My dreams from Sunday, 2008-01-13:
First dream. In outdoor theater seats I kneel and lay my
upper body across a strange woman's lap. My head somehow sticks
out through her, behind her, so my right ear is on the concrete
floor of the next higher row. I smoke a cigaret that gets so hot
it burns my fingers numb. I see my undamaged fingertips in
extreme closeup. The woman moves her knee and it presses into
the crease of my leg into my hip. I feel slightly nauseous.
Next dream. KMFB reggae deejay Sister Yasmin is using a
typesetting typewriter/computer in the bedroom of the house
where I lived when I was in seventh grade. She's upset in
typical techno-ignoramus mode-- the machine won't read her mind
and do what she wants it to. I'm about to leave, but before I do
she wants detailed instructions for anything it might later
/occur/ to her to want to use the machine for. I say, "I never
use odd fonts anymore, or change the fonts." I tell about
Instant Artist For DOS, the program that I used to make all the
column titles and display ads for my paper in the early 1990s.
How fast and easy it was. She says, "Will that work?" I say,
"No, not in a typewriter, but it was great. Well, bye."
I'm about ten or twelve years old, with two girls in a car
in a desert that's like the playing field at Franklin Elementary
School. A girl leans over to kiss me; I say, "No. I'm married,"
and flee. I fly away north, stepping abruptly between various
altitudes as if there are lanes in the air. I land in towns in
Idaho and Canada and then on islands north of Canada where it's
dark and they heat buildings with live steam (the rooms are
filled with steam). The map superimposed on this trip is a puffy
claymation globe.
All the way over the North Pole and south again into Russia
I go into a Safeway grocery store-- inside it's a Cost Plus
import store. My landlord's weightlifting nephew is here in the
department of potted plants hanging in macrame nets. I say,
"Where's the grocery store?" He points outside, out the other
side of the building. I leap/float there, squeeze through the
pet door, flip in the air to get over some cars and land next to
my old 1971 Toyota four-door. It feels really good to sit in
this car and start it and work the controls. (I miss having such
a small car. My big Mercury is fuel-injected and gets better gas
mileage than any of the little cars I had, but little cars are
just more --I dunno, car-like, more honest.)
Next dream. I carry a grand piano to my landlord's
dream-only ranch house, that's in a line of houses in what's
otherwise wilderness. I go into the wrong house, where several
old people are having an old-folks' association business
meeting. They ignore me. My landlord's nephew is in the middle
house. I knock dry, dead leaves and plant waste from potted
vines and ferns, gather the mess up and put it in a brick
fireplace, then I carry the piano out the back and around the
line of houses.
The path leads below the right house. I struggle up a steep,
unstable embankment, sliding the piano upside-down ahead of me,
get the piano on top, then roll over the lip of the hill after
it. I carry it into the house, set it on its legs.
Where's Juanita? Wasn't she supposed to be here?
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-01-15:
First dream. In the dream, Rebecca, one of my advertisers,
has hurt her back. She explains: "Five vertebra are fused going
/this/ way and /that/ way." I suggest she lie upside-down on
this Barcalounger here and stretch her back out by hanging her
head over the footrest.
Now it's Verge Belanger whose back is hurt. I offer to give
him my towel rod (really a pull-up bar) to put it across a door
in his house and hang from it. He says, "What if it slips?" I
say, Get someone heavy to try it out first."
I drive down a street of houses in like Escondido to where
there are no more houses. This is a desert with hills around it.
A road goes off in somewhat the direction I want to go, but it's
on the wrong side of the line of hills...
My car vanishes. Now this is a junkyard/dump. A young
musician (who'll be famous in the future) and another other
musician steal scrap bits of den paneling from mounds of trash
to use them for musical instrument parts. An alarm goes off.
Lights go on in metal buildings. I flee on a minibike with an
armload of trapezoidal pieces of paneling, get out under the
fence and go up a narrow mountain road that has a high concrete
rail. Federal cops come down the mountain. I throw the
incriminating bits of paneling over the rail.
The road and rail-wall and mountainside become inside a
court building. Narrow steps take a sharp corner upward to the
left. A friendly police dog comes to me to be petted.
Next dream. I'm driving a melted-gumdrop-shaped little old
sports car by remote-control from aside and behind it. The road
comes to another in a T and all the cars go left and curve
around a hill, so the car I'm driving goes well out of my sight.
I remember that something like this always happens when I drive
a car by remote (in the dream I remember other dreams of doing
this), so this is normal; the car probably won't crash.
Now I'm in a car-repair garage on a gray-green linoleum
floor, telling a combination-person of Verge and Tony about a
dream I had (that I remember only within this dream) about
dismantling a sports car in this same garage. I tell that the
other mechanic took the car apart from the top, under the hood,
while I lay on my back, taking it apart from underneath. Now I'm
reading this dream to Tony from my dream journal: "I take the
bolts loose and get the transmission out..." Reading it makes it
sound dumb even to me, but I soldier on.
I woke up with a song playing in my head that's a mixture of
the U.S. National Anthem and a song called /Vodka/ that I heard
a long time ago on /A Prairie Home Companion/.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-01-16:
First dream. I've climbed up to a high plateau above where
two rivers come together-- or one river makes a sharp L-bend.
Long barge boats fly over, held up by their tuck-and-roll loads
of big canvas bags. I have time to think, /Hydrogen?/ then,
/Even with hydrogen the bags aren't big enough to lift those
boats,/ and then all the barges are in the water below, floating
to the right.
Rough 1930s-Great-Depression people line up alongside a
canal up here, hoping to get work.
Now I'm in a roofless, wall-less house's living room with my
this-dream-world good-natured mafia family. I get everyone's
attention and tell about my memories of California, a land that
is a total fantasy to the people here. They accept that I
believe I'm from a made-up "California." People sometimes go
nuts --it's no disgrace-- and I'm family, so it's tolerated.
I'll either get better or I won't; why should they worry about
it?
Later, at the bottom of the driveway below a country church,
across the L-shaped valley from the plateau and the house, I set
message-in-a-bottle-like notes in wet cement and scratch
messages into fenceposts for anyone in this world who might have
also come from the California I remember so well. My friend
Mitch Clogg comes along (he's from here, not the real
California); I go with him to a gathering of mutual dream-world
friends down the river and up into the hills past the barge
plateau. A greedy, untrustworthy man-size lobster creature
(Sidney Greenstreet) feeds us raw spoiled fish. I sit examining
several fillets laid out on my pants leg. Bleagh. I wander away
and politely wait till I'm out of everyone's sight to throw the
fish into the bushes.
I come to what from far away seems like a modern,
normal-looking apartment building under construction-- closer, I
see they're using light, porous granite, but even so the weight
builds up, and the wooden supports and carport columns and floor
joists are weak and inadequate; the thickest of the timbers are
doubled rickety two-by-fours. It's an experimental building.
This is a college. A secretary-student woman lets me wait
for the old professor to get out of class. I tell the professor
and his colleagues about California. I'm a resource; even if
nothing I say is true, I'm obviously a tremendous source of
story ideas, and I have engineering knowledge a hundred years
ahead of theirs, that I can immediately demonstrate... but /I
miss my wife/. Everyone understands that. I'm like /The Man Who
Fell To Earth/ but if he'd come in the 1800s, not 1964, and if
there were no United States.
Next dream. Same Italian California-like other world as in
the previous dream. I'm lying in bed outdoors. Juanita sits
against a dresser, reading. I say, "I used to love Star Trek. I
used to really look forward to when it came on, and memorize all
the details. 'Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages
of the Starship Enterprise, whose /important/ mission...'" (That
doesn't sound right. I know it's not "'important' mission", but
in the dream I'm can't remember what the word is supposed to
be.)
Now I'm in the living room of my landlord's house, which in
the dream is where my high-school friend Jeff Phillips' house
should be. I'm leaving to go home (where?); we talk about maybe
putting a big teevee in the front window and a speaker under the
eaves, so everyone in the neighborhood can lie out on the lawn
and watch a movie. It's a really good idea --except it's
illegal; it's piracy to do that. We chuckle about this.
There's the tree we used to climb up at night. And there's
Jeff's pickup truck. And there's his Austalian shepherd dog,
Blue. --No, it's a cardboard cut-out of a dog, like for a
grocery-store cereal display.
I smell cardboard.
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /I Hate California/
playing in my head.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-01-17:
First dream. I fly over a concert crowd of 1970s black
people. I'm videotaping this, making an unauthorized documentary
of the event, as people pass the beachball-Afroed woman singer
from hand to hand over their heads, just ahead of my path. This
concert is a religious ritual for black people only. How can I
get out of the building with my tape without getting caught?
Only partially invisible I fly through a doorway and dead-end in
a deep broom closet. I'm caught.
Before the concert I talked with the singer about what I
wanted to do (make the documentary). It occurs to me that she
might speak up for me; I say, "Ask her." They look at her; she
says, "I told him not to do it. He wouldn't listen." Oh, great.
Now they will kill me.
No, they won't. They were just kidding by being all
menacing. It's fine with them if I take pictures.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in Headlands Coffeehouse,
getting ready to leave. A mixture of a man named Paul who
fifteen years ago developed a glowering hatred of me because of
something my paper printed that his personal rival wrote, and
the actor whose character sets up the transfer of smuggled goods
in the /Jaynestown/ episode of /Firefly/, is here a friendly
soldier home from Iraq. We've been talking. He decides to leave,
too; he gets up from his stool at the window-counter and shrugs
on an orange rucksack. I hold the door for Juanita and for the
soldier. He smiles and says, "Proper protocol must be observed."
Next dream. I'm in the self-checkout-scanner area of like a
Target store. I plug in the electric blanket I'm getting, to
test it. It doesn't warm up. /I didn't want that kind, anyway./
I think to use the checkout touch-screen to look up what I want;
I put the defective blanket --which has become an electric
cook-pot-- with other people's rejected items on a deep shelf
across the aisle, and when I come back a store worker girl has
commandeered my checkout computer to ring up another customer's
things. I laugh, "/Hey!/" The girl says, "You should think of
it as luggage lost at the airport."
Juvenile delinquent stringless-marionette kids constructed
of coffee-can-size corkwood cylinders take an interest in me,
probably to beat me up and rob me. I walk calmly away into the
next store, a hardware store, and I wait until I hear them right
behind me to whirl around and go enjoyably berserk defending
myself.
My dreams from Friday, 2008-01-18:
First dream. It's raining and cold out. Juanita and I have
broken into a strange, overheated apartment that has several
rooms on each side of a wide entryway/central-hallway. Juanita
will take a long time to get warm; she says, "I'll just leave
the heater all the way up until Marco cooks."
I check the thermostat --it's almost 100 degrees
(Fahrenheit) in here. I say, "For Chrissake, Juanita. Turn it
down and get ready to go." My shirt and coat that I just draped
over a towel rack are already dry. Juanita says, "I'll wait
till you're in the shower and turn it up all the way." I say,
"Turn it down and open a window." She's like, /Open a window--
are you nuts?/
Next dream. A vague, time-telescoped political adventure
ends in all the things that happened in it being elements of
having constructed a railroad steam engine on a concrete slab
and then putting a metal building up around it. (The steps of
the adventure are mapped to the construction of the scene and
vice versa.) I fly forward over the engine to put greasy (or
bloody) mechanics' rags in horizontal slots in the walls, which
a moment ago were metal but are now stone. I get
stuttery-mouth-locked trying to think of a way to say to the
woman and man who think they initiated all this, "When you need
me to help you, get my attention," and at the same time say,
"When I need you to help me, I'll expect it." I don't need to
say anything-- they're gonna be all superior no matter what; I'm
just the technician.
I lie prone, head forward on the bed-long dashboard of a car
being driven north on Main Street through Fort Bragg (CA). I
have something clutched in my hands held out in front of me; my
knuckles almost reach the windshield. It's a magic trick: they
saw me put a handkerchief in my hands; a bird will come out.
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-01-19:
First dream. It's night. I walk into and diagonally through
a park with a strange Mexican cop/agent man. A Labrador
retriever dog comes near. I take it by the roll of skin of its
neck, say, "Heel," and keep walking. It heels perfectly. I say,
"Sit." It sits. I say, "Drop." It lies down. Good dog! What a
good dog!
We come to the cop's family's house. Everyone's out on the
patio. Food is cooking on a barbecue grill. They're having a
party in just the light coming out the kitchen window from a
lamp deeper in the house. This is nice.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a big room like in
Juanita's friend Annie's San Francisco apartment in 1988 but
here it's at ground level. Other people are here. Everyone lies
down to sleep. It's cold; I direct a boy to switch on the
plug-in electric heater under the window shelf. Another person
turns on a baseboard heater. /Is that too much for this
building's old wiring?/
I go out and down a long tunnel-like hallway, wearing only
underwear and a t-shirt, pulling a suitcase on wheels and
carrying a folded umbrella-cane. Things become vague.
I'm still in underwear and still have the suitcase and the
cane, but I'm coming /back/ to what's now a stone building with
the sleeping room at the far end of the tunnel. A girl is
walking with me; she's worried about getting too near this
place, a taboo place. I say, "I'll surprise you." When we get
just inside the tunnel I push at the rock wall on the left and
it swings open into an old-fashioned rich big-city holiday-busy
department store. We walk in. Things become vague.
A long time has passed. I come through the tunnel, back to
the sleeping room, now a suite of rooms. Everyone is either gone
or in enchanted sleep under dust or has magically faded away
into the environment of the rooms. /Where's Juanita?/ I run
around, knocking things over, trying to kick people awake and
getting poor results. In a bathroom two small women lying
side-by-side underwater in the cold bathtub /are not dead yet/.
/Get up! Get up!/ They sit up, bleary, slowly waking.
I find my mother on a couch and wake her up, make her sit
up.
The bathtub women indicate without speaking that they know
something about Juanita. The give me a tiny metal souvenir
View-Master movie-camera-thing. /Is Juanita inside this?/ I
can't see anything in its lens. "No," one of the women finally
says, "Je Suisse." /Juanita's in Switzerland. I have to go to
Switzerland./
The way to Switzerland is through the department store off
the tunnel. It leads to a vast opulent country-club
ballroom/restaurant. An officious woman tries to chase me out of
here (I'm still in my underwear). I float up into the air and
slowly walk in the air back to the door-in corner where
less-respectable people are eating and drinking in like a
Dickens Faire pub. Everyone's amazed at my walking in the air.
An old Scottish or Irish man pretends I'm his old friend; he
shouts, "Hi!" I'll help him out here; I go to him and say into
his ear, "Look surprised at what I'm saying." He does. I say,
"Tell your friends I told you something secret about the old
country." Perfect. I don't have to spell it out; he know how to
do this. He has a little coin now among the others.
Now I'm going back the first way (to Switzerland, away from
the tunnel) with some of the good, disreputable people; we're
being chased by a malevolent dusty indoor wind that's carrying
cloth napkins and small trash at first but the solids join to
become jungle animals. We reach the middle of the long wall and
hide on the other side, up in complicated plasterwork at the top
of the columns. The animals attack. We repel most of them, but a
monkey and its monkey baby latch onto my pants leg, so in the
next place, a regular restaurant (in Switzerland?), I fly around
shaking monkey parts (bread, other food) loose onto people's
tables. A waiter shows me to the door. I thank him and
apologize.
Outside I fly through a film-noir city. The animals are
still after me, but here they are police and firemen with cars
and guns and searchlights on trucks. I fly up a hillside of dark
buildings. It's no trouble to evade pursuit; they're all stuck
on the ground and can only follow the streets.
This looks like a city of a million people, and it's only
one city in a whole country. How can I find Juanita in all this?
/Also, I lost the camera thing./ Oh, well.
Next dream. I'm fleeing with others diagonally across an
outdoor space that's somehow the same as the big ballroom place
in the previous dream. We go through columns into a covered
place. I say, "Does anyone have a plan?" I don't know what's
after us, here; ghosts, snakes, religious kooks, something. We
have an election and I'm named leader. I direct everyone to go a
different way, split up.
I go alone into the same-shaped ballroom space from the
corner across the short wall; now this is a covered mall-like
resort --a wedding resort? A woman and a man, newlyweds, have
just sat down at a table. The woman thinks I'm a waiter. She
says, "I'll have one of those," and points up at a sign on the
nearest column, that says, /Drink Atomic Blaster/. Okay. I go
across the room to a bar/kitchen area, get the staff's attention
and tell them to bring two Atomic Blasters to /those people/. (I
point to them.) Two boys are just getting off work; one has
incredibly greasy hair. They're talking animatedly to each
other. I get out of their way but the one boy flips his head and
hair grease flicks out and gets on my arm. /Ugh./
The young woman's new husband reveals himself to be abusive
and horrible; she gets away from him and I rescue her, carrying
her on my lap on a flying ice-cream-shop chair. We fly the
length of the resort/mall, go outside and fly through a city
like Burbank (CA) in the early 1960s. I'm like, /Where do you
want to go?/ She's like, /I want to go with you./ I'm
flattered and I appreciate the sentiment, but I still have to
find Juanita. I explain this to the woman, and she accepts it
and suggests I take her to a train station. We keep an eye out
for one of those.
The woman says, "I could help you find her."
I say, "Nice try," then, "Okay. Switzerland." She says,
"What!" Funny.
Next dream. Juanita and I and some others are on a kind of
flying platform, zooming above a dirty, crowded freeway in a
dirty city. I'm driving; I match speed with the cars and trucks
and slip in among them to fly through an underpass.
Now it's just me and Juanita and there's no vehicle. We land
at the side of a less-traveled road, still in the city but close
to the edge of it, and we meet a man and his daughter who are
trying to get back to their home in the mountains. Others
appear, and they all become a whole stereotypical inbred
hillbilly family. Juanita appeals to me with her eyes to save
them. /Sigh./
Okay. I say, "I've never done this many before but I'm sure
it'll work." Juanita guides everyone in holding hands around an
imaginary oval table and crouching a little as if sitting in
chairs. Two of the boys are retarded; one has to be persuaded by
a slap from the old grandmother lady to stop eating and put his
big messy sandwich in his lap. When we're all in position and
connected I turn on the flying power and we rise ponderously
into the air and begin flying away from the city.
Several of the hillbillies at once forget to keep holding
hands. Everyone falls about five feet to the grass on the road
verge. /Try again./
We get a long way this time, to a pink-beige stucco tourist
building on a lookout point. The family can't concentrate enough
to go any farther safely. They wander away. Juanita and I sit at
an outdoor table and smile and shake our heads about it.
I woke up with a familiar-sounding but unknown song playing
in my head: "I'm gonna get to Heaven with a big foul mouth, on a
horse to the east and the north and the south." It's like
something you'd hear on /Hee Haw/.
-end-
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