Carrie Brownstein(s) Back, What Does it Mean?

Back when I was 29, I deleted my old midnight blog on Tumblr in a couple of clicks. I have a history of erraticism, deleting blogs I’d worked on for years, deleting social media pages with thousands of followers, ending a business I ran for a decade.

I am loyal to no one, loyal to nothing but my heart and moderately fairly loyal to my libido—if it makes me swoon or makes me hot I’m following it. Because I can’t link to my old Tumblr, I’ll have to recall a life far away. 2011.

This post, by the way, is about dreams. If you don’t care about dreams, I have no plans to convince you to care about them and I do not hope for you to care about my dreams.

I don’t hierarchically separate my waking life from my sleeping life. Back when I was an itty bitty boy, living in a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement of the house half a block down the street from Jerry's Bait shop (you know the place), I learned how to lucid dream. All day, I’d deal with loneliness, separation from peers, some strange months of sexual abuse via telephone, domestic violence, brought my hamster to school once, peed my pants in class twice in the third grade while we were houseless, had my aunt wake up screaming from a nightmare and call me the devil. But at night! At night I was blessed with sleep paralysis, which didn’t go away until 2021 when I did a meditation summoning my sleep paralysis demon and then painted a picture of her (that’s another midnight post). On the one hand, sleep paralysis is not a preferred experience because you feel like you cannot breathe and you are trapped. On the other hand, being asleep and awake at the same time inspired me to figure out out how to be awake at night so I could build my own world! Awake at night would loosen the grip of the day, I was sure. I continue to be sure of this. Awake all the time, that’s me.

When I was a kid, I learned to revisit in my dreams and soften whatever was demented in my waking life. My turtle my dog ate? He lived in my dreams. My pet rabbit my neighbor’s dog ate? Also, in the dreams. All fourteen of the hamsters that crawled in my wall and died on Halloween of 1998? Hampton 1-14, alive and well in a field with high hills, hills so high they nearly go straight up, like in the SNES Super Mario game where the watermelon slice in the corner takes you 90-degrees towards the sky. In the backyard of a house where I was abused, I grew a garden. I’ve been revisiting dream spaces since I was 5, and I’ve been building more and developing connections between them all.

Up until a few years ago, the dreamworld had to be walked around in, or airplanes were required to travel. I couldn’t just turn my head and the scene would change, I’d have to do traveling to get to another location. One night, I got food poisoning (in my awake life) and while I was feeling sorry for myself for thinking about how I probably couldn’t eat guacamole again for a while and staying very still, I fell asleep and dreamed of a portal that could connect all of my dream environments. The portal was made of rotting water and menstrual blood when I found it, but I cleaned it up and it’s worked great ever since to walk from one space to another.

The power of the mind of the abused child in the gifted program in the 1990s, amiright?

Hopefully you can relate. If you especially relate, I’m including a section in my Marseille tarot book on lucid dreaming: how to start doing it, developing your practice, cleaning up menstrual blood dream portals and so forth. If you don’t relate, the book is looking great and the deck I’m making is free of swords hovering and stabbing you, the deck is based on the symbol and number pip cards but I’m reworking mostly the faces of the people so they don’t all look white European. That’s not out yet. But when it is, it’s going to be a useful companion whether or not you want to traverse the dreamworld.

I’ve got to finish that book.

But first, this blog post.

Carrie Brownstein, love of my dream life back when I was 23. During the daytime, I had a partner, who I’d enthusiastically tell about my romance. I remember once, we were with some friends and they asked how things were going with Carrie, and my ex said, “This is what I have to deal with, Tabatha being in love with the same person in her dreams every night who isn’t me”. We weren’t polyamorous, it’s not a thing I’ve ever been interested in. I simply am in love with everyone, and I’ve had a crush on every friend I’ve ever had, but I only want a single romantic partner during my awake life. And when I was 23, I also wanted a single romantic parter during my asleep life. I didn’t know I wanted this, but it unfolded and I was curious, and I didn’t take it very seriously. I did look forward to sharing with friends, and dear ex, about said romance.

Carrie was best friends with Miranda July in my dream world, which, at some point made my head explode when the internet got real big or I got real into the internet and learned that the two of them are dear old friends in awake life. When the dreams started, I was deep in a relationship with her. We had a dog, and we were best friends and I wasn’t jealous that in her awake life, she was in Sleater-Kinney and in Portlandia and was surrounded by people I’ll never know and that she, Carrie Brownstein, didn’t know me at all. I was happy for her, and so happy for me to know her and get to make out with her while I slept.

As time went on, I noticed that our relationship was happening backwards. Things that we’d talked about in earlier dreams happened in later dreams. We’d talk about something that would transpire, and then a few weeks later, the event would happen. We got our dog. Then, our life didn’t include our dog in it, only conversations about how we couldn’t commit to going to the pound or the shelter because we’d feel too sad for so many dogs and would muse about how we’d like our dog to just arrive one day, be here in our house. We moved backwards, and I asked her once if she felt like we were moving backwards, and she said she only felt like she was in the current conversation with me, that she couldn’t even imagine what backwards was.

One night, I had the last dream with Carrie Brownstein. It was the night we met. We were both ushers at a theatre, I’d never ushered at this theatre or any other theatre before, but one of my friends called and invited me to come to their late-night play about red curtains, followed by a late-night variety show, and I said I’d love to and they said they needed another usher, and that I might think the other girl who was ushering that night was cute and I said, “Did you just call me to get me to ush?” and my friend said, “I called you because I know you love red curtains,” and I went to the theatre, I went to the theatre and I met Carrie. When I looked at her, she said it was strange, I was looking at her like I know her so well. I thought about how this was probably the last night I’d ever see her, after an entire year of dreamtime life together. We tore tickets and then we arranged the tickets into pictures of nothing I could discern, then we blew them out of the theatre and our legs touched sometimes, accidentally, while we walked around and talked all night.

Four years later, in my awake time, I had a strong urge to make a movie that was set at night, and the movie is just two people on a walk, one of them walks the other home, and then they get to the home and turn around and the other walks the other home. They run into people on the street, step into a 24-hour liquor store and buy an air freshener, look up at the night sky, eat a loaf of bread and a whole picnic after they stop at the first person’s house and turn around. Two hours of dear friends talking. One night, again in awake time, I went on a late night walk with one of my best friends. I was on a road trip; I picked them up and they came with me to Seattle. Late night walk, rainbow cookies from a grocery store. We did the picnic, we talked for three hours. Was it real, or was it my movie?

Carrie didn’t return after the night we met. That was 13 years ago.

But she was in my dream last night.

She was in my dream last night, in a house I live in that’s connected to other houses, plenty of windows but no glass in the windows, the neighbors all move across the same spaces, but the house is mostly empty because the neighbors only come when they are on vacation. Carrie asked me if I’ve seen her lately. I said, “Carrie, I’m seeing you right now.” She said, “Are you sure?” and we sat in this house with the most open of floor plans. I asked how she found the house and if she was friends with one of the vacationers and she said, “I’ve got the internal map of a cat,” and I felt confused. I said, “What are you doing back here?,” somewhat nervous about falling in love with her again because I don’t have any space for a dreamtime love and I don’t want to explain that to her, and she said, “Hm, what’s back here? I think it’s just you.” and she bent over and her shirt lifted in the back and I saw a seam and then the seam tore and her body folded in half, her skin lifted up and I saw she was made of empty shoe boxes and a microwave.

I don’t have my notes on Carrie from when I was 23, but I don’t think she ever revealed that she was made of empty shoe boxes and a microwave back then. She also never revealed that she was me. I’m getting very tired of people in my dreams doing this, we get to talking and then they tell me they are also me. This happened in a conversation with David Lynch recently on an overnight film shoot, but I don’t care about that so much, I care about Carrie. Was I in love with empty shoe boxes and a microwave that whole time? The entire year of being 23? I know time changes the ones we love, but why aren’t there even shoes inside of the shoe boxes? Is she going to return to my mountain home in my dreams and will we talk about what happened? Will I fall in love with empty shoe boxes and a microwave? Is she going to still be there, in that room, in pieces?

The sometimes-downside (like in this case) to lucid dreaming is that you gain continuity in the dreams. You are able to access a kind of stability. You can look at numbers and they don’t change, you can look away and look back and the room is the same, the sort of tests you do at the beginning of lucid dreaming to figure out whether or not you are awake don’t work anymore. When you forget to water a potted tree in a foyer, when you return to that foyer, the tree is hunched and withered.

When you leave Carrie Brownstein in a pile, what will she look like when you return?

A very midnight to you all. Two in the morning at this point. It’s a pleasure to have you here with me.

Until next time,

Tabatha