My dreams from Tuesday, 2007-10-30:
First dream. I'm a hired psychic /meat maker/ working at a
summer camp. (I make edible meat appear from nothing on the
grill, already mostly cooked.) A woman is interested in the
process. I show her some practice tricks to use to develop the
ability, to show her how to move paper and pebbles and things at
a distance with her mind. She leaves the camp with me and we go
downhill into town, to an office-- a courthouse or DMV or maybe
it's a bank. Excited by her new telekinetic ability, the woman
plucks mentally at the back of a man's pants. He's one of us,
telekinetic; he plucks at her blouse in return. She's startled
and indignant. /Funny./
I ask the man, "When did you get it?" (Meaning, in what part
of his life did he get the power?) He doesn't want to talk about
it.
When I get to the front of the line, the office woman behind
the counter tells that she was four when she got it. That's
dangerous, because a child can be hurt by its own power, or
cause a disaster.
The man comes back for the sungl***** he left on the
counter.
Later, in the alley behind the courthouse, I upset a
1980s-style graphic designer man in an ugly van by saying,
"That's probably why you didn't send me samples." He invites me
inside the van and shows me his paintings, all of them gray-blue
on gray-blue, and all of them pretty good work. He says, "I'm a
/teacher/." I say, "I'm a teacher-- used to be." I'm jammed in
on my side between the racks of paintings; he helps me up. I
say, "I was wrong." (About him not being a good artist.) We
shake hands. Now that we're friends he tells me that when he
walked by my car before he saw that one tire was bald. /Thanks./
The artist's lowlife friend shows up. Now his van won't
start.
I go into a line of connected metal garages of tem****ary
booth/shops where derelicts hang out and discuss the weighty
issues of the day, such as the safety or danger of different
industrial chemicals to get high inhaling or drinking. A woman
like Eskimo Annie points at a barrel of cleaning solvent; she
says she drinks that kind all the time and it hasn't harmed her.
A heavy old Gypsy man slumped against the wall agrees with me
that cleaning solvent is harmful. He tells of drinking some
once, shudders and says, "I thought I was gaziggled for good."
I float and flip slowly back the way I just came and
continue through the metal building. A competent old detective
with a cane and his apelike backup cop stop me. The detective
says to me, "For a long time we only had two numbers for you,
then we suddenly got lots more." He writes unfamiliar strings of
numbers in chalk on the top of a barrel. I'm afraid to try to
answer his questions and also afraid not to. I say, "I want to
help you but I don't know how."
In the old Maranatha Tea Room (coffee shop in a wooden
warehouse-like space), Douglas Roycroft is dismayed to hear that
poet Leonard Cirino has copies of all the old local periodicals.
Douglas says, "A lot of people will be unhappy about that." I
don't see why.
Next dream. Julie, my girlfriend right after high school,
follows me in her dream-only early-1960s Ford Galaxie. I turn
sharply onto a ramp down to old railroad yards and I watch in my
rearview mirror as Julie takes the same turn too fast for that
kind of car and scrapes the concrete rail. I hope she isn't
upset about it; it isn't really a big deal.
Down in the metal buildings is a car-truck repair place. A
red-faced red-haired woman mechanic tells a customer named Alice
(she calls her Alice several times) that she will have to bring
her car back next week for more work. I say something rude (?),
then immediately apologize: "I'm sorry. I'm tired. That just
slipped out of my mouth." The mechanic says, "It seems to
always be busier when it rains." She means she's tired too.
Mechanic and I walk to the office so she can file
paperwork. I say, "What's wrong with Alice's car?" She says,
"Now, Marco." I say, "Well, let's find out what's wrong with
mine." She says, "Good idea. You're on the clock."
Next dream. With a strange woman and a teenage girl I climb
an escalator/stairway up around the outside of an apartment
building made of an immensely tall cylindrical water tank. We
get up over the last hump of the stairway and slide down the
collapsed escalator steps ten feet to the next stairway. The
girl leaves a half-gallon juice carton and other trash on a step
for robots to clean up. You'd think there'd be trash chutes.
In a car repair garage where in real life the Maranatha Tea
Room used to be I'm talking with the mechanics about advertising
in the Mendocino Commentary, which in the dream is still being
printed. A fat but attractive black woman maneuvers like a
tugboat to gently push me away from the others with her nose
against my nose. (She doesn't want them to talk with me; she
wants them to fix her car.)
Outside, this whole end of Fort Bragg (CA) is a used-vehicle
lot. An old front-engine schoolbus is marked /$1600/, but that
doesn't tell me anything, because all these jeeps and cars and
trucks are marked with /either/ their sale price or with how
much it will cost to fix them to be reliable. The other side of
the schoolbus bulges out with a fiberglass modification that
would make a big room inside the back. An Australian man says,
"Would you like to see inside?" I say, "Very much." We go in
and the whole bus is much bigger inside than out; it's a nice
living space.
I wake from sleep (still in the dream) in bed in the bus. I
must have been tricked into buying it, and this horrifies me.
Wait, maybe I didn't buy it; maybe I just, I dunno, fell asleep
in it... I jump out of bed, pull on my pants, look in a drawer,
in the closet. /All/ my clothes are here. /No! Noooooo!!!/
I woke up in the real world with David Seville's Alvin and
the Chipmunks song /Japanese Banana/ playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. In a school a little girl is
crying. I ask her what's wrong; she points to a teacher and
sobs, "She said cookies might be lost." Oh. /Well, that's
nothing, honey. Cookies are cheap. There'll always be another
cookie./
I'm in a wide dark room with someone else, designing a war
videogame. We're bent over a door-size tabletop screen that
shows a topographical map. Here's a mound we can use for a
barracks or underground installation. Here's another, better.
Now I'm in the war land. I fly above the landscape in
blue-gray night, seeing points at corners of metal buildings in
sharp close-up.
On the ground in the daytime I follow a path through brush
and low trees to a house where aliens have come and attacked
people. I separate the dead from the merely wounded and use
telekinesis to pull metal shrapnel from people's bodies and
limbs. I hug a girl to me to keep her from moving while I pull a
jagged U-shaped bit of metal from her eye. What at first I think
is a wound on her lower back turns out to be where three or four
inches of bare tailbones come out of a gristle socket there.
(This is like something from the movie /Existenz/.)
Human soldiers show up. I have to argue with them to make
them take the girl with the other wounded; they're afraid of
her. Finally I say, "Look at her. She is just a little girl. Do
your job."
I and one of the soldiers go across the yard, which becomes
an open area in a covered shopping mall big enough to have whole
office buildings inside it, on the main concourse. I look back
and see that we've just come out of the /Tim Russert Building/.
Something's creepily wrong here. We run inside another building,
which is the same /Tim Russert Building/, and we get separated.
I run down a corridor, down steps to where boxes of supplies are
piled up. /This is before the aliens came. They haven't come
yet./ I say to a small, fox-featured guard or cop, "The aliens
will be coming soon." He thinks I'm crazy; he says, "Yeah,
yeah." I say, "Right. I'll just go wait outside and come back
after they've killed everyone." This only makes the cop
suspicious of me; he calls to other cops and they chase me back
up through the building, as though /I'm/ the threat. /Why does
this always happen?/
My dreams from Wednesday, 2007-10-31:
First dream. I'm a new-age psychological therapist and
neck-massage guy in a government-sponsored healing center in a
horrible Midwestern town where people are like people really are
in the Midwest-- insular, anti-education, anti-/therapy/, and
who can blame them? I'm a fraud, working in an industry that has
always been collectively faking helping.
I'm massaging a girl's neck, encouraging her to talk about
her problems. Time's up. Everyone goes away, all the patients
and all the other professionals.
I walk through town. A girl in a car is upset; she's having
a problem with her boyfriend who's with his friends in the
street half a block behind her car. They're yelling back and
forth --the boy is yelling what I imagine to be just the most
awful things at her. (I can't understand what he's saying, but
the tone is vile.) I come even with the girl and say, "Just
drive away." She looks at me like I'm crazy, gets out of the
car and runs to the boy and starts flailing her arms at him,
doing no damage at all. The boy punches her once, knocking her
down, and he and his friends stroll away laughing.
Another girl comes along. The one in the street gets up and
goes away with her, both of them talking as though nothing
happened.
Time p***** and I'm still standing next to the car. /I want
to talk to the girl who got punched./ I go down the side street
where she went. This part of town is all sad little crackerbox
cafes.
There's the girl and her friend-- no, when they turn around
they're other girls, not the right ones.
I walk all over town through a time-telescoped vague
old-movie montage of example after example of the bleak lives
people in places like this have.
Next dream. In a continuation of the bleakness of the
previous dream I'm barefoot in a version of Fort Bragg (CA) that
has lots of thrift stores and cheap diners.
In a diner I eat green jello from a teacup. I go to the
register to pay; the register guy is busy talking to his
friends. These are the horrible boys from the previous dream
--which in this dream I remember as a dream, and which makes it
creepy that they're here-- but they're twisted and fattened into
horrible dangerous forty-year-old men. I wait a long time for
attention and finally spill change out of my pocket onto the
counter and the floor. The men /hate/ me.
In another diner I sit down across from accordionist John
Paul. He says, "You look tired." I say, "I am tired. I was up
all night walking around." He's worried about me.
At one point I'm up one of the tree-named streets in the
middle of town and a woman I know from Albion comes out of an
alley at the age she was twenty years ago and gets in a car. It
occurs to me to ask for a ride to Albion, but as I get there
three other teenage girls appear at the car, all with their
babies and baby bags and blankets, and so the car is full. I
walk by without speaking.
I go into a long, narrow thrift store in what in real life
is the movie theater building; I go all the way to the back. I
have shoes on now, from another thrift store, but I'm interested
in the shoes here because they're all weird; none of the pairs
match and no shoe matches any from another pair. It's like an
art installation.
When I go outside again the store girl is getting off work;
she looks at the shoes I have on and she thinks I stole them
from her store. We're going in the same direction; somehow by
her /look/ she tells everyone in her extended family/tribe that
she p***** that I'm a creep who came into her store and stole
shoes. Which I couldn't have done because my shoes match-- or...
no, they don't match. Now I don't remember whether I stole the
shoes or not.
In an apartment where Tradewinds Restaurant should be I go
over an im****tant court case with my dream-only lawyer and my
dream-only fifty-something harsh-faced-from-smoking white wife.
I'm to prepare my wife for court by asking the questions I was
asked in court yesterday, starting with, "Are you fulfilled?"
She says, "More fulfilled than you are." I say, "How do /you/
know how fulfilled I am?" She says, "/Exactly/."
The lawyer goes to the door and puts on his coat. He says,
"Looks like you've got this under control."
My dreams from Thursday, 2007-11-01:
First dream. I'm in remote mountains in snowy brush to shoot
video for a nature show. I'm lying on my back on the edge of a
high, steep place. An owl has its claws hooked in my pants-leg
below my left knee. I can't see the owl well directly, but I can
see it in the camera's viewfinder screen, though it's hard to
keep it in the frame; it's like trying to cut your own hair
using a mirror. I get about a minute of wobbly footage of the
owl, then I shake my leg and say, "Okay, get off, now." The owl
flies up, then flies away downhill.
Now I'm walking back to civilization with a generic friend.
We come to a big well-lit commercial nature camp at night. The
other person becomes my (dead) schoolfriend Randy. We go back
out into the dark to camp for free.
Time has passed. It's getting light out. I see that where
we've been sleeping in our sleeping bags is not hidden but out
on the yard of a college campus. Some kids drive by slowly in a
1940s convertible.
Now it's night again; it's after a school event --maybe a
s****ts game-- and everyone is walking across this yard to the
parking lot. Randy is already way ahead and has set up another
camp for us in an abandoned train station building. (I'm
returning there from accompli****ng something im****tant having to
do with the story.) I have two guns in my deep left-front jeans
pocket. A white gang boy menaces me, demands the guns. I say,
"I need these. If they aren't there a woman will die." He's
like, /Oh, in that case, keep them, Bro./ When I get past the
crowd and climb up onto the railroad station's platform a weak
drug-junky boy tries to stick me up with a ****ny little toy
cowboy pistol. I take the gun from him and knock him down. He's
pathetic; I help him up and give him his pistol back.
Here's Randy. I tell him about the truck I saw (?) in the
parking lot, the one we've been looking for. We go there. Randy
gets his car. The driver of the truck, one of the people who
kidnaped the woman (?) sees me, panics and tries to get away.
Randy smashes his car into the truck, so we have the kidnaper;
now we must get to the woman without being tricked by him. He's
tricky. Better not let him talk till after we decide what to do.
Next dream. A covered walkway from the street to a house in
Caspar (CA) is almost finished being built. It's a
twenty-foot-long half-cylinder. They're putting asphalt
roll-roofing on the inside as well as the outside. /Why would
they do that?/ I imagine making something like that out of much
cheaper materials and covering it with Ornyte-- just make an
Ornyte A-frame. It's their thing; they can do what they want.
I'm in Helen Schoeni Theater to videotape a kids' show. I
have my camera and tripod set up in the center aisle by the back
row. At first the show is two East-Indian-looking boys singing,
but the show and the theater expand so there are twenty or
thirty kids and adults on a stage more like the one in Cotton
Auditorium. I'm trying to figure out what the show is about. Is
it a church thing? a Russian cultural thing? a wedding?
Two men sit a folding table behind me. A tall woman like
Miss Hathaway in the teevee show /The Beverly Hillbillies/ keeps
having to move my boxes and power units and cables and video
monitor off and then back onto the step next to me and under the
back leg of the tripod. When I go to change the tape I discover
that it's VHS-C. /Why? Why do I even have VHS-C things?/ I have
a moment of confusion, then settle down into a familiar attitude
of /do the best you can with this crap; it's not your fault./
The M.C. of the show is a big Russian Englebert Humperdink.
The show has now expanded to fill the whole stage and spread out
onto an added stage that runs along the left wall. A man comes
up behind me and stands at my shoulder. I get a feeling from him
that he's about to do something to mess up my work. I prepare
mentally for this, visualize how to handle it... I'll zoom the
camera out wide and leave it, swing the man around and out the
side-back door, shove him against the wall and say, "Let me do
my job," then lock the door behind me when I come back in.
-end-
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