March 3, 2008
I was walking with my cat, Danya, and a big, unknown but very soulful dog. I carried my cat in my arms just in case — in case she ran away or got scared. The dog walked beside me on his own, on his hind legs. I remember being worried because I hadn’t fed them in a while, and their bowls hadn’t been washed.
March 6, 2008
I dreamed of my own wedding today. I was wearing an incredibly beautiful white silk dress. It was very simple, completely unadorned, almost like a nightgown. Two thin straps, bare shoulders, and the fabric flowed down to the floor. It was insanely elegant, beautifully simple. If I ever had a wedding and the body to pull off such an open dress, this is what I would choose. But the dream was strange. I tried to go through the entire wedding ceremony three times, but each time, I ran away. Then I came back. And ran away again. The last time, I approached the groom’s father and asked for his forgiveness. I couldn’t get married. I woke up in the morning, stunned.
March 12, 2008
Today’s dream was very magical and very vivid. The scenes were strange. I was in a friend’s house right on the edge of the ocean, so close that the edge of the house was by the water. I opened the door, took a step, and there was the sand. I ran out barefoot, shouting, “I want a house like this!” And I really did. The house was huge, enormous. With servants and a vast hall. There was a ball in the house. I stood deep inside, closer to the “big land,” and watched a hurricane. The sun and huge, unbelievably large waves, unlike anything I had seen before. They curled up, rising several meters, staying there for a few seconds, and then crashing down, creating a whirlpool that sucked surfers, swimmers, and fragile fishing boats. There was panic on the beach. People were disappearing under the water. My friend and I ran to the beach to help. We weren’t allowed to go, but they let us in, believing us to be nurses. By then, everyone who could be saved had already been pulled out. In a large room where all the water victims had gathered, there was a model explaining the positions of drowning people at different stages of drowning. The waves were made from some opaque material, and parts of bodies could be seen in some places. In one spot, the model was transparent, and you could look “down,” into the depths, where little figurines of people in clothes were frozen in various poses. In the thick of it, they were still struggling, but at the bottom, the small gray bodies lay, dead.
We were given the task to find the official statement about the “not missing” people for the press. We set off to find it, without even asking for the phone numbers of those who gave us the task… We returned to the house to make some calls.
My friend was the daughter of the owners of the huge, wealthy house. She was capricious and haughty with two girls who wanted to visit us. A servant brought me a hot, aromatic piece of meat on a beautiful white plate. I asked if it was lamb. He said, “Of course, it’s lamb.” I tried a piece, and it fell apart in my mouth into incredibly delicious fibers, just melting, creating an indescribable pleasure. The servant kindly asked if I wanted him to call me a car. They wanted me to leave. I refused the rest of the divine lamb and left.
I sat on a bed in a house made up of one room, but one of the walls was missing. Suddenly, water started pouring from the ceiling onto the bed. A character from “The Green Mile,” who had raped and killed two girls, poked his head through the hole in the ceiling. But I wasn’t scared. My body’s protective reaction made me stop feeling fear. The man was behaving irrationally, jumping down from the ceiling onto my bed… but I didn’t fear him, and he soon left.
March 13, 2008
It seems like I often have amazing dreams. The images are incredibly bright and magical. The kind you not only want to remember forever but also wish you could see around you, to return to them. Once, I dreamed of a city on the other side of a river. The city seemed to hang in the air, sinking in a light mist. It was unimaginably beautiful, with totally unreal architecture: delicate arches and golden domes. It looked more like the architecture of Eastern Asian countries, perhaps Indian…
But there was no sense of the city belonging to any particular style. Everything in it was beautiful, harmonious, perfect, especially the colors. The buildings were a vivid blue, almost fluorescent, decorated with golden-yellow accents that glowed and shimmered across the river. These blues and golds reflected in the water, creating millions of blue-gold splashes. It seemed as though the sky itself had caught fire from the light. The sight was so incomprehensibly beautiful that my heart clenched with a deep sense of beauty that penetrated the very core of my being. I wanted to stay, to look, to touch, to photograph it. Oh, if only I could photograph my dreams. If only I had enough talent to draw them.
However, I must note that as colorful and magical as my dreams can be, they can also be just as vividly terrifying. I remember only a few of my dreams. I usually remember the ones I wrote down after waking up, although even they fade over time, and sometimes I read my notes and wonder if I really dreamed that! One relatively recent nightmare was like this… I dreamed of my apartment in Florida, but outside, everything was strange, almost like a hurricane. It was gray. The tropical greenery had turned a grayish hue, and everything around me breathed fear and anxiety. The air smelled of mold. It was cold. It probably looked like the weather during Varenukha’s calling…
I was scared in the dream. I woke up from a crazy knock at the door. I didn’t open it. The person outside scared me with something irreversible he could do. He might take me somewhere. Meanwhile, it turned out that my mother had gone missing. I wanted to rush to find her, but where and how… The dream was quite vivid but very scary, although it might not seem so in my description. I woke up nearly trembling with fear, and for some time afterward, I couldn’t calm down, nervously pulling the blanket over myself, probably thinking it would protect me from the night’s horrors.
Then I dreamed this…
It started with the sea. Or the ocean. It was beautiful. Thick, golden rays of the setting sun lay over the water, painting it in various hues, mainly gold, bronze, silver, and maroon. The sky burned with an intensely bright light. The beach was covered with people, and I saw them in the rays, making them look like black shadows. The sand was hot, thick, and very bronze. I was holding a baby. My baby. I was supporting its bottom with my left hand and holding its head with my right.
The baby was strangely heavy but very dear to me, and completely naked. I thought it would be a good idea to put a diaper on it so it wouldn’t unexpectedly poop on me, as it did right then, and I carried it to change, or rather, to wrap it in a blanket after putting a diaper on it. The diaper was very small, and the baby spread its arms, refusing to be wrapped up, showing incredible non-childlike strength, pushing its arms out of the blanket that I was trying to wrap around it. And then, before my eyes, the baby turned not into a piglet (I’m not Alice), but into my kitten Danya. Danya continued to flail her paws, trying to break free from the blanket. Since she was already a cat, I let her escape the wrapping and just took her in my arms.
A voice came from the sky. It was stern and commanding. It ordered everyone on the beach to strip naked and approach the water. The voice said something about how we all deserved some kind of punishment, and we would now be drowned in the global flood. All the people, like dolls, meekly began to undress and walk toward the water. I followed them, still holding the cat in my arms. When the water began to rise, the cat jumped onto my shoulder and sat there while I tried to save myself and her. Soon the water receded, but there were still many piles of sand on the beach, resembling the wet bodies of kittens.
Déjà vu. I’m on the shore. Thick golden rays of the setting sun. Golden, bronze, silver, and maroon. The hot, thick sand. People like shadows. Now I’m looking at it from the side. I’m wearing a long white skirt. I leave my journal and keys with a keychain — two large transparent plastic hearts — on the sand and walk toward the water. The same voice echoes again, saying the same words. I make my way into some building, trying to open a door. The lock won’t budge, so I just pull the door frame out of the wall, which turns out to be easy since it’s made of plywood. I move through the second floor past a booth where the voice is coming from, and I rush by. Something happens, and this time the flood is canceled. I return to the beach, where now there is such a crowd that there is no untouched spot on the sand. My keys and journal are gone. I search for them, thinking that I have a spare car key at home and that they’ll probably give me a house key at the office. The vivid seascape fades from my dreaming consciousness.
Dream – May 1, 2008
To begin with, under the influence of the movie 28 Weeks Later, I started dreaming that everyone around me had died. Well, not everyone, but most people. My mom and I were wandering around the area, and there were no people. The best part was that we could go into any house and use things, like food. We had quite a large food supply at home, but there was no electricity, so we needed to make some sort of stock to store it without a fridge. The phone, however, for some reason, still worked. I remember that in my friend Ira’s apartment, the food was very neatly sorted, which was surprising considering neither Ira nor her mom were particularly neat. We found three plastic containers with different types of apples and began wrapping each apple in paper to make them last longer. It was really interesting walking around the dead city. It was very sunny, and there wasn’t a living soul around.
Then I dreamt of water. Blue, slightly greenish, incredibly clear. I was skating on its surface like on ice skates.
Then there was some sort of reunion of our class. My friend Natasha Lebedeva, the prettiest girl in our class, and I, for some reason, were lying naked under the same blanket. After that, I was trying to find the sandals I had arrived in and the ones I had also brought with me.
Then I was digging up boxes of wine and beer from some hole, and I was a man. It felt like I was in some old movie, maybe from the fifties… However, there were billboards for MTS and Beeline around. I even thought to myself, “Wow, mobile phones existed in the fifties!”
And then there was a dream within a dream. I was sleeping, and it seemed to me that I had already seen this dream. I even thought in the dream that I had written it down before. I should look for it, maybe it’s true… I dreamt of an elderly woman who walked into her apartment, and I already knew that she would enter a room that was a time machine. She left the doors open behind her as if she knew I would go in. I was a man again, and I followed her because I wanted to travel to another time. She opened the door and jumped into the past. I jumped in after her. She immediately became young, and I turned into a boy because, in that time, in the past, we were different. But then the dream broke off, as usual, at the most interesting moment, and it never returned.
Dream – May 3, 2008
At first, I barely remember what happened, but then something amazing started. I was in Kazakhstan or some other developing former Soviet Asian country. Our delegation (who exactly was in it, I don’t know) was visiting a mafia boss. I was supposed to take photos. Then, attention, the content turns R-rated. The mafia boss, naturally, had a gang and a very big house. I wandered around and ended up in some garden where luxurious beds were set up directly on the ground. These beds were used for group sex meetings by the mafia gang. They had very few women or none at all, so they engaged in group sex among themselves, and, shockingly, they also used rabbits. One of the rabbits I had to bring them. They had a dog that determined whether the animal was suitable for participating in the group sex club or not. When I brought the poor rabbit, the dog sniffed it and rejected it. But, having sniffed me as well, it considered me perfectly suitable.
I was very interested, though a bit uneasy, and, not knowing exactly what kind of diseases these Kazakhs might have, I asked if they used condoms, but I didn’t dare join them. Instead, I had a completely civil conversation on the topic, “So, how often do you guys get girls here?” All the while, the bandits were doing what they were supposed to do in a group sex club… But for some reason, this didn’t bother me.
The atmosphere in this garden was, by the way, very beautiful. A live fence, covered in ivy and grapes, dim greenish light, greenery everywhere, a large pond, and a narrow cement path running between the pond and the house, leading to the beds…
This plot took a rather amusing turn when I was caught spying on this mafia boss. They even made a film about how I spied on him and showed it to the guests. The film started with very beautiful underwater shots of dolphins and other large marine mammals. The light was blue-green, shimmering in various shades, and rays of sunlight were visible through the water.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see the actual footage of how I was spying, but it became seriously scary because now the mafia boss could do anything to me, even kill me… I tried to climb a ladder to get to a store that was closed, but the ladder at the top turned completely flat, and I was running, but sliding upwards, and there was nothing to hold onto…
Then I was late for lunch, and the food was very strange, but my spying was already known, so I had to run away… I escaped with some guy who was sort of with the gang, but kind of not anymore. In the dream, he really loved me, and when we ran, a heavy rain started… So heavy that we couldn’t see anything. We, like children, jumped under the pouring streams of water, and then he picked me up and ran with me in his arms, and it was so much fun: jumping in the rain…
Suddenly, winter arrived, snowdrifts appeared around, and my friend suddenly had a hat on and a piece of light fur on his shoulders to protect himself from the cold. It was a bright, sunny day, and my friend disappeared behind the snowdrifts. I tried to catch up with him, but the snowdrifts were all yellow, and, knowing why, I ran between them, overcoming my disgust, and finally ran to a house. It was my house…
In my house, we first entered the kitchen. On the wall in the kitchen were funny shelf-boxes, but it was pretty dirty, and the colors were off, so I immediately started thinking about how to renovate it. When I turned to the wall where the stove was, I found orange plastic boxes on the countertop, labeled “high protein food.” Inside the boxes, there was a lot of food, and surprisingly, it was all in quite edible condition. Apparently, the previous tenant was into fitness and took his diet seriously. I started checking the cabinets, and there was more food with the same label – “high protein food.”
However, when I opened the last cabinet, I found three large boxes. When I opened them, I almost died from fear: the food inside was so old that hundreds (HUNDREDS!) of cockroaches, and for some reason, bees, wasps, and even
April 10, 2008
The day has come. A few days ago, my friend invited me to a dinner where I met a remarkable man named Vasya, whom I could not stop thinking about. The first time I met him, I didn’t pay much attention, but yesterday was completely different.
Dream – April 11, 2008
I dreamed that it was April 10th, and I was holding tickets to Russia, which I had bought for 1200 bucks. Departure was on April 5th, return on April 10th. I was standing on Profsoyuznaya Street holding the tickets. I had just arrived. The metro was strange, like a bus. It went along the street to the Belyayevo station. I got off at the Belyayevo station and decided to walk home. It would take about 40 minutes. I looked into my bag and realized I didn’t have either my apartment keys or my mobile phone. It was 1 a.m. “It’s okay, mom will open the door for me.” But some strange feeling was following me. Something inside me vaguely sensed that mom wasn’t there. I had the tickets for the return journey, on April 10th. Today was April 10th. And I was late for my flight.
Dream – April 18, 2008
I went to my school with my cat. I put the cat in my bag. At first, she sat peacefully. I took off my checkered coat and boots in the school locker room and went to the assembly hall. There were already a lot of people in the hall. They were showing a New Year’s show with elements of Quintessence, circus, and other performances, so it promised to be grand. However, the first few minutes were a bit disorganized, and I decided to leave, especially since the performance promised many gifts, and Irka and I had swiped a little soap, and they made us return it since it was supposed to be part of the gifts. I stood up and headed for the exit, at that moment the cat jumped out of my bag and disappeared into the men’s bathroom. I managed to catch her there and put her back in the bag, but she found an opening and jumped out again when I was leaving the bathroom. I had to catch her in the bathroom once more, after which she jumped out of the bag for the third time, and some elderly man caught her right as we were leaving. We put the cat back in the bag, and I handed the bag to the man while I put on my strange checkered coat and boots.
Then there was Irka and her boss, and I told him right to his face that he was a moron. He was upset, and I took Irka by the hand and led her away from there. I woke up early because I had fallen asleep during the day yesterday and had slept for about two hours. The cat was lying next to me, and I immediately threw myself at her with hugs, saying, “Why did you have to run away?” The cat didn’t understand such an outpouring of affection and ran off the bed.