Had a dream I was temporarily roommate to a young white lady, conventionally attractive except her eyes were a bit buggly and heavily lidded, an art major at the University of Washington.  We were in a fictional version of the U District of Seattle, owned by this one specific scummy business guy.  He was known for chasing trendy artsy aesthetics, making the place a corporate version of New Orleans, with giant colorful murals on every storefront in a faux eclecticism that was way to crisp to be authentic, big white lettering on every business in a similar font family.  These were mostly restaurants.  The internet was free for tenants but shitty, I had a theory he was getting the service free via Alaska somehow and using it as an enticement to stay in his otherwise extortionate little kingdom.

Weirdly the businessman wasn’t the villain of the dream, but if I fictionalized it, he would be.  Instead the villain was one of the girl’s exes, a violent restaurateur played by Willem Dafoe.  He was younger in the dream, maybe in his early forties, but she was super young, in her twenties, the relationship possibly from her late teens.

None of that came out at first.  I thought her eyes were interesting and offered to draw her after the friends cleared out for the night.  There were typical dream distractions – suddenly I have to clean the non-present cat’s litter box and water dripped in it that was making it all clump up, just miscellaneous BS.  Again, this would be edited out if I made a story of it.

We got on OK, but when it was bedtime, we went from having a vague conversation about memories to entering a shared dream state, where it was lucid but we didn’t really control it – just our own actions within it.  Similar to Inception, but the setting was the actual history of the area we were in.  We kept getting separated, like when the storefront we were in suddenly changed into an abandoned grocery store, with us on opposite sides of a wall.

One or both of us were responsible for us being trapped in the magic dream due to a psychic power we hadn’t disclosed to each other, that was activated in the other’s presence.  Something like The Shining, but dream magic.

Through this all we’re occasionally being harassed by Willem Dafoe, but we usually get away and it isn’t full-on violence, just a menacing demeanor.  Also through it all I was discovering her back story, teasing it out in serially interrupted conversations.  She was the too-young girlfriend of bullying Willem, and came back to his neighborhood for college partly because of a lingering obsession of her own.  She related a memory of being cradled in his arms, him using some grody language about how she was supposed to be the best lay.  She told me “I was supposed to be the pussy he came back for.”

We got back to a version of our apartment and I was like, “Let’s make sure he isn’t still with us.”  I looked out the window and there he was, standing halfway around the corner of the building like Michael Myers, his own eyes bulging, big smile on his face, bouncing in place like a Fleischer cartoon character.  I said, “Fuck you.”

He started coming at me, faster as he came, with a big black combat knife in his hand – one of those jobs with openings in the flat part of the blade.  As he drew near, I kept saying, “fuck you fuck you,” again, faster as he came.  My boyfriend heard me cussing as I stirred in my sleep, and woke me up IRL.

Anyway, I think Willem Dafoe seems like a decent dude, but apparently his cinematic villainy was working for me in a way I didn’t notice.  Acting as mind control.  He Inception’d me.  Not cool.

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