To Touch the Pacific Ocean

Hello All,

I thought it important to include a picture that proves I do Indeed get dressed some days, but sought to comfort you with my usual morning picture (the one with my hair down). In this post I'm continuing my transfer of dreams from my old blog. This dream is part of my beach dream phase. I actually had one other beach dream that I never recorded, so I suppose I'll try to record it here for the first time, but first here is the one I wrote down.

I'll have to malign my rather stuffy old roommate a bit to record this dream. In the dream, Ashley (the ex-roommate) and I had to go to a conference out in Utah. The conference ended nearly as soon as we got there, but filled with an adventurous spirit gained from making such a trek from my home-state of North Carolina, I told Ashley I wanted to go ahead and see the Pacific Ocean, since we had gone so far already. As typical, my ex-roommate reacted with irritation as she was excited to get back to her normal television-programmed routine in NC and snapped at me saying, "I've already done that!" I withheld myself from arguing (which trust me, isn't normal for me) and drove her back to our apartment in North Carolina, and drove myself all the way back out West. I arrived in San Fransisco.

I reached the city exhausted, and needed to stay in a hotel before I could continue on my trek to touch the Pacific Ocean. I remember watching a documentary in the hotel room. It was about a local eccentric. A scruffy long-haired man, who pedaled around on his bike, with a baby-doll dress on (the similarity to me is noted). This man was strikingly ugly to the point where he was cute, much the way people think pug-dogs are cute. He was noted in the neighborhood for his child-like personality. He had rode his bike into a dangerous neighborhood because a woman there had offered to plait his hair into dutch braids (corn-rows).

The police stopped him, knocked him off his bike, and beat him to death because of his appearance. At that point, I had finally fallen asleep in my crusty hotel room bed. My parents are full-time "RVers," and had happened to be in a camp-ground near San Francisco. In the morning, I called them to tell them I was nearby. My Mom approved of my trek to touch the Pacific Ocean, so they agreed to meet me at said beach, but when I got there (in a rent-a-car) the road ended on a high cliff. I could see the beach below, but had no idea how to get there.

My parents had the same problem as I and met me at the edge of the cliff. As we were looking out into the vast darkness of the new moon sky and black ocean, I decided to go to the rent-a-car and use my cell phone and a map to try to find where the path down to the beach was. My parents were satisfied with just standing on the cliff, looking into the outer-space like darkness, so when I found the path to the beach, I just called them and told them what I was doing. I remember the car sharply pointing down a sandy path. It slipped down the path's loose sand, and I used it as a sled to get down to the beach.

That's how that dream ended. I had another West coast beach dream I never wrote down because it seemed fragmented and silly to me. Now, referring to real life, I've dated very seldomly, so the men I've had in my life maintain their significance through the years. My first boyfriend was a guy named Terry. He was a year older than me. It was at the height of "grunge" and we both loved Courtney Love's "Hole." I was 17 and he was 18, and we both had eating disorders and angst-provoked drug habits. Naturally, it was love at first site.

In this dream we had trekked across the USA in order to fulfill my dream to touch the Pacific Ocean. Terry had some drug-buddies he met back in Baltimore who we could stay with in San Francisco. I remember their house was a four-roomed disaster, but was achingly close to the beach. Always being the prude in the group, I was nervous about staying in a house full of junkies (Terry's drug habits where rather serious, while mine still remained in the realm of youthful experimentation), but Terry isolated me from the rest of the group, so I felt relatively safe.

The first available morning, Terry and I went out to explore the sea-side, and finally touch the Pacific Ocean. I wanted to go straight to the beach and get our quest done with, but Terry wanted to show me a tide-pool where ostriches had colonized. We were just a dune away from the ocean, and I remember walking along it, looking at the ocean, but knowing I'd have to wait till I could go to it. We reached a copse of palm trees where the wide, shallow tide-pools began. As soon as we saw the ostriches (they were much larger than I had imagined), Terry reminded me they were very territorial, and would attack us if they thought we were a threat. He also said they would follow a potential threat for miles once startled. I was rather put-off by this and asked him if we couldn't just go to the beach.

Sure enough, as soon as I said this, the ostriches spotted us and immediately started to charge. We ran all the way back to the dilapidated junky-house, and never got to go to the beach. He tried to act like it wasn't a big deal because there was a big party at the house, blah. So there you have two more Pacific Ocean dreams.

Thank you for reading,

Marc