bring him back bring him back
I can't stand how quickly the details of dreams slip every second of the waking life that passes. When I want to get back to the precious world of that dream I never can.
Dream, 09/28/2020:
I set up a stage show that's a cascading fortress of all my childhood objects of curiosity. The performer, a stranger who is a ghost in the body non-entity boy who is supposed to portray me, fumbles between stories. It's an audience participation exercise in responding only to prompts from objects. I realize all the note cards are out of order, so I creep up to the stage and attempt to put them back in order. I see that a few in the middle (from the middle of my life) are missing, and they're not under his feet or under the table, so I start whispering up to the performer on the stage to remember how we practiced, and start freestyling from cues from the objects.
I start running back and forth from the front of the stage to the back of this church theater, which is my childhood bedroom, which is set up with snacks for the audience. The spread is minded by a woman who never knew the original family so she has no reason to know why not to move around the objects in the room, and I realize that helper me is just a stranger also inhabiting a stranger's body, so no matter how much I plead to keep everything in its place, the objects dwindle and fade by the second. The baseball cards, the magazine cut-outs, short stories sandwiched between paperback books, small art projects in drawers; and I'm panicking as I know I have to gather these by the armful and prove them to the families in the audience as I fill the gaps on the stage.
He played the violin, and the family who now lives in the house is casually setting up to rehearse. The mom, these other stranger adults and children. The instrument and the bow are his but start to bend out of shape. The wood is brittle because it sat in the case under the bed untouched for years. The bow becomes a legitimate elements of an early period instrument but it's not his. It's morphing, mutating in to something generic from human history but away from his childhood bow, as the concept of "him" slips away.
There's a scale tabletop model of the town and there's a miniature family of characters taking individual sleds pulled by dogs across the snow to get to school every day. Stranger me reset two of the teams for the girls but the two pulling the boys are falling apart, going astray, in to barbed wire, and disappearing in to death. They make it to the school, and I want to tell two miniature boy players that I have something important to tell them, but wait until after school, and meet me in the church.
I wake up bewildered saying to myself, "Bring him back bring him back," but the thing is, the real child me was not full wonder and stories, and does not have objects that represent different states of my imagination. I'm struggling to remember the ghost of the fictional me who didn't get to grow up and I want so badly to capture that energy of wonderment. And here I am again, in my room full of boxes that have objects that don't really inspire much of anything. And I think about digging out my violin that I never played that well, and maybe those diaries from around fourth grade where the putrid blandness of my imagination feels gray on the pages, and I must get on with my day now.
Dream, 09/28/2020:
I set up a stage show that's a cascading fortress of all my childhood objects of curiosity. The performer, a stranger who is a ghost in the body non-entity boy who is supposed to portray me, fumbles between stories. It's an audience participation exercise in responding only to prompts from objects. I realize all the note cards are out of order, so I creep up to the stage and attempt to put them back in order. I see that a few in the middle (from the middle of my life) are missing, and they're not under his feet or under the table, so I start whispering up to the performer on the stage to remember how we practiced, and start freestyling from cues from the objects.
I start running back and forth from the front of the stage to the back of this church theater, which is my childhood bedroom, which is set up with snacks for the audience. The spread is minded by a woman who never knew the original family so she has no reason to know why not to move around the objects in the room, and I realize that helper me is just a stranger also inhabiting a stranger's body, so no matter how much I plead to keep everything in its place, the objects dwindle and fade by the second. The baseball cards, the magazine cut-outs, short stories sandwiched between paperback books, small art projects in drawers; and I'm panicking as I know I have to gather these by the armful and prove them to the families in the audience as I fill the gaps on the stage.
He played the violin, and the family who now lives in the house is casually setting up to rehearse. The mom, these other stranger adults and children. The instrument and the bow are his but start to bend out of shape. The wood is brittle because it sat in the case under the bed untouched for years. The bow becomes a legitimate elements of an early period instrument but it's not his. It's morphing, mutating in to something generic from human history but away from his childhood bow, as the concept of "him" slips away.
There's a scale tabletop model of the town and there's a miniature family of characters taking individual sleds pulled by dogs across the snow to get to school every day. Stranger me reset two of the teams for the girls but the two pulling the boys are falling apart, going astray, in to barbed wire, and disappearing in to death. They make it to the school, and I want to tell two miniature boy players that I have something important to tell them, but wait until after school, and meet me in the church.
I wake up bewildered saying to myself, "Bring him back bring him back," but the thing is, the real child me was not full wonder and stories, and does not have objects that represent different states of my imagination. I'm struggling to remember the ghost of the fictional me who didn't get to grow up and I want so badly to capture that energy of wonderment. And here I am again, in my room full of boxes that have objects that don't really inspire much of anything. And I think about digging out my violin that I never played that well, and maybe those diaries from around fourth grade where the putrid blandness of my imagination feels gray on the pages, and I must get on with my day now.