“Danny’s not here, Mrs. Torrence…”

Okay.. had a very strange, upsetting dream. Wanted to share.. even though it sucks ballz. The subject line indicates my wondering if it was in any way related to the fact that I watched The Shining before bed.

Dreamt we were out someplace, you riding the bike, me in the car, someplace I wasn’t familiar with, but it was very small-town. You’d been riding for a while, and you suddenly and very unsteadily pulled over. When I stopped, you told me that the last time you had pulled the clutch in, that you had felt something pull in your hand, and that you could barely make a grip with your left hand now because it hurt so much.

So we are trying to figure out how the hell to get your bike someplace where you can leave it and get you to a doctor, and somehow we figure that I can probably manage to ride it well enough to get it on down the street into a parking lot someplace, so we do that, and you follow me in the car. I do it, and did really well, so when we get there, you suggest I keep riding it around in the parking lot, stopping, starting, etc, then you even suggest that I could probably make it for the short trip back to the interstate, down the interstate, and back home, provided we leave soon and beat traffic. I remember being stunned in the dream that you’d suggested it, but well, I was feeling confident and decided to go for it. I could always stop someplace else down the road if need be.

Somehow, the issue of getting you to a doctor became not so urgent, and you mainly just wanted to get the bike home first. So we drive for a while, then hit a LOT of traffic, and end up stopping anyway, where you decide to just park the bike for a bit, and go to the hospital that’s off that exit. Your hand is hurting so bad that you’re not even thinking straight, and are having trouble driving the car yourself. You pulled out your pager and tried to page Jim and Maggie, I guess to let them know what was happening, but then you couldn’t remember your password to unlock your pager. So, I’m freaking out worrying about you, and trying to figure out how to get your seat off to get your wheel lock out, and you’ve gone to lay down on the grass in some shade while I figure it out. At last, I manage to do it, and right on top under the seat is a weird thick piece of purple paper, that’s been torn in half. I pick it up and look at it, and it has names and phone numbers and email addresses and messenger names, etc on it. Like.. Linda – work number..blah.. Amber – pager number…blah, and it sort of freaks me out. I manage to get your lock out and on your wheel, lock up your bike, and go to coax you into the car. I’ve kept the paper out, and when you sit up and seem to be feeling better, I whip out the paper, hand it to you, and tell you I found it on the bike. You take it, look at it, then make the most painful, rolling your eye, sort-of face and are mouthing like.. “shit” and “not again”.

So I sort of drop it, get you up and into the car, and we head toward the hospital. You just keep telling me that you’re sorry that I had to find out that way, and I tell you I’m having the weirdest sense of deja vu taking care of you while you’re sick, only to find out you’re only sick cuz you’d been screwing around with some sick girl, and that I hope I don’t find out this hand thing is similar because I don’t want to feel that same used and abused feeling from before. So you tell me that you haven’t slept with anybody, that the list is just contact information for a couple girls that you were “scoping out” as potential on the side sex partners, trying to make sure they understood the rules, that it was just going to be sex, no other attachment, and that you had a girlfriend, etc. You told me you’d gone out to dinner with most of them already as a nice neutral meeting ground to get to know them, but that there had been no fooling around, and then you told me that the paper was on the bike, because you always took the bike to the meetings, so you wouldn’t have to make an excuse to me to not want to go out with you, and that it got better gas mileage when you went to meet the few that were outside of town. I said that I guess that explained all the miles you’d been putting on the bike, and you said yea. And then I asked why you hadn’t told me, and you reminded me that as part of our “agreement” that I had last said that I didn’t want to know who else you were gonna sleep with until we got ready to get married.

Anyway, so I tried to be calm about it, but sort of realized that I couldn’t be, because I felt like you had been neglecting me for these girls, or at least, that you hadn’t been interested in sex with me because you were anticipating sex elsewhere, and it was making me mad. So I asked you “what if I asked you not to go through with this, not to sleep with anybody else?” and you told me that you’d think about it, but you said it all weird. So I asked you, “would you do it, and just lie to me? and next time cover your tracks better?” And you said, no of course not. So, then I asked you if everytime I notice that I sit down to use your computer and it’s password locked, and your pager is password locked, and you aren’t interested in me, and you are gone forever on your bike, am I supposed to just assume you are trying to conceal something from me and just pretend to ignore it?

And well.. it just went on from there. We never got to the hospital in the dream. I never found out what was wrong with your hand, and we never established if our “agreement” was on or off. I just remember feeling really hurt that you didn’t care if I slept with anybody else.. that there was no possessiveness or jealousy there, that it made me feel taken for granted. It made me feel like you just expected me to be there and put up with whatever crap you did and just go out and entertain myself whenever you weren’t interested and generally we stayed two very separate entities. It made me feel like there wasn’t any real love between us, even though I was trying to chastise myself for trying to equate love with having some possessiveness and jealousy.

I dunno. I’ve rambled enough, and people are starting to hang around the desk.