shivering, and I dreamt of being cold, of being cold but taking advantage of that cold, getting into my imaginary dream car and heading up to that imaginary mountain, abundant with imaginary powder. And I thought to myself in my dream, “See? I knew I’d take advantage of this winter, that I’d get to go skiing at least twice,” and it was one of those really real type of dreams, one where, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about it right away when I woke up the next day, but days later, when I started thinking about skiing, when I sat down to write this whole thing up about skiing, and I’m writing about how I didn’t take advantage of the winter, that idiot part of my brain chimed in, “What are you talking about? We went skiing that second time last week,” and only for a moment I was fooled, like for a quarter of a second I thought about how much fun I had upstate that imaginary second time around.

Guest Blogger: My friend Bill

I need, like a prescription, man, or something. I’m like so tired all the time. And it’s like, you know, I’m like really tired. I can’t get up on time for work. And my boss is always like, “The next time is going to be the last time, I mean it!” and I’m just like, whatever man, please, just do it already, just like fire me already, come on, just like, yeah just go for it and do it. Maybe I can get some sort of a medication to get me up on time and stuff, you know, one where I hear the alarm clock go off and instead of just beeping over and over again, without waking me up, you know it’s always like that, like I’ll set it for eight, or eight fifteen … no, not or, I set it for both. And eight twenty, and eight twenty five. And I do this thing where I put my phone charger on the other side of the room, and so eight o’clock comes around and it’s like that really aggressive, just really, really … like a really aggressive sound, it’s like, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” over and over again, not saying it like that, it’s an alarm noise, but that’s what it sounds like to me, when it goes off, at first, because, and I think this is where I was starting to get started with all of this, that I need some sort of a medication, just a light dosage, where the alarm goes off, and it would only be one alarm, and I’d be like, “Good morning!” and I’d be up. Instead of what normally happens, which is: alarm goes off. I don’t hear anything. Nothing. I’m just sleeping away. Every once in a while I’ll be having a really good dream, like one of those really good morning dreams, and sometimes if the alarm is going off in the background, that alarm noise, it’ll sort of, you know, like I’ll hear it in the dream, but it won’t be hearing it from the awake world, it’ll be like I’m hearing it in the dream world. I think. That stuff happens on TV all the time. And five minutes goes by then my roommate starts banging on the walls, that guy never works at all, so I don’t know where he gets off, for serious, because it’s like, dude, why don’t you try and get up early in the morning? And then finally he keeps banging, and, like I’m still half asleep, sometimes I won’t even remember doing it, I’ll get out of bed and I’ll walk over to that other side of the room and I’ll take it off the charger and turn that alarm off and put the phone right next to me in bed. So then the next alarm goes off, “Wake u—“ I’m already turning it off. Back to sleep. And the snooze button. And then I wake up later than ever, and I’m running around, I know my boss is going to call me, and I’ll be like, “On my way boss!” but not even, because I don’t want to do that, he’ll know I’m still at home. No, better to just show up, try to act all out of breath, I’ll tell him, “Boss, the subway, it just stopped. You know how it is boss,” and the breathing in and out, really heavy, he’ll know that I ran right in, like right straight from the subway stop, as fast as I could. But if I could just have like one pill, up and at ‘em, and another one, just one to make me go to sleep at night, I swear, sometimes I try to go to bed early and I’m just like, I can’t do it, I feel like I just got home from work, and there’s no way, I can’t, I just … I can’t do it, I can’t just have like a whole day where it’s like, alarm, alarm, alarm, work, bed, alarm, like I need to, you know, I don’t know. I just got to like … I just got like go to a doctor, my roommate does that shit, he’s just like, “Uh … it hurts,” and I don’t even know how much longer he’s going be able to keep pulling this off. He never gets out of bed. Never has to. Just keeps knocking, banging, like turn your alarm off dude, not saying it out loud, but saying it with his banging. But every once in a while, if I’m like really asleep, like really, he’ll be like, “Dude! Shut the fuck off!” which doesn’t even make any sense. Like I get it, but it’s not right, right?

I just had the craziest dream

I had this crazy dream last night. I’m just kidding. I’m not going to write about my dreams. That’s super boring. Every once in a while somebody will start talking about, “Oh my God I had the craziest dream last night,” in which case I prepare to be really unimpressed with the oncoming barrage of mostly nonsense sentences strung together back to back in no apparent order, all the while trying my best to maintain a look, a facial expression that says, I care about this story. I’m interested. Please continue. You telling me this dream is almost as good as me having it myself, which is impossible, but this is the next best thing.

There’s obviously one exception to this rule: Inception. If you haven’t seen Inception, well, you know, I don’t have to tell you what to do. Just go and do it. I hope they make an Inception 2, and the whole movie will start with Christopher Nolan waking up in the middle of the night, having dreamt the whole thing up, the whole movie, the whole release, the critical acclaim, that episode of South Park where they make fun of it, it’ll all have been a dream.

So he’ll wake up his wife and he’ll be like, “Honey! Honey, I just had the craziest dream!” and his wife will be like, Oh my God, what time is it? Three in the morning? Jesus Christ. These fucking Hollywood guys, they think they’re so important, so bloated with their own lame inflated sense of self. Seriously? He’s waking me up at three in the fucking morning for a dream?

This is still part of the movie, Inception 2 (Nolan: call me.) And we know that Nolan’s wife is thinking all of this because it’s one of those directorial tricks, like we see Nolan, then he’s like, “Honey! Honey!” and then it cuts to Nolan’s wife, and maybe she has one of those sleep masks on, and while Nolan is busy talking about his dream, about Inception, which, in this movie, Inception 2, it’ll all have been a dream. That was clear when I said it the first time, right?

And as the camera is on Nolan’s wife, you know, she’s pulling up her sleep mask to check what time it is, then you’ll hear her voice, her thoughts, like Nolan won’t hear it, and she won’t be talking, it’ll be like the audience is hearing her thoughts, and she’s making all of the appropriate facial responses as each thought pops up.

Her thought monologue will be like, “What time is it?” and her face will be puzzled, like she’s thinking hard, and then when she sees it and goes, “Three in the morning?” her face will be shocked, angry.

It gets better. It turns out that, in this movie, in Inception 2, not only did Inception never happen, but none of Nolan’s other movies happened either. He says to his wife, “Honey! Get DiCaprio on the phone! I don’t care who you have to wake up!” and his wife will be like, “DiCaprio? Leonardo DiCaprio? What are you high?”

Because it this movie, Christopher Nolan isn’t an award-winning director, he’s a furniture salesman. And he lives in Pittsburgh. Well, not in Pittsburgh proper, but like an hour and a half outside of Pittsburgh. And when reality sets in, when the dream starts to fade, even though it was all so clear in his head, even though he actually felt it, like he remembered watching that South Park episode where they made fun of Inception, he vividly recalls getting super pissed off, “How could those two bozos not understand my genius?” he looks in the mirror, in real life, and he’s not even close to being as handsome or as in shape as his dream persona.

He gets depressed. He has to be at the furniture store in like four hours, plus getting up and getting ready, plus driving an hour and a half to Pittsburgh. And that’s it. That’s all I’ve got. So far. I’m thinking eventually he’s going to have to wake up from that dream also, and that will have been a dream, and he wakes up and he’s the real Nolan again, but that dream of being a regular furniture salesman, it will have stuck with him. And so instead of making cool mind-bending reality-is-a-dream movies, he’s going to start making furniture commercials, and documentaries about Pittsburgh, even though he doesn’t live in Pittsburgh. Also, I thought that it would be cool if Nolan had another dream about being that regular Pittsburgh guy again, and he takes a day off and goes to see Inception in theaters. And he’s watching this movie about dreams within dreams within his own dream.

Yeah, you know what, this isn’t going to work. And this is why you don’t start off any story with, “I just had a crazy dream,” because it’s not crazy. It’s boring. It’s a dream. It’s nonsense, just like this blog post. Everybody has dreams. Nobody remembers them well enough to tell an interesting story the next day. Except Christopher Nolan. Seriously Inception was bad ass.