Tao of Pauly

Dreams; Sweet Sweet Pablo, the Tokyo Subway, and Hugh Douglas

By Pauly
Melbourne, Australia

I'm sniffing a whiteboard marker to staw awake. My latest addiction is the Artline 500A blak marker. Someone left it in media row and I've been taking off the cap at random moments to catch a whiff. The smell is intoxicating and keeps me up.

I worked until past 5am last night and had to be back at 12:30pm. I was so busy yesterday that I had to miss dinner. Again. I ate an omelet yesterday for breakfast around 11:30am. In the last 26 hours, I have only eaten a bag of potato chips. I'm fuckin' starving. Over the last 100 hours, I've only eaten two slices of pizza, a piece of chocolate mud cake, a cheeseburger and fries, along with the chips and omelete. Sometimes, I just don't have time to eat and when I get off of work, mostly since everything is closed.

It was sun up when I got off work last night. I walked through the almost empty casino (aside from a few degenerates at the slot nachines) on the way back to my room. I barely logged a couple of hours of sleep but in that short time, I managed to have a few weird dreams.

I cannot explain why... but I have vivid dreams in Australia. It has to do with the energy and location of the country. One of my co-workers Cory-Ann thinks it's because we're upside down on Earth.

A couple of summers ago during the WSOP in Las Vegas, I worked with a woman named Ali, who's from Sydney, Australia. Everyday she'd tell me these wild dreams which she had. A lot of them involved her dog. She kept a dream journal and when she woke up in the middle of the night, she'd scribble the details down and go back to sleep. She'd show me her dream journal every morning and she couldn't explain why she experienced such enriched dreams. I told her that perhaps the stimuli from being in Las Vegas might have triggered something.

Last January when I visited Australia for the first time, I had a lot of odd dreams that seemed to last for hours and hours on end, but in reality only lasted a couple of minutes. There's something about this place which messes with my head. I cannot explain it but Oz affects the inner workings of my mind.

The other night I had a dream where I was at my friends Garcie and Pablo's house. Nicky was there along with my brother. Pablo walked into the living room playing a diggery doo. We were drinking punch out of plastic cups and waiting to go out to dinner but then the power went out in their house. There was a blackout and we found candles to light. I kept burning my fingers holidng the candles.

Last night (or I should say, a couple of hours ago), I had another series of weird dreams. One invovled me riding a subway in Tokyo and I couldn't figure out which stop I had to get off. I kept walking from car to car and each one was a different color. I realized the cars were actually different subway lines. If you have ever been to Tokyo, their subway lines are color coated which made it easy for me to navigate when I went there back in 2000.

My other dream invovled my buddy TC from Seattle. We were driving around his hometown in Connecticut. We stopped off at a WalMart and a kid from my highschool was folding towels and putting them on a shelf. I had not seen him since 1990. He told me that his wife and kids died in a fire in New Jersey and he started using heroin and crystal meth. He went to rehab in Connecticut to sober up and they made him take a part time job.

After WalMart, TC and I drove to New Haven and we went into a Barnes and Nobles. I bought several books on quantum physics especially about string theory. I bumped into an ex-girlfriend and we started walking around talking about the books I read. She was shoplifting some of the titles I mentioned like Cat's Cradle and Flowers for Algernon. She stuffed them into her purse but I pretended not to notice.

On the way out of the store, my brother stood in front. Some local kids asked us if we wanted to buy some pot. We bought a few bags and one of them sold my brother a couple of joints. We lit them up and went back inside the Barnes and Nobles. One of the security guards grabbed me and told me that I couldn't smoke pot inside. So I put the joint out with my shoe and then started chewing the joint to get high. He kicked me out of the store.

I walked down the road and hitched a ride. I got on a bus full of little kids that were going to the beach. It was a summer camp for retarded kids and I sat up front taking turns driving the bus with a big black guy who looked like Hugh Douglas, who used to play for the Jets and the Eagles. That's when I realized it was Hugh Douglas.

That's when the alarm clock went off and I woke up. What the fuck was I doing on a bus full of retards with Hugh Douglas? What does it all mean?