My dreams from Wednesday, 2007-11-07:
First dream. In a second-floor Los Angeles apartment an American
Indian boy takes insult at something his father says. (His father's name
is Tractor.) I try to clear things up between them but, no matter what I
say, the boy believes I'm siding with Tractor.
Now Tractor is gone and there are lots more Indian children. The
apartment building is a school. Juanita comes here to interview for a
teaching job. I say, "Do you want to teach some of them to fly?" /Sure,
why not./
An oppressive storm feeling comes. Two little boys latch onto my
legs and won't let go. A glitter-kaleidoscope-eyed re****ter woman with
the aspect (and metal-fatigue cricket-clicking Adam's apple) of Ann
Coulter but also a little like a demented Diane Keaton or Mary Tyler
Moore flaps around screaming, "Get out of my apartment!"
From the doorway I say matter-of-factly, "Well, I'm out, and you are
still a hideous *****." She's all like, /How dare you!/ --not because I
called her a ***** but because I'm calm about her outburst; I don't take
her seriously. All this gives me an idea for a funny breakfast cereal
television commercial, and retroactively the action becomes a
rehearsal/pitch for the commercial.
Next dream. I'm in a normal-looking but weird-feeling modern school
at night. Kids hang out here unsupervised. A troublemaker boy roughly
shoves his bicycle back and forth with the front brake locked, to wear a
frayed line in the carpet.
Next dream. I return to my house after being away for a long time.
Everything's just like my real-life house, except there's no kitchen;
fold-flat furniture is stored here. I climb up to sit on the edge of a
bed frame on its side, and I smoke two cigarets, one in each hand, one
filtered and one unfiltered. I just sit here deeply inhaling smoke and
holding it in as long as I can. It occurs to me that this should give me
a splitting headache, but it doesn't.
At a craft/computer fair in an exhibition building an inventor
demonstrates his new multiplayer laser battle game. He wanders away,
leaving four or five prospective customers sitting in brown metal
folding chairs playing the game. I try to follow instructions to play
while tuning the game to work better and in the process trying to steal
its secrets. It's a regular video game with a big CRT monitor, but you
can turn your controller gun away from the screen and shoot at things in
the hall. I shoot the back of a folding chair and metalworking sparks
fly off it. Wow!
Next dream. Juanita and I walk around in a crowded
early-last-century summertime fair in the park of the Palace of Fine
Arts in San Francisco. A gyrocopter sky-writes so slowly that whatever
it's writing dissipates and distorts before it can become anything. This
gives me an idea for an ad campaign for a product or service (that's
clear in the dream but that I didn't get to keep on waking).
I sit down in a sausage-and-beer tent pavilion. Juanita goes to find
a toilet. An advertising guy across the tent writes a smudgy ad slogan
on the seat-back of a bus bench with his charcoal cigaret. I go there to
impress the man with my already-thought-through reply to his advertising
question. He doesn't get it. I say, "Look, I'll show you. Gimme a
cigaret." He gives me a cigaret. I smoke it down a little to make it
useful as a charcoal stick.
/Where's Juanita?/
The two bad boys from the first dream (the one shoving the bicycle
and the one balancing on the handlebars) are out here in the park at
night hurting park pets. Juanita and I chase the boys away and run on
stepping stones over a shallow pond. The pond has little islands of rock
and concrete to provide birds with a place safe from cats and dogs.
Juanita tries to catch a bedraggled but fluffy gray
parrot/pigeon/owl/chicken-thing that hides in a special tunnel in the
concrete. I go to the other end of the tunnel and wait.
A British female radio voice says, "Artist of inherent whatnot in
and without snow and the great reaches of the beach."
I woke up with the song /Poison Ivy/ playing in my head.
My dreams from Friday, 2007-11-09:
First dream. Juanita and I return from (where?) to an apartment
under the stage of a strange theater, then we're in a pickup truck
riding to a rural version of the old Community school that's
business-connected to the theater. A woman sitting on the other wheel
well in the truck bed cluelessly yammers on, complaining about the
Community School. I mimic her, saying, "They were teaching kids to
/juggle/. And they made a /fruit fly/ disappear out of a jar /without
opening it/."
Two old British men, some others and I sneak into the dirt-floor
basement parking lot of an apartment building. The British men wait
while the rest of us go up inside the building. In the apartment of the
theater's musical director we find scripts and the sheet music but no
money is folded into them. And there's no choir anywhere in the
building, no-one to sing the songs. Two others with me are looking
through the scripts and the music --they speak together: One says, "I
can't /believe/ these!" The other says, "I can't /believe/ this!"
I'm at the school's swimming pool with Juanita and Sean at the age
he was at the Whale School in the late 1980s. Sean's in the pool.
Juanita's reading a magazine. I'm messing with the pump plumbing. I'm
wearing cut-off jeans and my arms and legs are deeply tanned, which
concerns me because of the cancer risk. Juanita says something about how
long it's been since Sean came up for air. I say, "He's hiking
underwater."
A man like Ted from the Whale School, but grown up, is our partner
in building a special shop for science cl***** or to be a factory for
making a science-fiction project that the government has already given
the school the money for. We're going over the layout. Someone comes
here in a World-War-Two jeep and whispers to Ted, shocking him; Ted
says, "Done by Friday?" I'm not worried about it. It's only Tuesday.
That's plenty of time to throw something together for an inspector.
I'm in HSC Electronics in Cotati (CA), dithering over whether to buy
two big old CRT monitors. I see that I've absentmindedly stuck
Morse-code bars dots and dashes of sticky-white-plastic-coated magnets
all over the monitors' screens. Oops. Ed and Stan are moving things
around, closing the store up for the night. I brush the magnets away and
offer twenty dollars for both monitors. Ed smiles because they're not
worth even that, now that they've been ruined by magnets. (He saw that.)
Next dream. In the science factory that had to be built by Friday in
the previous dream I deal on the telephone with a woman caller who says
she's pregnant and she wants to use our big microwave oven --big enough
for a car to drive into-- for an art project. I gesture with the phone
handset and Professor Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books says,
"Pregnant." I say, "There's one in every kitchen in America," by this
agreeing with Dumbledore that if it it was bad for pregnant women we'd
know about it by now. I say to the woman, "Sure. See you soon."
Now I'm in a cold-far-Northern-country version of my mother's old
house in Grass Valley. Shelley of Shelley and Gardener Greg is
considering buying a laptop computer from Juanita's mother, who in the
dream lives about a hundred yards away through snow and trees and has a
slow kind of cancer. (Or maybe it's Shelley who lives over there and has
cancer, or lives here --it's not im****tant.) A Swedish-Eskimo yenta-like
legal mediator says to Juanita's mother, "You'll have to check on her
later in the winter." Juanita's mother says, "Why would I do that?"
The mediator says, "Because she'll have your computer," meaning the
payments will come over time, and if the cancer person dies the payments
will stop. That seems fair. Everyone agrees. Good.
-end-
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