I was walking in it again last night.  I’ve spent so much time in it now that I can almost draw you a complete set of floor plans.  I haven’t a clue what it means, other then what I already know about my hyper imaginative brain.

It’s an oldish rowhouse style house.  Not located here in Baltimore, but on some residential street of a town somewhere, possibly the main street.  The street has two-lanes, is tree lined and has on street parking.  But the house has a small driveway of crumbly asphalt and pebbles.  And it’s not attached to the homes on either side: it’s a stand-alone.  There is one like it a few blocks from where I live in Baltimore: an odd looking house that looks like it was meant to be part of a row and only one of them was built. 

It is narrow like a rowhouse, made of red brick and a stone basement.  It is two floors and a basement, which is only half underground in the front and walk-out in the back.  There is a small front porch that goes the entire width of the house.  The door is in the middle, between two tall windows.  There are stairs leading up to the porch on the side, not the front of the house.  There is a small grassy front lawn between the front of the house and the sidewalk.  You can’t see it from the front, but there is an odd little room jutting off the side of the basement, almost like an add-on.  The back yard is overgrown, but not hopeless.  The house needs some TLC, especially on the second floor, which is mostly vacant.  There is another odd little add-on room jutting off the back of the second floor.  There is a wooden shed of some kind in the back yard, right up against the rear property line.  I haven’t been in it yet.  The grassy-gravelly driveway goes all the way back to the ally behind the house.  There are trees lining it and an dilapidated wooden plank fence that blocks your view of the alley, except where the driveway pokes through.  You can drive all the way from the street out front to the alley in back…a straight shot, but bumpy.

The front door is made of wood and painted a dark green.  It has three small windows across the top and a simple brass door knocker.  Walking in, you find yourself in a room that goes almost the entire length of the house.  There is a kitchen along the left hand wall (as you walk in).  And oldish stove and sink and cabinets.  A row of small wooden framed windows runs over them, just high enough that you cannot look outside while you are working at the sink or stove, but enough of them that there is plenty of light to see by.  The floors are bare wood without even a few area rugs covering it.  There is a staircase in the middle of the room leading upstairs.  A couple small rooms in the back are for storage, and a small bathroom.

For some reason, the second floor spooks me.  Whenever I go up there I become very apprehensive.  Like the first floor, it is vacant.  There are two rooms in the front which I have yet to enter though the doors are open and they seem just as empty as the rest of the floor.  There is a large open area around the staircase.  In the back, is that odd little add-on room.  It is way more rickety then the rest of the house, and seems to have been slapped on by some previous owner who had little to no carpentry skills.  But it is the only room on that floor with anything going on inside of it.  You walk into it and find yourself in a room packed with tools.  Hand tools of all kinds are hanging from every available space on the walls.  There is a large table saw that seems ancient.  Likewise a band saw and both wood and metal lathes.  The floor is dark with soot and decades of grime.  There are only a couple of small windows letting light inside.  This was somebody’s workspace.  You can see parts of things that have been left uncompleted.  There is a doorway on the right, leading outside to what looks like a fire escape.  Next to the door, an ancient powerbox with switches and old style screw in fuses.  Old, cloth covered electrical wires run from the box, to various power tools, and bare overhead lights.

The basement is interesting.  Like the add-on room, it is full of tools.  But it seems more a storage area then a workshop.  There are old cardboard boxes full of parts for god knows what, and wooden shelves packed with…stuff…more small cardboard boxes full of hardware and small parts.  Metal poles go from the cement floor to the beams above to give the floor above support.  The sides of the basement are stone.  There is a doorway in the back leading out into the backyard.  But there is also a doorway in the right hand wall.  That door is always open.

Here’s were it gets really odd…at least so it seems to me.  That door should lead outside, since it’s against the right wall of the basement…but it doesn’t.  It leads instead to another room.  At first I didn’t know it was even there.  When I found it on one of my journeys through the house I was amazed.  Unlike the rest of the house, it seemed as if it was still being lived in.  Except it isn’t.  This is a house that I have bought in some strange recurring dreamscape I keep having.  That much I know.  The house is mine.  The previous owners are gone.  I’m not sure if I ever even met them but I think I didn’t.  I bought it from a real estate agent somewhere.  For some reason, this one room was never moved out of.  It was left as it was, almost as if the people who sold the house, whoever they were, didn’t even themselves know it was there.  I get the sense they never looked in the basement at all…or in that second floor workshop.

You walk through that door and find yourself in what looks like a middle aged man’s den.  It’s got a threadbare carpet, wooden paneling, and what looks like a small kitchenette in the back.  There is a fishtank on a stand against one wall, an old TV set sitting in a corner with a pair of rabbit ears on top.  There are a couple small book cases built into the walls with a few paperbacks and some magazines.  In the middle of the room is an old over-stuffed recliner chair, well broken in, that looks like it’s been there for decades, and, oddly, a small ottoman in front of it.  Next to the recliner is a small wire metal stand with a phone, an ashtray, an empty glass and a magazine.  There is a large window on the side opposite the door from the basement, and another door in the back leading out into the backyard.  Something that looks like an old space heater is under the window.  Next to it is a small table with a lamp on it.  Behind the TV set is a bookcase that has mostly a jumble of old knick-knacks on it, and a few books here and there that look as if they’ve never actually been read.

The room feels cozy, yet…weird.  Weird because it looks like its previous owner just got up and left and never came back and now I have acquired it just as it was.  The basement storage area and the second floor workshop have that same feeling too.  This room was somebody’s retreat from a hard days work, or maybe someplace they spent all their days in retirement.  Watching TV, reading the papers, fixing the random snack from the kitchenette and having the occasional smoke.  The phone is handy so either they had friends to talk to or just didn’t want to be bothered getting up to answer the phone.  I haven’t noticed if there is a remote.

I started having this recurring dreamhouse when I bought my little real-life rowhouse here in Baltimore’s Medfield neighborhood.  It couldn’t be more different.  For one thing, the dream house is a lot bigger.  For another, it’s way older.  My little rowhouse was built in 1953 and it’s only 1500 square feet.  At a guess, the recurring dream house is a 1920s artifact. 

Sometimes I don’t even have to visit the house for it to occupy my dreams.  Lately, my dreams about it are I’ve been in the middle of something and suddenly started worrying that I needed to go check on the house, because I hadn’t been there in a while.  In some of these dreams I’m still living in one of my old apartments and I’m doing this and that and suddenly I realize I haven’t checked on the house.  Sometimes the feeling rushes over me that if I don’t check on the house soon I might somehow loose possession of it.  Sometimes I find myself wondering what to do with the stuff in that odd basement room.  Actually, when that house enters a dream I’m having, I find myself wondering about what to do with that basement room frequently.  It’s very odd.

When I visit the house, I try to avoid going upstairs.  There is something about the upstairs part of that house, particularly in the front, not the back where the workshop is, that makes me very apprehensive.  I’m getting the creeps right now just recalling it.  The rest of the house doesn’t bother me so much, other then it clearly needs some TLC and I’m not sure I can fix it up all by myself.  But it seems like a cute house overall, with a lot of potential, and it has a nice yard around it with a really nice big old tree on the right hand side by the front near the street.  There’s a house something like it on Falls road a few blocks away.  One of these days I’ll post a picture of it so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.

I’ve often heard of people having recurring dreams.  I have recurring dreamscapes.  This house is one of them that started happening recently.  I was there again last night…the first time in a while I’ve actually been in the house in one of my dreams about it.  I was checking the house over and wondering if I should get rid of any of the stuff in that basement room, or try to find its owner and see if he wants any of it.  Probably it was related to all the intensive house clearing I’m doing this week.  But when something keeps coming back in your dreams, you wonder what the significance of it is…if there isn’t something it’s trying to tell you.

Maybe I’m just a bit nuts.  You wonder sometimes about the line between creativity and craziness.  I have co-workers who insist they never dream.  I dream all the time, and most of it vividly. 

Another dream I had just now.  I want to say it’s another odd one, but to tell the truth this is pretty typical.  Not so much because it was unpleasent…most of my dreams are actually quite nice…but because it was so vivid, and yet so damn weird in places.  I’ve had dreams like this all my life. 

It starts with me mowing the lawn…something I was doing late yesterday because I’d let my tiny back yard go to seed again.  So getting it back under control was a lot of work for a back yard so tiny.  In this dream, I’m living in some suburb somewhere, in a somewhat larger detached house with a nice lawn all around it.  There’s a bug infestation that’s killing my grass, and I go get some lawn and garden pesticide to put down.

The next thing I know is I’m under arrest.  They tell me that a cloud of gas rose up from my lawn after I laid down the pesticide, and drifted over to a neighbor’s house and killed him while He was mowing His lawn.

I don’t remember the trial at all.  Just…next thing I know I’ve been convicted and given a sentance of death, and I’m being led to the death chamber.

Here’s where the dream takes on a Twilight Zone-ish quality.  They sit me down in a comfortable, somewhat overstuffed chair in what looks more like a doctor’s waiting room then an execution chamber.  I’m given a single shot of poison.  Then I’m free to go.  Somehow I know that the way execution works in this particular dream world, is the condemned are given a shot of some sort of slow acting poison that takes something more then a day to kill you, and when it does it happens all at once, not slowly and painfully.  You’re then allowed to leave the prison, go settle your affairs, and basically spend your one last day however you wish.

Next thing I know I’m in the parking lot of some large, but not mega-large, Baptist church with mom and a few other people I don’t recognize.  This was not how I wanted to spend my last moments on earth, being emotionally suffocated among people who couldn’t care less about me, so much as using my life as their own stepping stone to heaven.

Mom, as always, excepted.  She’s the only person there I know.  Everyone else is a complete stranger, which is odd in retrospect because the dream could have easily populated that church parking lot with people I knew from my church days, or other family members on mom’s side who go to church…er…religiously.  Instead they’re all stereotypical Southern Baptist church droids, and I feel oddly, like a missionary surrounded by cannibals.  They’re all giving me, the condemned man, these sickly sweet fundamentalist smiles that barely hide the emotional hunger behind them.

Mom’s the only person there who I know loves me, and I’m distraught at having to put her through all this.  That’s the other wierd thing about how executions are done in this dream world.  The trials are secret and nobody knows when you’ve been released from prison that you’ve been given The Shot unless you tell them.  I figure that’s so you can go on about your last day as close to normal as you might want.  Somehow I’ve ended up here in this church parking lot with mom and she’s making another attempt to get me back in church again.  She doesn’t seem very upset though.  In fact, she’s her usual cheerful self.  So I figure, releaved, that she doesn’t know I’ve just been executed.  But she’s the only one there who doesn’t know.  All the church droids know, and they’re all giving me that concern troll look I came to know and despise when I was a kid.

Like everyone else there except me, mom’s in her Sunday best.  I’m dressed as I always am, in blue jeans and sneakers and a light short sleeved shirt.  And as is typical in my dreams whenever I’m self-aware I seem to be, at various points during the dream, the age I am now and a teenager again.  When I tell her I’m not interested in going inside the church she smiles and says that’s okay, and gives me a little hug.  Once I got old enough to make my own decisions, she never tried to force me into going to church.  She walks inside, leaving me out in the parking lot.  The church droids follow her in.  Irritatingly though, not all of them.

One church droid stays behind with me…some middle age man I’ve never met before, wearing a dazzlingly tacky polyester suit, is looking at me with that expression I know all too well as a prelude, not to making a pass at me, but worse, to a proselytize.  Incoming…!

I sit down and lean up against a car in the parking lot.  I have my laptop with me and I open it up and decide to blog.  Somehow when I open up the laptop I have an internet connection and I can post to my blog.  Maybe there’s a wireless portal somewhere nearby…I don’t know.  But I can sign into my blog.  I want to write one last post.  I want to apologize for killing someone…whoever that someone was.  I want to write some last essay about how I found life to be, now that I know how it ends.  But I can’t write.  This is a dream and deciphering written words has always been a major struggle for me in dreams.  It’s like the part of my brain that decodes words on a page just isn’t online when I’m asleep.

So instead I decide to draw something.  Somehow, my blog software has a Photoshop plug-in and I can start drawing right into the blog.  And here the dream gets a tad science-fictioney.  My laptop all of a sudden has a drawer in it that I can pull out, and in it I have my drawing tools…the traditional one’s I’ve always used: technical pencil, ink pens, kneeded rubber eraser, charcoal sticks…  I don’t need the Wacom tablet…a thing I’ve never really mastered the knack of drawing with anyway…I can draw with all my traditional art tools right on the screen of my laptop, and it all just goes into Photoshop as though I was doing it on art paper.

(Can I get a patent on this idea?  Probably not…)

So I start drawing something.  I start drawing a landscape.  It’s the field behind one of the apartment complexes I grew up in.  There was a place there where I used to watch the sunsets when I was a kid.  That’s what I start drawing.  The church droid starts asking me the usual leading questions about what I’m drawing.  I say nothing to him.  After a while, he just shuts up.  Good!  Leave me alone!

I really start getting into my drawing.  It feels good…real good…because I haven’t been able to draw now for so long in real life.  I’ve been so heartached I can’t even go near my drawing table.  Now here, in the dream, I can draw again.  It feels wonderful.  The drawing trance is so much better then the coding trance, when I can get it.

I’ve almost got my drawing finished when suddenly I start feeling the poison begin to work.  My hands and the rest of my body start going numb.  I loose fine control of my fingers and it’s hard to manipulate the keyboard.  It feels like a really severe fevor is sweeping through my veins.  I realize I don’t have much longer and I need to tell everyone this is the last message.  I try to find a clear spot on the artwork where I can write something out but I can’t.  The view is magnified and I can’t scale it back.  All I can do is drag the viewport around and try to find some open spot on the artwork where I can enter some text.  But it’s all varying textures of charcoal and ink everywhere I look.  For a moment I’m afraid I won’t be able to get my last words out there.  But then I find a spot, and…somehow…I manage to enter a few brief final words to…well…to everybody:

I am about to be executed.  This is my last post.  Goodbye.

I hit "Publish" and close the laptop.  Then I get up and start walking out of the parking lot.  I’m feeling feverish, very feverish.  Suddenly I’m not in the parking lot of the church, but of Congressional Plaza…a large strip shopping center near where I grew up way back when.  It’s odd…once again I’m a teenager, yet I’m carrying my silver Mac PowerBook and I’m walking to a spot behind the little Hot Shoppes Cafateria that stood by itself in the front of the Plaza parking lot.  And I’m going there because I know that’s where I’ve parked my car.  The Mercedes.  Yet in my dream I’m a kid again and I sure didn’t have the kind of money back then for the laptop, let alone the Mercedes.  But when I get to the Hot Shoppes, I decide instead of getting into my car I would go sit by the small green dumpster out back and die there.  Somehow I find that fitting.

As I walk back to the corner where the dumpster is, I meet a homeless man heading for the same place.  He grins at me and asks me if I’m looking for a place to rest for the night too, and I tell him he might not want to spend it with me because I’ve been given The Shot and I’m about to die.  Well don’t die in front of me, he tells me, but not unkindly; more like he’s sharing a friendly joke with me.  But he knows I’m serious.  He’s a middle age black man, with a touch of grey in his hair and beard.  But for a homeless man he’s dressed pretty well…casually, clean slacks…pressed no less…sneakers and a sport shirt.  His hair is neatly trimmed and he looks clean as a whistle.  Yet, somehow, I know he’s homeless.  I notice then that he’s with a young teenaged white girl, who looks more the part of a homeless person.  Her clothes are worn and dirty and she looks like she’s slept for the past several days in them.  She has long stringy blond hair and looks like she hasn’t bathed in weeks.  They don’t seem to be companions though…more like two people who just happened to be in the same place at the same time with me, looking for a spot to spend the night.  The man seems decent and very friendly.  The girl lonely, tired and very sad.

The three of us walk together toward the dumpster, looking for a place to rest.  They for the night.  Me for…well…for forever.  

The two of them sit down on one side of the dumpster and I go around to the other side and rest with my back to it.  I am miserable, and I want to be alone.  The sun is getting low in the sky now, but it’s not near twilight yet.  It’s still bright out, but the angle of light is low and the shadows are getting long.  My body is getting really, really numb now.  I start bawling.  I’m really, really sorry I killed that guy…whoever he was.  I just start crying my heart out over it…

…and then, I wake up.

As always when I wake up from a crying dream, I’m a bit surprised to find my face is perfectly dry.  But I’m not fully awake either.  It’s still early in the night and I can tell I haven’t had a good deep sleep yet because of the way my body feels.  Whenever I wake up before I’ve had a deep sleep my body feels a tad like it’s in a fever.  So I just lay there for a while and think about trying to get back to sleep. 

The dream is lingering oddly…I can still hear the other two people by the dumpster talking softly, distantly.  I can’t make out the words.  Then I distinctly hear the sound of the dumpster’s hinged lid being opened.  Then I hear something, like a sigh.  I’m still half asleep in this lingering dream and I know what I just heard was the sound of my last breath.  I just died.

I lay in bed turning it all over.  I think I’ve died about a zillion times in my dreams over the course of my life.  But now I feel like the fates have given me a gift of some sort.  You never know when your last breath is, it just happens and you’re dead so you never know that was the last one.  But I heard it.  I heard my last breath.

This post is either going to seem a bit freaky or you’ll be like me and just smile and shrug and write it off to the random weirdness of dreams.  Sorry, but sometimes I just like to think out loud.  Maybe some of you have had odd little dreams like this and they leave you wondering too about what the hell goes on inside the human brain.

Nap dreams somehow just get weird more often then sleep dreams.  I don’t know why this is, other then possibly something to do with the fact that naps aren’t really part of the normal sleep cycle.  This afternoon, after unloading the car and getting my house back up and running, and putting a few things away, I felt suddenly like a nap.  After three weeks on the road it felt nice to just lay down in my own bed again.  It wasn’t a long nap…maybe about an hour or so.  But I had this really vivid dream.  Most nap dreams are pretty vivid for some reason.

In my dream, I’m wandering around the house getting things back in order after my trip.  I go into the upstairs bathroom and start washing my hands.  I notice there is a pipe next to the faucet I’ve never seen before.  It’s a copper pipe, about a half foot to the right of the faucet, about an inch and a half in diameter.  It comes straight up out of the sink top for about a foot, and then bends back down again in a severe ‘U’.  The pipe ends about halfway back down its length.  The end is open, almost as if it’s another faucet, except that it’s not over the sink basin.   If anything came out of it, it would end up on the counter.   I’ve never seen this pipe before.  Somehow, in the dream, that is not unusual.  I continue washing my hands and pay it little attention.  Then something starts coming out of it.

Feathers.  Tawny brown feathers…they look like a barn owl’s wing primaries.  Picture a Japanese paper fan, folded up, but instead of being made out of paper it’s made out of owl feathers.  That’s what slowly comes down out of the pipe next to the faucet.  I watch, fascinated.  The feather fan comes down out of the pipe…then slowly unfolds…then slowly folds back up again…then goes back up into the pipe. 

Well that’s really odd…I think to myself.  You know it’s a weird dream when its weird enough to realize the weirdness of it while you’re still dreaming it.  I finish washing my hands and go back downstairs.  When I get to the kitchen I notice there is a similar copper pipe next to the kitchen sink faucet.  I don’t recall ever seeing that one either.  I walk over to the sink, turn on the tap, and once again a fan of owl feathers slowly comes down out of the pipe, unfolds, folds, then starts going back up.  I grab it before it goes all the way back in.

I try pulling the feather fan back out.  Something is pulling it back up the pipe, but not strongly.  I feel like I could just yank it out, but then I’d break something, whatever it’s connected to on the other end, so I don’t.  Eventually I let it go back up the pipe.

This is very strange...I think.   I go down into the basement and check the utility sink.  Sure enough, there is one of those copper pipes next to the faucet there too.  I turn on the water, and another owl feather fan slowly comes down out of the pipe, opens, closes, and goes back up.

What the fuck…???   I look up and notice that my brother is here in the house with me (I was visiting him for a bit earlier in the week).  He’s a home improvement contractor and I figure he might know what’s going on.  He’s looking around the finished side of my basement.  I call out to him.  "Hey…Billy…come over here…I want you to see something…"

As he starts walking over I turn off the tap, and turn it back on, and the owl feather fan starts coming out of the pipe again.  It opens, and closes, and I grab hold to keep it from going back up the pipe before my brother has a chance to see it.  It’s a delicate operation.  I don’t want to break whatever it is, but I want Billy to see it.  He comes over, stands next to me.

"Look at that…look at that…  What is this…?" 

We both look at the feather fan.  And I wake up.

I wrote about another dream I had once, Here…and said that some dreams…"really show you that all your careful analysis of your thoughts and feelings amounts to nothing more then mapping the waves on a restless sea and you really don’t understand very much at all about what is going on in the silent darkness beneath them or what makes it all work."  Yes.  I think that’s what interests me about dreams the most.  Where makes your brain assemble the imagery in them in that particular way?

I’m not one to see Mysterious Psychic Prophesies in dreams.  Well…once I had one that worries me, even now.   But dreams are amazing things to me all the same.  I like to dream.  They make sleep worthwhile.  Otherwise I could do without it. There aren’t enough hours in my day as it is.  But dreams not only make sleeping worthwhile, they can be inspiring.  They can lift your spirits, thrill you, scare the hell out of you, leave you with a peaceful glow, or a feeling of dread, that lasts all day.  They don’t come out of nowhere.   Which is where the techno/science geek in me gets really fascinated.  I’m laying in bed right after waking up from this dream and wondering where the hell that image of a fan of owl feathers coming out of a pipe next to my sink faucets is coming from.  The ingredients have to be somewhere inside my own noggin.  But…where?  And…what made them come together to produce that dream?

I can account for some of it…I guess.  I just got home from a long trip.  I Have been wandering around the house, making sure that everything is okay after having been away for so long.  I had to turn on the water, since I’d turned it off, and start up the hot water heater again.  I tend to fret about leaks upon re-pressurizing the water pipes after a long trip, and so I go around checking things for hours afterward to make sure there aren’t any.  Owls are a favorite bird, and barn owls in particular.  And…in a Gallup trading post I bought an earring with a little barn owl feather made out of bone.  I’m thinking about getting my ear pierced later this month.  As I was unpacking, before I took the nap, I carefully put all the turquoise I’d bought away, along with the earring.  I also bought a owl feather wall hanging made of pottery, and I was looking for a spot to hang it before I took the nap.  How all that made this particular dream, if that’s what was going on, would probably be really interesting if I could fathom it.  And also a bit freaky. 

Do you really want to know…?  Yeah.  I really want to know.  Our brains are strange, amazing things.  The thoughts you know in the foreground seem sometimes like they’re just waves on a restless sea…and what’s going on in the silent darkness beneath them is a mystery…