"someone stop the chickens, cuz they make too much noise" (the dream journal is back)

This is a reference to a song that I'm only kind of sure exists. I think someone yells it at the end of a song about insanity that my Dad used to have on one of his mixtapes. Maybe it was Todd Rundgren or something. It was espoused in a dream of mine by a wigged-out art teacher/janitor (*I think that's symbolism, that the art teacher is also the trashman, so let's make a note of it it).

The ride back from Milwaulkee took too long in the blizzard so my parents couldn't drop me off at my house. I wasn't willing to take the train back from theirs at midnight in search of fun that may or may not exist, so I set up camp here. For the last month I've been working these hours that have kept me from reaching lucidity, and I've been increasingly more frazzled with each day, taking solace in the fact that it's only a month. Well the month's up on Monday and I've figured out what I need to do in order to sleep and think. So I have, for two days in a row. With a big empty Sunday sprawled out in front of me, I figured I could play a brain experiment. I loaded up a bunch of mutant disco (you know, that shit that we used to call no wave?), some Aorta, some Mott the Hoople, and some weirdo funk on a loop and slept in a room adjacent to it. I was going to break my brain into thinking weird when it woke up.

I'm not sure how it happened, but in my dream I ended up acting in a musical at my old high school. Arvo was in it too, and where I felt trapped, he was thriving (*is this more symbolism? Friendship jealousy?). It was a terrible production that took itself far too seriously and had me playing a conniving, Iago-type (from Aladdin-of course, not Othello) who just happened to be a lisping hair-dresser, or pretending to be, posing as some sort of handmaid to the female lead on some fiendish assignment. The voice I was doing for the play sounded like a cross between Smeagle the Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies and John Leguizamo as a sloth in Ice Age, which begs the question of how many shitty goddamn movies can one dream remind me I've seen?

As I became dissatisfied with the production, I realized that I was losing my grasp on the lines. There were no scripts anywhere in the building so I tried to hide from the production.

-There was a side-story in the dream. My cousin Ryan, who is kind of trapped in his situation in Florida, was trying to meet up with me and my sister but kept running into trouble. He finally made it there for opening night. (*This part of the dream happened because I was asking about him earlier today but I think that my brain was trying to tell me something about the duality of our situations and how I wasn't being self-reliant enough)

One day, when everyone was gone. I got up on stage and tried to get my lines out, grimacing in pain from the apparent hole in my brain. It was at this point that the art teacher/janitor walked up. He was wearing blue overalls and looked like he'd been pretty burnt-out on acid in the 60s. He had long, blonde hair in a ponytail and wore dirty, blue overalls. "Oh, I remember you. You always liked to practice, even if no one wanted you here." He rambled a bit about the play and how overwhelming work was and then, under his breath, "someone stop the chickens cuz they make too much noise."

I laughed and he was surprised I got the reference. "Oh, you like Quiet Riot?" The band name didn't seem right, but I nodded because I really did like whoever played that song.

When remembering my lines was obviously not going to work, I decided to hide and sleep. I found a dark room but they found me, the people who cared about the play and their goons. Two heavyset black men grabbed me and closed the door begind them. I think they planned to rape me, to get me into line. I bit one and jabbed another with a pen, before escaping through the wings and the actors and the costumers and Orianna as stage director, and Arvo as whatever he was doing, to the woman in charge. It would probably be helpful if I remembered what happened as I talked to this God//Director/Woman/Puppetmaster character but I don't. The two men that chased me had caught up and my eyes opened.

I had broke my brain. The packed away treadmill in the corner of the room looked like a guy in a hoodie with a gun. The nighttable with the broken tv and remote, even though I recognized it as a nighttable with a broken tv and remote control, looked like a big square-headed monster man gesturing at me with another gun. I knew I could only make them go away by turning on the light, but turning on the light would mean a dash from the covers to the lightswitch, and until I made them go away, they could still get me, right?

With the lights on, the men were gone, but I didn't trust the machines, and now sitting at the computer, listening to Baby Huey and A Perfect Ratio, I keep looking over my shoulder. It's the darkness behind me. I turn on the TV to silence it, but the sound is arresting. It opens with a scream, and then a bunch of blurred Girls Gone Wild sex, followed by a surrealistic end of our broadcasting day when I change the channel to Adult Swim, and an ad for Zoobooks. Everything makes sense, it is all consistent with what should beon cable television at 5 in the morning but its more than I can handle.

My first thought, upon waking from my dream, was I need to get my trike fixed this week! It's something I was planning already but now I know it's important, it reminds me of a dream I had five years ago, where I jumped out of bed and yelled, involuntarily, that I need to lay off the drugs for a while. I don't know what would have happened, just that I'm sure that the advice, direct from my subconscious, is what kept me alive for another half decade.

Anecdote: At one point in the dream I was looking through the book of cassettes that made of the plays soundtracks. Some of them were old Disney tapes (I am a little surprised that, a decade after I taped over the last of the Disney tapes my Mom had left from the Daycare Center, I still remember exactly what they looked like and what made them different from other cassettes). Others were operas and marches with swastikas and luftwaffes on them (because every good musical has Nazis) and a bunch of blank tape reordings of the cast, and random sounds that were needed at different points of the play. Sitting across the table from Arvo, I joked that it was surprising how similar the soundtrack to a high school musical might resemble your own musical collection. The question still remains though... cassettes?

[currently listening to Pigbag]