My dream from Sunday, 2007-12-23:
The overview is that several unrelated people are trying to
get into a fancy hotel, each one for a different reason, and
each one has been thwarted for a different reason, and one day
their separate methods and plots coincide by incredible luck to
make each other work.
A Julie-of-Mod-Squad-like girl, one of the first to get in
and get all the way to the upstairs rear deck, is saved by a
news cameraman from being shot by a climbing assassin; the
cameraman aims his camera and the assassin puts his gun away,
climbs back down the wall and docilely lies down on the
sidewalk.
Meanwhile two other getters-in are on the deck up here,
sitting at a table near the table of the big mafia boss who's
been in power since, uh, some unfair but cyclic magical event...
The mafia boss is talking with his mafia guys; he says, "My
son-- something, something-- commence..." I'm one of the
getters-in. I assume the mafia boss' son has just graduated
(commencement ceremony); I say, "Congratulations."
Now that I've become one of the people who got in, I have to
get out. I go the long way through the hotel. A DeNiro-style
mafia guy runs after me, claps me on the shoulder, says
Italian-sounding things to test me, to see if I'm really
Italian. I make fake Italian talking-with-hands signs in the air
and saunter away.
Everyone who got in has to escape for a different reason
peculiar to their situation. There's a mass
Marx-Brothers-movie-style chase through the hotel halls, with
mechanical elevator doors /shhhoof/ing and /cha-cha-cha/ing open
and closed rhythmically. I see down several hallways, see
everyone involved in the chase, or chases.
I make it out onto the front sidewalk. All our escaping
action has caused all the items of a magical art collage on the
front wall to be stolen one by one. (One for each escapee?) An
old-regime (pre our invasions and escapes) mafia guy watching
from a front window sees the last item taken from the collage
but doesn't interfere. I don't know whether that's good or bad.
Whose side is he on?
The Julie-like girl goes up the street to a cathedral.
Re****ters and cab drivers and shoe****ne kids all agree:
"Ev'rybody wants to see Miss Lucy." The cathedral has a
stained-glass window on the left that's in two layers, slotted
like the slot they cut in your eye to put in a new cornea or
lens, and the flat demon-thing that has been propping up the old
mafia regime in the hotel is slid out to be replaced by the new
one but, remember, the transfer of power didn't go right at the
hotel --everyone had to leave, and the magic collage was only
disassembled, not rebuilt-- so the old demon just sits down in
the hallway back from the window and smokes a cigar, waiting, in
case he has to get back in. A new demon-window-insert guy is
hurried in and up the stairs by a frantic window crew. The
window demons look at each other like, /Eh, whatcha gonna do./
The problem of the magical protection situation being
undecided causes the cathedral's full-front bas relief to become
soft clay and smear and melt. Fortune seekers climb it, but each
becomes absorbed into the wall clay when another comes up from
behind and tries to climb over him. /The wall is made of
absorbed people./ A man is almost climbed over by another man
and isn't so high up that falling would hurt, so rather than be
stuck in the wall for eternity he pushes away and he and the man
grabbing his foot fall back to the sidewalk. The foot wasn't
turned to clay, though the shoe-toe was. Both are relieved to be
alive. One says, "We'll help each other," which results in the
window-insert demons shaking hands and deciding on their own to
switch places; the new demon gets into the window with his cigar
still in his mouth and he flattens and turns to glass.
It's raining and dark out now. I come out of the cathedral,
go back to the hotel, go around the back, grab cable-lift
handles and am winched up through a guide hoop to a high
fire-escape landing even with the back deck where the mafia boss
was before.
So-- the window-demon was replaced, which should protect the
new way, and all the people who got into the hotel before should
be in charge and powerful now, but the collage was not remade,
so-- it's still up in the air as to what will happen. The
tradesman who was just winched up the back of the hotel will try
to assassinate the old mafia boss for having the man's wife
killed. Will he succeed?
In the hotel bar a man who was with the old mafia regime but
was a good man anyway is only now noticing that something has
changed about the magical protection. He sits at a table with a
woman who's either a nurse or a hotel maid; she's on her break.
They flirt with each other with their eyes --she's Miss Lucy,
Mod-Squad Julie-- and she looks the question at him, /What's
wrong?/ He describes walking into and through the bar by
saying, "Nobody respected me." She says, "I caught your speech
yesterday. I don't think kids would tell their parents to be
more demonic. I think parents would tell their kids to be more
dry."
My dreams from Monday, 2007-12-24:
First dream. With (dead) Barbara Champion riding on my back
and holding on around my neck and my belly I scoot along at
bicycle speed standing bent over with one foot on an upturned
water glass, the other foot on that foot, and my left index
finger hooked around under the lip of the glass but somehow not
being abraded.
We turn off the street and go through a ranch house that's
also a law-court building.
A man is having problems with his toaster-size antique
vacuum-tube-type guitar amplifier. I say, "These are finicky." I
open it up and one problem is very simple: gritty grease has
collected on a quarter-inch plug inside. I pull the plug out,
squirt WD-40 onto it, wipe it off and put it back. Done.
Now the problem is a complicated many-pole-many-throw rotary
switch. One of its three or four disks is cracked; I can't fix
that. I say, "I need to get another one that does this."
In a storefront church like in a do***entary about black
gospel singers I run up a steep stack of cereal box shapes made
of charcoal and then climb/jump back down, backward.
Now I'm riding in the back seat of a car on a freeway,
having a friendly argument with a Brit in sungl***** about the
relative merits of tube amplifiers in general. (I'm hitchhiking
to San Francisco with an LP record of something like my 1984
Radio Free Earth project to try to get a show on a big AM radio
station, and this British guy had his driver stop for me.)
A golden retriever dog with a pulled-out-long gray muzzle is
sitting in the front passenger seat, facing right. It's holding
a hand-mirror-shaped piece of black plastic out in front of it
and using the plastic to push its nose around as if the nose is
a door-stop spring. I ****ge the Brit and say, "Look-- its nose
goes down then goes up." /Isn't America funny? The things they
do here./
Now the car is gone and we're all outside. The dog holds two
sticks up in front of it, then two pine trees. It walks into a
flooded river valley and walks under the water until the trees
float up and away.
I and the others with me get in three rubber rafts and float
upstream, up the river, by staying near the shore where the
water goes the other way. We reach a rocky gorge with a muddy
bottom, near a rustic version of the Caspar Inn. The mud channel
down the center of the gorge is periodically washed out, flushed
out by a burst flood of clean water.
From the rock bank across from the Caspar Inn I watch as
people come out of the Inn and down from the hills to see an
exciting thing happen --I don't know what --probably the
grandfather-clock-tick-like flu****ng floods. Paramedics show up
and give first aid to and bandage a tall, lanky bulldog.
Everyone vanishes but me and a man from the raft trip.
Handguns rain down from the sky. With a gun in each hand (we've
had our pick of these thousands of guns everywhere) we start
downriver on a trail. I see from behind us as we go out of sight
around a bend. Ominous music plays.
I walk along, closely examining my two guns. One is perfect,
but I don't like the second one as much as I did at first; it's
attractive but it doesn't fit my hand properly. I say, "Wait a
minute. I wanta get another one." The man won't wait, doesn't
want to stop. Okay.
I concentrate on watching for people who might be hiding
behind trees and rocks, waiting to shoot at us. They have a
great advantage. If I were in their position I would have no
trouble at all killing us.
I get in front and lead us off the open trail and into trees
so we can stop and talk about this. We'll have to develop a
trick to survive. Think, now.
Next dream. I'm tired, dragging. I show up at a version of
Mendo Micro where the buildings are all open on the sides, like
at a summer camp. My view of myself is that my head is wider and
shorter than I'm used to and my hair and beard are more neatly
trimmed --except that I just woke up (in the dream) and I'm
disheveled. My employer Tim and two teenage girls are working in
an open kitchen building. Tim wants me to pull cables through
conduit in the ground between buildings. (Network cable? video?
telephone? --he gave me a list, but I don't know where it is.)
The two girls say nice things to me, as if I'm a beloved old
person around here.
I come to the same place again, in the same tired condition,
with the same understanding that I'm to pull cables, but what
kind and where? /Oh, no-- do I have Alzheimer's?/ Just the two
girls are here. I say, "Where's Tim?" They point up. I go
upstairs. Tim and a strange woman are sitting on the edge of a
bed, talking. I stand here long enough for them to notice me;
they're like, /What?/ I say, "Cat-5?" Tim says, "/Yes./"
(Duh.) Then he suggests that I pull several cables at the same
time, to not have to do it again very soon. He reminds me that
he /gave/ me a /list/.
I go back downstairs. A little gold-colored cocker spaniel
puppy stumble-runs to me and wants to be my friend. I wander
away into the woods with the puppy.
Next dream. Brannon's restaurant is laid out inside as it
was before they enclosed the ****ch upstairs and expanded the
kitchen. I come in to work as if it's 1982. Tim is here,
cooking. So if he's cooking, what am /I/ supposed to do? Tim
looks at me as though I should know what I'm supposed to do.
Right, pull cables.
No-- Tim goes out a door where the the back of the line hood
should be and comes back in with other workers carry-sliding
rock-heavy beanbag chair bags. Why bring these upstairs? To
store them? Tim tells me to put them against that wall. I want
them out of the building; they'll collapse the floor. I wait
till Tim leaves, and I try to get the other workers' attention
by using telekinesis to fly the bags to the wall in a line; I
say, "I don't know why he wants them here, but that's what he
wants. I've made them light; he didn't say anything about
that." I think the others will experiment with picking the bags
up, now that they're just regular beanbag chairs, but nobody
cares. I realize that nobody cares about the bags or the floor
or anything; their responsibility was discharged once the bags
were upstairs.
The dream jumps back to when I first got to the kitchen.
There's a big fluffy bed in the back corner, blocking the back
door. I pull the blankets down to get in bed and I accidentally
spill photographs off the back of the headboard. I pick them all
up and look at them; they're all of college-age people I don't
know, having fun at holiday parties.
I wake from sleep (still in the dream) in the bed in the
kitchen. I get up, look around in the blankets for my
underpants, can't find them, give up and pull on black jeans and
a t-****rt. Restaurant construction workers bustle back and forth
around me.
-end-
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