My dreams from Tuesday, 2007-12-11:
First dream. Juanita get up early in the morning from
sleeping next to Franklin Street in Fort Bragg (CA), in a little
grass park where the Sears store should be. It's a special day,
a town festival of something arty. We walk south through town,
past at least a dozen restaurants. We don't have any money.
It's a film festival. A strange man gives Juanita two
tickets (that I just saw him throw into a trash basket and then
take back out). They're tickets to a show in Los Angeles. Los
Angeles is 500 miles away. Of course she wants us to go.
It's what she wants, so here we go, walking.
Next dream. We're in the show, in a mostly depopulated
minimalist version of Los Angeles. We play a ritual elaborate
game with two boys, that involves writing words on a notepad,
from a choice of endless words appearing on a line in the air. I
get an idea for a shortcut to win: "Let's write them as we read
them," (and only have to think about and memorize the ones we
choose, not the others). Also, we won't play the part where
we're supposed to go into the next empty soundstage, and so not
have to avoid the big rocks our opponents catapult over the wall
into there.
Juanita vanishes. I'm in the falling-rocks-danger place.
Another boy here suggests that we just turn off the lights, as
though that will solve the problem. I say no. Everyone is really
disappointed. /Sorry./
I fly in a horizontal concrete cylinder, a squat section of
culvert with a bench in it, into a futuristic valley city, and I
find that the focus of a giant parabola of buildings (an energy
gun?) is a rich political cheater's glass office across the
valley. Hmm.
I land my concrete craft to rescue an alien mantis creature.
The modern white gangster businessman political guy says, "Just
this once I'll let you leave, but if you ever fly into this area
again I'll..." (What? Shoot me?)
Now I'm on foot in the future city. Others are here for the
film festival. My group comes to John McCain's campaign
headquarters, which are like the political booths in the
Minnesota State Fair in a video I saw two weeks ago on John
Lileks' website. Oh, here's a show-- but no tickets are
available; you're supposed to have paid in advance. I deal with
John McCain to get all five? eight? of us in with him, and I do
it so slickly that he thinks /he's/ getting a deal.
I woke up with the song /Second Chance/ by 38 Special
playing in my head-- the part where it goes, "When love makes a
sound, baby..."
Asleep again. Next dream. My mother drives us down a
grown-over version of where we lived when I was in sixth grade.
Green grass has grown all the way across the road; I say, "Go a
little slower. Grass is slippery." I think she's taking us to a
hardware store or a light-fixture store like where she used to
go to get things to dress up houses she was trying to sell for
the real estate company when I was five.
We go through hills above the ocean; I get a view from high
up that we're coming to where there'll be fences and locked
gates. I say, "Hold onto the steering wheel and don't move," and
I fly the car up to go over all obstacles. My mother releases
the steering wheel and dangles a shotgun between her knees, idly
swinging it back and forth. (The car has no floor, here.) I say
sarcastically, "Okay, /let/ go of the steering wheel." I land
us by an excited wildly-waving boy who runs after us into a
ranch house.
Now it's me, my mother and the man and woman of the house.
The man is edgy, cagey; he doesn't want to do what my mother
wants-- my mother becomes a tiny mouse and hides behind the
front-left caster of the television stand. The man says, "We
have a contract. You have to give me the money."
Oh, is /that/ all. I magically produce a handful of money,
give it to him and say, "Here's a thousand dollars. Tell me when
you've used it up." He still doesn't want to honor his word,
but now he has to; he goes into the kitchen and comes back with
spinach-like ivy leaves. He says it's year-'round ground cover,
it holds the soil well and requires no care. My mother becomes a
person again.
Later the contractor's family is having a holiday-dinner
day. My mother cooks something special for them and p***** trays
of it out. My pants are speckled with tomato sauce; I take them
off and put them back on inside-out and-- they're still speckled
with tomato sauce.
The television plays generic television sounds while
everyone looks through the family's photo albums, which are full
of the same photographs every family has.
In a department store a big well-off Mexican/Italian family
gathers for an event in the 1960s-console-television department.
I'm drawn in by an aggressive woman for a part where she's
supposed to have a dance partner to be photographed with,
looking at a big television box. I sit on the box across from
it. The woman doesn't sit down; she wraps her big arm around my
head and pulls me against her so my eyes are covered; she talks
to me in loud funny/***y Spanish and makes kissy-kissy noises. I
worry that her husband (?) will get upset and attack me, as if I
initiated this whole thing to humiliate him.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2007-12-12:
First dream. A story about baseball evokes a spooky,
bluish-gray, photographic-negative image. It's about a woman
baseball player on an otherwise all-man team. It starts over,
only /this/ time through the story the coach takes the woman, a
Nellie Bly (re****ter) character, out of the game and puts a man
in. I wonder 1. how do coaches make a decision like that without
knowing how well people will play after being scared they'll be
taken out --or do they even take that into account? and 2. how
does someone make so good a story that, just by hearing it,
everyone sees the same 1890s baseball team in the negative, and
everyone gets the same spooky feeling?
This all feels like a cross between the movies /The
Prestige/ and /Memento/.
Next dream. I've just flushed the most reliable toilet among
all the ones paraded past me to choose from, but it fills up to
near overflowing, stopped by just a little toilet paper. I go to
use the plunger I find behind it, and now the toilet is tilted
at a forty-five-degree angle, settled into a collapsed
waterlogged particleboard floor.
Now the toilet is fine, right-side-up. It's mine, in my
bathroom. Juanita has come to the coast to stay at my house for
a few days, and she got up before I did and went, I think,
through the woods to Jerry's house. /I'm jealous that he'll talk
with her and she'll have a nice time over there./ I go in that
direction-- go directly that way, because in the dream my house
has no walls-- and there's Jerry in bed on the end of a long
peninsula of my house's platform. He wakes up. Juanita's not
there; she was never there.
Now my house (fresh plywood platform) is a bakery in
Medieval times. Bakers and apprentices covered with flour move
dough in all directions in heavy oak wheelbarrows.
Next dream. I'm walking south from like Fort Bragg (CA), but
with no town here, to try to get home to Albion, with no hopeful
expectation that Albion will be there either. It's cold winter;
I'm wearing a down-filled puffy sleeping bag or bedspread over
my shoulders under a loose raincoat. I tuck the sleeping bag
tightly around myself and hold the outer coat closed. I have no
pants or socks; my shoes are stiff and unstable, made of wood.
I come to Caspar. There's the Caspar Inn; I almost avoid it,
embarrassed to be seen dressed like this, but /maybe someone
there is about to drive south and I can get a ride./ Inside the
Caspar Inn I lean on a pinball machine and listen to writer Jeff
Fanning's story about the rock-pile wharf he used to fish from
before a [drug experience? political transgression?] (something
to do with looking up at the sun) caused him to lose his fi****ng
job and be banned from there. I say, "Boy, I know what /that's/
like."
A woman who professionally rides edible wingless flying
dragon things flies around on a new kind of dragon that they're
breeding for mass consumption. This test-dragon is obviously not
as obedient or intelligent as the other kinds. She
parallel-parks is on the street in San Francisco in the space of
three cars, gets off and talks self-deprecatingly to polite
Japanese re****ters about her job in general and specifically
about this dragon. The dragon is restless; it takes off without
her, zooms around, flies in figure-eights. The woman says, "See?
Like that. But all they're concerned with is the taste."
My dreams from Thursday, 2007-12-13:
First dream. A strange girl and I are in an airplane hangar
that has like a garage sale of antique sound equipment (from the
1970s and 1980s). A rich woman wanders around, asking what
/this/ was used for, and what /this/ was used for. I tell her
about how we used to make sound effects and record and mix music
in the old days.
The girl becomes my (dead) stepbrother Craig. A bad man
who's been hunting Craig catches up with him here. I protect
Craig by pulling out a big pistol and telling the man to drop
his gun. We have a standoff that resolves with everyone just
sheepishly agreeing not to shoot. (I'm only pretending to be
sheepish about it, to make the other person not feel tricked, to
make the agreement last.)(Essentially, I'm lying in order to be
trusted.)
More people are here. The hangar is huge, the size of two
rural towns with forest between them. I've agreed to make sound
effects for Pam's play in the other town and another play in
this one, both at the same time. The girl (she's the girl again
and not Craig) can split the work with me so this is possible.
We go over the list of sounds; one is, "Like professor is a
low lizard slug. 10-sec." That shouldn't be too hard-- there's a
low lizard slug right there on the concrete; just record it with
one of these tape recorders.
I become fascinated by a suitcase stereo system on a coffee
table. It's all unclipped and separated-- two speakers and the
record player, all covered in woodgrain formica. Kids are
running all around; Pam yells from the other town for me to get
there and start.
I sit down fast in a balletic move and put on and tie my
tennis shoes. A little boy from the local-town play rehearsal
asks me seriously, "Why do you like those shoes?"
Next dream. There's a metal airplane hangar in an empty big
flat green land. I'm here getting my employer Tim's ultralight
airplane ready to fly for (dead) Judi Bari to take it away.
There's only one can of gasoline here; it's been here a long
time with the top off, so it's mostly eva****ated and it has dirt
in it, but it's a /big/ can. I use a t-****rt and a thick
cardboard tube to filter the gas as I pour it into the
airplane's tank. Exactly full. Perfect. Except that's only one
of the tanks; there's another on the other end of the wing, and
that one is all the way empty. I should have balanced it out.
/Maybe there's a valve to let one tank leak into the other; that
would be close to the engine./ I go looking for that.
The ragtag but large enemy army is coming; Judi Bari has to
leave /now/. At first she'll fly the other way from the way she
wants to go, so the army will follow and go neither where she's
going nor to the hangar, so we can still use this place.
I wake from sleep next to Juanita on green grass under a
tree in the wettest, greenest part of this big flat place, which
now is bounded on two sides by huge rock cliffs and on a third
side by the ocean (in a view like looking west from up Ten Mile
River). It's getting dark; there's a Maxfield-Parrish-blue sky.
Skyscraper-tall ancient ruins of stone arches with delicate
antenna-like spires and crosses on top (all stone) stand on the
hills near the ocean; I wake Juanita to show her the ruins and
the sky and those beautiful cliffs; it would be so wonderful to
fly past those cliffs... Uh, /why did we go to sleep? We have to
get the airplane away!/ I say, "Come on, hurry." We run north
(toward Tim's hangar), cross marshland and shallow creeks. We go
through a quaint shopping center of small shops; Juanita keeps
stopping to look at things --fabric, a jacket. I say, "No! Come
on!" (Now I'm carrying the airplane under my arm and have been
all along; since giving up trying to get the gas to go from one
tank to the other I've been just keeping alert* for an
op****tunity to get some more gas somewhere. *Except for falling
asleep.)
We get to the hangar and it's too late; the barbarian enemy
general and his son are already here, and the general has a
wheeled machine gun that somehow is the size and shape of a
dorm-room refrigerator. I pick the general up (he's about four
feet tall and dressed in Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider clothes)
and I swing him by the ankles and smash and smash him against
wall sup****t beams and the concrete floor until he's only the
canvas clothes without a person inside, surely and completely
dead.
Does his son have the cannon now? No. Now it's a guitar
amplifier in a carpet-covered speaker cabinet, and he's
interested in it. I say, "I'll show you how that works." He'll
need a guitar.
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /I Feel Fantastic/
playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm in the same beautiful wide
green valley as in the previous dream. I use sticks to make a
model, designing a place to sit in the ultralight airplane
(which, before, you sort of dangled beneath in a harness that
went around under your arms). The seat goes on these rails,
here, and can slide forward and backward to balance whatever
weight you put in it, one or two riders, or a pilot and, I
dunno, some bombs. I visualize the plane flying overhead and
past the cliffs, doing aerobatic tricks. Would it be strong
enough? Why wouldn't the engine just break off of it?
Now I'm a woman, the ex-wife of a cross between my (dead)
stepfather Roland and man like Colonel Tigh in the post-2000
version of /Battlestar Galactica/. Carrying my finished,
full-size airplane under my arm I cross the marsh to the hangar,
surprise Colonel Tigh as he comes out of the bathroom, hug him
goodbye. He's miserable that I intend to leave him again when I
just got here, but he gives me all the gasoline he has, enough
to fill the empty left-side tank. A good man.
I reconsider the balance point for the bench-seat and slide
it farther forward on the rails.
Time has passed. It's late at night. I'm alone in the
hangar. The airplane is a lot more complicated and has
headlights in boxy nacelles on both sides of the seat; the
nacelles are almost as big as the whole wing above them. Well,
that's just dumb. Cut all that extra crap off. Put the lights on
the wing. Stand back and admire it. What else can I take away or
change or add to make it better? /Or was that what I was
thinking when I put those stupid light-nacelles on?/
Next dream. It's night. I'm in a sleazy, low, spread-out
desert town, like the town in /Touch Of Evil/. I leave my
one-room upstairs apartment here to just get out and get some
air; I've been in the room a week? more?, sleeping off being
sick or detoxing from being drugged. I come to a motel sign with
no motel. I go down an alley to a pastel-green office. "I want a
room." The office woman walks me back out the alley, down the
block, around another corner and to a plaster house on a hard
dirt parking lot. She lets me in, says, "It's gonna be a hundred
dollars." She turns down the bed and hurries away. Things become
vague.
I get up out of bed and wander around the dim house. There
are old-people things all around: two folding wheelchairs, a
folded hospital-type privacy divider, etc. (It's like Nicole's
set for /The Gin Game/ but indoors, with a gray carpet.) It
occurs to me that people must usually stay overnight here until
they they can get their old relatives into the old-folks'
horror-hospital next door.
I think, /A hundred bucks; I'm gonna run a lot of hot water
and lie in the bathtub./ But the bathroom is disgusting; the
linoleum floor is wet and stained red-brown from bad water;
reddish s*** covers the standing water in opposite corners of
the twisted bathtub. No bath.
I go back to bed and my (dead) grandfather comes in the
outside door. I tell him about the hundred dollars and the
condition of the bathroom. He strips to his shorts and
under****rt and lies down next to me, weary.
Oh, right, I remember about the sheets; I tell him that when
I came here they had a blue plastic tarpaulin for sheets. (That
may still be; I'm lying in the bed but it doesn't occur to me to
look at the sheet.)
My grandfather says, "Shut that windah, willya?" I go to
the high window; on the floor beneath it and to the right, smoky
heat from something burning under the ground is coming up into
the house from a concrete-lined opening. Probably the window is
open to vent that so you don't suffocate. I close the window
almost but not all the way. My grandfather vibes at me to not
pay, but just leave in the morning. /You don't pay for treatment
like this; it would just encourage them./
Next morning I get up after sleeping-in long past checkout
time. It's afternoon. I think the old woman who ran the motel
scam must have died, so now the house is mine. Sheila of
Earl-and-Sheila is here with some other hippie women I associate
with the old Community School. They're cooking in the kitchen
loft (the house is much bigger than before). They've cleaned the
s*** out of the bathtub and used the tub to wash clothes. I find
my clothes hanging on a line out back and get dressed. The air
has that one-mental-syllable smell/feel of fruit trees,
sand-dust and bus exhaust. California Central Valley.
The yard has a yellow lawn now. I sit in a diner booth
against the wooden fence with some old workers. A man with a
squinty eye and a sunburned, ruined face tells me that there's
work for me but it's a long drive through the desert and it's a
week's work of twelve-to-fourteen-hour days. /Okay./ He doesn't
think I can do it. /I can do it./
Now I'm just under the top of like a fort's observation
platform made of rough beams. On one side is the town I was just
in; the other way is a broad expanse of flat valley with
incomprehensible industrial plants spotted around. I imagine
having a flying car with a bubble top and flying it up almost
out of sight from here and then sharply to the right, then
swooping around at faster than the speed of sound to make a
thunderous sonic boom all over the town and this tower and show
them all. /That would be so cool./
Other kids are on and in the tower with me, looking out. I
describe, to the kids on the next shelf up, my fantasy about
having a supersonic flying car, and I tell a little about how it
would work, how it would have to be surrounded in flight by a
force field with a perfectly aerodynamic shape to keep its
flimsy plastic body and bubble from ****vering apart.
Things change so I actually did fly over and sonic-boom
everyone, years ago, and then I left with my magic machinery,
and I did it because --no, wait; /somebody/ did it because of
childish rivalries and disputes that couldn't be resolved. The
kids who took over operation of this post-apocalypse fortress
town weren't ready for such power, so the flying-car person left
to find a society that /was/ ready. The nearest boy, just above
me and to the left, understands that I'm wistful about how we
might have had flying cars but we blew it. He says in perfect
time to my thinking it, "It would have been so easy to just get
along."
-end-
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