My dreams from Friday, 2008-01-26:
First dream. A small alligator or axolotl tricks a hand-size
white-cutting-board-plastic space catapult into releasing in a special
way --the ultimate proper way-- sending an astronaut in a crumpled
aluminized canvas sack through a /scuba door/ and out of orbit.
I go down to the planet. The platform around a jungle treehouse is
not decked completely; you have to be careful where you step. Two
Margaritaville-style people stand against the wall. One says, "Do you
know how much trouble someone went to?" Talking to me? or the other?
I look for a way down to the ground. It's harder to get down there
from here than it was to get here from space.
Next dream. I come into a modern theater's control room from the
back. There's a problem with the sound mixing board. I reach past the
operator and wiggle each fader, listening for crackle.
The college kid operator pushes my hand away. There wasn't anything
wrong; I only thought there was. To the kids here I'm an old fool.
I go down the left aisle, climb up onto the stage, go around a
column in the split proscenium and sit with my back to it, out of sight
of the audience. Harry Rothman is sitting in the wings, to my left.
Tracy Burns leans over from where she's in the action and motions to
Harry, /Can you hear your cues?/ He motions back, /Yes, get on with
it./ During this the song from Randy Newman's /Faust/ album plays,
where a little dead girl in the Catholic Limbo sings in a high clear
voice to the Devil, "Perhaps when you were little no-one held you in
their arms and told you that they loved you very much..."
Next dream. In an upscale grocery store I see Harry Rothman near a
new-age vitamin display. The vitamins all have new-age-sounding made-up
names. I look at their ingredients labels; they're hard to read, but one
is just cayenne pepper, and one is powdered celery. In expensive vitamin
pill bottles.
Juanita and I are lying together on a sleeping bag on pavement in
fairgrounds. It's just before sunrise. I see a sharp image of a tree
faintly but beautifully lit underneath by starlight from the horizon. I
point this out to Juanita and we kiss about it, two homeless hippie kids
appreciating beauty.
A giant Coast Guard rescue helicopter made of dark wood and glass is
on display in (or on) a building-- it becomes a beached Coast Guard ship
made into a building. Art-gallery-administrator rich people go in, go up
the elevator, check around in the all glass upper story to make sure
everything is ready for the grand opening, and they come back out. I
stand looking up, reading advertisements projected on a billboard for
various products and fair rides.
People start arriving for the fair. Harry Rothman and actress-singer
Anna Taylor kiss; Harry abruptly disengages, turns and hurries away.
Anna staggers, theatrically faint. I hold her up by the elbow. She
says, "I took a pill. Harry upset me." I help her to a rail; she sits
and becomes a black girl. I say, "What kind of pill?" She won't tell.
I get her a drink of water in a paper cup and go back to where Juanita
is still on the sleeping bag.
Now it's earlier, very dark. I write notes in marking pen on the
concrete near a closed, boarded-up fast-food place. I see a UFO, point
my flashlight up at it and keep the beam on it, hoping it will come
here. It loops all around, goes all over the sky, changing shape;
finally it stops, becomes a flat painting of a race car on the wall of
the next store, between two real cars parked near the wall. /Was it that
all along?/
Next dream. Juanita and I and my stepsister Jamie are on a car trip.
We come to a riverboat river. Jamie climbs up the approach to a missing
drawbridge to wait for --I guess-- a bridge to appear, so now it's just
Juanita and I in Juanita's dream-only new-condition red early-1960s
Corvette, parked on a boat ramp.
Juanita believes her car can drive across water, even with the
big-ship waves that wash by. I say, "Are you sure?" She's sure, but
just to be safe she'll drive the car across the river by remote-control.
I have a bad feeling about this. We stand next to the car, Juanita
pushes the start button, the car goes down the ramp, enters the
water,tips abruptly straight down and sinks out of sight. I say gently,
"Your car is at the bottom of the river." She's shaken, shaking,
horrified. I say, "It's okay-- it was a mistake." She says, "No, it
wasn't!" I say, "It was a mistake."
But a boy over by the wall of the bridge approach saw everything.
There won't be any fooling the insurance company.
Next dream. I'm in bed. My answering machine lets me hear a call for
Bob at the radio station. A mean man complains that his /television ad/
isn't running, isn't being aired on the radio; he threatens Bob that
he'll take over the station, assume ownership.
Now I'm in a strange office/house place at night. I've just told Bob
about the man's complaint. Bob explains that the complaining man is
crazy and has no legal basis for taking over the station; basically,
/Don't worry about it./ But Bob has a weird big 3-D scab on his cheek,
like a rosebush beginning to grow there. I pretend not to see it.
Juanita comes in and kisses and kisses me in relief that I'm alive.
She wants us to go now, to get out of here. Okay. We can go.
Next. I'm in a big house built inside like the Company Store in Fort
Bragg (CA). Juanita's in another room. I microwave two potatoes. The
oven shorts out and shoots sparks inside. I open the door so it'll shut
off, but it keeps running! I knock it aside to point it away from me and
yank out the plug.
Bob is here. I amaze him with a magic trick involving a pool
cue-ball on long metal strings. The ball becomes a bowling ball and
rolls behind something. I go there and there are several chewed-at balls
of different sizes, all made of cuttlefish bone material. Which one is
my ball? The balls behave like balloons in a space-station; they
gradually accumulate around an air leak, a thin brass grate; which
collapses under their weight. The building is no longer proof against
alien invasion.
Other tenants appear and apply for relief from the electricity
problem that came to light because of the microwave oven. A Japanese
woman brings her little boy and cutely lets him ask the bank teller
whether Word Perfect 3.2 will work in their Macintosh computer. The
teller says, "Don't get the new operating system."
Now this is a government-office/community-center. I drink from a
ceramic drinking fountain. Juanita's wearing Spandex shorts; she and
others are taking a break from their martial arts class. A man sits in a
stone chair that has a puddle of rainwater in it, so sitting there
squirts water at a woman walking by. He apologizes so sweetly to her
that I wonder if he's a psychopath practicing to be nice, to fit in. I
remember reading that they do that.
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-01-26:
First dream. A whale shape drags another whale shape down under the
water with it. It doesn't happen over and over, and it doesn't take a
long time to happen, but somehow it has the feeling of great duration.
It's the idea of the shapes.
Next dream. Some kids are sitting in a soda fountain booth. Now I'm
one of them, a hick teenage boy with knobby elbows. Ilona from the Whale
School, at her real age now, grown up, is annoyed by the sex-attention
of the boys. She gives me her delicious-looking lime jello dish so she
can leave; she says, "I really don't want this," and walks away. I see
that each boy thinks she gave it to him alone so we'd/they'd all be
occupied with that. Clever.
Next dream. I'm in KMFB's new offices at night. The lights are off;
I see by the parking lot lights. Other people are upstairs either
sleeping or having a meeting.
I spill messy, gloppy food from a dish onto the rug, pick as much of
it up as I can with the edges of my hands, and use a liquid chemical rug
cleaner device with a battery-powered pump in its handle to try to
de-spot the mess.
The floor becomes a jigsaw puzzle of couch cushions. I run the
cleaner thing over them until it runs out of fluid. Someone asks me what
I'm doing. I say, "Cleaning up. It's a mess here."
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-01-27:
First dream. A thin blonde man I think of as real-life Willow's
uncle, and the uncle's friend, lead me diagonally through a wall-less
hardware warehouse and across a field toward another building. They've
hired me for some kind of wiring or plumbing or construction job, and
they're showing me what needs to be done, but they don't speak and I
have to figure it out.
Willow's uncle and I and a bunch of kids go to an
Anachronism-Faire-like place in a small town. The kids and I misplace
Willow's uncle and have to look for him. Then I lose the kids and have
to look for them.
Now I'm with people I half-remember inviting here: a man who looks
like actor Jeff Daniels, and his girlfriend, and Mendocino actress Gina
O'Feral. I realize Gina wanted the Jeff Daniels guy before and couldn't
have him. She's miffed about having to be here and watch Jeff Daniels
carrying on with this other girl, but she's not mad at me; I didn't
know, so what would be the sense in blaming me? (She's gracious about
it.) /I'm sorry./ I reach up and touch Gina's face. Awww.
Later I'm looking for the kids again. I come to a baked-potato
concession stand behind a big rollerskating building. I fly up to the
roof of the big building and /I don't care about looking for the kids
anymore/; instead of landing on the building I fly over it, fly over the
small town and out over wilderness. I just keep flying, night and day
and night, over a mostly depopulated Northern California. One night I
fly low into another small town where a boy has invented a motorized
skateboard and is terrorizing people with it. I call to him, "Which way
is Sacramento?" I fly through a rusty metal warehouse where people are
having another fair-like event, but this is after the big monetary and
societal smash so everyone's poor and dejected. It's like the
underground society in /A Boy And His Dog/.
I get to the sea and fly south over ridge mountains and brilliant
rock waterfalls that go into tidepool areas.
Eventually I come to another giant rollerskating building, this one
in a place more like the real-life Central Valley, and here are the kids
I was supposed to take care of, and here is a woman like my mother's
friend Eleanor, and there's someone else-- an old cowboy? Everyone gets
into a battered Step-Van. I say, "Let me drive, because we have to fly."
The woman moves out of the driver's seat; I sit down, fly the van up
into the air and curve around to go northeast. The sun is hot on the van
--I instruct the others to open any windows that open, slide open my own
window; cold air blasts through. We close everything and it's hot again.
Open, cold; close, hot. This is fine; it gives them something to do.
Now the other people are all different; I'm in the van with an old
couple and two teenage Japanese girls, flying through fog. I concentrate
on staying higher than any power lines can possibly be. We come to a dry
mountain peak and I park the van against the mountainside with the back
sticking out into the air. There's a steep road up and around the peak.
There's a bit of sun shining through here. The girls get out and lie in
the sun on rocks, then vanish. I explain to the adults that /when you
copy existing kids the copies are unstable and can't exist for long./
The old people are Lyndon Johnson and his wife. They get cigarets
from a convenience store, come back to the truck (it's a big new
crew-cab pickup truck now), and they sit in the back seat rather than
ride in the truck bed, where they were riding when I stole the truck,
before. (?)
I fly the truck up out of the convenience store parking lot. Flying
is just a chore now. I'm tired of flying, but mostly just tired of
flying carrying other people and vehicles.
My dreams from Monday, 2008-01-28:
First dream. The Flight of the Conchords song /Foux Da Fa Fa/ plays
throughout the following:
I'm in a theater whose rows of seats are on steep concrete steps.
This is a women's center dance studio sort of place. I'm waiting for
Juanita to be finished doing something. A pretty, serious, famous young
model/actress comes in and some others perk up, get ready to work or
rehearse something.
I have to piss. I try pissing into a bucket in the aisle, by
balancing with my hand on the wall, but others are here (of course
others are here; how did I forget that?) so I go up the aisle to a
bathroom at the very back-top of the theater, that has a sheet made into
a curtain for a door. Beverly is using the bathroom. I sit on the step,
put my face against my hand and almost fall asleep. Beverly comes out. A
fat man in underwear and a sleeveless t-shirt is already in the
bathroom, brushing his teeth. I sit on the step again but this time
don't rest; when the man comes out I rush in, beat another man to it,
shut the door (now there's a door) and wrestle it latched against the
man's pressure from the outside. /Lock it./
The fat man from before is in the bathroom again. I have to be
polite to him because he's only staying in the apartment up here till he
gets better from something really serious, like diabetes. I wait till
he's finished injecting drugs into his various swollen limbs and he goes
back out, then I piss into a kitchen sink set into the floor.
In the apartment the fat man laughs and says he and the others (the
others living here) are /suing/ the place. I say, "Don't do that."
I'm back in the bathroom, pissing into a normal toilet this time. A
horrible little boy scoots mechanically around like a big insect,
running into the walls and eventually going out the door. The toilet is
a mess. I flush it by pushing a slimed metal button, then I wash my
hands and arms vigorously with soap.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a grimy big-city grocery store
that's half-empty for renovations. Workers play ping-pong. I find two
ping-pong balls and an egg. Huh, wow. I get the folded-paper-machine
part I came here for.
There's something here about cassette tapes of an interview with not
Sean Maher who played Simon Tam in /Firefly/ but with Simon Tam, with
the character, where he became sick and threw up, and this interview is
a big deal waiting to explode upon the internet, and I have the only
tapes.
Where's Juanita? I look around the store and look outside, calling
for her. Was she kidnaped?
Movie people have a publicity photo shoot in the parking lot and I
instantly see the posters that result. One photograph is right up the
foreshortened barrel of a gun. I'm taking pictures. Someone comes to
take pictures of me taking pictures; they're gonna make a movie about
that next.
Next dream. I'm in bed in a strange house in like Ohio. Under my
pillow I find letters sent to be read on my radio show. They seem more
like a try at getting free advertisement than like stories.
I wake from sleep, still in the dream, in the same place. What time
is it? I'm late for college-- the second week. I can just cancel, this
semester. Let Juanita catch up, pass me; that's fine.
I go to the front door. This is my Aunt Honey's dream-only house.
There's my car, parked halfway between two driveways, taking up two
spaces. I pull the door closed but the latch won't click.
Upstairs I pick up paper waste, dust, cut-up bits of felt, and take
it all down and through the house to put it in the trash in back. A
strange girl is here. A big dog bursts in from the mud room. /Oh, no--
it'll get out the front door./ It does; it runs into the street. A man
brakes hard to avoid the dog; he gets out of his car, angry with the dog
for scaring him. My grandmother appears, crosses the street. The dog
moves to stay under her billowing dress.
The dream jumps back to before the dog got out. My mother comes in
the front door and tells me to move my car so people can park there. I
work on the door; maybe I can fix it in time... but no-- there's my
grandmother on the lawn across the street, with the dog under her dress.
-end-
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