The dream

Me and Alex, and Sally, and Chris but Chris is called Steven.

We are in the dark, but it is hot. No wait, it starts before that.
I am in St. Paul, except it's not St. Paul. The corner of Victoria and Selby, and there's a big piece painted on a half broken cement wall. It feels like Selby-side, not those Rondo summers but those Selby-Dale Augusts. But it's still blistering and hot.

The whole neighborhood is covered in graffiti, burners and tags, and then, there's Alex and Chris, and we go on a walk which turns into a car ride, past big Eros and Vipers, Chen pieces, weird names I haven't seen before, a Delt, even a Blast. A lot of early NTS stuff. We decide we could break into the power plant, and every time I look over my shoulder it's night and then day. We're in a little forest, held up and apart from us with chain link fences, too tall. I've been here before, in a dream I had in high school.

We stare, the power plant is now a grain silo is now a version of the ghetto in the sky is now similar to the texts I read in Metropolitan Studies my first semester at NYU, where we talked about the cities of the future. It looks like Brazil to me. It is all falling apart. It scares me.

Sally is now driving and even though we all agree we are on a car it is more like a toboggan with little wheels and we rush through the over grown grass and sweat and zoom down a hill. It looks like Resident Evil.

We slam into thick mud, muck, of dead plants. It smells like swamp and bugs crawl out and over our legs. Our car was just a carboard box. At the end of the road we are on there is an entrance to a cave, and we crawl in. It is dark, and then thick brown water starts to claw at our ankles. And we think we are going to drown. We start clawing at the clay, and when we break through and create an escape we feel an enormous sense of pride. Everyone is gone now, but I am Langston Hughes professing glory in the promised land. I exit on a hill with a Billboard on it, but no message. I stare down at a row of houses and walk in through a white door.

There, in the kitchen I see V, who is feeding a baby. I am scared of this place. It feels wrong and old and V makes me feel trapped. I feed her baby and I think to myself how wretched it must be being stuck in this house all the time. I look out the window and we are in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and I look back in. The baby looks odd, maybe one year old. I ask her how long it's been since she left the house and she says not since the baby was born. She picks him up and I see the strain of his weight on her small body. I feel sad and go to leave, making an excuse about just passing through and needing to find something although I can't recall what.

When I turn around the baby is walking, and I am terrified but not surprised that he has been completely sewn into a denim suit, even his face is a series of denim folds.

I leave through the kitchen, and there is Eminem, eating a sandwich on a plate. Through the doorway I see hands, in a suit coat with fancy cufflinks take his plate from him and retract into a cabinet. The plate is set on clean dishes, still with the sandwich on it. I look around the corner to see if I can see the person, but there is none, the hands retreat into a mirror. I look at Eminem and say,

"I know this is going to be weird but you saw that right?"

he says "What?"

and I say "The hands that grabbed you plate and went back into the mirror."

He looks at me in a mix of revulsion and exasperation.

I say "Why do you always have to look at me like that? Like I'm crazy?"

He opens his mouth and says "Look at you like what? Why do you always..."

And his mouth turns into a dark hole which swallows me in scraping sounds and I wake up.