I find it slightly depressing when fictional characters from TV show up in my dreams. I had several odd dreams last night – the zombie portion was especially special, but my initial recounting will be of the one right before I woke up. I’m on a busy street and up in front of me is a nice black velvet couch facing a theatre. I’m walking with Carrie Bradshaw and Big from sex in the city. Big and Carrie sit on the couch and leave enough room for me so we can await the premier of the final episode of the show across the street. I’m chatting with Carrie and I have my arm around her.

Why Carrie Bradshaw? These essays in this blog have something structurally in common with the premise for her show. Particularly the other day when I posed the open question about the link between civilized man and domesticated dog, that could have been a tag line from her show. Also, I was reading the RFT (River Front Times local independent paper) last night right before bed and there was a review of a New York writer come St. Louis who was writing Bridget Jones style fiction for the late twenty something female audience. So what did my subconscious want to tell me?

Ok, and why is this depressing? When R and I moved here and we had no money and very few friends, every night we’d watch Friends. They would show two episodes back to back. Over this six-month period R and I both began to dream about the characters from Friends, as though they were real people in our lives. I was involved with Rachel subconsciously for several weeks. We discussed this occasionally as a depressive marker and as a motivating factor for us to get lives, but we were both so exhausted. I used to be a night owl and this period was the forced transition for me – when I began to have to go to bed by ten in order to function the next day. I found it very depressing not to be able to stay awake through Letterman. The worst for me were the Friday nights, once a big night for going out in the ville, and here you almost can’t count Friday as part of your weekend. On a bad week you are so exhausted (as in last week) that you just go to sleep as soon as you are able to and Friday is a wash.

So the dream quickly transitions away from the TV characters, I look down and it is an ordinary old brown couch, the kind someone would leave on a curb, Carrie has become Karen and Big has become John, which makes sense even physically – curly haired female writer overlap, tall business guy overlap. Then we get location overlap, we’re on a street in kville just off the square, but it’s lined with St. Louis five story apartments from the twenties. There is going to be a Mardi Gras style parade. John goes inside to watch from upstairs, Karen goes somewhere else, but brings me a drill on a long extension cord to fix the couch, or a foot stool – something. I am constantly using the drill at work to fix things. The parade starts before I finish repairs and the route goes over the drill cord-which I just leave there and retrieve later in the dream. Interp – parties are a distraction, there is something you can fix, it is related to episodic writing, Karen is perhaps a factor.

My memory is already failing me with regards to details of the parade. There is something in the basement of Karen’s that I need, that someone else needs as well. I kick in a window with bars on it and enter easily as an alarm begins to sound. I know it’s ok because this is a house in which I am known and belong, so when the Cops show up I’ll just pretend to be investigating the break in which I am perpetrating. I don’t think I find what I’m looking for, but then I have Leland’s dry cleaning. The alarm that is sounding reminds me of yesterday’s tornado drill. Leland is tall, and this is a long coat in a plastic bag. I know he’s upstairs with John watching the parade. I go upstairs and give him his dry cleaning – in real life Leland gave me a book on writers block out of the blue – I read half of it yesterday and may order it for the store – the focus of the book – which is called The War of Art – is getting past resistance and procrastination in writing and in life. Apparently I am grateful to Leland, so I got his dry cleaning for him. Clean coats are an image of renewal.

John is upset when we’re upstairs because I take a call and don’t get all the information he needs. I apologize and he says, “I’m not going to let you off that easy, Cheerleading was very important to me and when those people from the old days call it’s really special.” I tell him to star 69 the caller and go back to recover the drill, which has been kicked apart and I have to put back together with drywall screws. I see John as someone very linked to his past. I imagine that a dream life for him would be to follow the Dead ad infinitum. He doesn’t like being in one place very long, in arriving at and being in the now. He’s on the run from the present moment. Why he is so on the move is an open question that only he can answer. He is restless, like Phil, and has a quality of not fitting into his own life. Melinda was like that – always the next thing and the next to avoid something in her past. Mel would enroll for seventeen hours, get a part in a play, do stage craft and costumes for said play, write for Windfall, be in several student groups, date/manage my life. She would then breakdown around midterm or so. I need to remember not to be like that – to give myself time to reflect and deal with my own backed up pipes.

The way early zombie dream was at first your typical horror film thing. There were zombies everywhere in this city on fire and if their vomit hit you, you’d become a zombie. A main zombie was a pea soup spitting Linda Blair, my imagination has been colonized by pop culture. So the more interesting portion of this classic chase dream was that Glen R – a friend since high school who I still hang out with. He lived out two timelines in the dream – in one he became a zombie and in the other he didn’t – zombies were clearly linked to heroin use and HIV, decay from drugs and disease. The Healthy Glen and I encounter the Glen from the alternate universe, he’s passed out on his back and his teeth have separated in the way that crack addicts do. This is a warning dream about the dangers of addiction with overtures to The Portrait of Dorian Grey. I woke myself up from that one, told my body I got the message and went back to sleep.

These dreams I have nightly are a great source of imagery, but they have a danger to them. In the film Until the End of The World, a machine is built that will record and playback your dreams for you. Several of the main characters become addicted to their memories and their dreams. There’s a great scene with William Hurt and others wandering around dazed holding little etch-a-sketch monitors with images of their childhood etc. After all, Narcissus drowns.