But how did the alligators get in the house?

Last night's dream was messed up. Matiah and I decided to plan ahead for my death and buy a coffin for me, and then we went a step further and decided to put a copy of my body in the coffin and bury it.

We went through some process by which I lay in the coffin, someone takes a picture and that somehow makes a copy of my body, and then I get out and my other body, my dead body, lies there in the coffin.

Matiah thought it would be a nice way to honor me by carving out a piece of the table and putting the coffin there. For some reason it was a big, thick table that we didn't need to put our legs under? So everytime we sat at the table, I'd notice the rectangular lines where the coffin inset was, and I'd trace my finger over it, fascinated, and say, "Here I am." Matiah would look up from reading the newspaper and put his hand on mine and say, "Yeah, baby, there you are. I'm glad it's out of the way and I don't have to bury you again. I couldn't stand to lose you again." Whatever that meant. My real body would eventually die right? I just had a feeling there were tons of unsolved phenomenon in this dream world, but it was a perfectly normal thing to bury oneself before one actually died.

Then for some reason it wasn't working for us to have the coffin under the table--or it was too sad a reminder of my death or something, so Matiah sawed a space in the floorboard and put the coffin under the house. I watched him do it and it was a swampy, watery other world down there. There were reptiles and fish, and I was worried about putting the coffin down there with all these aquatic critters. Then I saw two small alligators and panicked. "They'll eat my corpse! We can't put it down here!" Matiah reassured me and said the alligators couldn't get through the coffin. A few weeks later we open the floorboard to check on it, and the coffin was open and laying on its side in the shallow water. I was afraid to look because I didn't want to see my own rotting, mangled flesh, ripped up by hungry alligators, but when I finally looked I saw a mangled up fake body--a rubber mannequin body, not my body at all. "That's what was in there the whole time, not my real body?" I asked Matiah. He shrugged, as puzzled as me. I saw a sassy little alligator sitting proudly on a log, licking his lips, satisfied that he'd gotten into my coffin and eaten my corpse. I got so angry I lunged at it with my fist in the air, yelling something at it. It hissed at me, jumped in the water and swam away.

I cried about how hard this all was while Matiah consoled me. Then I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that alligators were in the house at all--the space under our floorboards wasn't outside--it was contained within our house, so why was it a damp otherworld that housed all these critters? I kept asking Matiah and I don't remember his explanation but it wasn't good enough and I felt more puzzled than I ever had. Then all of a sudden we were in a dry house with a sliding glass door and I saw two armadillos. They were sort of cute but I was still angry so I ran to the door, opened it, and shooed them out. They left, scared.

In the next part of the dream, Matiah was playing a really awesome and strange sounding synthesizer, seemingly making up songs as he went. It sounded like the weird moog music on that ode to plants album from the 70s. At some point he had little figurines in his hands and was using them to tell a wordless story. He moved the keyboard around so all five people in the room could see the tiny objects he was holding.

That's all I remember.

Saw the psycho again

I had a dream I was visiting Oviedo and it was completely different. It looked like the U.S., specifically somewhere around here. I felt like I was on a beach at Lake Washington looking at Vashon or Mercer Island, except the houses weren't huge fancy things like they are on Mercer--they were average 70s style houses with no notable gardening or architecture, and some of them were even ugly. I was sitting there on the beach marveling at how much Oviedo had changed, how trashy and American it looked, when a bunch of people walked by and I looked back in front of me and realized there was still some old world charm--cobblestone streets meant only for pedestrians, and the towering ancient churches. I settled into my blanket and grabbed my book but then I felt drawn to look up again. That's when I saw Jorge Fernandez Castro, my psycho ex who beat the hell out of me and denied it, who was absolved in court after I pressed charges and applied for a restraining order.

He was really the reason that I left Oviedo.

I noticed it was him even though he was wearing a large hooded jacket and a hat. Not sure why people were wearing jackets when it was this nice out and there were also people having picnics on the beach.

Then I did the unthinkable. I waved at him. I pretended everything was water under the bridge. I didn't address what happened 8 years ago, I didn't even yell at him. In my conscious waking mind I know I'd never talk to him even if I saw him on the street, but there really is a part of me that's curious about what he's up to, if he's abusing women as we speak, if he ever got in more legal trouble or got exposed as the villain he is. His eyes went wide, he said "It's you!" and he sat down on my blanket. "How are you?' he asked and I replied "Great!"

There wasn't much deep conversation and I don't remember what we talked about if anything. Sort of reflects the shallow mundane shit we used to talk about in reality: movies, music, people, food. Rarely did we actually talk about ideas and world events, and when I tried, he began talking so fast and passionately in Spanish that I couldn't really keep up or add new things to the conversation.

The next thing I knew we were in someone's flat having dinner at a long table with a bunch of other young people of all different nationalities. It felt like I was back then in time, meeting all kinds of people, trying to learn snippets of Portuguese, French, Japanese, whatever language of the person I met, while they asked me questions about English. Everyone at the table was jovial, wine was flowing, the food smelled delicious. Jorge's soft, jolly baritone voice was the most audible, and he made jokes and told stories. He made people laugh like he always used to. Some of his jokes seemed a little pointed or subtly harsh, and I saw a bit of a wounded reaction from one of the guys at the end of the table, who shuddered and glared at Jorge.

Jorge and I weren't sitting near eachother, but he kept looking at me as if he was trying to get my attention. I held steady and refused to make eye contact with him. I was realizing I didn't want to talk to him in the first place and was wishing he would leave. I was confused about why I was even here in the same room with him. He walked across the room a few times looking at me, talking about how he was getting out of here soon, making no attempt to hide the fact that he asking me to go with him. I waited it out and he eventually left. Before he did, he said, "Okay Lissa, I'm so glad I got to see you. I'm glad you're doing well" and I replied in a very emotionless and dead tone, "I'm glad I saw you on the street."

After he left I felt sick to my stomach. I immediately divulged to the people in the room what happened. "I never should have come here," I told them, "that guy Jorge is my ex and I haven't talked to him in 8 years. He attacked me in Budapest on New Year's 2011 and beat the shit out of me. He took my ID and threatened to leave me there. I took him to court and he was absolved. I was completely grief-stricken, depressed for the whole winter and spring, and triggered by childhood abuse. And I can't believe I talked to that fucker and sat in the same room as him. Entitled, misogynist piece of shit!"

Peoples' eyes went wide. The girl next to me was really sympathetic. She rubbed my shoulders and said, "Wow, I bet that dinner was really hard for. I wish I would've known." I told everyone about how he lied to everyone, turned mutual friends against me, etc. Then the guy at the other end of the table who I'd noticed earlier spoke up. Then I noticed he was shaking.

He said, "I'm so glad you said something. Jorge attacked me too. He held me down and tore off my clothes and told me he liked me. At first I was into it, but then he got rough and I told him to stop and he wouldn't. Then he raped me for hours after that, and wouldn't let me leave. It was the scariest night of my life."

Everyone in the room was crestfallen. The guy put is face in his hands and sobbed and the guy next to him hugged him and comforted him.

I felt angrier than I've felt in some time. "We have to do something to that fucker! We can't talk to him and be friendly anymore! We're just reinforcing the idea that what he did was okay and he can just go through the world doing whatever he wants to anyone and there are no repercussions and he's still adored and he's Mr. Popular. Fuck that!"

Other people agreed. "No, we can't talk to him anymore."

It was such an angering dream, and I was mostly angry at myself talking to that psycho.