Motorcycles and Divorce

I've been in kind of a writing slump lately. Days, weeks have gone by without something leaping up and stinging me, saying, "This! Something must be said about this!"

It's not like nothing's been going on. The dobermans disappeared suddenly one day like Latin American dissidents. My parents visited, igniting a streak of deliciously forbidden restaurant meals. My husband and I did a loop of Central Texas for Memorial Day and ate hamburgers the size of softballs in our favorite Austin bar, whose decor is based on the lower pits of hell.

But I've felt no urge to leave a word trail. In fact it's almost like I've been taking a certain pleasure in letting things go by, in wandering off the path for a while. Like all vacations, though, this one has its price.

I dream every night and I always remember my dreams. I've heard people say, "Oh, I wish I could remember my dreams, but as soon as I wake up they're gone." I want to kick these people in the shins and pinch them hard on the back of the upper arm where it really hurts. My dream life is exhausting and demanding, and it becomes infinitely more so a week before my period, during times of incredible stress, and when I've stopped writing. So, fairly often.

When I'm telling stories, I frequently have to stop and ask myself, "Did this really happen, or did I dream this?", and all too often I've already started the story and end up having to ask this question out loud, which just kills my credibility. I've held days-long grudges against my husband for things he did in dreams (most recently he passionately kissed a hippie girl all over her face after she told him he had a nice aura). I've called up acquaintances to check up on them after watching them be devoured by crocodiles in my head only hours earlier.

My dreams are also enormously self-referential, and thus almost completely useless in waking life-- like pretentious grad students, they adore alluding to other obscure dreams I've had, and the whole point to them seems to be to obscure the point. This is understandably frustrating when you remember each in detail, like having to watch French art films every night with the final the next day.

Last night was one of the nights when the bill for not writing came due. I dreamed all night and woke up tangled in sweaty sheets and thick images. I won't lay out the whole 8-hour plot, but the main themes were motorcycles and my parents divorcing, two things which terrify me beyond reason, and about which I feel compelled to say a few words.

First, motorcycles. These emerged as a dream theme only after I'd taken my first ride on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja a couple of years after I graduated college. It was my friend Larry's bike, and we wore helmets and he never went above 50, but the whole time I dug my nails into his sides and screamed inside my head. Originally I'd been excited to try it out, but after an hour of watching the pavement streak by mere feet below my face and picturing myself wrapped around the chassis of ever passing truck, I'd had enough. A dream metaphor had been born. I end up on motorcycles on dark highways in the rain, with no idea how to work the brakes, and no helmet, at times in my life when I feel like things are going too fast. Every time we move I get motorcycle dreams, and I wake up feeling like I've spent the night in a wind tunnel clinging to the walls.

The second theme is harder. All throughout childhood I grew up with the specter of divorce. It happened all around me, and some ways it felt like what I imagine the early days of polio were like-- no one knew how it happened, but when it did, things were never the same. Plus, most of my friends solemnly agreed that I was way more at risk, since my dad had an unusual job that required him to be away from home a lot. The ones it had happened to had lots of advice-- get separate toys for each house and play dumb on the old rules, incite a bidding war for your affections. My parents' "inevitable" divorce was an old, persistent fear, right up there with dinosaur attacks and the nuclear endgame. I had back-up plans for all three.

These two themes dovetailed nicely last night in an episode where I had stolen a motorcycle to sneak out of my parents' house and go to some huge concert, planning to be back in the morning. But I chickened out of the late-night, helmet-less highway drive and instead went to friend's house to sleep on the couch and await the inevitable explosion when my parents realized I had snuck out. Here's the twist, though-- my dad is already sleeping on my friend's couch, and casually tells me I would have been in big trouble were it not for the divorce proceedings occupying him and my mom right now. And then he rolls over and tries to go back to sleep! My dream response is to sit down in the meadow I suddenly find myself in and scream myself hoarse. Each scream is different from the one before it, one for anger, one for betrayal, one for sadness, one for complete and all-encompassing fatigue.

(I can picture my dad reading this and being deeply troubled, and doing that thing where he pinches his chin and juts out his lower lip. Clarifying here: fears are fears, and these have taken on metaphorical, totemic weight for me, meaning they no longer mean what they mean. Motorcycles don't mean motorcycles and divorce doesn't mean divorce. Both just mean fear. Now who sounds like a pretentious grad student?)

Anyway, this is often the cost of being lazy for me-- someone turns up the volume and color saturation on my dreams, and I have to find a way to balance things out again, to make my waking life heavier and more invested.

Mornin'.