Melatonin-induced dreaming

I've been taking melatonin strips lately to help me fall asleep. One of the side effects, however, is vivid dreams.

I don't really have recurring dreams so much as recurring themes, people, and places. Vampires are one example. The latest vampire dream I had is one I'm going to turn into a piece of writing, which I'll post here when it's done.

***

Another dream I had recently was of a bear. I was walking in the woods on a path that edged around a steep drop. This bear came out of nowhere. It had the body of a bear but its fur was grey and its head was strange. It kind of floated and bobbed around the bear's shoulders, as if it wasn't attached to its neck at all. The bear headed right for me. Somehow I actually fought with it hard enough to push it off the path, making it fall down the cliff.

A few minutes later it climbed back over, but it had died and was returning as a dog - a friendly, grey dog with that same strange, bobbing head.

What does this mean?

DreamMoods.com says, "To see a bear in your dream symbolizes independence, the cycle of life, death and renewal. It may signal of period of introspection and thinking....
"To dream that you are being pursued or attacked by a bear, denotes aggression, overwhelming obstacles and competition. You may find yourself in a threatening situation."

Unless you kill it and make it your friend, of course...maybe I'm about to have my own personal war.

Guns

What does it mean to dream of having a gun to your head?

Last night I dreamt I was walking through a field and everything just stopped. Everyone around had to get down on their knees and someone walked up to me and held a gun to my head. The thing is, though, I wasn't scared. I knew I should have been but I was completley calm about it - I knew that whatever was about to happen would happen. I almost felt safe.

In The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams, it says, "You or a close friend or family member will have to overcome injustice if you dream of a gun."

In another dream I had last night I was in some scuzzed-out bar in the middle of the day. I'd just finished using the scuzzed-out bathroom and when I walked out this guy came up to me and started putting his hands all over me. Then he pulled out a knife so I picked up a chair and hit him with it. It broke to pieces and he ran away.

In The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams, it says, "A fight in a dream symbolizes change, perhaps in love, your career, or your finances."

Excerpt: Manifestations

Since Eleven: Eleven came out, I've been working on a new project called Manifestations, which I hope will be published (somehow) later this year.

Here's an excerpt:

Manifestations, copyright 2009, Liz Worth

You wanted to keep a journal to record the story of your life but the pen in your hand emitted no words, only a low-frequency response.
You wanted to remember where the story of your life would begin, but you’ve spent the day with only one word rolling through you:

Disease
Disease
Disease
Disease
Disease
Disease
Disease…

This disappoints you. Today, you were ready for catharsis.

Maybe too much is already forgotten.

You’re sweating in this silence.

*

The sound of your neighbour gagging on the other side of the wall wakes you. The noise is sharp, jagged. Discomfort beads along the base of your neck. You imagine her tight, high-waisted jeans digging into her abdomen, pushing acids and flat beer upwards through her esophagus. Thick liquid salt fills your mouth. You swallow hard and pull the pillow over your head so to not hear the toilet flush.

The door to your apartment is hollow aluminum, a six-foot tall echo chamber. Everything vibrates through the bare hallway floor, all of the small building’s sounds at home, so relaxed they have forgotten to silence themselves.
No one with secrets lives here; everything manifests as white noise, disclosed through grunts and groans, rattles exhausted from the competition of going against the your internal grindings.
Matte frustrations mimic the pitch of shame.
These are not things that usually wake you. You’d learned to sleep through them but sleep is light and fleeting.
Everything in your head is restless, your body never calm. You close your eyes but your heart’s working hard, too hard. It’s full of sodium and cigarette strain. You press your chin against your collarbone and watch it try to work its way out of your ribcage.
Sleep hasn’t been easy to fall back into in days, or is it weeks, months, ever? The jeans by your bed haven’t been washed in at least a year. They slide soft across your hips, their frays entwining with the light hairs along your stomach.
There used to be a constant in your head, something more than a thought. She has diminished into something amorphous, an imbalance of subtle curves and primal warmth, sometimes combined with soft hair sweeping along the back of your hand.
She had a name; has a name, you correct yourself; it’s just not one that is meant for you anymore. Its letters have fallen from where your memory stored them; the ones left do not spell your language. This is a memory you no longer have access to.
Your reflexes do not operate on the same level of consciousness. Your hand picks up the phone but the fingers don’t dial. There is nothing for them to connect to that will tell them the numbers to press. Even if there was, it’s too early to call anyone. The mouthpiece is full of electricity, the earpiece humming dusty sighs. Even if she was there, whether in your head or on the other line, you don’t know what you would say, anyway: Neuroses of the tongue.
The other side of the wall is settled now. Lying back across the mattress you pull a loose sheet around your lower body, close your eyes, but it doesn’t matter – there will be no more sleep today; your thoughts are already ticking in time with your heart.

Skin and water

I've always had trouble sleeping. Falling asleep is a challenge, staying alseep is a challenge. Not dreaming is impossible. No matter how tired I am dreams are always there.

Last fall I started taking sleeping pills because the sleeping problems were getting to be too much. Now I'm trying not to take them and the only thing I can do is just accept whatever happens when I try to sleep. There's no sense in fighting it anymore.

Needless to say, the past few weeks have been quite interesting. I've always had vivid dreams but these ones have certainly been far more surreal than what I've experienced in the past few months.

Exhibit A:

On Thursday I was dreaming that each day was going in fast-forward motion. In my dream I would wake up and the day would just fly by and then it would be the next and the next and the next. And every day I was losing weight and losing weight, so much that my skin started hanging. And then I was so thin that my skin was becoming translucent; it was hanging there like thin plastic and I could just peel it off in clear, thin layers.

Why is this in my head? No idea.

What does it mean? According to Experiencefestival.com, "Peeling skin represents a sloughing off of the old in order to make way for the new."

I feel like that's definitely something that I'm currently going through.

Exhibit B:

Last night I had one of the most intense nightmares of my life. I woke up and was actually scared - my heart was pounding. In this dream I'd moved to this town for work and had been set up in this little house by a lake. At first everything seemed fine, but then I started seeing someone coming out of the lake. He was actually walking right out of the water.

Then I started getting weird messages left on my phone. They were always in whispers:

I can see what you're doing all the time.

I'm always right outside.

I would try to tell people what was going on and they would pretend like it was nothing. It turned out everyone in the town was a slave to this monster guy who lived in the lake. I called up my friends and had someone come to get me, but of course the lake guy killed them and then took me under the water. He had his own little world set up under there, and everyone from the town was there, too. It was a whole operation, and I was going to stay there with them forever.

What's the interpretation for something like this? DreamMoods.com says that water, "symbolizes your unconscious and your emotional state of mind. Water is the living essence of the psyche and the flow of life energy. It is also symbolic of spirituality, knowledge, healing and refreshment."

ExperienceFestival.com says that it has been believed that dreaming about being kidnapped is really an omen and that you will receive unexpected news and be successful against your opposition.

It's the end of the Dirt (blog)

It's the end of the Treat Me Like Dirt blog. This place will soon be occupied by new things: new writing, new projects, the shameless posting of old entries from my adolescent journals, and much more.



In the meantime, the first, and still main and major, announcement is...




EDITED BY GARY PIG GOLD. PUBLISHED BY BONGO BEAT. COMING IN AUGUST, 2009.