Cement Dreams

Cement dreams of a drippy cold faucet and filthy back alley keep me up at night.

Jittery flat on the ground staring skyward, cheek to gravel in the alley behind my childhood garage, a black boot heel lodged in my left temple. The assailant remains cloaked in my subconscious, gray as the sky and just as abstract.

The leaky faucet is connected to our hose, soaking down the elongated sheet of clear plastic that serves as a homemade slip 'n slide. But it's me who's doing the soaking and the sliding as a kid in our backyard. Though sunny there, a hard sleet rain beats down on the alley where "I" lay a mere twenty feet away. And the garage separating us is translucent (or at least becomes so when I strain my neck to see through it).

So who is this person lying bloodied in the alley, the one through whose eyes I now see? And the gray ghost with the foot upside this person's head? I strongly suspect they're both me at different points in life, just as the slip 'n slide boy is me as a child. All of me out of phase with time, location, and state of mind.  I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.  Who was it really that opened their mouth (me, me, or me)?

The slip 'n slides we'd construct as a kid invoke joyful memories of childhood. On par with flying kites, "poppin' wheelies" on my bike, and building fortified compounds in the foliage around the neighborhood. There is no dysfunction marring these happy times in my memory, so why do I introduce it in my dreams now? Why pollute that which has no subtext of angst when I have boatloads of memories that do? I'm by no means a Freudian and rarely have what one would call "symbolic" dreams but these certainly seem to qualify. What exactly they might symbolize remains to be seen.

The alley on our block served as a kind of social nexus for my friends and I growing up.  It was our "motocross" race track, the thoroughfare around which we'd construct our forts in the bushes that lined it, and the front line in snowball and squirt gun fights.  After watching Evil Knievel on TV, we'd run out to the alley and fashion makeshift "motorcycle ramps" from sheets of plywood and cement bricks.  Sort of like the picture on the left, except we were in the alley, didn't have helmets and our bikes were far more groovy (see above).  More than a few times I found myself on my ass with the bike on top of me in that alley; that I broke no bones is a testament to dumb luck.

But I'm not a kid and have no bike in this dream.  Well, I am a kid in my backyard, but he's me in third person. I'm pretty sure this is true of my ghostly oppressor as well, the being who has me pinned to the ground with his boot.  Sigmund would have a field day here.  Fuck Freud.  He might have had some keen insights into the human psyche but he also thought cocaine was a panacea with the potential to cure any number of neuroses.  Then again, so did I!  Neither of us struck gold in that vein.  Anyway, back to the dream.  My unholy trinity of selves aside, the neighborhood is eerily silent.  No family and no friends.  Just sundry manifestations of me.

Not much happens in this dream.  It starts with me pinned and bleeding, my kid-self hosing down the slip 'n slide for a minute, going for a slide and then repeating this over and over. My oppressor stands silently over me, digging his heel into my head but remaining otherwise obscured from view.  And I watch from my vantage point in the gravel.  The end of the dream is always the same and is perhaps the most bazaar: the backyard melds into the back of a curtain, which then rises to reveal an audience of elementary school kids and parents.  I'm dressed as a monkey in the play that we students wrote and staged at Whittier in the 4th or 5th grade (I wrote the lines for my character, Mickey Monkey).  The play is over, the audience applauds and I wake up.

I've had this dream several times in the past two weeks and can't for the life of me figure out why.  I'm hoping that articulating it here will help purge it from my system.  It's tops on my list for discussion when I next see my shrink Monday ....