Strange dreams in this heat. Fragments of memory dredged up by whatever process goes rummaging through my hippocampus while I sleep. I see Fayth more than I’d like to, although perhaps it’s to be expected, since I move around town getting pounced on by memories here and there, and vaguely afraid of running into her in the flesh. I wouldn’t know what to expect. We haven’t spoken in so long. In my dreams she’s always kind, and talkative to the point of garrulity: probably the scenerio farthest from reality. The night before, I saw her at a party, and she explained in great detail why she was quitting the business world to become a country music singer.

It occurs to me now that one of the reasons I found Richard Linklater’s Waking Life so charming is that the animation managed to convey something of the erratic, fleeting, and iconic nature of dreams. Cartoons somehow seem closer to how our mind represents form. I’m not the first to suggest that, of course, nor that the brain in a sense runs backwards during sleep, with concepts and memories evoking neuronal states in primary sensory cortex, instead of the reverse. Through a Scanner Darkly was good, but it had lost most of that charm for me. It was a little too polished and distant.

Last night: I’m sitting in a boat shaped something like a Viking canoe, and discussing with someone in a neighboring boat whether her sail, which is small, blue, and triangular, will allow her to go upriver. There’s some sort of trip leader, and as he’s talking I realize that my backpack, which I’ve left on shore, is much too heavy, no doubt because it somehow contains one of the 25-gallon plastic tubs I used to pack my clothes on the drive out to Chicago. I get out of the boat to repack and discover that I left it on top of a nest of termites, who bite me mercilessly, and in my haste to squash them I somehow leave the pack behind. We visit a museum, where I attempt to impress my new friends Laura and Tyler by identifying stuffed birds in a glass case, but the only name that comes to my mind is “great horned owl”, even though I know all of the birds are hawks. Andro rescues me and shows me another exhibit, something large and up a wide staircase. The museum resembles the library in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire but it doesn’t occur to me then.

In a later scene my hasty attempt to lighten my load results in further discomfort as I find myself trying to get over a mountain pass wearing shorts and Birkenstocks. I’m travelling with two hippies whom I don’t trust. The bearded one stole a sledgehammer from the museum, which he uses to lock in his ski bindings, and knock padlocks off the gates on the passes, as we make our way north. We break into an abandoned building that turns out to be full of an ungodly assortment of kitch. I attempt to operate a hot chocolate machine, which brings a woman who tries to charge me 35 cents that the hippies refuse to let me pay. The store fills with tourists looking for carmel corn.

We finally escape from the store, and find ourselves in a town I am certain I’ve been in before, just south of the Canadian border in Washington, though my waking mind will deny this completely. I try to skate ski across the highway in my sandals, and then recall a used ski store a few blocks south, which I beg the crazy hippies to take me to. On our way there the streets have filled with people, food kiosks, and the smell of hot dogs. It’s summer, and I wake up.

(cdm | TravelDreams)