Oddly, nothing directly 9/11 that I saw that day has shown up in my dreams. However, several peripheral, rather personal, events from that day show up again and again when I do sleep enough to dream. For example, my neighbor Laura who worked at the WFC and made it back home that afternoon covered in white dust sometimes wanders through my dreams. She’s in white face but she acts like everything is normal. Also, oddly, a very dense crowd I was in at the 2nd Ave. subway stop sometimes shows up. I’ll be in a crowd in my dream and suddenly the crowd becomes exactly that subway crowd and the four friends in the crowd who were waving at me are there waving at me and one of them says, as they said on 9/11, “You are just a blue collar guy getting to work and you don’t need this crowd, you need lunch and a walk home.” That was confusing on 9/11 and it still seems an odd thing to say. I think my friend was just addled.

The worst bit of recurring dream 9/11 business, however, is a fight that I saw in Tompkins Sq. Park around noon. Two tall homeless junkies were circling each other in the middle of a circle of homeless guys from the park. Two cops were standing off to the side, watching but not doing anything. The crowd was silent so all I heard was “Thwack! Splat! Crunch!” as the two guys in the middle punched each other in the face. You know those slow motion scenes in Raging Bull? These guys were moving at that speed, weirdly dream-like for real life, but when their fists connected you could hear crunching flesh and bone and large splurts of blood were flying about. Both guys were covered in blood and there were pools of blood on the concrete. I remember thinking “Fight Club. One man will die.” I also remember thinking “Oh, Jesus, I need to get inside.” I stood frozen for five minutes or so until one of the guys went down on his knees, with blood pouring out of his mouth and ears, and the other guy started doing those slow motion punches to the side of his head. I kinda came to then and thought “I do not need to see someone die.” and I walked off. That fight shows up in my dreams. Bodies falling, the plume of smoke, the collapse, the TV coverage, the guy dressed as Uncle Sam wandering downtown, and the gentle Thuwnk that woke me up that morning are all absent from my dreams.

(Deron, don’t post this to the main page, please.)

Also, dreams of multiple, very wide tornados.

And… very unpleasant are the dreams where my teeth are crumbling out of my mouth and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I think I have some control issues.