He was once a friend
This dream is a conscious (or unconscious) revisiting of a dream that occurred some 35 years ago. It has been on my mind since I started the process of detailed accounting of my dreams – so I suppose it was inevitable that it would form the basis of a dream now.
What is of interest to me in this dream is that I am aware when the it digresses from the already bizarre reality of the ancient event and pursues story lines that are sometimes stranger, sometimes more mundane than the original dream or the actual events that surrounded it. I use italics to indicate this dream’s revisions or additions to the original dream or waking events.
Except for these italicized passages, the rest is an account of a dream that occurred after I had been painting late into the night, working in my basement studio on a picture that shows a harsh angular face in profile, and hands that may or may not belong to the portrayed individual reaching up toward his throat. Eventually I tired and lay down on a bed which is partitioned from my studio by a bamboo curtain. I then dreamt …
I am in a crowded restaurant, standing against the wall and waiting to find a seat. I see, through the restaurant window, a man in a wheelchair approaching across a wide boulevard. A nurse who, while positioned directly behind the chair, is not actually pushing it follows him. The nurse is wearing a facemask. It is not a motorized chair, but the man in it is not using has arms at all. That catches my attention. I also notice he is arguing with the nurse, and can hear his harangue through the window. Oddly, I can’t hear any noise in the busy restaurant. There are no waiters and the patrons are serving themselves from strategically located stainless steel tables.
Now I am seated. The man in the wheelchair is shaking his finger in my face and demanding that I give up my seat. He has a touch of froth, in which I discern raspberry seeds, at the corners of his mouth.
I protest that I was there first. He calls me selfish and evil.
I am getting embarrassed and eventually blurt that he already has a chair. In the silence of the crowded restaurant everyone turns to look. The man in the wheelchair is crying. The crowd rises from their seats and menaces me. The nurse is sitting at the bar, back to us, hunched over a drink and staring up at a round-screened television. The bartender is studiously cleaning a glass with a towel wrapped around his finger. Some of the women are offering their chairs to the man in the wheelchair. I am almost hysterical with fear.
I awaken in a cold sweat and see, through the bamboo curtain, the face in the painting staring at me threateningly. I am absolutely convinced that I had turned off the light in the studio. The face on the canvas is in profile, but the easel is at a 45-degree angle to me and he is looking in my direction. I am overwhelmed with fear and cover the painting with a towel. Still unable to sleep, I put the painting in the trunk of my car. It works and I sleep through to morning.
All through breakfast I pondered the dream. There is a carpet knife and a canvas kit with an array of scalpels on the breakfast table. I decide I must do what I had failed to do the first time the “dream” happened. I mustn’t leave the painting in the trunk to be remembered on the way to work. I mustn’t return home and hide the painting in a closet. I mustn’t show it to a friend who freaks me out with amateur Freudian theory.
I lay the painting on a tile floor and, using each of the cutting instruments with some sort of selective logic, slice the art into long vertical ribbons. As I do this, a clear odorless fluid wells along each incision and escapes the oozes from the cut.
The so-called friend, who actually died in the years since the first dream, has been replaced by someone with the same name, but who looks, depending on the view, like another friend of the same era, or Kirk Douglas, who I saw a week ago in Lust for Life. He, now called Gordon, is telling me to stop slicing the painting. He is agitated and quite fearful. He thinks that changing the event will undo it. That emboldens me and I slash faster. The liquid is splattering now and, while still clear, is leaving stains all along the walls of a hallway.
A woman is shouting, “Wax! Wax!” and jumping up and down in tight little panicky hops. I scratch a stain with my fingernail. She is right. I am perplexed.
Someone (I recognize her from the restaurant) tells me telepathically that the dream is finished. It is.