Dream Log 1 by Amanda Auerbach


 
 
Based on what I have read on the Internet the dream says where I am happiest I am most stuck. I mean the latest dream. In which I marry polygamously and am not happy about it and would just be married to my husband I already chose.

In the dream I would have both marriages. They would be two separate things. Polygamous marriage would give me access to the Writing Retreat. At which my twin is imprisoned happy in the sense of having the most beautiful room with Buddha in the window and a vase of some-colored flowers.

I remember now premise of recording my dreams. Is not interpreting them but what happens in them does not have any meaning.

As I might choose the shade of yellow I associate with playing soccer if a dream is that way I am not in a life but can choose to be happy.

Two desires regarding dreams: they can serve as One who brings understanding and they can be changed with practice.

 

In the one last night one of my friends is figuring out who will work for the radio that plays swift similar music on the bus a group of us ride around in. I do not understand why she cares so much about the music. The upbeat bus is our friendship. I get I am a bad friend not actively sustaining the station I also like.

I wish it were different.

 

I am running in circles in sweaty rain with a group of people trying to get a part in the movie. I don’t want to be an actress. As I run the question of whether or not I want the part is irrelevant. I am doing this is what I am doing along with everyone else. The structure makes me unhappy. It is a large impersonal situation.

 

I am wrong about my employment status. I dream now about being unemployed and a party to which my friend Julia comes.

The salient thing about Julia is she was always the most popular one she did not need us. She had another friend from her church Michelle.

I am unlike Julia because she is a caterer in the dream. She always has something to do. Being employed being popular.

At the party book her services taking control of the wrong situation.

I need to love those popular: those who hate. I fear not getting paid. Love objects to which I have access.

 

I am impressed by cake I see on Facebook. I did not dream these last two nights but the cake is almost like dreaming. Opaque in a way, obliquely transparent.

The cake has aqua fondant scales and its topper floats on a darker more transparent aqua.

It is not like cakes my cousin makes for her children that express their wish. A cake in a dream expresses as a child but also as me.

Cake is not art but dream. It knows trivial-most desires. Like a perfect mother cake is a lucid dream. Can be enjoyed awake.
 
 
 
Amanda Auerbach is currently completing her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. For the summer, she is Writer in Residence at Boulder Writing Studio. Her first book, What Need Have We For Such as We, is forthcoming from C&R Press in fall 2019. Her poems also appear in the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, Conjunctions (online), Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Harvard Review Online, and Thrush Poetry Journal.