I dreamed there was an enormous, greasy, yellow-faced Italian man who had kidnapped a woman I knew. He dressed in the finest Victorian fashions and spoke with immense charm, chivalry, and courtesy, but he was evil evil evil. Now I think of it, I think he was one of the villains from Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. He and his wife, who was obsessively in love with him, were holding this woman, but she was pregnant, and finally they had to bring her to a hospital to have her baby. I worked at the hospital, and made a plan to help my friend. It was hard, because the wife was also pregnant, and came into the hospital, too, to keep an eye on their prisoner.
Finally the babies were born, and we were able to focus on her plan. Instead of sending them home together, like the wife insisted, I got a doctor to say my friend had to stay for longer. We secretly put her on a train to take her across country, but the man came to stop us. He ran at me, and I stabbed him over and over with a pencil, and got away. We held a sort of ritual that would keep him from getting well, but he lingered. I finally went into his room to finish him off, but found his wife there strangling him. So I let her.
I had to leave town after that, to get away from the wife who now wanted to be my best friend and constant companion. I ended up in the town I grew up in, sitting in on band practices. I started working on a design for a t-shirt. The graphic on the front
was a picture of a sort of Mr. Potato Head type of sock monkey, where
you could pin extra features on, which in my dream was a common toy.
This was captioned, "If you think Obama is the worst thing that's ever
happened to this country..." and the back had a list of awful things
like the Great Depression, Slavery, and other awful things America had
been through, including some sort of plague.
One day, I was listening to a few friends of mine practicing a flute trio, and one of them was trying out a new bass flute, when we learned the woman was coming. They joined up with me to help me stay away from her, and we began traveling again. We decided wherever we stopped that night, we would have a home-cooked meal of spaghetti, so we went to a grocery store and bought three heirloom tomatoes the size of soccer balls for the sauce. We met up with the band again, because it was traveling by bus to a performance in a different state, and they could drop us off at a house one of my friends said would be safe.
The band bus stopped in the town where we were going to stay to go to a restaurant and get dinner. My friends decided to eat with the band, leaving me with the tomatoes at our safe house. I didn't want the tomatoes to go bad, so I stayed to make the sauce, even though I don't actually like tomato sauce.
The house we were going to stay in was a big old home with four rental units branching off of a communal living space. It was an absolute wreck. Leaky roof, damp walls, bookshelves and rags and blankets and tables and dirty clothes everywhere, and all the doors were slatted shutters. The kitchen smoked up as soon as I started cooking, and we had to open all the windows so the fire alarms wouldn't go off, because it was about 3am and I didn't want to wake up any of the other tenants.
I finally gave up on cooking or eating because I was too tired, and went to lay down on my mat on the floor of the room I was supposed to sleep in. But I couldn't get to sleep because someone was playing an old, out of tune piano in the common space. Louis Armstrong showed up and said it sounded great, and kept me awake talking about it after that. And I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't sleep, and then I woke up.
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