NEEDLING

There was a girl I liked. I flirted with her even though I knew she had a boyfriend. She worked in a bookstore, I think, and I would go there and talk to her. Her boss was in at one point, and I waited for the boss to step out before I stepped in. Actually, I was all ready in, and stepped out with the boss, telling the boss, a woman in her fifties, goodbuy, nice bookstore, nice to see you, and all that. Then I waited outside for her to leave and stepped back in. The girl inside the store didn’t seem to mind, she laughed at all my jokes. I even found a French copy of Gaston and asked her if she liked it. Don’t remember what she said. Saying hello, because we knew each other somewhat, we hugged and I had my left arm wrapped around her and she was smiling and not moving away from my embrace so I brought her closer to me and kissed her lightly on the lips, pulled away and smiled at her to see what her reaction might be. She pouted mockingly and then asked what was that all about? I didn’t answer, but I knew I was in, that she was mine. That’s most of what I remember more or less from my dream. I also moved a lot and the last apartment I was in had rats. Even though I had just moved in and barely owned anything, it was all ready a major mess with all my belongings, and I didn’t understand where all this stuff came from. The girl in question came to visit me with other people, and there were rats in the apartment, little ones. Mice rather, or at least they were friendly rats if we can call rats friendly. They didn’t try to come after me or anything. I could see them scuttle away as I walked through the darkness and turned the various lights on. At one point the girl and her friends were in my apartment, I was looking up various servers and email addresses on my laptop, or at least that’s what I was suppose to be doing, when in fact I had gone directly to the girl’s web-page or something. When they came around to see how I was doing, the computer froze on the girl’s web-page, and I explained some bullshit saying that for some reason that was the only page I could open. It wasn’t really her personal web-page, but rather the home-page to the email server she used. It makes no sense, but in my dream everybody had their own email service like yahoo, hotmail, et cetera. Each person had a totally different service from the next, so each was readily recognizable. She saw it and said, hey you’re on my mail-server. I felt embarrassed, she seemed pleased to have caught me red-handed, then I was off again going towards the front door either for a new arrival, or to look for something which was in my closet... a little history here, my studio in Paris had a walk-in closet which also gave to the front door of the stuio, a sort of vestibule, but since it was so small, it was more like a walk-in closet, and I used it as such, hung my clothes there, stacked my shoes, so that when I walked into my place, or other people did, they actually had to go trhough my closet before entering my studio... So I walked to the front door of the apartment in my dream, a large place where such a walk-in closet / front door vestibule wouldn't make any sense at all, when I saw a rat/mouse and got scared. I screamed and climbed up the wall, one leg on each side of the door frame holding me up in mid-air – really a limb fellow in my dreams – like a spider monkey. The others showed up to see what all the commotion was about. They kind of laughed at me, an understanding laugh rather than a mocking one. The rat/mouse waited for them then left, making sure it had been seen by everybody. That’s when Brutus nudged me with his wet snout as he does in the morning when he’s in a hurry to be petted or taken outside to relieve himself. I jumped three feet from my bed. In my dream I had associated the wet nudge with a rat scuttling across my shoulder. I was awake and glad to see my dog wagging his tail sitting on the floor beside my futon wondering why I was looking at him like that. I cannot remember what the girl looked like, She was petite, a little shorter than me, brown hair, somebody I knew. Not a close friend, but not a stranger to me at all. It was none of my friend that I know now, maybe she was simply a made-up effigy of what I feel would be the perfect partner for me. Whatever or whoever she was, it's about as close as I’ve gotten to a wet-dream in a long time.