This dream was in my notes from Wednesday 2008-01-02 and somehow I
skipped it. It comes last for that date:
I'm walking across a wide conical mountainside. Dry grass and rocks.
A sheepdog/coyote-thing meets an ostrich/pteradon/crane-thing. The bird
bullies the dog and scares the sheep.
I cross a valley and go to where in the dream Juanita and I live in
a minimalist pastel-green plaster house. Now I've been inside this house
overnight. I pull thick wool socks on and pull on boots; I'm ready to go
back out in the cold and stay out for maybe days. The boots are too
small front-to-back; they bow up the arches of my feet and make them
ache.
Instead of going outside I go across the hillside the house is on,
go through rusty metal shop buildings. In one of these metal buildings a
meeting of self-deluding revolutionaries is taking place. They're so
intent on their political arguments that they don't even look at me.
Later Juanita and I are lying on a bed in an old grammar-school
office room (pastel-green walls, pastel-green desks and counter). A
National Public Radio show plays: a cheerful avuncular man's voice tells
a story about Juanita being in a hurry to get somewhere not the airport,
but she had to go to the airport for something first. There she met her
girlfriend from Lark camp, who convinced her to come away to Puerto Rico
to get a special harp string. (In the dream Juanita has a big Celtic
harp --here it is in the office, next to the bed; it has a metal part
that sticks out over the edge to hold two extra strings. One string is
broken.) The radio story ends by telling about how after she returned
from Puerto Rico (without the string but with the memory of the
adventure of trying to get it) Juanita still has no money and has to eat
cheap Ramen but now, the man sings, "she knows it's all about meeeeeee"
(meeeeee sung along with the plucked replacement harp string... /but she
didn't get the string... hmm./ I say to Juanita, "You never told me
they were doing a story about you." She smiles and shrugs. I say,
"We'll get the string." She and I quote from /Mouse Hunt/ in unison: "A
world without string is chaos."
Now I've been away from the grammar-school/dormitory place. I come
to the office room and Juanita's here with a rough hairy 1970s
businessman/hippie. The man's sitting in a desk chair. Juanita starts
organizing papers-- killing time till I leave? Juanita says something,
starts a sentence, and the man finishes the sentence with a location. I
wave a rolled up newspaper section like a baton and say to the man, "And
how did you know that?" The man blurts: "/Ridin' with the king./"
I have to go to work. I can't stay here. I slap the edge of the door
and say to the man, "Almost fast enough." Everyone waits, tense. I say
crossly, jealously, "Well, /bye/," and hurry away down the school
hallway. I go through the building, jump down a wooden bench rather than
have to go around it and down three steps. I turn right. A stuffy school
official says, "Where are you going." I say, "The wrong way,
apparently." I turn around and go out through the sets of doors of a
cold-lock, then out and down steps at the front of the building, then
right. This is a street but it's still indoors, in the front aisle of a
cold-country underground-feeling grocery store. I see a rack of heavy
Sunday newspapers and feel happy for a moment because I can buy a
newspaper and spend an hour or two reading, and for that time I won't
have to feel all jealous of Juanita and that guy. And I think, in the
dream, /What's with all the jealousy all the time anymore? What's the
matter with me?/ And I answer that question: /If I had just a little
more money, I'd be happy and confident./ And that's just funny, because
it sounds like spam-- you know, /Subject: Make money! Be happy and
confident!/
(Then comes the dream about the game of portable telephones and the
five car-wash elevators. And so on.)
My dreams from Friday, 2008-01-11:
First dream. I'm riding in a truck with some other kids in like a
Scout troop, being taken somewhere by a strange grownup. Everywhere in
this dream is a black barbed-wire vine motif. Except for the road
there's only wilderness; off to the left a kind of unwritten caption on
the landscape is /The Indian Shooting Gallery/. A boy really wants to
see the Indian Shooting Gallery. The driver stops for us all to get out
and rest, and the boy wanders away. I go after him, catch up and help
him look.
The truck driver turns out to also be interested in finding the
fabled place. He drives on a trail while I hop alongside in a
ditch/creek, vaulting forward on a tall crutch with every other step.
We never find anything. Later we're on and in a black-vine-covered
hill, having a play war with beebee guns, actually shooting each other
in the face with them. (Doctor) Sherie is here; she does a trick with
her gun, where she bends the stock double and shoots backward over her
shoulder, like William Powell shooting backward over his shoulder in
/The Thin Man/.
Next dream. I'm in a strange house in a Scotland-like version of
Caspar (CA). In the dream this is my employer Tim's house, and I'm
taking care of things while he's away. The phone rings, the answering
machine gets it, and the outgoing message jerks to a stop before ending;
I take out the outgoing cassette. The tape is caught in the machine. I
have to pull more and more tape out of the cassette to get it loose from
the machine, and when it comes loose, several feet of it spill onto the
floor. The tape is thick-- some kind of metal. It's not damaged. I'm
turning it back inside the cassette with my index finger when Tim gets
home. He takes the tape out of my hands and asks me why I'm not doing
what I'm supposed to be doing.
But I am, or have been. I lead him into the next room and show him
that I have indeed set the bucket of silkworm silk compound (it's like
half-congealed rubber cement) next to the clothes-drier-like spinning
and drying machine and set it going. The machine pulls the stuff in and
spins, dries and spools it inside itself-- that's what what it should be
doing, anyway; in fact, I've put too much in the bucket and so spinning
it and heating has just puffed it up inside the machine like wet dough
and it's starting to come out the vent pipe... /Should I open the top?/
Tim says, "No."
The dream jumps back to where Tim has just come home and is acting
like I broke his answering machine and I can't be trusted. This time
when I discover the silk machine all messed up, Tim isn't in the room
with me. I just leave the house. On my way out the back, Alice is here.
I say hi and bye, pet her dream-only big shaggy dog and set out across
the field toward the cliff edge over the sea to go around the fence and
go south. Tim comes out the door, says something to Alice and then calls
after me to come back and fix things; I swear calmly at him and continue
away.
The grass is wet and very green. There's a path along the cliff
edge. My arms are scratched and puffy --is this poison oak? poison ivy?
I'm not allergic to those things; /I've never in my life had a rash on
my arms./ Maybe it's from the chemicals in the silk compound. Or were
there sticker vines in the dog's fur? I can't remember.
Next dream. I've just escaped from Tim's place that's under the
water off the coast of like Maine. I'm in the water but I'm not wet or
cold; my view is uphill to what might be a quaint New England town. I
float up out of the water and move toward shore.
Now I'm on a road by the water, going uphill, driving a motorcycle;
I turn north onto a road parallel with the shore.
And now I'm pedaling a three-wheeled adult bike going the other way.
I stop to give a ride to a boy who in real life twenty years ago broke
his neck diving into the Navarro River; he gets into the big basket in
back. I stop for performance-artist Sherry Glaser. She gets in. An angry
little red-haired creepy man who I did not stop for rides past us at
high speed on a white motor scooter, shouting as he approaches and goes
away, asking snarkily, "How do ya like going so slow! Ya wouldn't stop
for /me/, would ya!"
And now I'm pedaling a long hallway rug on the ground, sitting up,
with the sides of the rug bunched in my fists and the front rolled over
my toes, pulling the boy and Sherry Glaser (they're riding behind me on
the rug). I angle right, leave the road, go across a dry field, cross
railroad tracks and come to where another road goes very steeply uphill.
It's too steep for the rug. The boy gets off. I wonder if Sherry will
pick me up and carry me the rest of the way up there...
I'm with a strange woman in Sherry's dream-only nice side-hill
house. The woman tells me that Sherry has gone to the show-- the show
the woman and I came thousands of miles to see. How do we get there? I
go to look it up on Sherry's silent Macintosh computer.
I don't know how to work a Mac. I want to get to its desktop to find
an icon for a browser I can use, so I close a window that's a still
picture of Sherry talking to some guy by the back (side) door of this
house, and there's another window underneath; this one has motion. I
close it, and there's video of part of an /I Love Lucy/ show that
someone (probably Sherry) has halfway converted into a title sequence
for her own next show. /Shit, I've been closing edit points of her
project-in-progress./ I have to keep going, though. Here's some video of
her and her whip-thin Gypsy Musketeer-like boyfriend having a funny
screaming fight by the other door, the door out of the kitchen area.
/How do you just look at the desktop?/ It doesn't occur to me in the
dream to do anything other than close every window that appears.
There are wires everywhere. I follow some to a noisy boombox and
shut it off.
Sherry's son (?) and his girlfriend and all their friends come home.
It turns out there's no show tonight or ever, and so I came 3000 miles
for nothing. Oh, well.
The woman with me is hungry. I ask the kids for permission to use
the kitchen and say I'll cook dinner for everyone. That's fine.
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-01-12:
Vignette. I get a closer and closer view of a pet dog whose side
becomes a landscape of wires coming together in what I take to be
processor chips. This feels like reading about the prosthetic nerves
used to repair the damage done to Lieutenant Koudelka in the Lois
McMaster Bujold books /Shards of Honor/ and /Barrayar/, which are mostly
about Cordelia, Miles Vorkosigan's mother.
Next dream. I'm flying high in the air. I fly out over the edge of
the land, over a much-farther-down, bigger land of forested hills and
lakes. It occurs to me to deliberately fall, and it's delicious-- I fall
and fall and fall, some of this time with my eyes closed, and wait till
the absolute last instant before using flying power to not crash, and
curve up to fly slowly past a hill where sea pirates are camping. The
head pirate stands to wave and shout something piratical as I go by.
Next dream. A man and his big-chested blonde wife have crashed their
car in an alley. The man is lying back on his folded-back driver's seat;
the woman has been bounced around in the passenger seat so she's sitting
the other way, lounging with her back against the dashboard. I stand
outside, leaning in the passenger window. We're old friends.
/Something develops between the woman and me./ The man says
something the woman misinterprets as his wishing to have her breasts cut
smaller. We all laugh a bit uneasily.
They get out of the car. The woman holds my hand and stays with me
while the man goes off down the alley with other people on their way to
a party or festival or something. I say, "This isn't right."
The woman vanishes. I go though a carport and into a nice alley
apartment. In the bathroom I find the crashed woman's plastic hospital
gown in the wastebasket. The deep laundry sink is full to the brim with
water; bubbles rise from the metal plug-chain. I pull the plug out to
drain the sink.
Someone comes in from the alley. I say, "Who is that?" It's a
gay-ly overgroomed man, one of the people who live here. I say, "I
didn't think anyone would be here this week." He says, "We got back
last night." I become fascinated by a small video device on a
bookshelf. It's a solid wooden plaque that --through video paint! a
painted-on video screen!-- plays advertisements and an afternoon women's
teevee show. Video paint! You can see the woodgrain through it. I say,
"That is so cool!"
A crowd of people gathers on a road that goes along a cliff-like
rocky hillside above the ocean. I float just overhead in a lie-down
anti-gravity go-cart. Here comes actress Gina O'Feral carrying a
suitcase-size video camera on her shoulder. She starts down the rocks.
I think, /Probably dozens of people are killed here every year they have
this stupid event./ I call to Gina, "Be careful!" She speeds up out of
control, loses her balance, falls down over rocks to a lower part of the
trail. I swoop down to where she's sprawled there and give her a hand
up. (The cart is like a wheelchair for me; I can't get up myself.) I
say, "Are you all right?" She says, "I think so." She's feeling over
her arms and head and back to see if anything's broken. I feel her knees
and shins; she pushes my hand away. Okay-- I can take a hint; I fly up.
Back up on top of the cliff now I see that the road is a street in a
busy future city. I fly toward the buildings. A giant video screen
across two mismatched buildings plays quick incomprehensible cuts of an
advertisement for-- what? The screen has a lot of bad pixils, some stuck
lit up, some stuck dark; the problems with the screen become more
obvious as I get closer.
-end-
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