This dream was from 2007-12-21 (two Fridays ago). I just now looked at
my notes from that day and realized I skipped typing it. It came first:
I wake up from sleep (within the dream) on an army cot set halfway
back in a theater, across the seats. My (dead) stepbrother Craig is
asleep on a cot next to the door at the bottom; he's the age he'd be
now-- low fifties. About fifteen kids are asleep in sleeping bags on the
floor in front of the stage.
I drink the last of a squarish brown bottle; I imagine there'll be
more in the theater's kitchen. I run silently down the wall-aisle to go
out there. The kitchen is empty; there's nothing in the refrigerator or
in any of the cupboards.
Now the theater is a school. The kids are up and playing an
educational game of trying to resist or control obnoxious magical powers
that Craig has. (Craig and I are teachers here.) The kids resent being
slowly doled out powers; they naturally want to be given all the powers
at once. I say to a girl, "Throw something at me." She throws a wad of
paper; it bounces off an invisible shell around me and somehow lands on
the floor inside the shell. I say, "Would you like that?" (Meaning,
would she like to have that power.) /Yes!/ I hand her the paper ball;
this is giving her that power and all sorts of other powers, /but
without the key./ I say, "There ya go. You hafta figure it out." She
gets everyone's attention; the kids will all try together. (That might
have been a mistake on my part. They might actually accomplish it.)
My dream from Friday, 2007-12-28:
A boy steals an old-style Macintosh computer from a U-shaped
travelers' information counter in a supermarket. I keep him in sight
while I absorb the details of the ongoing feud between my cousins Mimi
and Lorraine. In the dream they /hate/ each other and have been going
from episode to episode of personal battle all their lives. I should be
able to solve this; I know how to do that.
I wander around in a vast fleamarket/fair of metal barns, looking at
old record players and radio sets and wishing I had more money and a
garden cart.
In a barn at the edge of the fair I have sex with a strange thin
girl who was waiting for me to get tired of shopping and come back to
her. There's a condom dispenser next to the couch. The girl and I lick
rather mechanically at each other both before and after.
Now it's night. While people giving up pack their booths and items
away, and new people bring in their things for the next day, they all
sing a roadhouse-blues/church-choir humming song in funny-fake but
mellow old-black-guy voices.
I fly up the dry-grass hill behind the fair.
My dreams from Saturday, 2007-12-29:
First dream. I'm walking around in the house in Caspar where Juanita
and I lived from 1986 to 1992. In the dream my mother lives here-- she's
fixed it up. It's not renewed inside --the surfaces are just as porous
and old I remember them; it's just clean, scrubbed.
Here's my mother's bed in the back room that used to be my teevee
show studio.
The air is interesting. It's visible but not because of smoke. It's
calm, old air.
Next dream. A lot of people are living in a mostly empty big-box
store. Outside, a malevolent? benevolent? force has started a storm that
makes hot spots where magic is magnified. The first indication of this
is: J-shaped streetlight poles start falling over into the building
through partly dematerialized walls. That's not particularly dangerous,
but the effect gets stronger and other things start to happen. I feel
that people are blaming me for this.
A woman has been following me around; I lead her through a metal
room (airlock?) and show her the storm outside: a conical cyclone shaft
emerges from the underside of the clouds miles away, teases at the
ground then /smashes/ into it and comes this way.
Back inside, schoolkids are having a class on a wide theater stage.
An old man comes in from the back of the room, goes up onto the stage,
interrupts the class. He forms a twinkling electical-smoke ghost rabbit
in the air in front of him and tosses it upward. The kids' teacher is
annoyed but interested; he waves the children closer to watch the old
man make another rabbit and then change it into a frisbee, a
football-size acorn, a spiral parachute plant...
On like Franklin Street in Fort Bragg (CA) a strange couple and I go
into a narrow storefront diner that goes way back into the building.
There's a six-inch tear in the styrofoam wall just left of the door to
the back kitchen. The hole goes through into a similar world. The others
don't know what to do. I say, "Let me," and I widen the hole to make it
big enough to climb through. The others go through, then I go, and we're
in the kitchen of the other-world diner. I worry that the front
counter-person/cook and customers here will make a fuss about three
strangers coming out of the kitchen. This place is more of a bar than a
diner; the bartender sees us, quirks an eyebrow but says nothing. /This
must happen all the time here./
This town is like the one in the ghost world in /Spirited Away/.
Next dream. This is the middle of a story with no beginning, about
people walking from ancient Northern Gaul to ancient Rome. I become one
of them when the people come to a railroad construction camp. Here's an
ancient Roman liquor bar that has racks and racks of books-- it's a
/Biblio Bar/. The old man who did the magic tricks in the previous dream
is our guide here; he goes aside with some workers and talks to them
about me and the others, about our mission, every once in awhile
gesturing to us; whenever he gestures, everyone looks at us, then looks
back at him. We just have to trust that he's not setting us up.
In the Middle World, the one through the styrofoam wall in the
previous dream, the same old man allows himself to be arrested and
pulled away from his followers by two traditional Oriental police armed
only with small clubs and authority. He's led down a side street and
presumably killed. The two policemen come back; one is a puppet ghost,
the other is the unharmed old man in magical disguise. They go past the
pompous boss policeman and into an open-sided cafeteria building. The
people in the street know what happened and are gleeful but control
their jubilation so to keep the secret. (All during this the song /I Get
Knocked Down/ plays.)
Next dream. With Juanita and her family I go into a seasonal
fairgrounds' big permanent movie theater. I sit in the row just in front
of and left of where Juanita sits on the aisle. At a place not an
intermission lots of people just leave. Everyone else (including
Juanita) jumps up and hurries to sit in the front section of seats. I
didn't get up fast enough; also, I don't like sitting that close. I go
across the center of the theater, which is now even bigger and outdoors
on a lawn. The seats have all become whitewashed Adirondack chairs. /Oh,
no-- I took my eyes off Juanita; now I'll never find her./ I go down to
the second row and a little to the right of where I last saw her. (The
way out is down and right, so I'll see her when she leaves.)
The movie is like a combination of something by Kurasawa and a
Miyazaki animation; it's ending very smoothly and slowly. A diesel train
pushes through a lovely Japanese snowy mountain evening scene. There are
more telegraph poles than there need to be; these become sticks in the
snow. I see up the side of a mountain-- is that the old man and his
policeman puppet ghost? Or is it the old man rescuing someone, getting
the person away? No, it's sticks. No, it's a shadow of bumps in the
snow.
The camera keeps panning to the right as if it's on the train. This
is the end of the film, but it never completely ends. /This is what we
were seeing when we came in. So that's why everyone got up and left
before-- they came to the part where they came in./ A ten-year-old boy
stands up in the front row and says to his father, "It's perfect. It's
as good as I thought it would be." He's so happy.
My dreams from Sunday, 2007-12-30:
First dream. I'm looking at images of rural France. In one picture,
dense flocks of black birds ribbon around in the sky over distant
winter-dead trees; the caption says something about how the birds and
the trees are equally responsible for each others' survival.
I'm a little bird. I want to fly up into a nearby tree to look
around in it and figure out how so many birds can possibly be good for
it; I mean, it seems like they'd just eat all the leaves off it and that
would kill it.
/What if a hawk is around; he'll get me./ Never mind.
A French woman lives in the top of the tree. Her husband --not
here-- is abusive and controlling and he makes her stay in this tree
when he is away. I try to communicate with her by jumping up and down on
her hand and on her leg and on the branches and gesturing with my head
and wings, but she can't understand that I'm telling her to get down out
of the tree and run away, and I can't understand anything she says
because she will only speak in French-sounding baby talk to me.
The man drives up to the base of the tree in his truck. Now I'm his
French son. I climb down and go into the field with him. He wants to
show me his new project; it's a radio-controlled shock collar for the
dog. There are two dogs here, but the man is concerned with only the
little one. He puts the collar on it, puts the dog on a heavy chain and
loops the chain around the metal mesh of a rabbit hutch, then puts the
radio-control box on a lectern planted in the grass. The dog runs out
through the too-large cage mesh and runs to me but reaches the end of
its chain at the same time as the collar gives it a shock for going out
of range of the control.
Now I'm the little bird again. The boy was never here. I follow the
thuglike man away from the tree where he keeps his wife to see where he
goes, and he goes to visit with his son on the boy's way home from
school in town. The boy looks just like him but smaller-- same thug
face. The man goes away. I with the boy to where he lives in a parked
car with his little brother, and when they're doing their homework I fly
into the car and gesture for the boy to take his pen apart. He's smarter
than his mother; he understands right away and takes the pen apart. I
take the inside part in my beak and write on the newspaper on the car
seat, "MOTHER ALIVE HELP HER." The boy puts the pen back together, puts
the faded-red three-by-five-inch card (that the newspaper has become) in
his mouth (!) and lies back to take a nap. I'm like, /No! You have to go
now! Before he (Father) goes there!/ but he's not interested. He's just
as bad as his father.
His little brother in the back seat saw what I wrote and seems
concerned. Maybe he can do something (ineffectual and suicidal).
It's the next day. I fly to the boys' school. Their father and his
friend, another thug, have a whispered conversation and the father walks
away, leaving the other to wait by the front door for the boys to come
out. I have a bad feeling about this. Should I go back out to the woman
in the tree and try again to get her to climb down and go to the police?
/Why is it all so hard? Why is it always like this?/
I woke up with the Toto song /Africa/ playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. My college friend Dan is driving a motor
home that's all closed in except for the military-style slit windshield.
I'm riding in the back with some children and adults who we just rescued
from a crazy Christian cult.
Dan parks the motor home in the parking lot of the movie house in
Fort Bragg (CA). We'll stay here for the night.
The whole back of the motor home is a big hard bed. Everyone lies
down. The cult children rub against my legs suggestively; a woman leers
and winks at me and tries to hand me a big Polish hotdog. "No, thanks."
/These people are beyond creepy. I realize that we didn't rescue them;
this is how they entrap people into their cult./ I say, "Dan," the way
Mal in /Firefly/ says, "Jayne," or, "Zoey," so the person just
understands and immediately moves to do the right thing, and Dan gets
the message, starts the motor and we start driving again. (The rules
are: while a vehicle is rolling, they're prevented from doing their
recruitment blackmail scene.)
Dan doesn't live here, so he doesn't know his way around; he's
frustrated. I say, "You wanta drive?" (Meaning that I want to drive.)
Now I'm alone in the Winnebago. I'm looking for the people we
rescued (not the creepy people, but the ones we /really/ rescued)(this
is puzzling). I turn up side streets and alleys, and alleys off alleys.
The motor home becomes a tall, springy-metal tricycle. I get trapped in
a corner of alleys and have to drive into and through an old woman's
house. I explain my problem and apologize as I drive right over her,
where she's sitting in a stuffed chair. It's okay with her that I'm
here; she's happy to have company. The house is tiny but even so has
several rooms. I drive through a bedroom and get a close-up view of a
lot of long coats hanging in an open closet. I go through a dining room
and between furniture and over an armoire that's like a grandfather
clock, and I squeeze my giant tricycle out the front door. The old woman
is disappointed that I'm leaving so soon; she wanted me to stay for
dinner.
I woke up with the Robert Earl Keen song /Merry Christmas From The
Family/ playing in my head.
-end-
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