This will be my dream journal. I have concluded that with my lack of visual contributions over the past year or so, I will need to inspire myself to be industrious. With that, I will share my dreams and one day read back in retrospect at the marvel that is dreaming. Perhaps that is where my inspiration lies.

Recently, I have had dreams that host a variety of people from my past, mainly those who have passed on or ex-lovers (or both), and I am perplexed.

Occasionally I meet up with a dead relative or two in slumber land, and I am amazed that I am conversing with the apparitions of my subconscious. I have already had in-depth conversations with my late grandmother, so real I woke up in tears.

In a recent dream, I happened across a person who falls into the dead, ex-lover category. The strange thing about this encounter is that I do not hear him speak- not once.

The setting is a river of some kind... a very expansive one. The trees are towering as high as skyscrapers and I feel so small. I am among classmates that I know I would recognize in real life, yet I do not know them. There was Jim, sitting on the bank and perched on a tree stump edging over the water. He sits there like an imp, head cocked to one side, just looking through everything around him. He doesn't speak. Not to me... not to anyone around me.

I try to speak to him but get no response. As I turn away in defeat, a black woman approaches me and tells me that she sees an eye buried in the mud. She shows me this eye, and I tell her it must belong to a dead reptile of some kind... like a crocodile or an alligator (even though, looking back, it could not be classified as either).

As I kneel down to get a closer look, this alligator-like creature lifts up from beneath the mud and charges at me. Something is keeping it tethered and I slip as I try to get away. The creature does not catch me on his second lunge attempt, and I find myself magically transported to a make-shift shack on the higher banks of the river. There is a conversation, and Jim is there again, still ignoring my presence. I cannot make heads or tails of anything going on around me at this point, and this is when I wake up.