(1/13/08) the persistent doberman

(Entered in paper journal at 8:25 AM at Heights Coffee in Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I lay on my mattress in the front yard of the house my family lived in when I was five years old. I had a skewed or obscured view of the house. The house, I realized, was very small. I felt bad that we had lived in a house that small when I was a child. I wondered how it could have felt so big to me when I was a child. The house looked like just a small box now, hardly bigger than an equipment shed. I tried to place the different rooms in my mind, but I couldn't figure how there could even be rooms in a place so small.

At some point I was standing on the lawn. I looked across the street to another house. It looked only slightly larger than my old house. I thought that the places must seem larger once you're inside them.

I remembered now that I have always remembered a living space like a guest house behind our main house. I tried to look into the backyard to see if I could compare the size of the guest house with this house. But I couldn't even get a good enough look at the house to see whether it was a house at all.

I realized I had been standing here for a while. Somebody obviously lived here. I didn't want them to see me hanging around in front of their house. I figured I'd better leave.

I walked into the street. It was night. My car (the car I had during my last year of High School?) was across the street. The driver's side door was open. There was a weird, gobbling sound.

I ran to the car, to see what was going on. A black boy, about seven years old, with a big doberman on a leash, was climbing into my car. The weird, gobbling sound had been the dog "barking." I grabbed the boy by the back of his head, as if I were clawing or clamping into his head. I threw him out of the car and sat down.

I couldn't figure out where my keys were. I found them and was about to turn on the car when I looked out the passenger door and saw the boy again. The boy was grinning. I wondered why. I now saw that he had opened the door and let the doberman sit in the passenger seat. I pushed the doberman out. I locked all my doors manually. Looking back to the back seat, I saw how full it was of stuff. But it was so dark I couldn't make anything out.

I had started the car and was pulling away. But I saw the boy in my rearview mirror. He was grinning again. I pulled away, thinking I had gotten away before the boy could do anything to me. But as I got to the intersection and turned right, hear the dog barking its gobbling bark again. Somehow the boy had gotten the doberman in through the trunk of my car. I tried to believe it wasn't so.

I heard my mom and her ex-boyfriend J talking about driving directions, the quickest way to get somewhere, possibly to or from Boulder, Colorado. My mom and J were arguing about one of them having taken the wrong directions. I was, in the meantime, driving through what seemed to be a back road in between the city and the foothills.