I actually just remembered I wanted to write about a dream I had last night. What's this preoccupation with dreams, anyway? Isn't it so boring? I don't know; I guess it is kind of stupid. But in some ways, they feel like portals to meaning, lifetimes I won't live, being able to touch people who have gone away, or access to things I've lost or that have simply past on, like a field I remember from childhood that is now a development. Entry back to that world is important to me.

But anyway. Last night struck me as odd not because of some vague earlier part about going up a mountain with a lot of strange imagery and significance, but later in the dream. In the latter part of it, I was living on my old house on Beverly and I was still in grad school. This professor I knew in real life came to a party and was acting somewhat badly - showed up drunk, larger than life and loud, was generous to excess with nice wine and his time, but making people uncomfortable. I had this feeling of being flattered he had come but also wanting him to leave. An overstayed welcome. In real life, he had been a prize fighter once - he had huge fists. People would say "fists like hams" in a novel, but they weren't anything like that. Boxy, hard, powerful. Nothing like ham. He was an old man with white hair, a barrel chest, and very red face. I remember he had a weird thing he liked to talk about, how he wrote every single thing that had ever happened to him his whole life in these composition notebooks and that he had closets full of them at his home. He said he could open up a book for a year, say 1967, and read everything that had happened to him and know exactly the person he was during that year. Does this interest me because of my own compulsive diary keeping? 

He died the year after I graduated; he fell down the stairs in his home in a medical event. They didn't find him right away. I got the sense he was an isolated person. I honestly haven't thought of him much since then. We were never close; to be honest, at the time, his brusqueness scared me. I craved warmth, attention, compliments from my teachers - the assurance that I was special and talented like the little narcissist you know I actually am. I don't feel sentimental toward him now because of the dream. But it made me think about something I read once about how a person actually dies twice: once, when you stop breathing, and a second time, the last time a living person says your name. But what about the last time someone dreams about you? If the man were still alive, I think he literally wouldn't remember my name. But here he is, lodged in my subconscious. Showing up at my shitty, imaginary house parties. 

Anyway. I'm going to the villa to run around the dogs. Hopefully I don't get any fucking leeches this time.