ooh, hot

I’ve been having strangely erotic dreams lately. They aren’t the hot and sweaty dreams, the ones that make you wake up suddenly thinking ‘holy shit, if only I could meet five sailors in an elevator who want to take me to visit their pet donkey!’ No, these have been different.

In one, I was a fabulously devastated widow. My husband had died too young and I couldn’t let go. I carried his ashes in a beat up metal box that would sit in the front seat beside me as I would drive up the California coast, the ocean to my left, and the brown hills on the right. On one of these trips I drove toward a black mountain with a tunnel running through it. My convertible Mini chugged through the broken terrain inside the tunnel and I complained to my dead husband’s ashes about the broken axle I was sure to get, the damage to the tires, my hair getting all messed up and how fucking long it was taking me to get out the tunnel. When I finally emerged, it was into a beautiful department store, all honeyed wood and velvet curtains, like a David Lynch movie.

I parked my little Mini in the special parking lot for special guests and a thin blade of a man was about to escort me away from the car when I remembered my husband – I went back and scooped up his box, as well as a couple of pounds of his favorite cheeses – a Morbier and the Humboldt Fog.

I walked slowly through the department store, carrying my stinky cheeses and my dead husband’s ashes, and I passed Gil Grissom (yes, from CSI) in the men’s fragrance department. I’m twisting open a small dark green bottle shaped like a twig and the scent makes me cry. He comes along to tell me some obscure story about smell and an equally obscure culture; he offers to walk with me. We’re looking at beautiful glass things and there’s something about his spectacles, his rumpled little jacket, his bow-legged walk and his weird little stories that makes me decide to put my husband’s ashes in the trunk of my car along with the stinky cheeses.

We leave the department store and then we’re in an empty house by the ocean; we’ve made love. (Yes, my dream had completely skipped the sex!!) Like a cheesy French perfume ad, the sheer white curtains at the windows overlooking the beach are fluttering, the sun is either setting or rising and Gil Grissom and I are nestled snug in a bed with a quilt on it. It’s quiet and I am filled with such lassitude it almost makes me want to cry. I can hear his voice rumble through his chest, can feel him stroking my back and he begins to tell me another queer story. This is how it ends.

Yeah. An erotic dream where NOTHING happens. I woke up feeling like I had a secret.