Megan Stielstra's Blog

In class, we had a conversation about the difference between having a dream, and telling a dream. I looked back through my journal, and most of my dreams read like this:

Dreamt I gave my Czech fortune telling cards to Martine and he put them in the deep-fryer. I ate them like potato chips.

That's all well and good in my journal, which is just for me, but if I'm going to really tell that dream, say, to all of you, there’s a lot of fill-in-the-blanks that'd need to happen. Like maybe this:

When I was living in Prague, we went every Friday to the Allegro gallery, a consignment shop that rotated some three hundred Czech artists. Painting, sketches, sculpture, ceramics, clothes, jewelry, every week different things. I fell for a deck of hand-painted gypsy fortune telling cards, sort of like tarot cards except, along with a picture, they had a single word—Death. Love. Memory—written in four different languages. Death in English, German, Czech and Russian. I bought them, brought them home to Chicago, and have no idea what to do with them. I don’t use them—I’m not so much a fortune-telling kind of girl. That shit makes me nervous. I went one time to a palm reader, and she said I’d be very important to the world at large but very unhappy and lonely in my own personal life. I remember wanting to tell her to suck it, which was not very karmic of me. Anyway, I look at the cards often, because they’re stunning, and I figure I bought them for a reason other than aesthetics, right? Who knows. Anyhow, I had this dream where I gave the cards to the cook at the restaurant where I wait tables. Martine. He’s this smiley Puerto Rican guy in all white-chef jackets, his black hair up under a baseball cap in accordance with health code regulations. He’s very kind, all about learning English and thinks I’m cute when I try to use Spanish (Quando tengas tiempo, necessito mas salsa, por favor), but when we’re busy, he Jekyl and Hydes into a big ‘ol jackass and screams and yells at me for screaming and yelling at him. I am screaming and yelling because table twenty is short a breakfast burrito, everybody else has had their food for fifteen minutes, come on! and he is screaming and yelling because I am annoying the hell out of him. So anyhow, in the dream, I give him the cards and he drops them into the deep fryer, which is funny because we don’t have a deep fryer at the Bongo Room. We grill everything. This annoys a lot of people because they like their French fries. I am glad we don’t have French fries, because I like them a lot, also, and I am trying to lose ten pounds. Also, when I was in high school I worked nights at Arby’s and one time I touched my wrist against the wire-mesh deep-fry baskets (you fill them with frozen fries and set them in boiling oil for three minutes) and it hurt like hell, white-hot wire against my flesh. It branded a cross-hatch F into my skin. F for fry. So anyway, when the cards have finished their three minutes in the deep fryer, Martine pats them with a paper towel, dumps them on a plate and gives them to me. They are thin, brittle, and curling up at the ends like potato chips. I eat them one by one, without looking at them first, so I don’t know if I’m eating death or love or memory.