My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-01-02:
First dream. I hold hands with a combination-person of
bar-owner/poet Peter Lit and Rod Serling and we fly up into the
sky. The Peter Lit person is freaked out both because of holding
hands with a guy and being too high up to even see buildings on
the ground. (I think of this as near-orbital-height.)
Juanita is in an /Our-Gang/-like show with a bunch of kids
(she's a little girl). I'm like Captain Kangaroo's Mister Green
Jeans in this episode, which is about a big toothbrush with a
rotoscoped human face. The show is produced in studios built in
a parking tower in Italy; Juanita and I gradually realize it's
really a test for employment in a government agency that is
sinister and oppressive. We don't want to be in the show
anymore.
Now Juanita is at her real age; she and I calmly
escape/saunter away to a foggy 1950s version of the north side
of Fort Bragg, where people play a game using portable
telephones in adjacent elevators going up out of the car wash
structure across from the brewery. There are five car wash bays
(five elevators). You talk to the person in the next elevator as
you both go up, and there's something about the strategy you
develop for determining the position of the other elevator when
you've gone up and down a few times separately and are out of
synch. It's a game and it's also a kind of employment that makes
you eligible for medical and dental insurance.
Next dream. In a subway tube a man climbs up between roof
girders to hide and sleep. Later, inside a speeding train, the
same man checks on rows and columns of hibernating 1950s-style
gangsters in electronic suspended-animation coffins --they're
all sleeping perfectly; nothing's wrong anywhere. The man is
discovered and he avoids being killed by making a
service-contract deal with the sleeping gangsters' boss (to
check the coffins at regular intervals). When the boss goes
away, the man lies down on a bench by the train doors to sleep
for awhile before he'll have to go around again and take
readings.
Next dream. A time-traveling 1950s-movie Hercules character
is in ancient Rome. A woman Juanita used to work for is a
swindling fortune teller (deposed high government mucky-muck)
who uses Hercules in her scheme to make several simultaneous
thefts. Next day in the fortune teller's office there's an
office party in celebration of all the successful thefts. The
fortune teller gets drunk and maudlin. The party winds down.
Everyone goes home.
Outside the office a black gladiator talks up Hercules'
value to another employer, a historian/philosopher/general. The
main selling point is Hercules' uncle, who is included in the
employment deal. Of the uncle he says, "He's good at memorizing
important surrender dates." (There's always a war wherever and
whenever you go, so if you know when the war ends, and when the
last one ended, you know everything about the situation.)
Hercules and his little old uncle dynamite the entire side
of a hill above a river to hide their time machine. Fleeing
searchers, they find a rowboat and ride it downriver until the
river becomes too small and shallow. Now I'm in the action; I'm
the calculating old uncle. I get out of the boat and run
barefoot on a rock path next to the river, leading Hercules, who
has become an infantile lummox, like Lenny in /Of Mice And Men/.
In hills above the sea like between Albion and Navarro (CA)
I turn onto a cliffside trail. The trail makes a steep
switchback where rich vacationers sun themselves on the rocks. I
come to where I have to put out a hand to brace myself on the
other wall of the chasm the trail turns around, because the
trail is slightly recessed into the cliff to about hip-height so
you can't just balance on it.
Somehow the trail turned back on itself becomes a row of
sports bleachers. Behind the bleachers inland and to the right
is the dynamited river-hill from before. Sky (a little girl from
the Whale School) at the age she is now --late twenties?-- is
here with her dream-only troubled hillbilly family. She says
something that takes up the dream-only long-ago last
conversation we had as though it was just a moment ago. I say,
"/When's/ the last time I saw you?" General merriment and
accordion music follow.
Sky says her brother needs a replacement modem for his
computer. I say that I'll be going right by HSC Electronics in
Cotati next week. /That's too long for him wait; he'll be back
in prison by then./ Okay, I give Sky directions to HSC from
here: that's the Navarro River right there, so go in on 128 to
101 and then go south... (128 and 101 meet in Cloverdale. From
there it's half an hour by car to Cotati. No-one here has a car.
Half an hour by car is two days on foot.) I say, "Just let me
take care of it. He can have it in jail."
My dream from Thursday, 2008-01-03:
The CGI logo/title of a video game turns over on brass
gimbals and becomes crossed blood-splashed wooden toy rifles.
Sage of DarkAge Pictures speaks in a deep Darth Vader voice
about a video game's dark-future story that takes place in a
Thrifty Drug store. I ride my bicycle out of the game (out of
the store), past not a truck but the /shape/ of a UPS truck; I
laugh at the image I have of a red 1970 Dodge Challenger maybe
being inside it.
I walk at night across the parking lot of a strange shopping
center. Eileen and another stage tech woman come the other way.
I ask where I'm supposed to go; Eileen points behind her and
says, "The clapping practice room."
The shopping center has been turned into a college-like
grammar school. I go where Eileen pointed; kids are cleaning up
after a class or a show, leaning folded chairs against the
walls. I go deeper into the building. In a photography studio a
man is lying on his back on a wooden bench with his feet on the
floor; he's making the faces I imagine I make when my back hurts
and I lie like that to try to get some relief.
Upstairs in this increasingly claustrophobic building a
teacher gives me an instruction paper for a reading
comprehension test. The test uses a typewriter; I roll a blank
page in. The teacher shows me which part of the test will be
referred to, and he goes away. And I'm confused. What am I
supposed to do? Nothing, apparently. Wait.
Tired of waiting, knowing I'm being given the run-around, I
go back downstairs. In one room kids are getting ready for bed,
brushing their teeth. In the next room everyone is doing a
long-division test. /This is where I was supposed to go in the
first place. I'm half an hour late./ I go back out and look
around for the teacher, rehearsing in my mind picking him up by
his collar; I'll say, "I'll take the test tomorrow. Don't ever
do anything like that again."
My dream from Friday, 2008-01-04:
I'm in a Swiss-cheese-porous building with a sidekick girl
(like Sparky Smith when she was ten but also with the flavor of
Little Sparky in John Varley's book /The Golden Globe/). We get
a radio message and fly out, fly across hills and a floodplain
toward the ocean. We're very high up, but we keep coming to
power lines to avoid. /Be careful./
Down at treetop height we fly south along the seashore,
looking for a ship in trouble, to help. That's our mission.
A calm river backwater in sand dunes is the playground of a
gang of wild parentless kids. They're playing Gypsy Vikings on
two mostly-rust iron tugboats; one boat is stuck in the sand and
won't go anywhere and the other one actually has to be paddled
with planks. They take turns in groups being on the attack boat
and the victim boat. It looks like great fun; we don't
interfere.
Sparky and I go across the dunes to a sea observation point
castle. Down inside is a Denny's-like bar. David who used to run
Headlands Coffeehouse is here with a problem: his dream-only
house on the beach nearby is infested with voles. I say, "Wrap
the house in tarps and fill it with hydrogen sulfide gas."
Someone says, "That wouldn't work." I say to David, "Don't
listen to them. It'll kill everything in there, insects too." I
consider going off on a tangent about the weasels and stoats in
Toad Hall, but I want David to take my advice, so I control
myself and shut up.
On the trip back north Sparky and I are in a wide rock
sea-cave pub. Partly-wood/partly-rock ancient Viking
creature-men sail their boat in. Sparky speaks a modern Norse
language to them and she can understand a little of what they
say; she explains to the pub people that the Vikings are from
another world-- nobody knew that. The Vikings drink beer;
rather, being solid stone and wood, they awkwardly splash beer
at their faces. That's all they wanted. /Thanks, Sparky./ (Or
whatever her name is here.) And there they go in their Viking
ship, back where they came from.
I want to be as much help as Sparky has been to the normal
human flesh people who run the pub; I squeeze strawberries in my
fists for mashed strawberry drinks. That hadn't occurred to
them.
The Viking boat comes back by itself with no Vikings in it.
/Oh, no! In the other world the strawberries were the Vikings!
and when I was squeezing the strawberries, I was really
squeezing entirely out of existence the quantum possibility of
stone Vikings anywhere, everywhere.../ I try to think of ways to
undo the damage, like, I dunno, plant the strawberry mash in
dirt and grow more strawberries from the seeds. Can strawberry
plants grow from mashed strawberries?
A stereotypical horrible witch like Margaret What's-her-name
in /The Wizard Of Oz/ chases us around. Boring.
In another stone building that's all concrete pier supports
an older, skinny version of Sparky and I are resting on a ledge
after running and hiding to exhaustion. A V-shape of rising
bubbles moves slowly toward shore, moves this way. A snorkel
rises out of the water. I fly out to sea from our hiding place,
circle around and go near the snorkel from behind its path; it's
the size of a barrel. I yell down it and kick it. A /giant/ man
stands up. I flee, flying through the wreckage of buildings that
have collapsed into rising water, and the giant man follows me,
wades after me; he moves fast enough to catch up with me but
he's time-lagged; still, the third time I fly the other way past
his head he catches me. He holds me between two fingers and
lectures me about my casual /interfacing/ (meaning, squeezing
the strawberries and so causing genocide in the other worlds).
He sets me down in the corner of a building and I step on
some CDs he has collected (they follow him around like
butterflies and settle in heaps). I look through the CDs and
find two hand-painted-on voice recordings of a chubby, pink
little cartoon girl who has narrated her investigation into
/this/ world. The giant man doesn't want the CDs anymore;
they're just clutter in his life. I say, "Don't throw them
away. I'll take them." I imagine using them on my radio show--
I won't explain who the girl is or tell about the other worlds
or anything. There's plenty of time to tell about all that
later, after I've resurrected the wood/stone Vikings by growing
more strawberries so people won't think I'm a jerk for killing
them in the first place.
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-01-05:
First dream. A sleepy Mexican version of Mister Universe
from the movie /Serenity/ is driving me somewhere in his
crew-cab pickup truck. I'm in the back seat. He keeps turning
completely around to say things to me, and I tell him to just
drive, ya know, would ya watch the road! He's smoking a joint.
He reaches around to pass it to me and it's become a square
white cough drop. I wave it away; he says, "Come on, do one." I
say, "No. I hate the effect." He never looks back at the road
after this. He starts to fall asleep with his head on his arm.
I say, "Look! Look at the road!"
Next dream. Government spy/agents who are also senators have
been arguing about some important legislation coming up for a
vote. One of the senators gets a
machine/god/artificial-intelligence thing that shows him the
worldwide catastrophic destructive results of his not being able
to persuade the others not to pass the bill. /But they've
already passed it./ He gets dressed and arranges to have the
device, which is now a white guest bed, be shown at a government
event, where it can show the others how they've basically
destroyed the world. On the way in with the others he
calmly-affectlessly punches a young black-haired senator in the
stomach, disarranging the punchee's hair and shirt-tuck and
springing one end of his tuxedo collar loose. He'll shoot some
others, too; he's all ready. He has nothing to lose. (But is
this just something the machine wants? Has it tricked him, lied
to him?)
Next dream. In a closed-in government building in an ice
country, a woman sees a killer-troublemaker-spy man escaping
through the crowd /without his being pursued/. (She intuits that
he's done a terrible thing.) She runs after him.
I'm the woman. A blond officeworker girl diverts police
guards to help the the man get away through hospital-hallway
crash doors. I follow the girl into her office and accuse her.
She says she doesn't know what I'm talking about, but she says
it a little too defiantly. (Unless I'm crazy and nothing I
suspect is true.) I shove her back into her office chair so she
hits the back of her head on the wall. I say, "You stay there."
I go back out into the main hallway to help the police. At
the entrance I shoo people away from where the rug has been
moved, so not to disturb the evidence of the man's being here--
but this is now back in time, before the royal baby was kidnaped
and killed, or something like that. (Again: unless I'm crazy.)
A man on the wide stair landing above will have something to
do with the crime. I go to him and tell him I know all about it.
He says he doesn't know what I'm talking about; he uses the same
tone as the office girl did. I try to get police but the man
hurries away; I run after him. In an office obviously hastily
partitioned off in a soundstage --it's like a room in a castle
in the old /Flash Gordon/ serials-- the man and a woman
conspirator are farther along in the collective crime plans.
When I come in, the man has the sense to keep just acting
indignant with me, as though I'm mentally ill and only imagining
something is going on, but the woman attacks me from behind on
my right. (Actually, she hasn't moved; I came in and moved
between them.) I elbow her in the chest, trip her backward into
a chair and lift her left leg sideways and twist it so it /pops/
and bends at the knee at a bad angle. I'm all like, /You're not
going anywhere./ The man gets away again --or gets away for the
first time... Was the other time before or later? Confusing.
Running around like a chicken with its head cut off is
accomplishing nothing. I should stay here and wait for police.
Maybe I should pull the woman's leg out straight; I ask her what
she wants me to do. /She/ doesn't know. She doesn't seem to be
in any pain. Maybe I should leave before police come. Yeah,
because more and more I'm gathering that I'm the one doing all
the damage, and the man has probably gone to get police.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-01-06:
First dream. I'm working on someone's truck motor. This
morphs into my helping a foreign soccer player to assemble a
small car body of thin plastic and metal panels around two
bicycles bolted together side by side.
The soccer guy drives the resulting car by switching back
and forth between seeing out the front of the car and steering
in a completely immersive Google Earth environment. He swerves
us off the road onto the smooth shoulder, swerves back over a
now foot-high asphalt curb-stop rail. (It's a rough bump, but
there's no damage to the vehicle.) I tell him why driving this
way is dangerous: Google Earth images are not in real time; when
he's seeing only in Google Earth we might crash into something
that arrived there after the image data did. He doesn't get why
that's a problem. I say, "What if there's another car? Or a
person?" He's like, /So?/
The road meets two other roads in a Y. This is where I get
off. The soccer guy vanishes. I take my half of the panels off
the car, fold them up into a yard-square art portfolio and go to
hitchhike on the road uphill to the right. A college girl comes
here too --she'll hitchhike in the same place, making it less
likely for me to get a ride because there are two people here,
but more likely for me to get a ride because more people will
stop for the girl; those things cancel out. Fine.
Others come to stand here. Lots of people. Maybe there'll be
a bus; we're all going the same place anyway. It starts to rain.
Here come three buses.
Upstairs in the peaked loft of a long barn a play goes on at
one end of the building. I return all the baking spices I
borrowed from real estate woman Carol Greenberg (a box of jars
and shaker-cans, with some jars and cans inside of bigger jars).
I lie on the long couch down the left-hand wall, that everyone
else is already lying on; my face is pressed to the middle of
Carol's back; I put my arms around her hips for someplace to put
them but don't touch her with my hands so not to be rude. The
play starts. Of course I can't see the actors or hear what
they're saying --they're all down at the foot of the couch;
their voices rise and fall and take turns and switch abruptly
and artificially on and off, so it's definitely a play and not
just some people who came in late and found nowhere to sit and
are standing there talking.
I relax into sleep.
Next dream. It's night. It's raining. I walk downhill on a
busy San Francisco street that somehow starts right outside the
rural barn where I just got up off the couch. I cross a street
and turn right. A retarded-looking crippled man shaped like a
squat truncated cone hops sideways along the gutter on a springy
skateboard, at almost walking speed. I go into a
bakery/restaurant where an avant-garde play will start soon. I
have something to do with putting this play on, something so
important to the production that I don't think about it and so I
don't know what it is. In the very back room of two facing walls
of stainless-steel commercial refrigerators I dress in my
costume of tennis shoes and a green terrycloth bathrobe.
The entire business has become a kitchen. Outside the store
window, people in cars and on the sidewalk wait impatiently to
be let in; it's past time for the show to start. A big black man
leads the kitchen crew in frantically cleaning up. (They're
frantic; he's calm, giving directions.) The green-painted
concrete floor is greasy, a hazard. I suggest using the
pressure-washer that I just saw in the back. The leader says,
"That's a good idea." The job becomes getting boxes of food
supplies up off the floor because the floor detergent will ruin
them and the pressure spray will tear right through them.
I find some more of Carol's cooking spice jars and
shake-cans. Will she come here? Or should I take them back up to
the barn?
My dreams from Monday, 2008-01-07:
First dream. After a vague time-telescoped adventure I lean
on a central handrail to run/glide down long, wide steps to the
lowest basement of a big building to get to the restroom in the
very back. /I know and am proud of that this looks like
levitating./ I bang open the restroom door. There's someone at
the urinals, so I go into the wheelchair-accessible toilet stall
and latch the door. I kick the seat up, rip open my pants and
piss with a great feeling of relief.
The restroom becomes a long series of connected college
laboratory rooms not in the basement but on the surface.
Retroactively (or maybe this happened in the vague part before)
I'm an alien man from another world and I have triplet
eight-year-old daughters here. Pretend-sweet-and-helpful but
really mean government people have captured the girls and will
test them to see if they can levitate --the test is to /throw
them off a tower/. I appeal to the kindest-seeming woman among
these people; she smiles and acts all sorry but she won't do
anything to stop the murders.
I kick and shove people aside and run into the tower to
climb the stairs that go up around the inside and then the
outside; I run looking up the whole time (outside), worried
they'll throw the girls down before I get to the top.
Next dream. In the dream, just south of what used to be
Mendosa's Hardware are public telephone booths that are all open
to each other inside and share a long front and back wall.
It's a foggy early summer morning, no-one's out on the
street, and I'm naked here, taking a shower under the iffy water
from an overhead spigot near the telephone on the north end of
the row of them. The water stops. I go to a drinking fountain to
wash the soap out of my hair.
Mendosa's is now a modern gas station with a convenience
store and several repair bays. I tie a towel around my waist and
cross the parking lot to the office/store. Several gas guys are
standing around talking about movies. One says, "It's like I'd
walk miles." He doesn't think I get his joke, but I do; he's
referring both to the /I'd walk a mile for a camel/ ads and to
an obscure French movie where the people talk in a made-up
language that's like Boontling. The /miles/ guy and his chief
movie-critic rival argue over which movie of a pair (that just
arbitrarily comes up) is the better one, then they pick two
other movies and argue about those.
Dressed now I go down a long hallway in a school building
that government has taken over to use to deal with what it
thinks of as the alien invasion problem --that would be my
people, of whom I'm the only one here. Some invasion, eh?
Everyone wants me to do a different magic trick with my alien
powers. I put up a finger to stop the woman at the
meeting-classroom door from suggesting yet another magic trick
for me to do, and I sweep past her, giving a suggestion for
/her/: "Make the doorbell sound less like a doorbell." She looks
stricken, insulted.
Around a partition, here's the big meeting. These people
have no power over me, not even the power of calling up my
sympathy. They tried to kill my three little girls and all they
got out of that was a lot of really bad publicity. I'll let them
conduct their pointless meeting until I get bored, then I'll do
whatever occurs to me to do to have a little fun with them, play
with their heads.
I woke up with the song /Dog Police/ playing in my head:
"Rurf, rurf, rurf, rurf! Dog Police, where are you coming from?
Dog Police, nobody knows who you are!" (repeat, repeat, repeat)
(To hear it, find /Dog Police/ on YouTube.)
-end-
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