My dreams from Friday, 2007-11-30:
First dream. Mendocino (CA) is rudimentary, fields and shapes, no
businesses or buildings. I find an ice chest with no ice of course but
there's soda pop in it. I get a Pepsi out and open it; it's okay that I
have this rather than turn the chest in intact. (You're supposed to turn
in found artifacts from before the erasure.)
In the field where the pharmacy should be are two tall towers each
made of three wooden poles bound together at the top; one of the towers
has like a tree house at the top and an enclosed stairwell. A woman
keeps a library up there. I go up and look around at the handwritten
books. The whole tower wiggles alarmingly when someone's walking on the
stairs. A man comes up and I recognize him-- he's the creepy fox-faced
little man who in real life stole an antique book from me in 1987; it
was a hundred-year-old leatherbound /Oahspe/.
The librarian goes downstairs on business and I go with her, leaving
the creep up there; if he steals anything I'll just take it from him
when he comes down. At the foot of the stairs an old fisherman presents
to the woman his latest journal.
There's an earthquake-- the pole opposite the stairwell lifts out of
the ground; the tower falls over. The woman, the old man and I are
unharmed.
Later my friend Mitch and I walk around looking at the fallen tower
(retroactively there was only the one). I pace off one of the intact
poles: thirty-two steps; so it was about ninety feet tall.
Next dream. I'm a skiing instructor. Two loose skis zoom past where
I'm standing. I skate-ski downhill to build up great speed and catch
them, but I never get there-- or rather I get there but I'm not there
yet.
Next dream. I'm walking with a woman and a man in the rain uphill
from the Mendocino of the first dream. I guide them down to the place
where the tower fell; now there's only the concrete foundation. The
woman is overcome with emotion, and she's /cold/. I consider tele****ting
her back to where we met, but that might be even more of a shock for
her. The man and I take off our coats, drape them around her and lock
our wrists together for her to sit. We carry her back up the hill.
Farther uphill east of town (such as it is), a powerful, clever
fifty or sixty year old woman runs an office upstairs in her
stack-of-cubes wooden house. I think the woman is singer Lavender Kent
at that age. Lots of hippie types hang around outside. I sell my kayak
to (dead) Tina Seidell and lift it off my car for her; as I maneuver it
around to set it down, the round knob on the nose of it pokes into where
Tina pissed by a fence post. The knob becomes separate; I wave for Tina
to see that I know she pissed there. This is my way of saying I won't
tell, but don't do it again; go farther away from the house.
Wait-- this is not my kayak; it's a pedal-operated contraption with
sprockets and a series of propelling vanes radiating from a chain. It
has no way to float; I see that it needs to be bolted to two floats, one
on each side. /I want this./ Maybe I can get my kayak and make Tina take
it and I'll keep this thing... No. This is what she thought she was
paying for; this is what she gets.
The phone rings on the covered ****ch. A hippie kid gets it and says
it's for [he points up]. I go inside, upstairs, and say to the woman,
"It's your mother, I think," to make her drop her work and answer it,
because otherwise she might not. She picks up her phone, listens for a
moment, then says, "Yeah. Mom, you know what happened? The Time Machine
fell down." (That was their private term, when she was small, for the
pole tower with the library on top.)
My dream from Sunday, 2007-12-02:
I'm a present-day police inspector browsing a nonverbal database of
robotic/AI technology given (left by) future people --the other
possibility is that they weren't future people at all and were strangers
who mean us harm and we've been tricked into /stealing/ the information.
Multiple windows open into different degrees of complexity that somehow
corroborate each other, but only to the level picked-- no magic advance
is explained/revealed/apparent, yet the result is obviously way ahead of
what we've produced. Or is it faked?
I keep clicking on different windows and deciding one way then the
other.
My dreams from Monday, 2007-12-03:
First dream. There are two open cans of strange food. I try a
forkful from one and say something friendly-sarcastic about the other
people in the room. A big dangerous boy takes it the wrong way and
mumbles something like, /Where's it say that in the food can?/ but not.
I can't understand him. He mumbles his angry thing again and again,
working himself up to attack. I step up onto the chair behind me and
kick the boy in the face, knock him over backward.
I woke to dim red fla****ng cloud blotches in the darkness, got up
and got a drink of water, went back to bed.
Asleep again. Next dream. People are on a steep hillside above a
cliff; the hill is like the loge area of a theater, where the lower
areas are a dark river valley. A policeman arrests a boy --not the boy I
kicked in the previous dream; another boy I kicked-- and he charges the
boy with being a terrorist. I tell the policeman, "I kicked /him/ down."
The policeman, angry at being contradicted, comes to arrest me, moves
around downhill from me and bats overhead at my face with something
rolled up in his hand-- a magazine? I shove him and his thug helper
backward down the hill to tumble and fall off the cliff.
Different groups of 1930s-style gangsters are coming into a
speakeasy for a truce night of fun. A gangster tells a fast, complicated
story about a woman with very hairy legs. I say, "It'd be like doing
this..." (I rub my arm.) He thinks about it and says slowly, "I get what
you mean." I give him and his party a roll of steak tickets and wave
them inside from the parking garage.
Next dream. I and a lot of others are putting on a magic and music
show in a theater in a warehouse, so the performers are all around and
the audience sits in the middle in folding chairs turned all different
ways. Cartoonist Mervin Gilbert plays a song on piano then botches his
part of the magic show by messing up the fuses on some firework sticks.
I put out the wicks/fuses by spitting on my fingers and pressing the
wicks out, and I pull two dangerous Roman candles (the sticks?) away
from the piano seat, on strings, and fling them over the room divider to
the part of the place where there's nobody to be hurt. I make a speech
to the polite crowd: "Come back and see us again. Tell your friends.
/Nothing/ in the last ten minutes went right, and /that is remarkable!/"
Juanita and I are driving on a freeway whose directions and lanes
are educational categories marked on overhead freeway signs that move
around by themselves at freeway speed. We decide on lectures by a famous
man and drive that way, now in separate cars, both of us worried about
being left behind by the others. (?)
Now there are no cars. About twenty of us are on an educational
nature trip. There's a food buffet outdoors, with big pieces of breaded,
fried chicken and different kinds of sandwiches, each item wrapped in
plastic and with a printed label of details. I look through the food for
the highest ratio of ounces per dollar. An older professor-like man
takes bread and cheese for free from the end of the table where nothing
is wrapped. I think about doing that /and/ getting a sandwich.
Gloria is here. I pick up a Mendo Cristo sandwich (fried ham and
cheese on fried egg-wetted bread, with hot mustard) and say, "This kind
was always my favorite." Gloria says, "How's work?" I tell about being
fired from the vanity publi****ng house. (In real life that was 1998; in
the dream it's recent.) Gloria says, "That explains-- I said something
about you and John froze up." I say, "He should only live and be well,"
which sounds like something Jews might say, so I add, "That's what the
Jews say."
I'm in the woods uphill from the buffet with Juanita. She finds a
time-lapse-speed-growing patch of dandelions and grass and everyone
comes here to see. I still didn't get any food. I go back down that way
and Juanita's mother has just shown up. I point uphill and tell her to
go there; that's where everyone is. But she follows me farther downhill
to the edge of a /really deep, vast valley/ with huge futuristic
buildings in the bottom, and lakes, practically seas. I say to Juanita's
mother, "I just have to see down there real fast." I jump out and
fall/fly down. From the bottom I see someone sliding down a track in the
snow and ice and I think it's Juanita's mother, but it turns out to be
musician Johnny Bush. He slides out onto a frozen lake of something
colder and softer than ice, super-cold ice, and stops sliding by pulling
out a sword and stabbing it down behind him. He's here /in the past/ to
see his friend.
I go with him through an empty hospital built in horse stalls. I
really have to piss; where can I? Not in one of the stalls/rooms. Here's
the kind of toilet you'd expect to find in a horse barn; I go in and
piss with firehose force; it just goes on and on. Finally I finish and
wash my hands, and I duck my head under water in the sink and run my
hands for a comb through my hair and come out.
An enemy with a sword is here. I spin like a top, make him flinch
back blinded by the water from my hair, and I fly up and land behind a
tree. Another enemy is coming, /he/ sees me hiding here. I go to Johnny
Bush and offer to carry him up to the other world, but he won't go; he
has to see his friend. I can't fly carrying two people; I have to stay
and help fight.
Next dream. I'm trying to find a house/town/land, a vague place that
I know is somewhere in /this/ direction. I'm driving in hills and
mountains. At one point the dirt road I'm on goes uphill then sharply
down; I have to trust that there's more road on the down side and not a
chasm. The car tips down, and-- there's more road.
I come to an odd, small, tourist-oriented town during a popular
festival. I get out of the car and point my finger to direct the car to
park itself across the cul-de-sac; it becomes a combination of a
convertible old ****che and a B-type MG. I go over and sit in it; it's
littered with sheets of aluminum foil between and behind the seats. Why?
I leave the car and wander around, looking for somewhere to buy a
map. The post office? No. Mineral shops? Food booths? No maps.
Okay, this isn't the place. I drive the little MG out of town and
have to go up on the edge of the main street to get around five men
marching abreast with brass instruments. Just out of town I and someone
else walk and then crawl along a narrow cliff ledge. Here's a miserable
wolf-dog tied up with no water or food. We set it free.
Now I'm in bed with my mother's friend Lucy. A lot of strangers are
all around, sitting in wooden chairs, talking. /I have to get out of
here./ Lucy grabs me and kisses me on the mouth; I kiss back, but the
instant it's over I get up and pull my pants on. She's angry and hurt
that I want to leave. /But I don't belong here./ Things become vague.
I'm driving through a strange valley of shopping centers and parking
lots. I pass a giant sad bedraggled white bird that's just standing
there, the size of a house, breathing, bent over, dark circles under its
eyes.
In hills a soldier hides in thorn bushes from other-side soldiers
marching past on a trail. He moves and is detected and snatched up. An
enemy officer paints black around the man's eyes in preparation to kill
him. /I can kill them all. Should I? To save one man?/
An early-1970s Ford Bronco is stuck nose-down in a ditch for a video
shoot for a television advertisement. The children of the people on the
video crew are playing around a dirt track across the side of the hill.
I walk on the track. No-one pays any attention to me but a little girl
like Sarah Polley as she looked in the Terry Gilliam movie /The
Adventures of Baron Munchausen/; she says something childishly
disparaging of my look (my clothes, I'm old, something). I walk backward
away from her and say, "But I can fly." /Oh! Well, that's different./
She runs to me, becomes a college-age girl and takes my hand. I count to
three, we step into the air and fly fast between and over miles and
miles of trees in lovely cool fog and end up in a place like Toluca Lake
(L.A. area) when I was little.
Her husband wants to fly now. Okay. I hold hands with him; we fly up
between buildings. I give the standard talk about avoiding power lines:
"If you brush by one, you might be okay, but if you touch two at once or
/hit/ one or hit the pole or one of these towers, it's like a bug in a
bug zapper." We come to a miniaturized, quaint version of the Warner
Brothers little city of movie soundstages. I say, "I dream a lot of
this place." We go through places where people are working on movie
sets and making props. Some men are making a landscape of craggy rocks
out of wire mesh and plaster.
The alleys between the buildings become covered over. I fly us to a
place where a window is covered with wire mesh and just pull it loose
and go through to get out. Now I'm with the girl again.
Movie tech people on their break are having a picnic in a very small
park. The sun has come out. Only an old sea-captain-like carpenter can
see the girl and me in the air. I pick up a white enamel coffee pot and
wave it around in figure-eights while the man pretends to do magic to
direct its flight. It's just his old trick; none of the others are
interested or impressed, but it pleases him.
-end-
|
