Dreams 001–004

Names have been changed.

1.
I’m out on the street and I’m thinking about him. There’s no one around. I start to hear grunting, impassioned. I somehow know who’s making these sounds but I don’t know where they are. They’re far away. Are they? I hear nothing besides these sounds — disembodied — seeming to come from either all around or nowhere at all. I’m careful not to move and stir the air. The grunting grows more frantic and finds a rhythm. It doesn’t sound like grunting anymore. Maybe it was just a train?

2.
I wake up in bed and check my phone. I have a text: 2:17 a.m. It just came in. I notice it’s the fourth message from this guy. The other three have their own separate timestamps. (I’ve never responded.) The text reads: “Ok I’ll give this a shot: what are you up to?” His name is short with tall letters. Eli, Ira? I don’t know what he looks like but I imagine him to be dark-haired, scruffy, and slim. I want to respond but the message bubbles are wiggling like apps do just before you delete them. My service level reads “0.0F” (temperature?) and when I look away and glance back it’s just three dashes. I sound them off in my head: bzzt. bzzt. bzzt. I hold down the power button. One, two, three, four, five, six. The phone reboots with a command prompt and it’s asking me something I don’t understand. (Safe mode?) I hold the button again, this time surging with impatience. It turns back on but I’m not able to use it.

I’m naked. My pants are lying inside out on the bedroom floor with a belt looped through them. I find my underwear not near them. I have the sense that I had worn them earlier in the day, and I see what they smell like. It’s a low queen-size bed in a large suburban bedroom that feels like mine even though it’s not. Everything except for the red glow of the alarm clock appears washed in a blue tint. A sterilizing, revolting blue. The room is painted off-white and carpeted in soft off-white carpet. I’m lonely. Speaking of which, where is everyone? I assume this room is in a house: whose? I think I’m on the second floor. I have that sense that my window looks out onto a quiet street in a residential development, but I don’t look. I think it might be a house on the street I was on earlier.

3.
I wake up. I check my phone. It’s 2:03 a.m. and there are no messages. Someone is stirring in the house. Maybe just getting home? The night has gotten cooler, enough so I pull a thin sheet up over me. I’m comfortable. I wonder if I’m lonely. So lonely that the feeling of loneliness, stripped bare, demands attention in my dreams. What do I do? Is this a dream too?

4.
I wake up on a park bench. The park is closed. It’s nighttime and the weather — as far as I can tell — doesn’t exist. I’m content in the temperature that I can’t feel. There is no breeze and I don’t check for clouds or notice the size of the moon. I look around: no one. I think about getting up, but where would I go? Home? Where’s that?