My dreams from Sunday, 2008-01-20:
First dream. In a wet valley a river has thick green grass
on the banks; the concrete arches on the sides of a bridge make
two two-foot-thick protractors. Trees cover pretty hills in the
distance. A World-War-Two-style war is going on, and I'm
shinnying up one arch of the bridge, trying to stay out of sight
of anyone who might shoot from the other side.
My point of view moves backward and to the left and floats
away up (or down) above the flat river. I sit against the wall
of a garden shed, realizing that my growing understanding of my
magical power to stop war --this war, any war-- is an
accumulation of not imaginary but real push-pedal sewing machine
parts. When there are enough for an entire sewing machine, the
power will work. /But will it only work for me? Does everyone
have to build his own sewing machine? Or is it like with the
Lamed Wufniks, where there's a critical number who must live and
do the magical work or the world fails?/
Next dream. I have to go to the North Pole to turn back
time? (Or reboot time?) I run downhill to dark water in an
Arctic bay and slosh deeper and deeper into it, expecting to be
somehow borne up to run on the surface, which doesn't happen,
but as long as I keep slogging I won't sink.
Across the bay in a cave/grotto a lot of people in a secret
society have a new-age religious ceremony. I climb up to an ice
ledge and displace religious people from where they're chanting,
to get to a way out. Pursued by all these people I push a plug
of ice out of the doorway and climb through, emerging on the
rock shore of not the bay from before, but a long-frozen one;
it's just beginning to melt so the ice can move a little.
Once out here I'm not breaking the religious rules anymore,
I'm not in their sacred grotto. They continue with their
ceremony and shoot fireworks out over the ice. Fine, they're
busy; should I go through this hollow Chinese-Great-Wall-like
seawall and follow it around to the right, to the north? or go
over the mountains? Easy choice; the wall is heated inside.
The evil teevee preacher in charge of the religion plots
against me. I see through his eyes as he combs his mustache out
in a bathroom mirror-- wait, that's my face, that's my
mustache... but it's much longer that I remember. I twist it and
arrange the ends pointing up, to make a squiggly W out of it.
That looks cool but I know it won't stay that way without
putting something sticky in it. I know Salvador Dali used dates.
I don't wanta do that; that's just copying.
This is the bathroom in my grandmother's house in Burbank
when I was little. I'd really like to talk with my grandmother;
she might be right in the other room.
Nope. Back at the ice bay. Well, get running.
Next dream. I'm picking up trash from the narrow L-shaped
lawn around a corner house in a neighborhood like at the
east-north edge of Fort Bragg (CA), just before the dropoff to
Pudding Creek. One of the pieces of trash is a dented teevee
set. While I rake and pick things up I watch a cheap sketch
comedy movie; in it a man is cleaning up a lawn just like this
one. He's an Elmore-Leonard-style criminal, and he's just made a
lot of money from some kind of lowbrow but clever criminal
enterprise, so he celebrates by hiring a woman by phone to come
around and be spanked.
She shows up in a stewardess' flight suit that's also
suspiciously like a police uniform. /Is she a cop? Is paying
someone to let you spank her illegal?/ The criminal thinks about
it for a moment, makes an /eh, what the hell/ face, sits on the
teevee (!), turns the woman over his knee and happily starts
spanking her.
I don't want anyone to see me watching this; it's
embarrassing. I switch it off.
Some kids come play-marching up the street. There's a ruined
yellow tennis ball in the trash; I throw it for the kids' smudgy
little white poodle-mutt dog, and when it brings the ball back I
see that the dog is a clockwork robot-- its covering is a
threadbare knitted sweater. Huh.
I take the bags of trash and garden waste around the side of
the house to a row of green plastic trash cans and rearrange the
trash in the cans to not have to use them all. One of the cans
is a third full of water; I spill it out. Much more water comes
out than seems right. The water runs along a concrete walkway
and goes into the dirt under and behind the travel trailer that
the old relatives of the spanking criminal stay in. I think this
will be okay; if they don't come out for awhile the water will
dry up and nobody will care. They'll be able to step there and
not step in mud.
I drive a strange pickup truck around the front of the
house, the other way, and turn downhill to park, but the parking
brake doesn't work, and leaving the stopped truck in first gear
doesn't hold it entirely still; the engine slowly pumps air as
it rolls. I walk around the front and easily push the truck back
uphill and maneuver it against the curb, steering the wheels by
guiding the truck sideways. I prop the decorative chrome side
exhaust pipe in a crack in the rock curb. Parked.
Now they're having a yard sale of the useful things I
separated the trash away from. An evil torturer guy (?) asks the
truck's driver (another customer now) easy club-entrance test
questions about the history of torture, while I poke around in
the sale items. I find an antique pool-cue (or clarinet or
microscope) case of lock-pick/torture-instruments.
My dreams from Monday, 2008-01-21:
First dream. A man returns to a dream-only familiar casino's
basement, this time in disgrace with the owner-manager of the
establishment. A thug leads him, by squeezing his elbow, to a
lower-level boss and his pals sitting at a picnic table. I
gesture for the thug to let go, and I step up on the table,
snatch the boss up by his shirt and only now try to think of
what to quickly say to calm the situation and get the man out
from under the accusations against him-- but I don't know what
came before this. I'm just making it worse for him, interfering.
Next dream. I'm in a dim shipboard room with a low ceiling
and rows of metal parts shelves. I got in here by pretending to
be the man sent to solve the problem with some telephone jacks.
A bag of wet laundry and two damp pillows are on a big chair.
They interest me. There are the jacks behind the chair; I might
as well test them.
Not a ghost but a bodiless intelligence guards the window
into the rest of this giant ship. I use telekinesis to pull the
guard's airhose/gun away from there; the guard wakes, rises,
moves inside the room and gets his gun back. The compressor
isn't on. He turns on the compressor and puts a drill-like power
gun on a charger; that'll take fifteen minutes. I'm like, /You
shouldn't have fallen asleep./ The guard is like, /Yeah. Tch./
I fly through the window into a vast rusty cargo space as
big as a sports stadium and I go way to the back and into a
small room lined with metal boxes. I find the secret that was
given to the previous people in charge of the ship, that will
clear my client's name (Priscilla); it's a circuit cage with a
cute baby-food-jar-size oscilloscope tube. /Is this enough? Or
do I need these audio parts too? Take everything. Take off
shirt, bundle everything in it./
I fly back through the cargo space.
I got everything but the audio parts... /Go back./ When I go
back to the little room a nosy man comes after me. He says,
"Where are you going?" I say, "Just playing." He doesn't
believe me. I shoot him with an electric gun. He staggers but
recovers and looks at a table of junk-store things, memorizing
it, memorizing exactly where we are and which direction I was
going. I shoot him again. He staggers back and stands straight
again. This kind of gun isn't strong enough.
Something goes really wrong and I wake (from being knocked
out) in a British boys' school in dark winter. I sneak out into
the night, dressed only in pyjama pants with wide elastic cuffs.
/Which direction is the ship? I have to get back there before
the judge unjustly sentences Priscilla./
I woke up slowly, repeating /Priscilla, Priscilla/ in my
head because /that's the part you'll forget./
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm in a weird version of
Mendocino (CA) that's having a whole-town J.C.-Penney-style
clothing sale for the arts. In one of the stores of the sale
(every store is given over to the occasion) I see Hit-And-Run
Theater's Harry Rothman, say hi, shake hands, say something
funny to each other --except I worry that the funny thing I said
(?) was insulting... He's smart; he'll figure it out.
On my way out to the street through a park-like place where
in real life are the back additions to the Mendocino Hotel I fly
up into the air to impress some retired rich people sitting on a
bench by a little church. They exchange comments on how dirty I
am. I get all huffy about it; I say, "Can you fly? No," and to
demonstrate that I can fly I shoot idiotically upward, smashing
through cypress branches. /That was embarrassing./
I fly over and settle in the middle of Main Street. The town
isn't crowded anymore. A woman is standing in the street,
watching me. I try to impressively fly up again but can only go
up about four feet and drift out of control at walking speed
toward Ford House, trying to look as though I mean to do this.
Behind the house are horse stables. 1920s servant-class British
people sit around picnic tables, drinking beer and relaxing
between work shifts.
Next dream. There's a long line to the only open checkout
counter in a big hardware store at night. I'm here for Borden's
glue (milk glue). I look over what they have, find a
tennis-ball-can-size refill bottle for $1.19 and get in line.
Hit-And-Run Theater's Steve Weingarten is here. We say hi, shake
hands, say something funny to each other.
The line is not moving. This will take forever. I say bye to
Steve, hand him the glue, leave the line, go out the back door
of the store, through the dark stockoom...
Now I'm in the ranch house of a remote mountain ranch at
night. George Bush is agitated about having seen what he thinks
is a U.F.O. He says, "Didja-- didjever see a slow-flashin', uh,
whatchacallit?" I say, "Meteor?" (The word he wants is meteor.)
He looks puzzled. I say, "It was an airplane." That never
occurred to him. Poor stupid George.
A rich young ranch-heiress woman played by actress Cindy
Triplett gets instruction in using a lightbox to make stencils
to cut different shapes of road-warning-light lenses out of
fresnel plastic. My character is trapped by business-office
contract on this ranch, working for Cindy's character. In the
back-story, we've developed a sex relationship, and I only now
am beginning to realize how mentally disturbed and clingy she
might be. I experiment, saying, "I'm just looking forward to
getting back to town in two days." She doesn't go nuts. Good.
Okay.
In the front room, two old people sit in wingback chairs,
reminiscing about when they were young. /They're our characters
in forty years./ The man has a cane with a hand-buzzer shock
button on it.
Cindy and I go outside and walk across roads cut by
bulldozers in the many-feet-thick wet sawdust coating the
house-hill. It's cold out; the sky is a beautiful
Maxfield-Parrish blue. Cindy says, "I love the smell of winter
coming on the high range." (She's talking about all the wet
sawdust. That's the smell of winter, to her. It's a sawdust
ranch.)
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-01-22:
First dream. I skate on my bare feet through a rich man's
house. Some others with me are also trying to escape-- there are
three of us; three naked boys. I say, "We can go out that
window." We all crouch down and slide to a stop, bunched up
against the window. The rich man's outside, right down there,
carrying a shotgun, looking around. Just wait awhile; he'll go
around the house and we can leave. The boy behind me wiggles his
foot between my heels. I say, "Get your foot away from my
butt."
Two 1960s spy men in turtleneck sweatshirts come in and move
around the room in a clockwise direction, opening desk drawers
and looking under and behind everything-- curtains, paintings...
They left the door open; a stuffed toy monkey comes in and comes
to me; it's made of old carpet material. I see a closeup view of
the fibers.
In a deep, high room a woman asks me, "How high is the
ceiling here?" I show her and her friend how I can /dive/
straight up in the air and leaf-float halfway down then glide
like a paper airplane; I use this opportunity to go smoothly out
the corner door.
Outside I ride and steer a ten-foot two-by-eight plank down
to the low end of the property. In a clearing there's a cache of
audio-video equipment. A sick old man's friend wants him to
accept his life's work of 70mm films and show them in a
prominent venue in the city. He says, "Promise me. Promise me."
His friend is nervous; he isn't sure how to go about it; he
can't honestly promise.
I find an antique wind-up 8mm movie camera in with some
other things in a fiberglass equipment case. It reminds me that
I never had the film developed that I shot at the Community
School in 1983 and '84. (I took click-shots, got hundreds of
pictures of kids and activities on one roll.) The old man is
just waiting to die now. His friend left without the bundle of
film cans. /I'll do it. I'll show the films./ I say, "Do you
still want to give me your movie camera?"
In a strange school I demonstrate stretching smoky blue webs
of high voltage electrical discharge between insulated wires in
a corner of the room lined with black construction paper to show
up the blue light better.
Next dream. The hills just south of Albion are made of puffy
white down-comforter material. A man brings a car that took away
from his brother who has been abusive to animals. The trunk
turns out to be stuffed full of dogs. I tell the man to take
them to the animal shelter in Fort Bragg (CA), but I want to
keep one little white dog. I use Juanita's ultraviolet spotlight
to show up any fleas there might be, and it turns out that the
dog is spewing fleas in all directions like a garden sprinkler.
Keep it anyway? /I don't want to have fleas in my house./ But
isn't there something you can do about fleas? Wash a dog in
baking soda? Something?
Next dream. It's the last day of school in a modern high
school or college. In a math class a girl in a short lab coat
and black boots stands at the blackboard, crossing numbers off a
six-by-six square and writing results of her calculations to the
left and right. I go across between buildings and into a history
class that's just ended. The woman teacher is lenient; a
curly-haired girl has been failing all term and she's told
she'll get a C and pass; she's so happy.
I'm naked, but I have cutoff long underwear shorts balled up
in my hand. I pull it on, go out and fly up to the roof.
Everyone's going to the forest downhill and to the left. I fly
there. A grammar-school girl has been having a feud with several
girls from the school I just came from; she tries to make it all
okay by sending out a ribbon of light as tall as herself from
about sixty feet away, but it's warded away by the ribbon
between her mean older sister and her sister's friend (one of
the enemy girls). Having her light-ribbon knocked aside hurts
the younger girl's cheek and ear, but she's too proud to cry.
She flashes her broken ribbon out in all directions as she
retreats.
Under the trees, away from the fight, I go to the girl and
say, "I want to learn how to do that. Can it be taught?" She
doesn't know. I say, "You did the best you could. They're just
bigger." She knows that.
Next dream. I turn left onto a mountain version of Highway 1
just south of Fort Bragg (CA). A red-haired woman who looks like
Sonya-and-Juarez' friend Gypsy (her name) is in the truck ahead
of me; she's falling asleep driving. Somehow I /pull/ her truck
safely to a stop in the middle lane just as she conks out.
My car vanishes. I go down into the dream-only tilted
parking lot next to the Humane Society's thrift store. A black
woman and her daughter are working in hot sun, lifting heavy wet
six-foot-long scarves knitted of black-person hair from where
the scarves are layered on the ground, and hanging them up to
dry on both sides of both fences. I pitch in and help.
Gypsy becomes the woman's other daughter (black, thin).
She's awake now. I call to her to drive her truck down here. She
calls back, "I forgot to." I shrug and throw my arms out to the
sides. Gypsy says, "Oh, all right," and drives carefully down
the lot, trying to stay on places where the scarves are
thinnest, where they're going to become part of the pavement
anyway.
-end-
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