Anna’s Adventures

My dreams are going really technicoloured, really hyper-real. I can read people’s minds, and they understand me, and everything works out for the best.

That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. She had come to him to escape her mother’s world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no, distinction between Tereza’s body and other bodies. Her had sent her back into the world she tried to escpae, sent her to march naked with the other women.

– Milan Kundera, Unbrearable Lightness of Being

Tereza has this dream that Tomas doesn’t understand. A mere fuck isn’t a betrayal. But that line drawn between her and all the others is. He calls her attention to her sameness, her lack of originality; but in causing her to suffer it, treats her differently to all the rest.

She is not the same, yet suffers as though she is.

Dreams

Poems are coming to me in my dreams, but I forget them when I wake up!

Who is Anna, anyway?

My mental healthiness hasn’t been better for a long time. I figured out that I’m doing a lot of things because I should, and that’s really untenable.

I was talking yesterday to a fellow ex-”gifted and talented” child about parents, society and expectations. Turns out we had rather similar experiences… For one thing, having the pleasing aspects of yourself praised unconditionally, and the less-pleasing aspects of yourself just ignored, or separated out. So being fractured because you’re too clever, too lonely, too needy, too desperate for peers, too wonderful and too terrible at the same time. Kids your own age can’t understand you. You get along with older kids until they get their own lives. Adults just go “what the fuck?!” and are condescendingly interested in you as a triviality, or are outright hostile.

Ack, such was life! Its kinda no wonder that I twisted myself into knots trying to “be good”, go stable and most of all finish things. Even when those things were very, very, very bad for me. But my best intentions aren’t enough, and I’m happy to realise that now. Maybe a new formula will be - “does it please me?”, then “is it good for me?”, then “does it please my family and close friends?” instead of “is this the right thing to do?”.

Audioslutting

Kal has introduced me to lastfm and audioscrobbler… Audioscrobbler sends your recently played tracks to lastfm, where you can navigate around to similar tracks, things other people who liked what you liked liked. Its fun. The radio “play songs from bands like this band I like” is a very fun way to burn bandwidth and find music that you may’ve missed due to, gee, I dunno, having a life instead of spending every waking second at redeye records.

Yay! Music that I like and didn’t have to pay $30 to discover!!

My sister appeared to me in my dream last night and commanded (like the voice of a god): “Cut down your coffee consumption”.

Last night, I dreamed that RW asked me “so are you living with K?”. I said “well, I am staying there a few nights a week”, and she said: “Well, that doesn’t really suit me” and told me to move out.

Needless to say, my dream-self was devastated.

I dreamed that I lived on a property with 3 dwellings on it. Beaver lived in the house, with my second-youngest child. DD and a friend lived in the longhouse with the 2 oldest children who were around 10 or 12. I lived with Kalypso and the baby in the tiny granny flat. It was so lovely.

The house and the longhouse (but not the grannyflat) were afflicted by a magical flooding. A room or two in each of the houses was flooded, and there was no way to relieve the flood. You could open the door, cut a hole in the floor, but nothing allowed the water to drain away under gravity. KV found a piece of furniture that was damaged by the flood and told me that “apart from the water” it would be a useful piece. But there was no way to repair it, even though the surface looked ok.

I was so happy and content in the grannyflat with K. Even though it was small, it was lovely. People began to visit the other 2 houses and I went to greet them and guide them, wading, through the flooded rooms. I spoke at length with a handy girl who had tried to expel the water about the various methods she had tried.

My 2 oldest kids told me that DD had been bullying them… and the last part of the dream was trying to engage him in a discussion of why. He kept changing and ignoring.

I woke with a great sense of relief from the problems which aren’t mine. The flood of emotion doesn’t reside in my house - even though my interests might. I can move my interests away from those hateful, damaging places and people, and from the problems which really are not mine!

I’ve been dreaming of havng a baby. Two nights ago, I had an intense dream where I was giving birth. I felt the pain and joy of suring waves of uterine compression, and vaginal expansion. Bringing a life into being from my own body, and it was beautiful.

My body wants to be pregnant, heavy with life brought from love. Suddenly, my mind is clear enough to expect that a child would be a joy rather than another burden on me.

Its lovely. A lovely feeling.

I’m walking down a corridor. I know what comes next.I walk into airlessness, I can’t breathe. A man presses his arms and knees into my throat and I can’t breathe.

The fight to wake becomes the fight to live.

I can’t scream. I can’t move. Something is choking the life, the colour, the creativity and the will out of me.

Next to me, he snores, undisturbed by my tortures.

There was a river and I was on itThere was a fire in me, on the river

My mother said “Fire, I always knew you’d burn yourself to ashes”

I am a firey girl

What would you think of me if you could read my dreams?My dreams of searching, longing, endlessly walking and finally falling into arms and arms and arms. What is it I’m looking for? Not a place to rest. Not an adventure. I’ve had those. I come to the night with a sense of the ordinary, but what I see and do is not.

Strolling through electric blue train tunnels. Carrying my paintings on my back. Searching for someone, something to hold onto for a moment. I marvel at the sights, the ordinary sites. A school bus with a pay per view telescope set into the windo

w. A cafe where the the dingy artists meet. Heart attack victims dying in my arms. The urge not to end it all, the urge not to wake.Anger, a reaction to desire.

Tonight, I can’t sleep. Even though I’ve lain abed for hours. Softly with eyes closed. I’ve even taken a pill. Something has excited me, its everything. There’s this tension, its in my jaw and in my back. My head rings with passion.

Is this me? Am I back within myself now? Returned to my body after a long exile in sober ordinariness. Perhaps. It is me, to stay up late, to wander the streets. A neon glowing ghost. Cigarette in one hand, penguin classic in the other. Reading under street lamps and meeting all the randoms, of which I am one.

Viscious scrawling in my notebooks. Random wanderings and wonderings. Paint and blood. Just my underwear and my lonliness. My aloneness. I prefer it to my lonliness.

Nocturn I. Another habbit I couldn’t shake.

What will you think when I tell you my dreams? Will you care when I uncover my midnight betrayals?