My dreams from Monday, 2007-11-12, Part Two:
Next dream. I drive past a modern school building that's set
well back from the road. The barn doors are open on the big main
room in the center, under the peak. /That would be a great house
to live in./
The road comes to old rectangular white-painted-wood school
buildings with trees all around. /I'd like to work here./
I drive past a swimming-pool area where they're having a
1940s Olympic swimsuit competition. Is that my mother taking
pictures? I turn around and go back. No, it's Kay... No, it's
not; it's a man who looks like Kay.
Now all the swimming pools are indoors. I walk around taking
pictures with a big camera.
I'm staying with others at a house in this other world, on
the hill where I remember there was a monastery. It's another
day. We all go out to return to the /event/. We have to climb
down through a metal play-tube and, one at a time, push up a
hinged door part to squirm out. Everybody just knows this; this
is how you get to the right world.
But it's the wrong place, not the swimming-pool place. It's
a strange city. Oh, well.
Next dream. Kay's leaving a big strange house at night. From
halfway to the road she shouts back something about my VOM--
it's on the table, or it needs a new battery, or something. My
mother is here with her friends. She says to me, "Weren't you
going to check my heart with that?"
In the back yard of a house like the ones where we lived
when I was in the second half of fifth grade I'm lying on a
generic middle-aged Russian woman on the top one of a stack of
lawn couches. And the woman's Communist Party husband is right
over /there/. I climb down.
Now the house is older, on a hill, on the edge of the high
point of the V of a garbage dump valley. Feral children want
something from me --candy? cigarets? A boy knocks down my
armload of things and grabs me; I fly out over the dump and
shake him off.
On the deck between houses I gather up all my fallen soft
notebooks and invisible but tangible clipboards and fly up to a
roof. A /big/ teevee screen is starred, damaged. Two boys
climbing around up here are playing pioneer with beebee guns. I
confront them about the teevee and they sheepishly admit
shooting it. Their parents and parents' friends and all their
dogs mill around on the driveway and in the garden below.
Next dream. Entropy, Inc. is a big company whose factories
cover a city-size ridgetop. I think they built all that with
nanotechnology. In the employee housing district I clean up the
mess in a publicity-writer's house. When she comes home, I say,
"Did you say /come in/?" to let her know that I knocked before I
came in, that I didn't just barge in.
Now the writer and I have been away. The company calls us
back. The house is a different kind of messy, more runny than
merely disorganized. The inside walls are blue, where before
they were gray, and there's a sense of danger. From flying away
I say, "What was the spinach?" (A balled-up green rug thing.)
Before (or later) I climb with a Kay-like person up a wooden
ladder to the roof of a house from the previous dream, and say,
"I've been here. Is the dump...?" (Meaning, is this the house
with the dump on the other side?)
I push through oak-tree branches that grow low over the roof
and get sticker-like oak balls and tree dust in my clothes and
my hair.
Kay is gone. The writer and I clean up the tree mess I made,
and I use telekinesis or magic (or nanotechnology) to make the
faded pastel-blue paint and bent structures of three parallel
trailer houses new again. I say to the writer, "Your husband
scores high in midichlorians. If he's ever out of a job, have
him call. He could take training and work for us.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2007-11-13:
First dream. An invisible demented boy makes a noose of
blue-and-white cotton rope to put over the head of a studious
nerd boy to teach him who's boss. I rush in, knock the invisible
boy down and step on the rope and his hands.
Things change so the bad boy has had time to get the noose
ready. He's coming up behind me, raising the rope... I visualize
defending myself and to go beyond defense and beat the boy up:
I'll elbow him in the chest, turn and kick him in the crotch,
pull his head down and knee his nose. Then I'll take the rope to
his parents for evidence and let them decide what to do.
Of course he'll lie that he meant no harm and that I just
went nuts and attacked him.
I woke up with the Elton John song /The ***** Is Back/
playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. A sick-dream of flying endlessly
between and through on delivery (or bombing) runs in airplanes
like the ones in the movie /****co Rosso/. There's the constant
worry, /am I using up materials and fuel or not?/
Next dream. I walk into an asphalt-schoolyard jumble sale of
boxes of old dial-telephones and toy electric cars and things
like that. My friend Mark is here. A stranger leads me through a
bus garage to an office-desk-size machine that's made to analyze
something. Will we carry it away? No, use it here.
I'm on a bumpy dry dirt road with a lot of strangers. The
road expands to be rudely-cleared and now dead-dry land being
developed into-- motels? A car tears through the crowd, pulling
a boy skiing on his hard black shoes. I say, "They could have
hit a kid-- all the kids who were just here." (and who aren't
anymore; they scattered). A big dumb dangerous boy says
something about people drinking vodka and driving. I say, "No,
I never do that, but I do drive too fast sometimes."
A small, pretty, black-haired woman with a sharp-featured
foxlike little face wanders over here. I point to a building
under construction and say, "Is that going to be a motel too?"
She says, "/Compelled/ motel. Movie directors, etcetera. They're
competing me out of business." I follow her away to her office
in an already completed motel and say, "My name is Marco." She
notices that the gravel rectangle between walkways in front of
her office needs watering, gets a hose, waters it. She says,
"Elaine."
My mother shows up --she used to be a realtor; I introduce
them to each other: "This is Ev. This is Elaine." Elaine turns
off the water, puts her hands on her hips and says to me,
"You're the worst person I've ever been attracted to." I say,
"What's bad about me?" She says, "If I had to say, it'd be your
poor ratio of power to actual usefulness."
I go with a lot of others back across the expanse of dead
earth and to a real estate seminar/lecture. I take one of each
kind of brochure and form off a folding table and go into the
classroom. Everyone's sitting in tiny school desk-chairs; one is
empty, but I can't sit there because the big dumb high-school
boy in the seat behind it puts his feet there and all the other
big dumb boys chortle.
I sit crosslegged on the floor in the aisle; instantly
there's a delicately-built girl sitting crosslegged on my
shoulders, so I can't sit up straight without spilling her off.
Now I'm in the front row on the far left, in a chair, and
the girl is in the chair behind me. The lecturer speaks
paragraphs of incomprehensible computer/math/hardware jargon."
The girl behind me says, "What's a codac." I say, "Codec. You
should look that one up at home." She says, "Okay." But
playwright Lawrence Bullock and the whole bunch of other kids
who I thought were just big mean dumb boys happily sing a clever
funny answer to her question in a rising, building,
anthemic-musical-theater-song chorus that ends with, "Yadada
da-ta da-ta TOMORROW!"
The girl whines, "She should have put me in a remedial." I
say, "You'll do fine." Defeated and miserable, she says, "You
don't understand-- there'll be two grades after my name." So?
My dreams from Wednesday, 2007-11-14:
First dream. Still sick. Bad dream about using a hose to
bathe in a bedroom downstairs, below the level of the ground, in
a strange house. I'm surprised to find there's no drain; all the
water stays in the room. The bed is soaked. My mother is coming
here; I tell her through the high window that I'm almost
finished and I'll come out; don't come in. Then I have to hurry
because I know she'll just come in and come down here, but I
think I have time to finish wa****ng, so I'm surprised when I
hear footsteps on stairs outside the sliding door-- but the door
is latched-- but I know the latch on that kind of door doesn't
stop it from being opened. I rush to the door just in time to
keep my mother from pulling it all the way open, and I shout in
her face, "You didn't hear me say, /I'm almost finished, don't
come in/?" She backs away and lets me push the door all the way
closed again. The latch is still no good and she'll just push in
the instant I let go of it. She says, "What do you want me to
do?" Totally off my head with rage I scream, "/Just leave me
the **** alone for five ****ing minutes!/"
Next dream. A man drives my (dead) schoolfriend Randy and I
and some others down a long dirt road in a boxy convertible car
with the top down. Now it's just me and the man in my Mercury.
The man complains and complains. He stops just before driving
through a low doorway and over a cliff; I'm standing on the
trunk of the car, pu****ng down on it by pressing against the
roof of the passageway. I can't keep the car from falling; it
tips over out the door, unblocking the tunnel. I fly out. Randy
and the others fly out after me. We're all in the air above a
beautiful prehistoric valley, swooping around, playing tag.
Puppies and dogs fly up out of the trees and play with us.
Next dream. I'm in the writer's messy house from the last
dream of two days before. My stepsister Jamie is here, weeping,
saying incomprehensible things.
Juanita and I are in bed. There's the feeling of someone,
some malevolent guy, crouching down behind me, behind the
headboard, waiting for me to say something incriminating he can
use against me.
Two Italian girls go down to the water in a cave. I follow
them. The floor is slippery. We're all shown an old educational
newsreel about what /not/ to do; in it, the slippery chemical in
the water of an above-ground backyard pool causes black runny
sheep **** to flow down the floor in a cave /just like the one
we're in/-- is that why the floor is slippery? In the film and
in the cave we're in, ocean waves come in from the other side;
water rises and lifts the Italian girls up, giggling and
spla****ng as though they're not in terrible danger. I think,
/That's the human spirit, right there./
Next dream. There's a meeting outside a Medieval/Wild-West
post-office/Grange building for participants in a coming speech
event to describe what they'll do, define their acts. I came
here thinking that I'd be paired with Kathy O'Grady and her
improv skills would carry us through, but it turns out I'm not.
I have no idea what to say. It's my turn. I point at news
stories and others' publicity on a bulletin-board window and
just make the whole thing up: "This girl [in the picture] bought
two radio sets. You'd think that new ones would work a lot
better than the old kind, but no. The one that cost a lot more
was no good. Surprised? Well, wait till you find out what she
did /then/." Done. Whew. I walk away through the crowd. Now all
I have to do is write the whole speech by tonight and somehow
make the story about the girl and the radios true by finding
something /like/ it that really happened. I'll need a newspaper
for this.
I come to an old four-story house/stable/boat-building in
fog. Pirate-like criminals have been successfully faking that
the building belongs to them, for long enough that by now it
might as well. I talk with them, carefully not angering them,
and take a tour of the building, holding my L-hands up in front
of my face like a camera, making a news show about the place and
its history. This is perfect; it has the girl, the radios,
everything. And pirates.
Next dream. Juanita and I are out at night in a strange
city. We walk down a path past a rich person's house to go to
the beach. The path curves around behind the house. They're
half-finished making a fence by piling up horse-head-size
stones.
Juanita vanishes from my attention. I'm in the back yard of
the house. I find the rich man suffocating by a garden project.
I clear his airway, start him breathing again. I think he might
have had a heart attack, too, but his heart is beating okay now.
I carry him up the outside stairs past a servant girl who was
just watching; she didn't care that he was dying, because he had
been mean to her. /I understand. He will understand too. He
won't fire her./
Later, inside, upstairs, the rich man is up and around; in
gratitude for saving his life he offers me the little house
/over there/ for Juanita and me to live in. I think about it;
I'm sure the man will forget after awhile --maybe a year or
two-- and kick us out... But he's not offering the house; he's
offering to put me through school in the big gray building past
the house. Hmm.
A little blonde boy like A****in Skywalker in the later
(earlier in story time) /Star Wars/ movies is all excited about
soon going to school. This room in the big house now has a very
low ceiling; despite that, I show the boy that I can clench my
fists and lift both feet up off the floor.
The man comes back in with a steamer trunk and takes out
old-fa****oned exercise equipment to give to me for school gym
class: small iron dumbbells, an alligator-like
neck-pillow/towel-thing-- things he had when he was in school.
He goes away again. The little boy takes from the trunk a ****ny
plastic-leather jacket with points everywhere, pointed lapels,
pointed shoulders. I say, "You want that? 'Cause I don't."
I've been turned into the boy's twin. I experiment and find
that I can still fly-- "I still have my powers!" The boy says
nothing. I say, "I can teach you how." He says, "I prefer to
swim." I say, "Okay, of course, but I don't understand why
anybody wouldn't want to fly."
Time for school. We troop with other kids to the stairs to
go there. I step into the air and fly down the stairs. My twin
is all embarrassed and pretends he doesn't know me.
Years later my twin and I are ten or twelve years old. We're
the school newspaper's star re****ters. We go to the police
station in City Hall and find that our school-paper-donated
free-food table has been taken away and the sign has been
changed to make it seem there never was a free-food table. My
twin is all for storming into the mayor's office and making a
fuss, but I tell him to leave it to me and I remind him that we
were going fi****ng later; he should go now. I wait till he's all
the way out of the building and I find the sergeant on duty and
talk /very respectfully/ to him. I show him the sign, show him
where the table should be, will him to /be on my side, be on my
side in this matter./
Next dream. In a single-person office on the second floor of
a college building I have a ten-gallon water-heater-like thing
that has im****tant future technology in it. An evil enemy woman
disguised to seem harmless comes to pick it up and take it away.
She acts like she's the one it's supposed to go to. I'm like,
/Not so fast, honey./ The impatient evil in her shows through
her disguise. I shout, "Help! Help!" She goes away down the
hallway and into a door on the right --to change completely into
her fully dangerous self?
Now I'm a woman teacher. I grab the water heater, run down
the hall, past the evil woman's room, run downstairs, outside
and around the back, then jump into the air and fly the water
heater away toward a distant group of other buildings. The evil
enemy woman bursts out onto the roof behind me as an evil
version of Illya Kuryakin in /The Man From U.N.C.L.E./; he sees
I'm getting away with the magic water heater. He makes a face
like /Curses, foiled again/ and goes back down inside the
building.
Next dream. I'm driving downhill in a four-lane-wide tunnel.
In the rearview mirror I see that the yellow taxi following me
has no driver or passengers. Crooks appear in another taxi, come
even with me on my right and shoot at me. A brown car gets
involved. I speed up and brake to confuse the people shooting.
After the tunnel, in an underground city, /this/ time the
mime/acrobat street performer is accosted by aggressive
criminals at a slightly different time, so I'm not in perfect
time to stop them, I don't get the business card, don't know to
go to the other street and private-detective-help the
black-haired girl-- nothing happens but that I chase the
criminals away; there's no more story. Not like last time.
My dreams from Thursday, 2007-11-15:
First dream. A low-level rock star owns a grocer store like
Safeway in Fort Bragg (CA) when it was where the RiteAid drug
store on Main is now, and he constantly makes changes in the
operation of the store that are related to his fame, so his
brother, who really does the actual managing and work, is pushed
to the background in a way that is almost but not quite fair.
I'm here to interview the rock star. I start to talk to the
not-famous brother, and the rock star grabs everyone's attention
by switching on a six-foot-high number display made of light
bulbs. He says, "Whaddaya think o' /that/!" I say, "The numbers
ought to frizz," meaning that it would be more interesting if
when the numbers changed, an electrical-problem effect could be
fired behind them. The rock star thinks about this, and also
looks thoughtful about the way he's been using his brother and
not giving him credit.
Later, outside, across the street, there's an elaborate
concert-event gate of giant chains with tire-size plastic links.
Past the gate, on the left, Doug Nunn and Steve Weingarten and a
big crew are taking tem****ary concert buildings apart. They have
several garage-size roofs down on the grass and are tearing the
corrugated metal off them. A red-haired girl wearing a tool-belt
has just unbolted the last roof; when it's lifted off she jumps
down carelessly and twists her ankle.
I go to one of the roofs and use a two-by-four as a pry-bar
to help three or four others pull metal off it.
Next dream. A big goofy warrior guy (someone from the roof
crew in the previous dream) and I carry an intact metal and
truss-rafter roof over our heads, running tirelessly through
fields, past big dead oak trees.
Supernatural-war refugee families are going back to their
home country on horseback. They'll take the dangerous road we've
warned them against. They won't be persuaded not to; they're the
boss of themselves. I'm about ten years old here. I convince a
friend, one of the refugees, to stay behind. He and I ride fast
to get back behind the fence gate; bad creatures are coming.
We don't make it to the gate. We have to fight the bad
creatures, using twelve-foot-long saws. We're doing okay;
knocking them off their horses and sawing at them. They're just
regular people now. Others on our side have come to fight, and
the enemy people see that we're uncomfortable about sawing into
them. Somehow without speaking they tell us that they pass into
other bodies when these are ruined, the way Cylons do; they say
this to dishearten us further, but the warrior guy from before
says something to them that confuses them so they stand there
thinking while we saw them up. I pull and push my big saw and
cut into a man's shoulder, then into his neck... I'll make one
saw stroke but another in the same place doesn't seem right. I
really don't want to do this anymore, but I have to. We have to
win.
Much later in the same place no-one believes our stories
about what we went through in those days. Kids never understand
their grandparents' wars.
Next dream. The food prep area of a big restaurant is up in
like the choir loft. The dining room below is filling up with
people. A prep-cook girl wants the bucket of chopped onions; I
look for it in the walk-in cooler and discover that I have no
clothes on. I'm supposed to go downstairs and be second cook on
the line along the wall of the dining room. I think of putting a
full apron on and just going there and working, but-- someone
would notice; I'd better not.
I wander around in the building. It's bigger and bigger. A
door is open to a hallway off the main hallway; way back there
stairs go up even farther --I point this out to another
restaurant person walking by, as though it's a big amazing
surprise.
I go with another employee to the end of the first hallway,
which becomes the alley-street that MacCallum House is on in
Mendocino (CA). I tell the girl to say, when she goes back to
work, that I've just gone home to get my clothes. To show how
much of a loyal-worker rush I'll make to get there and back, I
step into the air and start to /fly/ north, but flying is slower
than walking; it's like swimming. Feh.
As I strain to go a little faster I somehow overhear the
restaurant manager saying on the telephone, "We'll try his
little brother." Fine; my (dream-only) little brother can have
the job.
Flying is pointless. I land and walk north through strange
streets. Now I have white underwear on. I pass a cafe that has
tables out on a regular narrow sidewalk; a man at a table says,
"/Disgusting./" His girlfriend looks an apology at me.
I come to a failed industrial area. There's a mountain in
the way of continuing south. Fly up there? or go over to that
highway?
Where am I? Where is this place?
Oh, well.
-end-
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