Last night I had a dream I was sitting on the street, crouched over a leaf-filled gutter, picking out half-smoked cigarette butts and piling them together. I got really excited when I found a fully intact parliament. This is my brand! I thought, pulling out a bright green lighter with which to light the beautiful white cylinder.
When I awoke I found myself craving that parliament. All day I wanted the sting of smoke in my throat, the gasping feeling my lungs make when I inhale, the dizziness of a cigarette smoked to its butt. I even thought about buying a pack. I’m not a smoker, but somehow that longing had been imprinted on me from the dream. It’s amazing how dreams can influence an entire day.
My husband gives me copious amounts of grief–loads of eye-rolling and guffawing–when I awaken from a nightmare in which he has somehow wronged me. “I can’t be held accountable for what I do in your dreams,” He says. Oh, I know. But, that doesn’t stop me from having feelings of angst toward him for at least an hour (sometimes more). I know this is unjustified, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
In middle school my friend Tiffany and I would hitchhike the three miles up Rough and Ready highway where we would loiter, without notice, in front of the Country Store and Post Office–bumming smokes and picking up the half-smoked carcasses the cowboys would toss in our direction on their way inside. She grew up in a trailer park a quarter mile northeast of our school–conveniently, within walking distance. She lived with her mom, who worked most days and nights–and, an older brother who we adored. He was tall and handsome, clever and silly and he was nice to us. Which, was a rare thing for an older sibling in our neck of the woods. Eat or be eaten or something like that. I always had permission to go to her house because we could walk there, which meant no one had to deal with pickups or drop-offs–a parent’s nightmare.
Their home was small and cozy. Brown and tan shag rugs, cream-colored walls, dark-stained furniture, a small, yellow electric stove and a huge television just a few feet from their tiny couch. The entire place reeked of stale cigarette smoke and moldy carpeting–and some part of the ceiling was always leaking, a slow stream of brown water accumulating in the plastic buckets below. It was warm there, always, even mid-winter. Lamp shades were adorned with colorful scarves, emitting an inviting glow, cigarette burns concealed by lacy doilies offered a personalized touch, and the most spectacular sight of all–a beautiful glass cabinet filled with tiny ceramic figurines. There were little lambs encircling a sheepherder in a bonnet, cows lazily lounging on their stomachs, bunnies mid-hop and my personal favorite, a spritely-looking fox with a long, red, bushy tail.
Tiffany shared a room with her mom which, fortuitously, granted us access to all of her mom’s things. Behind the sliding closet doors were dozens of tight, lycra skirts and impossibly high heels laid out like flowers on a polyester fiber carpet bed–she had ombre-hued scarves and felt hats in every color. A wardrobe in stark contrast to my mom’s earth-toned pantsuits or sequined, holiday sweaters with their giant shoulder pads. Tiffany and I spent hours perusing her mom’s clothing, trying on her skirts, dancing (and falling over) in her red patent and black suede pumps, filling our lips with reds and purples, giggling through clouds of face powder, spritzing our soft wrists with Vanilla Fields and ckOne. Her mom’s bureau was covered in gold tubes of mauve lipsticks and cream blushes, puffy black-bristled brushes and silver chains and bangles. My mom didn’t even have a dresser, let alone an entire space for jewelry and makeup.
We’d cover our faces and bodies with colors and scents and put on fashion shows for her brother and his friends. They’d look up every now and again, immersed as they were in their video games or the newest Nightmare on Elm Street installment and give some nod of approval or a half-hearted smile, which was enough to set our hearts a-flutter and send us back to her mom’s closet where we would create yet another persona–this time geometric leggings and pink leg-warmers, a black tube top and a flowery scarf tied into a bow on top of our crimped hair. The iterations were endless and the glee those sessions inspired was magical. It provided a necessary escape for both of us. Her, from the absence of parental units and the loneliness and isolation of her living situation. Me, from the violence and turbulence of my world, which produced a similar form of isolation and loneliness. Both of us outcasts.
Her mom had this giant waterbed in the middle of her room on which we were strictly forbidden from playing. Which meant, of course, that we spent most of our time lounging there–reading magazines, listening to the Cranberries, talking about boys and how silly school was and whether or not we should shave our legs or wear deodorant. I was fascinated by the thing. I’d never felt one before and was horrified the first time I sat on it. The warm water enveloped my bottom, my hand sunk every time I tried to escape and the way the watery mattress pulled up around my sides made me feel nervous and trapped but in an exciting kind of a way.
I wasn’t allowed to watch scary movies at home. Bad for our bardo, dad would say. Those images would stick with us in the afterlife and cause a lot of problems. So, of course, I watched any and every horror film I could. My friends’ parents were much more relaxed about imprinting their children’s psyche with images of death and violence–also, no one was paying attention. Tiffany’s brother loved horror films–the more gruesome, the better. It was in their living room, squished between Tiffany and the cloud of Marlboro smoke her brother blew in our direction, that I first saw Freddy Krueger. I was terrified, I wanted to leave but out of fear of judgment from her very cool brother and a morbid curiosity, I stayed. My eyes wide and palms sweaty, I sat through the entire film.
By the end I was shaky and traumatized, I followed Tiffany like a zombie, through our bedtime rituals and into some conversation about why Lance wasn’t paying any attention to her and did I think that David might be my boyfriend since we’d french-kissed on that dare? I listened, I nodded, I grunted yes or no and hoped she would go on like that forever, delaying bedtime until the light of morning. That night Tiffany and I slept in the waterbed–which we often did when her mom worked the graveyard shift. The scene of the boy being stabbed and drowned in his waterbed played over and over again in my head. I couldn’t stand the suffocating feeling of the liquid underneath me. I was sure the mattress would burst and we’d be sucked down into a watery death. I was positive that if I went to sleep Freddy would come for me. I tortured myself for hours–lying awake, too scared to close my eyes, too embarrassed to wake Tiffany or call home. Eventually, sleep overtook my body and when I awoke to Tiffany shouting obscenities at her brother I was relieved we had made it through the night. But, for weeks the images haunted me, they came for me in my dreams, they hid behind bushes and in the silhouettes of dark trees. The wind was Freddy’s whistle, the playground his battlefield, even my bedroom which once had provided such solace and comfort brought me nothing but terror and dread.
It’s easy for me to recall these sensations because I still have them. I still lie awake at night–thinking not of movies but of the state of the world. I still cringe–not out of fear of ghosts but fear for my daughter. I’m still afraid of the dark–not the darkness of my room but the eerie quiet of an abandoned street after dusk. I still feel helpless–not against Freddy Krueger but against real and tangible evils over which I wield no power. My nightmares haunt my waking hours, the distractions of adult life the only thing that keeps the monsters at bay. Age hasn’t made me less scared or less prone to anxiety. It has simply changed the object of my fear.