My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-01-29:
First dream. It's night. A puffy-fleshed pink-white little
girl and her street-tough Eskimo-Latino boyfriend are being
kicked out of resident artist housing at the Mendocino Art
Center because they had a baby together. I see them being sent
away in shame --the girl carrying and breastfeeding the baby--
as I'm coming out of the theater company downsizing meeting that
I can almost-but-not-quite remember. (I know that I argued
persuasively to be kept on the payroll and they said no, but
there are no details.)
I offer for the kids to stay at my house at least until the
weather gets better. I hope they don't turn out to be vicious
conscienceless leeches like characters in a David Sedaris story.
But how will we get to my house? I cross Little Lake Street
to a giant 1970s station wagon parked in thick weeds. The back
part of the car's right side is missing. How long has this car
been here? I say, "Will this even start?" but I'm confident I
can start it. /If a thing ever worked, I can make it work
again./
Refugees are traveling on an endless metal bridge that has
Chinese pagoda-like fillips on the poles and girders. The
politics of each new section of the bridge must be accommodated
in order for you to pass without being killed. One section has a
tribe of Polynesian warriors with spears. So-- what are you
supposed to do, and not do?
Several families of kids live in a long compound of
buildings in an isolated area. Some adults are expected to come
back soon from a dangerous trip to a wrecked city for useful
materials.
In a lath-and-plastic-sheet gardening shed a girl is having
a baby with other kids' reassuringly calm help. (She's already
had one baby and didn't die from that; this should go easily.)
I run and jump-flip over an old station wagon, lengthwise. A
generator powers a string of unfrosted bulbs set far apart.
Maybe the right adults aren't coming back; maybe it'll be mean,
crazy, other ones. Do we have any guns? I gather up the kids
playing outside in the dark and set them looking in all the
buildings for guns and ammunition. "And don't play with them;
just bring them here."
Next dream. Juanita and I go into a meeting with the
next-to-top-level guy in charge of a teevee puppet show. We
invented the show --we make every episode; we want more control
over how the show goes, and more money.
After the embarrassing meeting (where we were turned down)
we walk away through connected buildings full of props and
theater things. I say to Juanita, "He's even more strict than
[name? top guy in charge]." I find a puppet that's a vest with
three long furry arms and hands, and distract Juanita from our
career disappointment by helping her put the puppet on. I say,
"See? It looks great on you."
A man like the Withnail character in /Withnail And I/, but
who didn't commit suicide and so became old, is waiting in his
office/rooms for us to report on the results of the meeting.
He'll be disappointed. No point in hurrying there.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-01-30:
First dream. In the parking lot of a shopping center I catch
a runaway team of horses, take them to the director of a play in
rehearsal in a failed, gutted bank. I give another man credit
for catching the horses. (I'm just passing through; he needs to
work here and he hasn't been treated well.)
I fly around in a grocery store with a high ceiling. My
friend Mark says, "They're telling stories about you." I'm not
sure whether this is good or bad. Are they telling that I lied
about the horses?
I fly out a window and up onto the domed roof. Big sections
of thin asphalt roofing are loose, just resting here; no-one has
fastened the roofing down.
Under the roof, in a secret attic area, I find old Sunday
newspaper comics pages and little yellowed crackly-dry
incomprehensible waitress receipts. I wonder how many people
know about this place.
Next dream. I'm walking north on Franklin Street in Fort
Bragg (CA) but it's in a version of rural Ohio where man-made
things are all falling back into the earth. The road leaves
town, becomes less and less paved, and finally comes to a
six-lane-wide road downhill to the left, that's really a
recently flooded and drained river, whose bed is lumpy and thick
with grass and limp water plants. There's a sinkhole to avoid.
At the corner of the river and another road, indolent
camping hippies use a lazy shouting sort of non-technological
radio to communicate across the miles.
A man drives a motorized farm-plow device made all of
perfect shining new steel.
In a farm work camp a troublemaker pirate-looking man fallen
on hard times (too crippled to work) takes money to show people
the matted pepper-gray long glove of his arm and hand hair. He's
shaven a band around his upper arm to show just how thick the
fur really is. (This condition only affects his right arm.)
I become the man. I examine my arm. What could have caused
this? Radiation?
My dreams from Monday, 2008-02-04:
First dream. Carrying Juanita I fly through a sky of
shredded paper and paper dust above a city of old dry paper
structures. I accidentally-on-purpose knock over a precarious
tower building of stacked-up paper bits.
In the rooms at the top of a regular concrete skyscraper an
old-time famous radio announcer man has given up on ever again
getting to do his important news show. (The technicians have all
left long ago.) I give the man a cheap but working microphone
and a mini-plug headphone jack adapter from my jacket pocket. He
still doesn't know what to do. I show him where to plug things
in, what to turn on. He's grateful, but only for a moment, then
he's the boss again, the important-sounding person who deserves
to have others do things for him and doesn't have to know
anything useful. I knew that would happen.
Next dream. It's coming near time for an annual outdoor
ritual church show where people slide down the short ramp at the
end of a tall wooden tower/bridge and --what? fall to their
death? I don't want to watch this.
I fly up the hill behind the tower, come to some strange
people's house and am greeted like an old friend.
I get a big shotgun and a small pistol and walk through
back-alley parking lots, looking for a car to steal to get away.
Police are arresting someone. I pick the nearest car with a
window open to pretend it's mine, shove the shotgun inside. A
man is already in this car. I sit in the passenger seat, shut
the door, say, "I'll pay you $50 to drive me a couple blocks."
Okay. He drives out onto the street, turns uphill, goes four or
five blocks, parks at a house. /Thanks./
A tiny woman is driving a child's-pedal-car-size cop car up
the road. I fly above it, put one foot on it to let it pull me
along. The car-and-woman becomes a lizard/cat-thing and runs up
and down metal stair rails of the brick buildings I'm going
past. It's friendly; it goes just fast enough to stay ahead of
me and keeps looking back to make sure I'm coming along.
Farther up the hill, like at the top of a hill in San
Francisco, I ride in a car with 1950s-style gangsters to a
film-noir Chinatown plateau place. People know me here. Yoko
Ono, here a pizzeria/criminal-godmother woman, sells me two
cords of hard firewood --I usually only get a cord and make up
the rest with slash from Nathan's mill work, and that lasts all
winter, but she insists; she will only sell me two cords, no
less.
In a bakery/tea place I'm given strange food: a kind of
soupy tea that you put Chinese vegetable glop in. /I don't want
to eat this./ At a table of good-hearted prostitute women I do a
complicated magic trick with invisible (nonexistent) money that
I /will/ everyone to see. Either they see the money and
appreciate the trick or they don't see it and pretend to see it
because I'm the village idiot.
Now I'm in an empty house. I follow a ghost woman outside
and to a restaurant booth against a brick building. The ghost
sits next to a live woman and, talking, becomes solid. She has
skin problems --acne scars-- but still is really pretty. I ask
her about how long she gets to stay not a ghost; she puts her
face close to mine and makes her eyes glow blue. Ah, I see.
Never mind.
I interfere with a gladiatorial street entertainment of big
black wolves that are rushing to attack a naive traveler; I fly
up out of the blood-eager audience, land in the middle of the
street, between the wolves and their prey, and hug and play with
them. Distracted, they're not dangerous at all.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-02-05:
First dream. It's night. I'm a kind of diplomat-spy bank
regulator for a mostly-honest but shadowy company. I'm upstairs
in a tall flimsy house high up on a hill. Competitors are trying
to get into our property/information by coming in under the
floor, under the rug. At the edge of the rug they sniff at their
path like dogs.
A creature that's /like/ a woman leans out this
treeless-treehouse door and leans down to get a secret tube of
information. I kick her out and follow feet-first kicking and
pushing as she hangs onto my calves. I'm outside, hanging from
the doorknob and from a brass rail on the wall.
My landlord from when I lived in Caspar (CA) is on the
ground watching me try to kick the woman loose. The ground is
not as far down as it was awhile ago; the woman can let go any
time and fall only about a foot to the roof of a shed, but she
hangs on. I swing her around laundry ropes, then the other way
around the ropes, then loose again, then slam her against the
wall. /I'm sorry to have to do this./
My landlord is gone; my neighbor Jerry is on the ground now.
I tell him about the men sniffing into my employers' data; he
suggests sarcastically that the company invest in good security.
(Implying that I'm lousy security, which I know.)
I've failed in my job. I rehearse in my head telling the
employers, an Oriental family, that they don't have to pay me.
But why should they even talk to me now?
Either the woman I tried to kill or someone from the company
becomes an older version of Lili Parsons. She and I are standing
in a shallow creek about where in real life Pacifica Drive makes
a T with Caspar Road. I try to pick something up out of the
water --the tube of information?-- lose my balance, fall and
soak the back of my pants and my shirt. Lili and I keep talking
about the security disaster back up in the treehouse; I get the
feeling she's here to see that I'm sufficiently contrite for my
part in it, but also that she's on my side in this and wants me
to succeed, even though I tried to kill her. I think, /This is
the way people should be. Focus on the job. Like Jayne says in
Serenity: "Can't be thinkin' on revenge if we're gonna get
through this."/ Of course this is what I'd think; I'm the object
of any revenge that would come.
Next dream. I and a few others are hiding in a jungle. A
strange feral girl and I sneak to and into a dead train. We're
detected and a bad man comes. We fight the man and flee. Getting
in and getting away counts as a win in this game; even though we
didn't kill the man, he's no longer a problem.
The girl becomes Juanita. We're still in the train. I
explain to her about how a bed was held up in the center by a
crate in some other room. (The train's wide, now, and has a lot
of rooms.) I tell Juanita about the small handful of red gems we
can get from the bed, but she's not interested in gems, or
rather that's not enough; she wants to retrieve all the sheets
and towels and burn them to recover the gold dust in them.
At a press conference before a rowdy British crowd I am
asked, "Does it still have the time?" I look at the screen of a
handheld video camera and at my wristwatch and say, "The camera
clock says ten-oh-four. The watch says six-fifty-four."
Obviously there's some kind of /Contact/-like missing-time
problem involved in getting in and out of the alien treasure
train. It occurs to me to just give the camera to a child here.
Juanita will think of the camera that went in and out of the
train as a valuable item, but I think there's more value in the
publicity and the goodwill of just offhandedly giving it away.
/I want to try to find and get into the train again, and we need
these people's government's help to do it./
Next dream. I'm driving a car toward school or work but I
don't recognize any place I'm driving past. What city is this?
I skate uphill between buildings, using a shopping cart as a
push-scooter. The road becomes a ramp corridor inside a
building.
Juanita and I are deep inside a building, on a floor that's
terraced-- ramp, level, ramp, level, and so on probably forever.
In a magazine I find an advertisement for something, some
product, that uses a photograph of Tracy Burns, Kathy O'Grady
and Ellen Callas as the band The Ovaries (The Oves) from the Hit
and Run Theater show /Rockalypse/, and I say, "Juanita! The
Oves! This is what they looked like." She's not very interested.
She's sewing at a machine.
Now I'm still skating on the shopping cart. I pass through a
place where all the original Hit and Run Theater people are
getting ready to go into a side room and put on a show. Tracy
says to me, "Where are you going?" I say, "Nowhere. I have
business." I gesture uphill and continue there.
The shopping cart vanishes. I run farther uphill. Matt
Rowland is in a courtroom here, counting crates of theater
equipment, checking off items on a clipboard. I ask him if he
needs a thick pair of socks.
Next dream. A complicated interlocking several-play
rehearsal is going on in Cotton Auditorium. I'm sliding around
on my socks backstage on perfect linoleum. Oasis is here,
helping direct, also sliding around.
The auditorium becomes a three-story apartment building that
somehow is my (dead) grandparents' restaurant in Burbank, but
there's grass behind, not pavement, and there's another flimsy
wooden apartment building that's like where Kay once took me to
stay at her friend Joy's house in San Francisco. I go up into
this other building. In the dream my friend Mitch lives here
with Tim's ex-wife Diana. Mitch plays his new song on a battered
wooden alto recorder. He wrote the song, but he isn't playing it
right; I take the recorder and play the tune perfectly,
effortlessly, but I notice that I'm being rude by doing so and
slow down.
I pretend to do a magic trick and somehow make the recorder
brand-new, shiny, free of dog-teeth marks and dents.
Next dream. I find my first car, the '71 Chevy Nova, under a
blue plastic tarpaulin on the grass next to the Caspar Inn. In
the dream Peter Lit still owns the Inn, and I have his
permission to leave the car there, under a condition I don't
remember. Was it, I can leave the car for a week? two weeks?
indefinitely as long as I do something? don't do something?
I put the tarp back over the car. Figure it out later.
Juanita, Deejay Gerard, some others and I are on a dirt
cliff about thirty feet above rock tidepools in Caspar. Juanita
goes close to the edge and looks down. I can see from the side
that there's nothing holding up the lip. I shout, "Juanita, get
back!" She moves back just in time; the whole edge where she was
crumbles and falls away.
Gerard and a demented woman who used to go around everywhere
in a full-length fur coat are doing a new-age ritual to make the
cliffs safe; the Coat Woman lies on her back in a depression in
the dirt and buckets of water are poured into her held-open
coat. The water through the coat makes that part of the dirt
/thump/ down about two feet, so that place will be packed
harder. Juanita play-particpates in this, lying in the coat,
being soaked with water, thumping down. Now it's Juanita's coat;
I hadn't known she had a fur coat, but it looks expensive.
Really, pour water in it? I'm usually the one who doesn't mind
destroying something expensive because it's only a thing --here,
she is; she wants to help these people. I don't care about their
pet concern. My solution to cliff danger would be to just stay
away from cliffs.
The pilot of a spaceship evades being shot at by following
graphic arrows that appear on his heads-up display. He follows
the arrows so automatically that I wonder why the ship even
needs a human pilot. Why not attach the mechanism that produces
the arrows directly to the controls?
Now I'm the pilot. Follow the arrows, don't follow the
arrows-- it makes no difference; no-one is chasing the ship or
shooting at it.
I'm flying in a small spaceship or airplane with musician
Charles Tyler. With the convertible top down I direct the ship
around and over two small tropical rock islands as Charles
comically explains about his dick-size contest with his rival on
the next island over from the island with his house on it.
There's the house. Swimming pool. Nice place.
Now I'm sitting in the kitchen of an apartment in the back
rooms of a bar made all of unfinished wood. Charles Tyler is
here with his drop-dead-gorgeous Nordic girlfriend. I say to
Charles, "I thought you were gay." Everyone laughs.
Same room, but Charles and his girlfriend have been replaced
by Late Night Liz and and a dark-curly-haired girl with big
strange eyes --Liz' daughter? or Liz at seventeen?
I go out into the main room and sit at the wall-long bar
next to Rich Alcott, who tells me about the guy who was here a
minute ago, who has the magical power of being able to have any
woman he wants just like plucking an apple from a tree. I think
Rich is kidding, just making up a story, but the guy --a
horrible man I know, who twice called me on the air at my radio
show to drunkenly swear at me-- comes back from the restroom,
looks around, picks a woman in a booth with her friends, goes
there; she hops up and hurries away with him. Wow, that's some
bar trick.
The dream jumps back to when the guy is just coming back
from the restroom; he starts over toward the woman he wants. As
he passes by, the bartender tells him to take a bath, then turns
to me and says something I can't understand. I say, "So? And?"
It's many years later. Society has broken down. There are no
buildings here. Refugee children live in a camp near an old dead
stake-side truck piled high with previous refugees' suitcases.
Japanese army men come here. They want the children's boots, to
use for an industrial/magical reason --I think it's to boil the
magic out of the boots and then use centrifuge the resulting tea
and have a power source for machines. The Japanese officer sits
next to me and gestures for me to take my boots off. I say,
"I'm fifty years old." He says, "The boots are just as old."
(Meaning that's how old he is, too.) He sits down next to me,
sighs, looks around, disgusted with the way his life has gone.
He hadn't planned on doing this for a living. (Capturing wild
children, to take their boots.)
-end-
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