How I Roll - Dreams, Cat Vomit and Crystals

Last night I dreamt you were left-handed and lived in a tree-house. The tree had a strong trunk and the air at the top almost always felt cool and bright. People who were about to die were drawn to you, as were spirits, and consequently you developed a habit of spending a lot of time alone. You liked to find places high, high up where your eyes could look down and contain all the corners and edges sharpened by the distance. You had a calmness about you that I never saw in real life. Except maybe sometimes in the margins of your writing, or in the space under the dots of your "i"s. There was very little static.

The calmness made you look different. I am not even sure how I knew it was you. I think somehow my subconscious endowed you with the qualities of a bird. Maybe this is how you exist to me, somewhere at the back of my eyes, at the border of my retina where the letters you have strung together transform into electricity.

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And then I woke up and began the process of separating my dreams from reality. And since I am not particularly good at this type of threshing, it didn't go very well. In fact, after turning off my alarm clock, I fell back asleep and dreamt I was getting ready for work and was on my way, out the door, almost there. Only to wake up fifty minutes later with just a few minutes left to scramble around and get ready. Tricky, tricky dreams....

So I maneuvered around the cat vomit on the floor and removed the crystals from the sink so I could brush my teeth; the whole time the phrase "Last night I dreamt you were left-handed and lived in a tree-house" was beating through my brain. And while I was admiring the way the zoisite looked in the water and trying to recall the exact feel of my dream and attempting to avoid thinking about taking my cat to the vet, the juxtaposition of unattended cat vomit and crystals in the sink became laughable to me. How clear is it that I mix up dreams and reality? What says that more than cat vomit and crystals? Could it be any clearer?

Even as reality slowly seeped into my sleep-soaked body, I was still mesmerized by my dream of you. They way it felt at the top of your tree-house. The lightness of your spirit. Even the realization that I left my car in the parking garage at work yesterday when it ran out of gas BECAUSE I SPENT MY LAST FIFTY DOLLARS ON CRYSTALS didn't pull me away from the dream. It just caused me to smile at my own ridiculousness. I confuse dreams with reality, you see. So I walked to work, ten minutes late, down the street with all the cats that are scared of strangers, trying to figure out exactly where that tree-house of yours was. Near a church maybe? Behind a cemetary? Neither of those seemed quite right.

And I cut through the park, with its lovely trees and cool, clear air and shifting light, and I realized that this must be where your tree-house was. This was where you lived up up high, with birds for neighbors. And I wanted to stop and sit and drink in the air, remember the dream of you. But somehow reality won and I kept on going, strolling towards my cubicle and my co-workers who don't seem to have as much trouble separating dreams from reality as I do. My co-workers whose floors are free of vomit and whose sinks are free of crystals. Towards putting on the appearance of normalcy for a few hours until I have to walk to the gas station to buy a gas can and a gallon of gas. Towards a dream of reality.