I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a rabbit tonight. I’m so sick of automobiles. Death traps they are. I’m not well-suited to them.

Today I read through sections of my dream journal for the first time in perhaps forever. Here’s an entry from May 2010:

“I could understand what squirrels were saying. Apparently they have jobs like us and were discussing a colleague. It was actually quite boring.”

My process for dream journaling involves retrieving the notebook from my bedside table as soon as I awake. I try to approximate automatic writing as near as possible. The result is extraordinary; when I look back at entries I often have no recollection of writing them. Frequently there are editorial comments on the dream that I’ve entered during the recording process. A lot of these are simply question marks indicating my confusion about the presence of a particular person, theme, or action in a dream.

I often have horrific dreams, many of them set in post-apocalyptic settings (usually due to some form of environmental collapse). In an entry from April 2010 I complained about not remembering my dreams lately. The next morning yielded this entry:

“Well, I got what I asked for. Gruesome dream during part of which I was standing at the bottom of this chute. People at the top were throwing down these plastic bags, some of which contained blood and other fluid, and others that contained chopped up body parts. Sometimes the bags would break open. Disgusting.”

Dreams such as these leave me shaken. But dreams also bring welcome visitors from my past, such as my dearly departed cats. Waking from these dreams leaves me warm inside.

Lately many of my dreams have been set in my hometown, a place I haven’t seen in almost 20 years. It’s made me curious to visit.

A common thread in my dream journal is the periodic desperate comment that I haven’t been remembering my dreams. Dream-life is so important to me, and when I lose that connection to it waking life appears dimmer than usual. I also feel that dream-life and waking life interact. Sometimes the two are so bizarrely different, but as I keep track I see a seamless passing of themes, of characters, of settings between the two worlds. There is a path between them that I know is worth traversing.