My dreams from Wednesday, 2007-12-19:
First dream. In a story, a man has committed murder, but did
the other person, the victim, even exist? Or the man was goaded
to fight back against an imaginary person and his /fighting
back/ hurt or killed a real person... Maybe both those things.
I'm the man in the story. A demonic version of counselor
Steve Siler hounds me.
In an indoor swimming-pool/jacuzzi/sauna a man and a woman
are talking in deaf sign language while having ***. I've just
come in from the cold and I'm freezing; I want to get in the hot
water. I wish the people would hurry up and finish. (If I'm
going to be arrested I want at least to have had a hot bath.)
At an outdoor swimming pool next to a two-story Googie-style
motel, army police make trouble for me and my generic friend. I
push two policemen into the pool and then push the third one in,
keeping my friend, who was being strangled, from falling in with
him. The police all still have their guns. I have a
stretched-out period of time here to think about whether a wet
gun can fire. /It probably can./
Next dream. There's been a huge economic and/or physical
disaster. I drive down out of mountains and park my car near
some service buildings at the entrance to a national park.
Everyone will be coming this way to go across /that bridge/,
which has something wrong with it and needs repair, so this
place will likely become a refugee town.
A sign by where I parked says /FOR LARGE TRUCKS ONLY/.
There's no-one to enforce that.
Maybe I can get a job here. Two dream-only friends need $120
to get married. I give them ten dollars.
Jason and his red-haired friend show up. Jason looks at me
oddly and goes away, saying he'll be right back. /Where did
Juanita go?/
I walk around the hill to the right to a big dirt-floor car
garage. My car is here (how?), but no Juanita. I have to piss.
No-one's around; I piss on the base of the wall with tremendous
force.
I cup my hands on the car's side-window look inside. There's
motion under the blanket in the back seat. I knock on the
window. Juanita gets out. /Is Jason still in the car, under the
blanket? If so, do I want to know that?/
Next dream. Actors are sitting in the audience seats of a
medium-size theater, rehearsing a play. I'm supposed to start
them on the next play in ten minutes, but I need to leave now.
Should I give them my black boots? (Not as a prop or costume
part but as a script.)
Next dream. I go into the cafeteria of a hospital or
college. They're cleaning up between meals; the only food
available is a jumble of different kinds of leftover cold
pizza-- which is fine; I love cold pizza. I get a piece with
mushrooms on it and one with pepperoni. The horrible woman in
charge of the cafeteria is furious; she yells at the workers for
leaving leftover food out to attract moochers-- they're supposed
to throw the food in the trash. Things become vague.
Now I'm walking on the road my (dead) stepbrother Craig and
rode our bicycles on to get to the air****t outside Fresno (1967?
'68?), except here it's a trail through dead-dry grass fields.
The cafeteria woman is following about thirty feet behind me,
still yammering on about people who don't follow the rules. I
/humiliate her/ with a poetic Irish-sounding paragraph of abuse.
No-one's ever talked to her like this before. She droops,
suddenly miserable. I'm like, /See? That's what that feels
like,/ but I don't say that part out loud.
Next dream. The L-shaped Community Center building in
Mendocino is here two stories and bare wood, inside and out; I'm
upstairs in a north room, enjoying laying out a new issue of my
old paper. In the dream I remember several dreams of doing this,
starting it up again, and /here I am really doing it/; why did I
wait so long?
They turn the building's power off for the night. I go out
and walk through town. Next to the Presbyterian church, where
the gas station should be, people are standing around a big
well-lit carnival-ride-like hydraulic press with
telephone-pole-long hinged, articulated rams that reach down the
front. Across the vertical platen is the name of the
manufacturer: /Garrison Tate/. (/Garrison/ is in fire-engine red
and /Tate/ is in pastel blue-green./) Here I remember somewhere
seeing printed sheets of Tetris-block shapes of colored text
about the different colors the company chooses for its name on
all the different machines it makes.
Currently they're using the press to print rectangular,
shadowed targets on institutional lav doors; the targets will
later be overprinted with male or female stick-figures. I show
off my knowledge of the process by knocking on a freshly-printed
door and declaring that it is in fact a metal bathroom door.
DarkAge Pictures director Sean Gill startles me by tapping
me on the shoulder. I say, "Sorry, I'm a little paranoid."
Sean gestures with his finger to his chest, then throat, then
nose and says, "Perfect," meaning that the new issue of my paper
has already been printed and distributed, and he got one, and he
caught that I cleverly scattered different permutations of a
word (?) through the paper-- the same word (?) that the giant
hydraulic press is now stamping (embossing) into two metal
doors. (That was a coincidence, not cleverness, but I nod and
smile to take credit.)
I suggest to Sean to get the crew to give him a ride on the
press; he should say he works for the paper and just expect them
to comply.
A local generic hippie 1980s-style rock star climbs up onto
a tem****ary stage in front of his band and addresses the
carnival crowd: "I am the king of the [something], the potentate
of [something something]..." I say to Sean, "He can talk pretty
freely when he isn't scripted." Sean says, "He's smarter than
they give him credit for."
Now I'm in a long low house that sticks out over the edge of
the cliff behind the giant press. A telephone in the back of the
house rings. When I get to the bedroom, two business-serious
twenty-something girls are there; one has just answered the
telephone and is giving office-work orders to someone named
/Robretta/.
I imagine the two girls having been making love here while
the diesel engines and the press and the shouting and everything
went on outside, and it gives me an idea. I tell the girl not on
the phone, "This could be a prototype," (for a video game). I
describe my vision of Japanese businessmen playing a
karaoke-like game in a bar, where the one losing gets painfully
/shocked/. It's like a drinking game; the more you lose the more
spectacularly incapacitated you are; once you start losing you
might even die.
The girl on the phone covers the mouthpiece and says to me,
"Okay, /what/, now?" She's interested-- she likes my idea; this
could be big.
My dreams from Thursday, 2007-12-20:
First dream. I fly with a Middle-Eastern-looking woman into
and through the enclosed upstairs seating areas of a stadium.
She's on a personal mission to find and kill her abusive
husband. We fly over her mother, who cheers and urges her on. /I
can still stop this./
We come to a soundstage-size white linoleum room. The woman
is the queen, but the soldiers are not hers to command. She
shuts herself and me inside a fold-up cabinet, her private
place, that I hope has weapons in it.
Now we're far away from the palace, being hunted. We're
hiding, clinging to the side of a rough cliff at night.
Government people are up on top, searching the Alamo; if they
find us they'll kill me and bring the queen back for trial under
her husband. The captain up there talks about "numerous counts
of heresy."
Eventually they'll look down here and that'll be it. I say
to the queen, "Hold onto me and trust me. Don't make a sound."
She lets go of the rocks, puts her arms around me. We lean out
and fall almost to the bottom before I curve us out to fly above
wet grass and then over corn (or bamboo) fields for miles and
miles. It's starting to get light.
We fly down a narrow dirt road in a worn-deep ditch and stop
where a small circus is packing up and moving out. No-one
recognizes the fugitive queen. I say, "We can help," and a man
directs us to load canvas scenery scrolls onto his horse cart.
Next dream. I see from above and aside a fleet of barges and
small freighter ****ps escorting a ****p-shaped industrial plant.
My point of view flies close to the giant ****p and the bow is a
concrete works with belts and metal hoppers and mountains of
sand; it's an island, not a ****p, but it's moving anyway at ****p
speed.
I tell someone that all this is mine, this country made of
****ps. They're all headed southeast toward a town like Fort
Bragg (CA) but in Southern California.
I take someone (a real estate client?) into town to show off
my new houseboat. We walk up a street and here it is: a
pastel-green two-story plywood brick. We go in at the corner and
immediately up the stairs. The upstairs back wall is paneled in
mirrors whose backing is corroding because of the moisture; the
mirrors are streaked and steamy-looking, but they make the room
feel big. A two-foot-wide slot goes around the front and side
wall to give air down to the lower floor.
Now I'm showing the place, as in selling it. I say, "I'll
put navigation screens everywhere. You can control it from
anywhere inside."
Next dream. I walk from the back of a supermarket to the
crowded florist's section at the front-right to get in a long
line to the only checkout counter that's mounted sideways. A
blonde, vaguely familiar girl with heavy Oriental skin folds on
her eyes is in line. I say, "Hi, Duffy." She stares straight
ahead, narrowing and widening her eyes together and separately
as if exercising them; she doesn't notice me.
Some annoying children and their mother get in line behind
me. The littlest boy, in a little blue business suit, keeps
poking at me, trying to spill the open quart of half-and-half I
have. I chase the little boy around, can't catch him, give up
and just go across the store to another checkout counter,
declaring, "I've had about enough of this."
Now I'm sitting up, riding a wooden self-powered go-cart. I
pick up a well-behaved Labrador retriever puppy; it curls up on
my legs. I head north on Highway 1 from about Mendocino, but
it's a long, wide superhighway, like 80 across Utah, and this
doesn't seem odd. I pick up another, bigger puppy, arrange the
puppies on my legs so they won't play but will lie still and so
be safe. I accelerate the go-cart by twisting my right foot on
the steering axle. There's no speedometer, but I feel that we're
going about fifty miles per hour. Top speed.
I think it'll be okay with Juanita that I'm bringing two
dogs home just out of the blue, because we haven't ever had even
one dog together.
My dreams from Friday, 2007-12-21:
First dream. Juanita and I are eating in a strange Chinese
restaurant-- we've finished eating, but at the same time we're
ordering and haven't eaten yet. You taste different foods from a
tray they bring you and then pick from that; that's the menu.
There's a milk-melon kind of food that Juanita likes that I'm
too disgusted by to even taste it.
Juanita gets up and goes away to the restroom. I go to pay.
The check adds up to $36. All I have is Monopoly-money-size
/Hell Money/. The exaggeratedly Oriental waitress glares
comically at me.
Now Juanita was never here. Little sleepy dogs on some of
the chairs watch me walk out through the restaurant. A cute
little Skye terrier sits by the column just outside the glass
front doors.
I go to my experimental vehicle, which is a flattened
double-long coffin shape made of glass, on a rug-covered stage
riser with two steps up all around. I lie on my back inside the
vehicle, reach out the open side panel to press /start/ on a
control panel. I use a rearview mirror to see forward. A woman
is sitting scrunched up in the very front.
I pull out onto a sunken freeway and have trouble seeing
because the woman's black sock tube-top bra keeps slipping down
over my mirror, and then I pull it out of the way and still
can't see well and have to readjust the mirror. There are
frightening periods where I have to just trust that the vehicle
is keeping itself in the lane.
The woman says, "There's a helicopter." We're being
followed by a helicopter. I try to accelerate but now we're only
going at like walking speed. /Magic,/ I think, /Magically
instantly go fast,/ but it doesn't work. We'll be shot and
killed. Oh, well.
Next dream. I'm in a society of space****p racers. I come
back to Earth and hundreds of years have passed-- everything has
changed-- we're not respected anymore; I'm in danger. The future
is like a big fascistic shopping mall. I go into a restroom and
disguise myself.
Someone who knows I'm a racer but who won't turn me in
explains about how the government is building giant rocket
engines to send Earth out of the galaxy. I say, "Why, and where
to?" He says, "That's a good question."
Even though everything was indoors a moment ago, we go
outside into the cold air and look up at the stars. I look
around at moonlit mountains and trees and the antique
rocket****t.
My dream from Saturday, 2007-12-22:
I'm on a dock on a mountain lake at night. There's a shack
on the end of the dock; I'd like to go look in there but there
isn't time. I go to the beach and into a fish building, and pile
things, shapes, in the bottom of an oversized bucket and expect
the jumble of shapes and the bucket to automatically be a
machine that does something.
In a niche in the side of this dark building, a moving
diorama with live actors plays like an advertisement for
investors in a movie? opera? a game in development? about
zombies and Vikings. I say to the boy seemingly in charge, "How
much money do you need?" He says, "Clovis will be here in a
minute." (So I should ask Clovis?)
Kay's son Clovis comes in. Businessmen will be coming soon.
Clovis says, "These are the two best ones. They really spent the
money."
Now there are other sheds and buildings here. I go into an
unfinished, uninsulated banquet hall that has three long rows of
folding tables covered with white tablecloths; I sit in the back
at the corner of the L of the building so I can see into the
stumpy leg of the L where amateur actors are putting on a play.
In the play, a mother and her subtly Mongoloid daughter have a
Merchant Ivory conversation. (This is after everyone's already
eaten.)
Two tall muscular man-like women ballet-dance in between the
far row of tables and the far wall. The woman with elaborate
black arm-tattoos spins on her toes and the bearing of her point
of fingers fitting into her dance-partner's cupped hand.
Now there's no L to the building; where the tables were is a
rectangular swimming pool, and everyone's in the water, fully
dressed, waiting for the play to start in the part of the
building that isn't there anymore. I'm treading water, eating a
soggy pitzel cookie. A girl like the girl in the play from
before reaches around from behind me to kiss me on the side of
my mouth. I see where this girl's mother, a real estate woman,
has put my name in her company's magazine advertisement in
watery, translucent letters, as though I'm already a full
partner. Apparently it's all been worked out; I'm to be brought
into the family business.
The woman says to me, "When do you want off." I don't know
what she means. She says, "Ten-thirty?" "Oh. Yeah, that would
be fine." (I still don't know what she means.)
The girl says breathily and kind of retardedly into my ear,
"My name is Robbly Davison." I say, "I'm very pleased to meet
you." /I gotta get outta here./
-end-
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