Oddly Enough,
A Non-Sentient Phone
and a Swath of Hair
(dreams 12/4/21)
Janet Kuypers
12/4/21
Woke up at four this morning,
this time, oddly enough, remembering a dream,
and I thought that I have to remember
to write about how my smartphone was sentient.
I don’t remember how it was sentient,
I don’t remember my phone proving
somehow that it was sentient to me,
but this is something I had to remember.
then,
per my usual waking up in the middle of the night,
I turned on an ambient sound I made
of water slowly sloshing in a metal can
that plays from my non-sentient phone
to help me relax.
then,
almost on cue, my cat Mynx hears the noise,
comes in, and with every meow
I tap my hand on the bed until she jumps in,
struts to my shoulder and stares at me momentarily
before turning around and laying down
against my hip. Sometimes I skritch her,
but when I lay my arm right alongside her,
he lays her back right paw on my arm.
And sometimes, when she stretches her leg,
she rests her back leg all along my arm...
and that always puts a smile on my face,
even when I’m in my semi-lucid dreamlike state.
I fell back asleep after five a.m.
and I was suddenly with a whole group of people,
I want to say they were poet friends from Chicago.
But I went out of the way, and for some reason
I pulled on my hair at the base of my neck.
I pulled, it felt like some came out,
so when I looked at my palm
I literally saw a one-inch by two-inch
swath of hair in my hand.
I hadn't pulled hard, but there it was,
a chunk of my hair from my scalp.
I instinctively wanted to throw away the evidence,
but then I thought better of it
and thought I should show it to my husband.
I found him and said,
“Look what I just pulled from the back of my scalp—”
and
I don’t remember his response.
It was time to wake up again.
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