My dreams from Monday, 2007-12-31:
First dream. Tracy Burns has has been a movie and radio star for
many years-- now she has a prime-time network teevee /cartoon/ show of
her own; I just found out about it by accident, switching around the
channels of a black-and-white 1960s-style television set, and it's up to
the last three minutes of the show. Her special comic touch is to end
the show with a not-cartoon part, shot on grainy eight-millimeter film,
like a Mike Mazurky piece, about Tracy driving up and down in a car,
like a small boat going over ocean waves, through a landscape that was
obviously blasted by an army experiment that used a captured war
criminal's super-new-tech weapon. The entire rock and sand valley floor
is dug out in ripples in the shape of the veins of a miles-long leaf.
I wonder if the show always ends this way. It's not broad humor. But
America loves Tracy Burns, and clever things like this are a big reason
why.
I wonder what the main cartoon part of the show is about. I'll have
to wait till next week to find that out. /I don't wanna wait. Maybe the
show is just starting now on another channel./
Next dream. In a strange house's kitchen I put water in a glass pan
for an envelope of instant pie? jello? to go in it and that will light
it up like Cyalume compound to be seen by an airplane.
My mother comes in and while we're talking I forget to turn off the
water; it fills the pan and starts to spill off the counter. I shut off
the spigot and stop the water pouring off by putting my back and the
backs of my arms along the whole length of the counter. The phone rings
and my mother goes away to answer it. I say hopelessly, tonelessly,
"Help," meaning that I expected my mother to see that she could minimize
the problem by scraping the water on the counter into the sink with her
hand, but of course she would answer the phone.
At night, out at the hill edge of the collective back yard of lots
of houses in a line, I gather up colored pencils whose fat leads take up
most of their thickness; I drop a pencil and reach downhill over what's
now almost a cliff to get it back. I put it and the others on a folding
table. A dragon-like lizard-thing the size of a housecat is up in a
tree. I think about jump/climbing up there to get it away from there,
because I'm afraid someone will open the screen door (?) and squash it.
Now it's darker-- ominously dark. A man goes away up an alley. I'm a
little boy here; I go with my kid friends after the man. They've left
behind their camping food; I point this out but they don't care. I go
back and put the food away in cold chests and slide the chests out under
the streetlight so they'll see it when they come back. Now the
cat-dragon-thing is /bad/ and I deliberately squash its belly open by
pulling open the back gate onto a continuous ground-level wooden deck
between two two-story houses. Some older kids are smoking dope next to
one house's outside refrigerator; dull, sad music plays from inside the
house.
Corroded switches (for outdoor lights?) are set in rotting wooden
plinths. Someone has left the doors open on the refrigerator-freezer
outside the other house. There are no lights on in this house. I walk
carefully on the deck to not wake people up when I go to close the
fridge doors, but the step-creaking is loud. When I get to the fridge,
someone opens the house door and rushes out at me.
(Discontinuity.)
A bright little boy like Charles Wallace in the book /A Wrinkle In
Time/ talks to me on a picture-phone set in a telephone pole. There's a
vague feeling of aliens not necessarily coming to take over but
encroaching with a plan. The boy gives me a /you're-in-charge-now/ look
and clicks off.
I go into an abandoned house and find pants and a t-shirt to wear,
and a pillow to carry with me. When I turn the pants right-side-out I
see that they have a gun-holster pocket and a 1950s-rocketship-shaped
outline in red thread sewn to the back-right. This is just like the
other kids' pants; we shouldn't all wear the same thing, but I like the
rocket... When I pull the pants on I notice an itchy spider bite on my
left thigh. I squeeze it like squeezing a pimple; clear, thick jelly
comes out. My leg is full of the jelly-- it has become an alien leg.
There isn't even a bone in there, but it feels like my leg and I can
stand on it and use it. Maybe at a crucial moment the aliens will take
control of it... /I can't worry about that now./
With a British government minister type I cross a wide road and go
into a government compound. An old British maid/nurse brings a pillow
and makes up a bed for me. She wants to take away the pillow I brought,
but I suspect this is a trick and I keep it.
Things change so the government has abandoned this place a long time
ago. There's nobody here. The kids come for me and I get away through
the back fence and go with them to sneak through a jumble of connected
houses and apartment rooms, some of them occupied. We make it to the
outdoors again in a car garage, but a car comes, so we have to hide in
the cars that are already here. Men in sunglasses and their woman boss
stand in the open garage door. Some of the kids laugh. /Shut up, ya
dopes!/ The woman sees me hiding under the glass hatchback of a hollow
car. We're all discovered and taken next door to a house whose ground
floor is on several different levels, a foot or two or three above and
below the ground.
The spy boss woman says something about my mother's college friend
Eleanor Schaubel. I say, "/How/ do you know Eleanor?" The woman says,
"She's a public figure." Oh. Right.
We all sit around the edge of a round raised part of the room. Now
we're expected to reveal the big secret. I don't trust the woman. She
wants my pillow; she's watching it, poorly pretending it isn't
important. I pull it closer to me.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-01-01:
First dream. In either a bus station or a school on Saturday or in
July I find a rack of metal shelves of old electronic things. I get an
old cassette deck and take it apart. It's missing its tape head; that's
all that's wrong with it. I find a tape head that will fit it and that
has three terminals --there are three bare wires in the deck just
hanging loose; these parts go together.
I wander out into an industrial yard, looking for a soldering iron
and solder. Saxophonist Carl Shoen come by on his way to the /bus
station/. He admires my cassette deck; it's a good one. He says, "These
were expensive. I had one just like this."
I become fascinated by a life-size baroque horse carved out of
marble, with intricate designs all over it and its saddle; the closer
you look, the more complicated the designs get. A baby in the bus
station is crying in that horrible, hiccupy, screeching,
fingernails-on-a-blackboard way; I press /delete/ repeatedly on my
keyboard, each time deleting some of the horse's complexity, saying,
"Delete, delete, delete, delete, /delete/, baby," so the baby will think
I'm doing this to please it and maybe it will stop crying, but it keeps
crying and I've ruined the horse.
Ah, here's a soldering kit. I start to fix the cassette deck.
Next dream. At a place like where the Whale School was, a remote
place in a forest, a lot of self-sufficient good hippie people have
gathered to live, now that the world economy has collapsed and polite
society has broken down everywhere else. A boy talks about having saved
some thirty-volt wiring from his old place. I ask him if the wire is
thicker than /this/. (I hold up one conductor from some scraps cut out
of twelve-gauge Romex.) He can't really remember how thick it is. I
say, "Where is it?" He motions with his head-- back that way
somewhere. I say, "If it was for a thirty-volt system, it's probably
thick enough." I explain about amperage and voltage, but it's all going
over his head. I say, "Just come get me when you're ready and I'll help
you wire it up."
At the top of the hill there's a sunny swimming pool in perfect
condition. I see it in my mind as though I just came from there, though
I haven't ever been. For some reason, to get /up/ there I have to go
/down/ the hill; I set off and walk for a long way. Here's a shallow,
calm river with people sitting on the bank and wading and swimming
around in it. My path goes into and down the river, which is now flowing
back the other way, uphill. /Is that the tide? Have I walked all the way
to the ocean?/
No. This is the top of the hill-- the water's going the other way
because it's going down the other side. And here's the pool. Empty.
Well, that's easy to fix. Except the river water is sandy.
Now I'm going downhill again. My path goes to a tunnel that tiny
foot-high people use as a walking road to and between their undergound
cities; I imagine going that way to see if imagining doing it attracts
the little people's bad attention, and it does. /I don't have to go
there. I don't want to. Why should I?/ They all turn away and go about
their business.
An alternate path goes steeply downhill through haphazardly
connected shack houses. The commune has been here for years now and
everything's apparently going well. Everyone has enough to eat. Poet
Dobby Sommer is happy to see me; she gives me a slab of boiled ham the
size of my hand and asks me if I want hot mustard for that. /Yeah./ I
say, "Where do you get mustard?" She says, "I make it."
Outside the downhill end of all the connected houses is a
sperm-cell-shaped gravel cul-de-sac at the end of the driveway leading
here. A boy is putting away a gas-powered weedwhacker. He's just killed
all the pretty ferns around the court.
Real estate people will be coming soon. This is the end of all the
hippies' happy years here. Too bad, but inevitable.
I think about using the weedwhacker to scare the real estate people
away. It would be fun but it wouldn't really accomplish anything. Too
bad. Tch.
My dream from a nap Tuesday night:
A lot of small fighter spaceships --like Star Wars X-Wings or
Battlestar Galactica Vipers, but all different-- are led flying through
a vaulted metal tunnel by a much bigger ship. All the while, the officer
in the big ship is talking to them on the radio, reminiscing about
pilots he used to have working for him, and how great they were. He ends
by saying not kindly but meanly, "--And then there's /you/ guys."
In the big ship with the officer is a translator woman who agreed to
come on this suicide mission. She's working silently, bent over a bunch
of i-pods that are hot-glued to a square of plywood. Everyone knows the
enemy is listening and watching. The big ship comes out into a huge
metal-enclosed space, where it seems the plan is to have all the little
ships have like a World-War-One dogfight with enemy ships, ships that
aren't here yet. I think, /Why wouldn't the enemy just send an atomic
bomb into the tunnel and end it like that?/
The big ship lands on its belly near a wall and immediately scuttles
sideways to tip on edge and climb the wall. When the ship is vertical, a
squat metal cylinder the size of a town's water tank flops off the
ship's back and settles to the floor. /This is why the enemies are
waiting; they're curious-- what's in the cylinder?/
Now in a dark bar/lounge two military officers sit in a booth with
two officers of a much more powerful faction of the same side. The
powerful ones are humorless; the two underdog good guys are in trouble
for something creative they did --the cylinder trick?
A waitress comes to pour dark beer from a pitcher into everyone's
glass. One of the good-guy officers says, "Wait." He puts a translucent
plastic card into his glass, dividing one side of the glass from the
other. "Okay." The waitress pours beer into one side of the glass, and
as the beer filters into the other side, much lighter-colored, the
good-guy officers half-stand, bent over the glass, counting-shouting,
"Rumbala rumbala rumbala /ONE WATT!/" (It takes one watt to filter
exactly that much beer, to make it taste better than any other kind of
beer.)
Now I'm at the table too. I say, "Of course, it's still beer.
Bleagh." The two good guys chuckle; the humorless guys are just
puzzled. I say to the bigger of the bad guys, "What's the best taste?"
He doesn't know what I'm asking. I say, "Come on, try. Chocolate with
raspberry inside? Yellow ice-cream with candy cherries...?" The guy
gets the game. Everyone's thinking now of what the best taste might be.
I compose saying, /Cold tuna salad on pan-toasted French bread with
Swiss cheese half-melted on both breads, and hot peppers.../
I woke up and said it aloud and thought about it for a bit. That's a
pretty good taste. But is it the best?
-end-
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