My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-01-23:
First dream. I'm practicing, trying ideas for a play. A
train rushes by right-to-left, electricity sparking from every
sharp angle of it. This is after I already know about the place
where the model-train guy's trains are admired by /Notwursts/
(people who participate in the train-chase game).
In a big room of an empty school I show invisible investors
my idea, which is to put lightning wire on everything, not just
trains. An autonomous computer is downstairs in back,
compulsively saving up and counting and recounting prop blocks.
I hope it won't be further damaged by any high voltage that gets
back into the line.
I go out to the parking lot to drive away to get my big
capacitor and Tesla coil base from Juanita's house. In the dream
I expect to find the Turquoise 1963 Rambler that I had in the
early 1980s, but on the way there I see my first car ('71 Chevy
Nova). Bass player Richard Karch has been living in the back
seat of this car all this time, since the late 1970s. Kay Rudin
is here; she's having a comical angry conversation with my
neighbor Jerry-- /she sold him my car/ and he's upset because
she didn't tell him Richard Karch came with it. I'm like,
/Jesus, Kay, that is so typical. Okay, whatever; you sold my
car; you figure it out./
I go back into the school and in the doorway find a lumpy
envelope addressed to /Dr. Tottet/. Inside on a table parents
and kids have left a small mountain of envelopes of donated
coins for Dr. Tottet, variously spelled Totdet, Tottd, and so
on. (Todt is German for /dead/.) Someone says, "Doctor Tottet
for President."
In this same California Central Valley town much later, on a
plague-depopulated Earth, a nurse-like woman and I run a school
for --for all we know-- the last twenty kids on the planet. The
kids and the nurse are out on a field trip. A strange man comes
into town. I plan to quarantine him far up the street for at
least a couple of weeks-- but he won't listen; he marches right
into the school, touches things, picks up my guitar. Carefully,
using only the bottom of my shoe, I knock him down into the
basement/back-room/garage. He whines, "I'll go where I want!
I'll do what I want!"
I'm Doctor Tottet; I say, "Do you have any idea what even
the flu can do to kids with no resistance? They've never had the
flu or measles or anything." His eyes dart around; he's looking
for a weapon. I really don't want to have to kill him, but I
equally don't like the idea of his eventually becoming breeding
stock to repopulate Earth --he's a bad strain; he's not entirely
human. On the other-other hand, it might be that he's been
traumatized by thinking for so long that he was the only person
left and his childish whininess will wear off. What to do, what
to do...
Next dream. I go around a corner between worlds and walk
down a scary street. I come to a house where my this-other-world
aunt is used to taking in analogs of me when they wander here;
she doesn't like it but she feels it's her duty. Other odd
relatives show up and everyone talks about how another one's
come here. There's cooking and there are chores to do but I'm a
guest; I'm not allowed to help. I don't want to be any trouble;
I stick around until after dinner and then slip away, as I
suspect all my other other-world analogs do. Clever Aunt.
I participate on the crew of a complicated outdoor opera
performance. Actor David Woolis sings in it. Afterward I wander
around in strange fairgrounds and come to the fair's bad side of
the tracks, where the shows are sloppy and bawdy and technically
dangerous. I see part of something like /The Threepenny Opera/
but with scenery falling down and light bars held up by
clothesline.
Down a paved golf-cart track I come to a booth/stage where
Juanita is a dancer in an African drum voodoo show. While I wait
for her to be finished I eat toasted oats from a paper cone...
Wait, are there drugs in this? I stop eating.
The end of the dance show segues seamlessly into a natural
Punch-and-Judy routine where a cute skinny black girl keeps
playfully trying to but can't quite ever hit her boyfriend over
the head with a bottle.
I wish Juanita would hurry up and get changed so we can
leave. Or has she disappeared?
Next dream. It's a dark story that's halfway between Lars
Von Trier's /Dogville/ and the Cohn Brothers' /Fargo/, with
maybe a little /The Saddest Music In The World/ mixed in. A
meeting is held in a church in an oppressive, cold, gray-tone
version of Mendocino (CA). A fifteen-year-old boy is guilty
--but not of what a criminal from out of town and a mother (of
that boy? or another boy?) frame him for. Laconic thug cops
arrest the boy and take him away from what's now an outdoor
meeting (same night? other night?) while the woman (or the other
boy?) saws the fingers of one hand nervously against each other
under a school-type desk.
Everyone's in the church again. A man drives recklessly away
from being parked on the street (he's guilty of something). A
woman backs her car frantically, guiltily out of the overfull
parking lot and power-spins in the lot to go forward onto the
street, but only after going forward, the easy part, does she
clip another car, spraying broken glass everywhere. The
dashboard light strobes in her face as she roars away into the
night, squinting one eye, biting her lip, haunted, miserable.
A slick criminal man from out of town (the same one?) and
another man trick a local real estate salesman (part of yet
another crime) to shut him in his 1940s car and drown him in the
bay. I'm in this now --I'm the criminal's accomplice; I push the
real estate man's hands inside his door as the main criminal
shuts it. The car goes down a ramp and sinks instantly because
the victim got the door open. So did he escape? Not sure.
Somehow we get another chance to arrange the same murder; we
get the man later and trick him better, so he cooperates to be
truly trapped in the car.
How many crimes-- ten? Twenty? Nobody wins; everybody's
guilty. Claustrophobic doom.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-01-24:
First dream. On the road around the Mendocino headlands I
watch fascinated as a time-travel agency's vertical endless belt
of clear plastic Coke bottles (each one representing a different
pronunciation of a special word) go over the top and appear
again at the bottom. As the agency's activities change time, the
colors of the materials in the bottles change. When all the
bottles are either empty or have clear contents or the colored
and clear bottles make a pattern (spell a word, or make a
shape), time has settled into the new way.
I say to someone operating the machine, "Saying it like [new
pronunciation of special word] is like saying CAR-uh-bee-un
BAR-buh-ree-un."
An obvious result of the agency's changing time is that the
headlands are now covered with L-shaped plywood houses in pastel
colors, where in the original way there weren't any houses here.
I suppose it could be worse; it could be all industrial and
smell like hot asphalt, like Richmond (CA). The machine operator
hears me thinking this and says, "Or Ugohuto." I laugh and say,
"Yeah-- ya know, I'd forgotten completely about /Ugohuto/." He
laughs too. There isn't any Ugohuto.
Next dream. Wide streets come together in a Y. A decoy
minivan /almost/ breaks the law, drawing a police car after it.
In a small office in like Burbank the way it was when I was
little, men count and distribute twenty-dollar bills, ten-dollar
bills and an occasional fifty, to a short line of men in payment
for providing decoy service. I count over two hundred dollars in
my wallet. Not bad.
The next few days are a general vacation. Someone says,
"Where are /you/ going?" Another says, "Fishing." A man and a
woman show up; the man (Oasis?) talks with me and says something
that makes me think of how an old boxer talks-- this man doesn't
have a brain/speech problem; I'm just reminded of that, so I go
into a routine about two old boxers talking to each other, and
as I walk away across the street with another man leaving the
office, I'm saying, "In da haid, ya know. Dat's where it hits
ya, 'cause dat's where /dey/ hits ya." This guy doesn't know
what I'm talking about.
In the park across the street I watch a butterfly flap
around. The grass is a whole country of insects.
I go back to the street, fly up to about thirty feet, rising
effortlessly but flapping my arms to counter the wind against
me. Another boy flaps into the space above the crosswalk. I say,
"It's nice to see someone else up here. Hardly anyone does this
anymore." The boy grunts, "Uh-huh." He's having trouble
crossing the street; he's flapping his arms like crazy. I say
of the wind, "It takes you where it will."
The decoy office is now one room of a long apartment
parallel with the street. Inside, I watch a long leaf of a
potted plant slide up and down against the window, moved by a
big mosquito hawk (or emaciated dragonfly) biting at it from
behind the pot. I go down a hallway and catch my mother using a
blender to blend chalky drug rectangles into milk. I shake my
head and say, "Mom." She says, "What." I say, "Don't do
that." She says, "Okay," and keeps doing it.
I say, "Who's that for?" She ignores me. "What is it?"
Nothing.
Next dream. In a deep, two-story storefront business in a
Middle Eastern country, boys play in a back room downstairs. An
outsider boy is staying with the family. Playing is serious work
here; it's training-- they shoot spring-darts into tubes that
stick out of the wall.
Someone's coming into the front. Put away the practice.
An American business spy man has given the boys' father a
suitcase computer to solve a cryptographic problem and see
pictures from a remote spy camera. A computer wizard boy is
working on that in another room. The American thinks it's some
high this-country spy agency doing it. The report: no results so
far. The pressure is ramped up on the father.
I watch the boy's method. He works out one way after
another-- there can only be so many ways; sooner or later it'll
be the right way. As he tries a way, a graphic of an eye is
layered onto a screen of three columns steadily scrolling up.
Out in society something goes wrong, so results must come
now. Frantic to get out with his family's lives, the father
makes a move: someone is dead or sick unto death. Everyone
carries the sick person on a chair out of the building. In the
process a package of photographs is left spilled on the floor.
/These pictures are the results from the cryptographic problem/,
but the father didn't know that and the boy didn't know it was
important; the boy was just swept up in all the fleeing and said
nothing. Tch.
I go with them at night out onto the sea in a wide fishing
boat with a landing-craft-shaped front that's a window; you can
see two to four feet under the water. We come to shoals of dead,
mutilated fish. On the deck the father shouts incomprehensible
instructions to someone on another boat.
Next dream. It's the same situation in the same Middle
Eastern country as in the previous dream, only later. Bad men
like W.S. Maugham's Quiet American have made bad deals with
nearly everyone, so the country is even more of a nightmare, but
it feels less like /The Quiet American/ and more like /A
Handmaid's Tale/.
Two boys sit on the stairs inside the shop. Two American
tourist (or spy-wife) women come in to buy something; they sit
on a squat conical cushion in the business-deal alcove where the
crypto project was discussed before. The kids snicker; one
points out that /nobody/ sits like that at this time of day. The
alpha woman stomps close to the boy and takes a snarling /how
dare you talk like that to me, an American!/ pose.
I take over the situation for the boy, saying in his place,
"It's just that it's considered very rude." The woman
understands, or thinks she does; she goes back, tells her
friend, and they /lie down/ on the cushion. The kids explode in
derisive hilarity and run the rest of the way upstairs into the
back.
Now there were never any boys on the stairs. The boys are
all dead. The father is dead. Upstairs three little girls
anticipate becoming prostitutes to survive; they play at being
grownups by drinking a poison adult drug to get high and
pathetically belly-dance out of three restroom stalls. The
smallest girl collapses, convulses and dies.
In a bar full of loud, wild-eyed Americans and
closed-mouthed but wild-eyed Arabic men in Fidel Castro
uniforms, pointless spy deals are constantly being made.
Everyone's either offering a dangerous service impossible to
carry out or offering money he intends never to pay. Everyone's
taking every offer.
-end-
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