My dream from Tuesday afternoon, 2008-01-08:
I go to work as a lowly apprentice in a neo-Medieval
art-supply/medical-pharmacy operation in a wooden barn. Filled
prescriptions are supposed to go out with an envelope that has
important warnings and directions and little Cracker-Jack-prize
going-home-from-hospital gifts, and these envelopes are kept
stuck in cracks and panel doors of an upright drill press. /I
knock an envelope down/; its contents spill everywhere. I pick
the things up and put them back in the envelope, and when I try
to stick it back where it was I knock down several more. I pick
everything up, try to put it all back and nothing will stay
stuck to the drill press anymore. People are coming back to work
after their break. I can't be doing this now. I set the
envelopes on things near the drill press. I hope I got
everything back in the right envelopes. At least I know which
ones might be wrong. Should I tell what I did and have the
mixed-up ones checked? No.
I try to solve it by talking with the other workers, and get
nowhere. The woman in charge barks at me, "Get back to work.
Sweep the floor. Do something." Sweep the floor.
Now it's night. The workers are all sleeping on piles of
burlap. Outsiders, grownups, partiers come through; the people
in charge of the business are with them. They're all upper
class, corrupt.
I leave and go along the line of barns to a big
depression-era industrial work camp. Hundreds of people are
gathered in the central area for a rough church ceremony. The
preacher is not confident; he's losing their attention. I point
at him from hiding, levitate him, try to impressively fly him
up-- but he springs around on the invisible control line from my
finger, he's unstable; he flies too far one way and pulling him
back sends him too far the other way. I almost sling him into
the side of a barn but manage to set him down gently at its
base. In all the crowd's excitement and wonder at this I go near
the preacher and apologize; he doesn't hear my explanation, only
his religious feelings' explanation. My saying, "I did it," to
him means that I and everyone in the crowd somehow lifted him up
on a wave of spiritual power.
So there's no place for me here, nor at the pharmacy; I walk
through the hills. Time passes.
Here's a community of shacks. In an unpainted (and not
level) wooden pavilion, people sit around a central mountain of
food. A jolly heavy Carribbean-type wild old white man puts food
on plates --different kinds of fish, mostly-- and he slops a
thick lumpy paint-like white sauce on everything. It's an open
secret that the thick paint is a drug. I'm so hungry I eat it
anyway, /then/ I worry because I remember, from plenty of
storybooks, what a bad idea it is to dose a person who has
magical powers.
There's a vague time of my going around trying to help with
all the mysterious problems that are suddenly everywhere; my
helping just causes more trouble. I try to undo just the
troubles that affect a pretty white-haired girl, but she doesn't
understand what's happening, nor associate any good with me.
Somehow I become trapped in a motorized olive-press-like
kitchen exhaust fan outlet on a roof. Squirming out wiggles it
and starts it running. A tall black man, one of the many people
who have come to think I'm the devil, won't help me. I reach
over the top of the motor, pull the four spark-plug wires off
and so save myself.
It's always dim here now. A leftover problem from the
troubles before is a hot place in the flowerless pampas grass in
the center of this /McCabe-And-Mrs.-Miller/-like community where
steam and tar puff and splutter up out of the ground. People
gather and get closer to this, interested. I shout, "No! Get
away from it!" Nobody listens to me. The tar place suddenly
peels back, gets bigger and more violent. People panic but
mostly only step back a little; they should run! Jade from the
Whale School is here. I say earntestly to her, "Get them away."
She's white-faced, terrified; she says, "I can't do it." She
runs away with the few who are running away. At least I did that
much.
Steam and tar everywhere. /Did I cause this?/
Then all is quiet. There's nothing growing; there's only
tar. The people left alive lie around in and on what's left of
their shacks. They're letharthic, spiritless. I float over them,
try to get them involved in music. Here are some German-American
hillbillies; I hum old seventy-eight-r.p.m-record music-box
polkas and this perks the hillbillies up a little. I try to get
others to sing by singing a made-up song whose tune is a
haphazard medley of whatever occurs to me. One person sings
--the white-haired girl? Some others start.
This help also devolves and fails.
It's dark now. In front of a shack on a road out a
side-canyon a rock back is playing, a garage-quality band that's
a lot like the Grateful Dead. I use my magic to try to keep them
on key and on rhythm; this almost works (they spring back and
forth in pitch and rhythm on the control the way the preacher
did before, flying); they suck even with help. Also, they're
slathered in the white drug paint with only a bare cheek or knee
or instrument part sticking out here and there.
More time passes. If these are the last people in the world,
then people are about extinct. I climb up the bowl of the
horrible little town, trying to find the end of a flattened
canvas tube to sneak through it into a flattened tent place and
talk to the white-haired girl this has all been for. Her
guard-guy is sleeping at her feet. I'll have to get past him.
I'm spotted. The alarm goes up. The girl turns out to be
forty or fifty here; she's Helena Bonham Carter, in charge of
all these people. She has no reason not to think I'm the devil,
but /in the story, I love her; everything I've done was for
her./ She paints at me with the incapacitating white lumpy
paint, shouting, "What do you want! What do you want!" I say,
"Just to talk to you. Please listen." She paints and paints at
me; the paint is in my mouth so what I say becomes slurred: "I
just want you to listen. Please." She says, "Do you want /me/
to listen, or do you want /anybody/ to listen?" I fall back
against the wall behind me, overcome by the drug. She's still
slathering paint on me. I say, "You... A'ybody... Pleesshhe."
I'm blind. I can't move.
Delicate airy music plays during this. Start at middle C;
dashes are beats: C G - - - E C G - - - E C G - - - E C
DE(low)A - - - - (low)G G - - - E C G - - - E C G - - - E C
DE(low)A - - - - (repeat) (The DE(low)A part is the end of every
line in the lyrics, the "--talk to you" part.)
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-01-09:
First dream. I've been walking a long way at night through
strange places. I come out of wilderness into a nice small-town
neighborhood at night. Dogs and cats come to me; I kneel in a
house's concrete driveway and pet them. A fully-grown but small
orange cat rolls over so I'll rub its belly.
Back through some of the wilderness I'm in an like a ski
lodge apartment with an ever-changing number of people. My
mother is in a bed in the living room. I say to her, "Ya know
what I'd do if I were fourteen now?" (Fourteen and knowing what
I know at forty-nine.) "I'd build a Tesla coil fourteen feet
high... on /that/ model." I point to the Tesla coil in the
corner, that's just like the biggest real-life one I ever made--
the secondary coil is almost three feet tall.
My mother says, "Can we get into there to get the car?" She
means, can we use her car to get to my car in the housing
development of the pets. I say, "Sure," meaning /no/; we
wouldn't be able to find that place on ways a car can go, but we
can walk for hours and get there. I like that idea. Let's get
going.
At this point most of the other people in the room leave at
once out the sliding glass door. My mother reaches over the side
of the bed and lifts up onto it a complicated electromechanical
douche machine of wires and pipes and vinyl hoses. I have a
moment of panic: /Did I have sex with her?/ --and then relief:
/No. Good./
Next dream. With the memory of having been on the plateau up
and to the right, I drive down a narrow, winding dirt road to
where my car (?) is stuck dead in a sharp turn. I get out of my
(working) car and pick up my (dead) car by hand to align it to
be towed, then get back in the working car and nose it over the
ditch where the road turns back on itself, to hitch the cars
together with a ten-foot-long triangular tow bar.
Now there's only one car. I'm up on top of the plateau, in a
house that has several two-story-high metal shop spaces for
garages. The car is on the middle landing of a stairway between
two structural walls. (The stairs are only half as wide as the
space for them.) I lift the car to set it so all four wheels are
on the steps. (In the dream it doesn't seem strange that my
car's wheels are only two feet apart.) But there's something
wrong; at this angle the tow bar won't re-attach to the ball on
the back of the --uh --of the car upstairs, that's this car... I
see that I have to both lift and twist the car so it can tow
itself up. I call to Juanita in the kitchen through the
left-hand wall: "Come and help me lift this!" She says, "Okay,"
which means /later, when she's finished with whatever she's
doing/. I say, "No. Normally that would be okay, but I need you
to help me now. Come /now/ this time." She says, "Okay." (Same
thing.)
I stand on the stairs doing a self-sarcastic /I'm waiting/
dance with my upper body. This all has the flavor of a story on
one of Bill Cosby's early albums. That's the way I'll tell it.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-01-10:
First dream. People sit on church pews outdoors in a
sycamore-tree park, having a citizens' meeting about
space-station politics. The park becomes inside a warehouse (or
maybe in a section of the space-station habitat). I go into a
bathroom that's like the one in my (dead) grandparents' house in
Escondido (CA) in the late 1960s. I almost-but-not-quite can
smell that house.
Next dream. It's raining. I'm in a college that takes up an
entire sleazy 1950s-noir East Coast city. The tennis team people
are insular and mean. I intercept a letter from
outraged/condescending older students to freshmen new to the
tennis team; the letter mainly says, "Get out of there." (They
feel the younger kids should know enough to get out from under
an oppressive system, but they have to tell them anyway, hence
the condescending tone.)
Without going inside I'm inside a part of the college
converted from an department store. A cross between photographer
Garth Hagerman and my college friend Dan wanders around in here
with me, commenting on things. Around and past the crossed
escalator is a museum of antique vacuum-tube-operated
chess-playing computers the size of office desks. Teachers have
claimed these as their own desks; this department is their
office space.
Now Juanita and I are camping in our sleeping bags on a
grass parking-lot island amid normal modern four-story college
buildings. I get out of my sleeping bag and pull my pants on,
and only then realize that it's the middle of the day and anyone
in any of the hundreds of windows around might look out here and
call the police. Well, we're leaving; if they tell us to leave,
I'll say, "What's it look like we're doing? Look, we're already
gone."
A kid crashes his garbage truck into a blue dumpster, whose
corner creases the side of a station wagon, which slides over to
/just barely touch/ my Mercury. The boy is shaken up but of
course unhurt, and my car is fine; I tell the boy to relax, get
on with his job, and to move the dumpster somewhere else and
just forget about this. He says, "Yeah... yeah, thanks. Right.
Okay." Everything's such a big deal when you're that age. You
have to /learn/ to not sweat the small stuff.
Next dream. In another dream-only college a lot like the one
where Juanita and I were camped in the previous dream, here I
have a letter that incriminates the administration, and I have
to get it through the interference of old
women/janitor/letter-carriers who are
administration-protectively bunched up around the entrance to a
dormitory building. I pretend to be one of them; still, this
isn't going to work. Something else will have to happen...
A man brings a crumpled letter he found that my mother
stuffed in his locker. (This is the perfect confusing thing; the
janitor/letter-carriers turn all their attention to him and
/his/ letter.) My mother says she told the doctor (?) my
symptoms (?) and he agreed it's important that I go into
/restraint/. (I and the janitor women see /restraint/ as my
being confined in a canvas space suit and drugged into
passivity.) I pretend to go along with this, and sail right past
the women into the building. /It couldn't have gone better if
I'd planned it. Way to go, Mom!/
-end-
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