Dreamt Sophia and I were in love.

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Coming up with the right thing to say when it’s too late. The French have a term for it: l’espirit de l’escalier. Staircase wit. When you’re leaving a party, going down the stairs, perhaps playing over an incident in your head, and you think of that perfect riposte.

Staircase wit isn’t limited to insults and witty retorts though. It can be any moment when you can’t think of anything to say, only to reach an epiphany soon after.

I always end up saying what I want in my dreams, but it’s never as satisfying. This is how I know that life isn’t a dream.

Otherwise, I’d be more witty.

There’s something about these small-town stores. They carry everything; books, art supplies, furniture, candy.

The baubles, the African statues, the organic catnip tins, the esoteric wire sculptures, they all go home with someone. Some of them will be thrown out in less than a year, others become heirlooms passed from generation to generation.

The people who work there are never the same, but there’s always one thing that’s consistent. You can see the innocence in their faces, a warm feeling of rustic integrity. They all say hi, and go back to what they were doing, never minding your wandering presence in the store. I think I’d like to be one of these people some day. Maybe when I retire.

Selling dreams.

Last night I dreamed of beautiful bokeh.

Short and sweet.

I’ve been falling sleep with the TV on lately. Discovery channel, trashy tabloids, commercials every quarter hour. The constant chatter keeps me company the way old movies on DVD can’t. It’s like the world never sleeps. Someone else is awake, and watching the same thing as me.

It’s one of the things I like so much about you. If you hide that, you’re hiding the best part.

The little girl was taken to Humber River Regional Hospital, and later transferred to the Hospital for Sick Children, where she was diagnosed with what police call “a significant brain injury”.

The J is like an H Ricky, Hal-a-peen-yo

This is live.

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head that I may not own, or even particularly like. Sometimes I wake up knowing some news before I read it on my lunchtime break. Sometimes my dreams will take off in a strange direction, and I’ll be cooking something complicated or unloading automatics through house windows or fucking someone I’d never have a chance with in real-life.

Last night I was plagued by nightmares about being drugged with sodium pentothal, held down by sniper fire in a beautifully furnished Victorian home with George Bluth. Between the clinkety-clink of the cubes in her low-ball, Mrs. Bluth said, in a moment of clarity, “If you can’t live for yourself, you might as well live for others”. The words made more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month. She gave me a clockwork wink and disappeared, leaving us alone against her hired red beams and smoke grenades.

When I stepped outside to head to work this morning, the winter chill startled me into a false sense of alertness, but it was quickly taken over by a general feeling of uneasiness. The dreams were unsettling to say the least (I haven’t slept so poorly in over a month), and the last thing that I wanted to do was start the day off with a walk on a winter morning before there was any light out. I kept waking up every two hours, and as good as it was to feel exhausted enough to fall sleep again, it felt terrible to not actually be able. It’s as if I haven’t slept at all, and tragically enough, I start work for the new year today. I was hoping to be well rested for the first day back, but that isn’t happening, so I’ll be fighting off a tremendous urge to sleep when I get home. I’ll try to burn through it, which shouldn’t be hard.

In any case, I use the words, “more sense to me than almost anything I’ve heard in the last month” because John is in town. This is the person who knows me better than anyone else I know, better even than myself. Within half an hour of arriving, he helped me realize that I do require acceptance in my relationships, a need that has stemmed from childhood, that the best road to achieving my goals is not always the easiest one, and so many other countless things that I couldn’t have seen for myself. This winter break has been the worst in years, but now, John is here. I haven’t seen him in over six months. Yesterday, I couldn’t stop smiling, after finding him in the peephole of my front door.

This is my vacation.

What a nightmare. I just dreamt that I adopted another cat (few weeks old), but I had no car to take it to the vet, no money to feed two pets, no time to spend with it, and the helpless feeling of being unable to handle such a responsibility. One cat is enough for now, thanks.

Ugh, I’ve been plagued by nightmares lately. Yesterday it was kitchen knife wielding twin sex murders, today it was nuclear holocaust meltdown Christmas party. Ever feel like there was nothing to make you feel better than writing about it to make it go away? Yeah.

I’m scared to fall asleep again.

I had a dream last night, a dream that seemed so real, a dream I did not want. A dream of scattered memories sewn together, creating such a perfect world, where love was requited, where I was blissfully happy. When I awoke, everything I had was gone.

All I was left with was hope, and emptiness. I immediately knew that what I had was false, too perfect a world for me to live in. I felt bitter, as if I had something taken away from me which I felt was rightfully mine.

Why would my subconscious trick me so? Why should I feel so terrible, so laden with hope? Couldn’t my mind simply give up this struggle, freely, without interference?

Hope is not a good thing for me. It makes me weak and vulnerable. When I have no hope, then all is known. Nothing is uncertain. I am sure of what I have and what I don’t have. Progress can be made on accepting this. But when hope enters my mind, all progress is lost, and I can only try to fight for what I’ve gained.

Yet I wish to dream again tonight, of memories strewn together, for they were so wonderful, that any let down seems worth it. I don’t know why I’d want to torture myself again, feeling empty and bitter when I wake up. Somehow, the high seems worth it, like some addictive drug Pandora was selling out of her magical box of plagues and death.

Perhaps I actually do believe in what my hope is telling me. Perhaps I need to believe in something, that somehow this will change, that things will be different. Or perhaps I’m simply a fool, willingly falling for something that may make me happy, but empty in the end.

Nothing good ever came out of Pandora’s box.