H’mm, talk about REALLY overreacting to a dream message.
I’ve been depressed recently, especially over winter break. I was examining my life and I realized that I was 22 years old, almost done with college, yet I’ve never had a boyfriend, never had sex with anyone, never even gone on a date or held hands with someone or kissed someone in an intimate manner. In short, I was (and still am) desperately single. To beat the point home a close on-line friend of mine who lives far away from me has recently found love with another boy, and, while I’m very happy for my on-line friend and glad he’s hooked up with such a nice boyfriend, I can’t help but be reminded of my own situation. My home state, Rhode Island, is quite a small state (no duh) and the gay scene here is severely lacking, though I usually try to avoid scenes anyway. Going to clubs and bars is definitely not my thing. I tried on-line dating but that was a disaster. And the enrollment at my college is 70% female, so there are hardly any gay male students at all. In fact I’m the only (born) male member of the campus gay-straight alliance. I was pondering maybe launching a sigil to get a boyfriend, but it’s something I desire so badly no way I’d be able to forget about it, plus it brings up ethical questions I’d rather not think about at the moment, my life being hectic enough as it is.
During winter break, I knew during the upcoming spring semester I’d be attending a creative writing course. I thought to myself, gee, wouldn’t it be cool if you’d fall in love with a fellow creative writing student, and he’d be the guy you’ve always dreamed you’d fall in love with? Rather then just fantasize about it, I decided to write a short story about it. I believe in the idea that what you write can happen in reality, in fact quite a bit of the stuff I’ve written in my old stories has come true in the future. A Burroughsian type of magic, eh? So I wrote a short story where I was the main character. On the first day of the writing class I wrote about an attractive, intelligent boy (who was also gay) sitting next to me, and during the upcoming classes we’d start to fall in love, starting with him liking my stories a lot.
Eventually the spring semester started. On the first day of writing class (the class had 8 students and the teacher) I took my seat early and waited for the class to begin. Then HE walked in and sat down next to me, just like I had written. He was my height and cute, though not so cute as to be out of my league. His hair was red and he looked (and his voice sounded a bit) like Tyler Durden, which was a turn on. Dressed kinda alternatively. Not much happened in the first class though.
In the second class we all had to introduce our names and say 3 things about us (I said that I liked cats, avant-garde electronic music, and the occult). I found out his name and some more stuff about him. He had a great sense of humor that appealed to me. That class I had to hand out a short story that the class would read over the week, write a one-page response to, and it would be work shopped the next week. My story was about a cynical gay quasi-punk writer named Dylan(who looked like Spider Jerusalem) who hates fairy tales. But one night he gets a call from his landlord, an old queen he can’t stand (Harold Royal) asking him to save his adopted daughter Princess, a drag queen, from her abusive boss, Camilla, an evil female impersonator known as the Dragon, who owns a nightclub. So Dylan walks around the city’s Red Light District, passing by homeless people doing the I-Ching and ruminating on the art of writing and city magic and Machine Elves before he gets to the drag club, called The Cave. There, he tries to convince The Dragon to let Princess off her shift early, but the Dragon refuses. Then Princess appears, tasers the dragon, and Dylan escorts her home, where she makes him rethink some of his cynical attitudes towards the gay mainstream (attitudes that reflect my personal opinion, but I wanted 2 sides presented). Dylan drops her home then writes a story about how much he hates fairy tales and that no one lives happily ever after.
I was worried about the workshop, but the class loved the story, calling it very post-modern (I like post-modernism). The student I had a crush on liked my story a lot too, he said hi to me at the start of the class and in his response to me he said he identified with Dylan cuz he too was an “Outsider fag”. My heart leapt: I wasn’t the only outsider fag in the class! He even knew about Siouxsie & the Banshees and Throbbing Gristle and stuff like that! It was like a dream that had come true. For the first time in 4 years I was in a serious crush. Was this the guy I had been waiting years to find? Would he be my night in shining armor? Would we live happily ever after?
Erm, NO! Class after that I found out he was living with a partner. And thus endeth the romance story (hey, I don’t remember writing that part!) My heart felt like it had been ripped out of my chest and used as a suppository. That’s what I got for letting myself fall in love with someone. Now I know why I hate fairy tales so much. I became depressed again.
That’s the back-story. Here’s the dream: The dream happened a few nights ago. In the dream I was on a staircase in a campus building. At one point the stairway halted and the stairs that led to the upper floor was separated by a gap, a gap that led stories downward. At first I was going to leap across, but then I chickened out and took another route to the upper floor. I came to my writing class, which was now a CD/boom store. Before class the teacher let us browse the books and CDs. I browsed but couldn’t find what I was looking for, which frustrated me. Then we all sat at the big table, only my ex-crush sat across from me rather then at my side and stared at me in a disconcerting manner the whole time, which made me uneasy. After class I was walking along the quad, brooding, when a really cute boy who looked like Ste from “Beautiful Thing” approached me and gripped my arm. He led me into an alcove and stood close to me, so close our faces were nearly touching. For a moment I thought he would kiss me (wishful thinking, even in my own dreams I’m never kissed) and I would have kissed him had I been in control. He gripped my arm and asked how long had I been in college, so I said 5 years. He then said he knew an anarchist boy who would be a perfect match for me, and that this anarchist boy was a bottom, which pleased me as, even though I’m a virgin, I feel I’d be more comfortable on top. He then whispered into my ear that he was a messenger, and that he would tell me the boy’s e-mail address, and that it was VERY IMPORTANT I remember the e-mail and get in contact with the boy. His lower lip brushed my ear and I shivered, the feelings were so realistic… Then he wrote the e-mail on a piece of paper: saracream@aol.com. I saw the e-mail JUST as I woke up.
When I woke up I groaned, it was like Baudelaire’s poem where the poet has a beautiful dream then wakes up in a depressing reality. But I remembered the dream, which was odd as I usually forget dreams, except vivid ones, like the Frodo Sam hobbit porn one. So I wrote down what happened and the e-mail address, remembering William Gibson’s “Mona Lisa Overdrive” where the character Mona gets a dream image that’s important.
That day at work my mind went in overdrive thinking about the dream (work is boring). Was the e-mail address real? Did it belong to a gay anarchist boy? Had he sent that messenger into my dream to get into contact with me? Was there a secret organization of gay anarchist witches in my small boring town that I wasn’t aware of, and they were looking for a new member (more wishful thinking). I’ve been reading too much Burroughs I guess. Then I really took a creative leap: The latest story I wrote for the writing class was about a bored female supermarket employee (I am not female but I work at a supermarket), who writes a story about herself falling in love with an employee who turns out to be part of a rebel cell, hoping that by writing it out it’ll happen, who falls in love with a cute cashier, who turns out to be the member of a secret anarchist cell known as the Punk-Modernists. They work in a mushroom shaped tower like the Crack in “The Filth” and use chaos magic to fight against the president, who is an ordained member of the church of Satan and plans to evoke Satan at the pentagon using corpses from a new reality TV show called “Survivor Auschwitz”. I ends with the female employee (modeled after me)slaying the president with words on her laptop and kissing the male employee as world peace occurs. The story was 23 pages, had 23 references to 23, and it even made references to memes and fiction suits, AIDS conspiracy theory, Freemasons, etc. something that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow here but might be odd for your average student.
I thought to myself… what if that that student I have a crush on… what if he IS part of some anarchist cell and he was just waiting to see if I’d be a good member? What if there really WAS a group called the Punk-Modernists and this was how they recruited new agents, by the stories they wrote in college creative writing courses? Had he read my story then appeared to me in a dream with that e-mail? Was the e-mail part one of the initiation? Maybe he was a member of the Invisibles! Maybe it WAS all real!
Then I got my head out of the clouds and actually tried the e-mail. Guess what? The e-mail address didn’t even exist. So much for the very important message. If I see that cute messenger in a dream again I’ll defenestrate him.
I think I’ve been getting a little too much into the Illuminatus Trilogy, which I began reading recently. I’ve been obsessed with secret societies and conspiracy theories ever since.
Ah well, at least I have a name for that female porn actress I was having trouble naming in a story I’m working on: Sara Cream.
Well, at least my imagination is still vivid.
So now it turns out I’m not getting initiated into an all-male gay anarchist witch coven. And the best chance I had at getting a boyfriend in the last 4 years has been shot down. And I’m still depressed and feel like I’ll be forever single. Still, I guess if you can find humor in these things it’s worth it. My life is starting to resemble Bronski Beat lyrics. “Smalltown Boy”: Run away run away run away…:P
Bottom line? Don’t take things that happen in your dreams too seriously I guess.
And fairy tales really are bullshit. |
