My dreams from Friday, 2007-12-14:
First dream. Juanita and I walk uphill on a wide street between rows
of two-and-three-story apartment buildings.
A pretty forty-something woman with long straight black hair rides a
manual wheelchair out a walkway to the road and stops to look through
her purse.
The road makes an L to the right. A sign warns of where an
eight-foot-long household-type LP-gas tank has sunk into the earth-- and
there's the tank, sunk into the earth.
I'm by myself now. Here's a big green house where my friend Mark
lives (in the dream only). (I half-remember living in that house years
ago.) The fence gate has a broken latch; I try to fix it with some bare
wire. The ceramics teacher from the Community Center in Mendocino asks
me, "What gauge wire?" I say, "Eighteen and fourteen." He says, "About
the same as the telephone system?" I say, "No. It's not even the same
kind of metal. /Duh./"
I experiment with waving a black, old fa****oned telephone handset
over torn bits of paper to pull loud shortwave-radio-tuning whistles and
squeaks out of them.
It's five after eight. (In the dream, my show starts at eight.)
/Dammit, late again./ I get in a junky old car, duck down low behind the
steering wheel and sleepily botch my intro, speaking into the telephone
handset. I drive away, holding the handset over the car's CD-player
turntable. It's playing a CD that becomes more cracked the longer I look
at it; finally it breaks into pieces.
Miles of telephone wire trail behind the car, out the open passenger
door. I stop in a turnout, get out, taking the CD deck with me, and use
my Swiss Army knife to pry the bits of broken CD off the sticky platter.
Next dream. I drive down Albion Ridge Road. As I pass the yellow
house whose back yard drops off sharply downhill, I see that the mile
marker sign has slipped down to lean against the house's mailbox post.
/I should fix that./ I stop, back up, leave the motor running and get
out. The marker has by now disappeared completely into the ground. Books
and left-behind-when-moved bits of trash are spread all around.
The car vanishes. I carry my little childhood dog Ferd in my arms
the rest of the way down to the highway. At about where Albion Grocery
should be, someone's standing on a tractor-truck's roof as if standing
guard over the parking lot. I climb up behind him and scare him and then
jump down.
The dog vanishes. Juanita is in a house at the corner; retroactively
we've both been here for hours. She's involved in a craft project,
knitting or macrame or something, and she doesn't want to leave. She
kisses the needs-a-shave lawyer guy who lives here, which doesn't make
me jealous at first, so much as just edgy that the more I want us to go
the longer she always takes in some more annoying way. /Fine, I'm
leaving, then./ I go outside into an Ornyte-sided mud room that connects
the house to its garage. I stand here. I go back into the house and say,
"Please, Juanita, can we go?" An old man and and a woman are lined up to
kiss Juanita when another woman is finished doing so. (!) I go back out
and this time I slam the door. Juanita comes out all happy and
pretending to be unaware of how peeved I am. I say, "I don't like that.
Can you fly? Because /I'm/ flying home." She can't fly; she doesn't
understand why I'm being so mean. The mud room becomes an Airstream
trailer. Juanita becomes sculptor R. Buzby, working on a small art
project made of boiled-animal glue and sticks. I go out and around the
nose of the trailer, fly up into fog and immediately have to swerve
embarassingly gracelessly to avoid power lines. I'm pretty sure
everybody saw that, too.
My dream from Saturday, 2007-12-15:
I'm in a long, narrow, dim, rainy-day-steamy cabin at the old Whale
School. The room is crowded with kids all making things out of paper and
sticks and glue. Singer Lavender Kent is here; she's the teacher. I have
a week to /write two plays/, and I'm thinking of subjects for plays and
rejecting them and thinking of more. I'm confident that I can do it.
Plays are hardly ever 20,000 words, so that's 30,000 words for both
plays, at, say --and let's be conservative here-- fifty words a minute
once I start writing, so: six hundred minutes. Ten hours. Easy.
One comedy and one drama.
My dreams from Sunday, 2007-12-16:
First dream. I'm carrying Swift sideways in a crowded corridor.
Someone pushes me from behind. I set Swift down --she's recovered from
her faint-- and we stand here kissing while people shove around us.
We're the same height, and somehow this allows me to see all around me.
When a man reaches out to push me I reach forward behind me with Swift's
arm to knock the man's wrist aside.
Vignette. A movie war scene of computer-generated armies stutters.
Next dream. Juanita, David Gealey from Headlands Coffeehouse and I
are in a narrow stainless-steel restaurant kitchen. I cook bacon and
eggs for David. Juanita is annoyed about something.
The restaurant's dining room is a deserted department store at
night. In the couch-bed department I use Word --the only software
available in the department counter's computer-- to lay out a
complicated eleven-by-seventeen political sheet for /someone else's
customer/. A man and a woman provided the text; should I put their names
in this odd white space /here/? No, their names are already on the page
somewhere-- I just saw them... If I saw them, they're there; stop
worrying about that.
I've been clever, using three Word files to have different numbers
of columns at different levels and fit blocks of text into each other
like puzzle pieces; the idea is to print file 01, then put the same
paper in again and print file 02, and then do the same thing for file
03. (Each file is a layer.)
Now the department store is the house where I lived when I was in
seventh and eighth grade. I go out to the living room to tell
singer/director Linda Pack that I've finished the layout job and that
I'll give her a paper proof and the Word files on a disk.
Linda Pack is counting colored bits of cloth for her mending
customers. I say what I came to say, but using words that sound like the
things she's trying to remember as she counts; this throws her off. I
say, "Sorry. Sorry." She says, "That's all right, I'm already done."
My dreams from Monday, 2007-12-17:
First dream. It's getting dark. I come to a corner of a field that
has eucalyptus trees around the edge. Lots of weird people are here
standing around, everyone looking in a different direction, like in a
Fellini movie. I fly up and /zoom/ back and forth just over their heads,
then twist up into the sky like a jet doing a falling barrel roll but
rising-- falling up.
Inside a soundstage or airplane hangar, people are getting ready to
put on a wedding or a coronation, an im****tant event. I demonstrate for
black service-staff people how I can fly down and up next to an orange
extension cord hanging from a light bar. Only a man stuck on a platform
up next to another light bar finds this interesting; I say to him, "I'll
show you how. You don't need the cord."
We're all prisoners. Somehow my flying around hasn't been noticed by
our captors, so I don't have any trouble getting loose and getting the
others out, but they've been prisoners for so long that a division of
labor, a pecking order, must be established: I say, "You do the part of
the job you want to and I'll do the rest."
We sit around talking about how nice it is to go skiing after
working so hard; during this I relive the exciting high-speed ski
adventure down through mountains that I had just before coming to the
field and eucalyptus trees in the first place.
Now I'm driving on a wet road at night. A car p***** me in a bad
place to do that, and a little later it tries to pass the car in front
of me. /I hope he crashes/, and then I wish he had crashed behind me,
before he passed me, because if he crashes now it might block the road.
/They don't ever crash when you wish they would./
The road becomes lines on the floor in an endless roadlike
commercial kitchen; people slide along standing up, moving the way cars
would on a road. Singer Sandy Glickfeld is here; she slides along next
to me, and she starts talking about my radio show. She says, "Some
people would take four times less money to be able to talk back to their
boss the way you do to Bob." I say, "I don't talk back to Bob." Sandy
says, "People say..." I say, "People say I'm sarcastic and mean. People
say a lot of things." Sandy digests this.
I follow orange extension cords to a nest of audio equipment on
wooden tables in a corrugated metal building and I sit down, spread out
my books and papers and magazines and things and start doing my show.
After I recite the intro and standard disclaimer I discover that I don't
have any public service announcements or lost-pet re****ts or anything
like that. Okay. I put on a Tom Waits song and carefully make a little
fire of redwood bark in a rectangular brick barbecue pit set right into
the linoleum floor.
Next dream. In a place like the street Leon's was on (my grandfather
used to walk with me to his friend Leon's soup diner in Burbank) I move
all my dream-only Gypsy group's camping stuff off the sidewalk and
around the corner of a concrete rail that walls in a triangle of green
grass. (I don't want anyone to come along and think our things are free
to take.) I separate out two changes of clothes and take them and a
thawing sealed bag of about two pounds of frozen baby shrimp across the
street, into a storefront apartment. I put the bag of shrimp in a big
stainless dishwa****ng sink where there's already ice and loose jumbo
shrimp.
Next dream. I get off work in a restaurant in a stereotypical
hillbilly mountain environment. In back of the restaurant I change into
a clean ****rt, collect bits of scrap lumber in a wheelbarrow and run and
then ski at car speed down a dust-dry dirt road on my flat shoes,
steering by turning the wheelbarrow handles like motorcycle handlebars.
I leave the main road and turn down a new roadcut that curves right, and
I come to a cabin where an old woman sits outside, sewing on a sewing
machine. There are cats everywhere. I deliberately /bump/ the
wheelbarrow to a stop to scare the cats, but they come and rub all
around my legs, all friendly.
I wanted to put the wood behind and below the cabin for Eth, the
dream-only girl I like here, but I'll put it with the old woman and
leave a note for Eth. I say to the woman, "What's Eth short for?" She
says, "Nothin'." Oh, so a code note won't work-- she can't read.
/Nobody here can read./ I tell the old woman that by this time next year
everyone on the mountain will know how to read. I will teach them to
read.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2007-12-18:
Next dream. I'm in a strange version of Mendocino (CA) that's like a
church camp. I come to the Community Center building with a big bag of
flour (or dry dog food) and a bundle of cloth. Jack Millis, who years
ago was KMFB's repair engineer, is working in a garden here with his
beautiful young girlfriend; he says he saw my mother buy me a musical
instrument for Christmas. I say, "Don't tell me what kind."
Across town to the south, but somehow in the same place, the camp
people are having a church service on what I think of as Barry's lawn.
My (dead) grandfather appears and shakes my hand. I put my other hand on
his and he puts his other hand on, and we stand here looking at each
other, attached by a big ball of our hands.
After the service I go to a firewood bin against the house and sit
on its plywood lid. A boy sits next to me. Some other kids come around.
I say, "I don't believe in any of that crap," waving at the church
people, "but matter is a dance of spacetime," meaning that it's often
hard to accept and at first a matter of belief that solid matter is
mostly empty space and math. I thump the heel of my hand on the plywood.
"See?" Yeah, they see.
I tell funny stories of episodes of /South Park/.
Next dream. I'm in a 1940s version of Fort Bragg (CA) at a foggy
summer holiday festival time, like Paul Bunyan Days but something else.
People wander around town. After browsing through thrift stores I go
down Redwood Avenue from a few streets up; in the middle of crossing
Franklin Street I jump, tumble up into the air, turn north and fly above
Franklin Street. Things become vague.
I go into a dim theater that has wooden seats. My mother is in a
seat about two-thirds of the way to the stage; she's arguing with some
people near her about something that she feels needs to be done. She has
her fill of their apathy and stands up to announce something but becomes
dizzy and collapses in slow motion. I run down through the theater,
stepping only on the tops of the backs of the seats, to catch her and
hold her up. The people who were right next to her all along just stand
there gawping; they would've let her hit her head on the ground or break
an arm. I say, "Get outta the way," and I help her out to the aisle and
out.
Now I'm at about Franklin and Laurel Streets, but it also seems like
more the middle of town, like around Oak. I fly toward the ocean,
skimming through a dumb crime paperback book. I sit on a tilted bar sign
two stories up, leave the book here and fly up into the fog.
The parking lot across Redwood Street from Lee's Chinese is being
used as a food court. I cut and dice green onions to put on a chili-dog
for Sandy Glickfeld --this reminds me of a (dream-only) time I wore
white plastic-fiber pants for kitchen work and onion juice made the left
pants-leg transparent from the front left pocket to the knee; I see this
in closeup.
I'm behind a line of food tables. A boy wants something-- what?
ice? I say, "You want ice? Take what you want." He tips the ice-chest
lid up too far and spills four packages of green peas down inside.
I go with my mother around the block north and west; she leads me to
where there are seats for us. Sandy Glickfeld is at this table. Good.
Next dream. A tour bus trip starts from the L of the road at the
south end of Caspar (CA) and goes north. A whole-town-size theater show
is playing, that I wrote and organized and cast and directed but don't
remember even the tiniest part of. A goofy/retarded little
greasy-black-haired man laughs in an embarrassing way as he crosses the
road in front of the bus. I say, "I can do that laugh." The people
near me in the bus are all like, /Do it, then./ I wait till we pass him
and get a little away --I don't want to hurt his feelings-- then I cut
loose: "Gahilk! A-hyulk a-hilk!" /Exactly./
I'm riding facing the open back of the bus. 1970s-movie-***-like
dialog and music retreat behind us over the hill down to Caspar Creek.
As the bus crosses Highway 1 at Jughandle Farm, it becomes an
open-sided train and turns southeast. There's no engine; the cars have
their own power. I'm in the middle of the second car back, facing
forward now. We pass a weird Basset-hound-like dog-shark-thing that has
Bob's-Big-Boy-cartoon-style wedges of light reflection in its eyes,
which are on the dog's flat side looking up-- it's like a flat fish. A
normal Basset hound runs out of the train's way then runs along next to
the train. I put my foot out to ward the dog away from getting under the
wheels. "Go home! Go home!"
There's something here about a person who's lost his dog, that's
just like this one, and somehow the dog will be reaching Canada soon. I
think about some simple rules to tell the person about getting the dog
/right away/ when the Canadians write to say they have it. Maybe just
"Don't wait."
A magazine ad goes along with this. The picture is divided
diagonally. In the top-right corner is a dog in a suitcase cage being
carried to, I suppose, either another cage or to the gas chamber; that's
in Canada. In the low-left corner a young 1950s-looking couple in like
Nevada or New Mexico has been discussing what to do; they're inclined to
wait a while before getting the dog --the young man is obviously
mouthing, /Relax./ The only actual text in the ad counters the young
people's bad attitude. It says, "Be a friend and don't." (Don't relax.)
-end-
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