My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-02-06:
First dream. I'm in a flat rowboat on a calm river. A house
right down on the water has a shelf outside a window for a boat
to leave mail there. An alien creature, a smoky purple-pink
cross in a shell of purple-blue light, comes to the mail shelf.
Others go in the window. I've been waiting for something like
this, but at the moment I'm a hundred yards up the river,
talking to the man in the next house. I hurry back and find that
the aliens have pulled my portable computer out onto the shelf
and filled its hard drive with zipped installation files for
programs.
In the air over a freeway and at the same time in a kiosk
office in the middle of the parking lot of a shopping center I
install a program the aliens gave me on someone else's much
better computer and play with it, design a blimp-shaped shell of
light that can be made any size, to use as a vehicle to move
through water or air or travel in space. At a streetcorner I
meet a science reporter named Paul Dirac and we establish in
pre-interview setting-up-the-recorder small talk that he's no
relation to the Paul Dirac who invented faster-than-light space
travel.
Next dream. Bob Woelfel of KMFB is playing a show of his old
45rpm records on an upright-piano-shaped console in a back room
of a theater or restaurant. Patched linoleum floor.
Bob is kept busy choosing what to play next; the records
only play for about thirty seconds each. He gives me permission
to take away one special funny red vinyl record that I want to
digitize.
Upstairs in a flat-floor balcony at the back of a fancy
theater, a 3-D black-and-white old movie is shown in the air,
about ancient-Roman-dressed robots with soft white flesh and
silver-painted cardboard heads and shoulders. The robots have a
swordfight. I pick up a sword and join in; the sword is heavy
and clanks against the movie-projected swords. /How is this
done?/ Out of the action I talk with a rich old lady about how
fun that was.
Now the movie and immersive game was part of a fundraising
gala. In a cafeteria in the next building I'm a
Sunday-comics-style high-society woman; I get a tray of mashed
food from the steam buffet and carry it and a card table with
two short legs to a round wedge of motorized floor that turns.
When the floor turns, it vibrates, and all the tables shudder
gently down the slope, like the plastic football players on my
(dead) stepbrother Craig's vibrating metal football-game toy. I
set and reset the table, and eventually two of my high-society
women friends come and sit with me. /What's the deal with
turning the floor?/ /I dunno./ /Somebody's idea of art./
Next dream. I'm in the empty lobby of palatial 1920s movie
theater. My part here is like it was with Mendo Movies: I'm
supposed to sell the tickets, project the movie, operate the
food bar, clean up and put everything away, all for twenty
dollars and happy to get it. Here's the ticket table with a big
maroon-leather sign-in book on it. Under the book is an
eighteen-inch reel of film; this is the movie. I take it down
into the theater and on the way find another reel of film, then
another. They're not marked. Which is number one? Good thing I'm
early; I can put them all on and figure that out. It's
five-thirty. People won't start showing up until seven-thirty.
Now I'm an old man walking down into a bigger, newer, less
fancy theater. I'm wearing Bermuda shorts and zoris. The theater
is full of old people; they're using the theater for their own
even before I show the movie, which they don't even know about.
They're all here to hear a lecture by a famous man who wrote
self-help books about how to get rich, and they love him because
they're rich, and they don't realize that /it's a total accident
that they're rich/. They attribute their wealth to the
self-help-book guy, and they don't know what he looks like,
because they only know him from his books. And he's late or not
coming.
I say, "How many of you are rich because of me?" The people
cheer and hold up brightly-colored cardboard squares. I'm
halfway down to the stage now; I say, "So you all frickin' owe
me, right?" They fling their colored squares into the air like
graduation caps. I /have/ them. I deliberately don't think of
what to tell them to do with all their money. I'm going to get
to the stage, sit on the edge of it, look up at all these people
and just start telling the first story that pops into my head.
If it goes well, great. If it doesn't, I'll say I was just
kidding, reveal that I'm not the self-help guy, and invite them
to stay for the movie. /Tell them to pay now for the movie./
/Stop it; stop thinking of what to say./
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-02-07:
First dream. I'm on a ski mountain that has no snow, though
people were just skiing a minute ago. I'm at the top of a long
ravine that's filled up with waste office paper, that curves
down around the mountain. It's getting dark out. I'm here to
read my radio show in front of an audience. Only when it's
almost time to go to the amphitheater to I realize I don't have
the main stack of my printed paper; I just have my mail and a
magazine and someone's flat vanity-publisher paperback book.
Should I go all the way back down the mountain to the parking
lot to look in my car? It's miles. It'll be too dark to see to
walk before I get even halfway down. Should I call out to the
people higher up on the slope for someone to give me a
flashlight? No; I'm too embarrassed. Use my plastic lighter to
see by? Make a torch out of paper? No.
I'm not going back down. /Why didn't I check earlier? Shit./
Look again; maybe I only imagined I forgot the papers. No,
they're really not here. Oh, well. Try to do the show with what
I have. (In the dream this sort of thing has happened before.
It's familiar.)
Next dream. A new kind of low-budget high-tech music and
generated video show is being put on in a square circus tent.
I'm in the audience; I find I can influence the music and the
projected video by flailing my hands at an upside-down plastic
cafeteria tray on my lap. I make the light strobe jarringly.
Everyone's going diagonally across fairgrounds to another
tent where, it turns out, music automatically related to the
first tent's music has been going on all along.
The music sounds like a cross between Greg Brown, Leonard
Cohen and Yes, with the main low voice slowly, sleepily singing,
"I-yi-yi-yi," rising to a tense note, then the same thing again
but falling and at the end it resolves, with a chorus of
background men yammering some kind of nonrepeating story in
double and quadruple time. And drums and electric guitars.
I woke up humming the song.
Asleep again. Next dream. In the back-story most of a teevee
game show was taken up by asking the audience of normal
ineffective mediocre people how they'd solve a problem. (Each
person was presented with a different problem.) Now it's the end
of the show, and the screen shows a collage of tiny
unrecognizable thumbnail images representing all the suggested
solutions, as if all together they're the solution to a single
big problem, and the show is going to use all of the solutions
at once on the problem, whatever it is, right after this
message, and it'll be funny.
Next dream. I'm at a gas station out in the middle of
nowhere, like the Arctic but also like outside Bakersfield, but
with trees. Live man-size wooden soldiers and their French
police inspector officer show up; they're stationed here. It's
like a retribution post for incompetent and immature Foreign
Legionnaires.
Two soldiers catch a deep-green turtle the size of a truck
tire and manhandle it around to make it a target to shoot their
little cannon at; I interfere in this and the turtle scurries
away. Somehow I know that the turtle's name is Gygax (say
JY-gax).
An environment-size invisible dragon (related to the
insulted turtle?) comes here. Everyone hides. I hide in the gas
station's washroom and peek out through the crack over the
badly-fitting door. The dragon blows cold air, freezes all the
trees white and covers everything with ice and snow.
I'm on a hundred-yard-square iceberg that's shaped like just
the lower fourth of an Egyptian pyramid. A man puts up a blanket
on a stick for a steering sail. The iceberg begins to spin;
someone is spinning it with a powerful motorboat. Juanita and I
meet in the center of the iceberg, where the twisting force is
least, and we hang on here. The surface becomes dry grass, an
unwatered lawn. Juanita becomes Julie, my girlfriend for the few
years right after high school, and we start to have sex, but
there's no birth control, no rubber. We kiss for awhile, then
put our clothes back on.
The guy who put up the little sail explains that the man who
spun the iceberg came by and said to him, "You should be
ashamed!" He didn't have a good retort, and that's what set the
boat guy off, made him angry enough to attack. I say, "Next time
some Texas prick says you should be ashamed, say, /You/ should
be ashamed. If he says you should stand on your head, you say,
/You/ should stand on your head." He moves his mouth along with
this, memorizing it.
I woke up with the song /Clap For The Wolfman/ playing in my
head.
Asleep again. Next dream. Same grassy iceberg as in the
previous dream, but back where the gas station was, and the
grass is just lying on the surface of red clay mud, not rooted.
Near a wire-mesh fence gate I give a goofy speech to our little
group of refugee subsistence farmers about nobly defending our
glorious land against /poltroons/ and /duckwads/.
A man from the 1800s is terrified by other more modern
people who drive a brown Dastun Z-car to drag a sledge to go get
us some firewood. I go to the edge of the clay iceberg, where
the plan is to build a carport (there's already a drainage
ditch), and I suggest to a Russian peasant woman to help me form
an outline for the structure with rocks. She offers to do
several layers to bring the ditch above the level of the mud.
She says, "You go do your work. I can do this."
Next dream. Everyone's returning for the new school year at
a boxy WalMart-like castle on flat land. A boy is excited about
what his graduation gift might be. (Everyone gets a gift for
someone else.) I know what the boy's gift is --I got it; it's a
coffee-table-book version /Charlotte's Web/. I feel a little
guilty; it's a lame gift. But he won't find that out until he
graduates, years from now. Should I replace it with something
better? Yes, but I probably won't.
I wander around, go up into the attic, where a party is
happening. The boy is drunk and is coming on to an older girl
who is not his betrothed. I help him lie his way out of this,
say he's only eleven years old; this way the girl won't feel
bad-- she can comfortably turn him down. She's thirty-- eleven
is too young; the rule is, half your age plus seven years.
The boy goes to his private room to think about things, then
goes into the next room, a ceramics shop, and examines the
merchandise. Here's a special beer mug with a wheel of T-shaped
ceramic drinking straws sticking out of the glazed-shut top.
/Better than Charlotte's Web./
A Harry-Potter-style mysterious danger develops. I
investigate a ranch house on the street where I lived when I was
in sixth grade. The girl who lives here comes home unexpectedly
and I'm caught inside. I impersonate the girl's mother, but
poorly, so she tries out saying, "You're not my mother," to see
how it sounds; it sounds true. Uh-oh.
The person I just was is the bad guy. Via a dimensional gate
in the upper corner of a room he flees into rooms of analogs of
this same house in other worlds. Other teachers, including me,
need to catch him. We send a pointy-nosed dog up into the first
other house to sniff him out. The bad guy was clever; the dog
gets more and more lost in rooms-within-rooms. (I see this from
outside the action.)
On a playing field a soccer ball and a bowling ball are
magicked to trap the bad guy. He runs, but the soccer ball goes
ahead of him, then the bowling ball rushes to crush him between
them. I'm the bad guy again, fleeing. I almost get away over the
hill of the end zone, but the same gravity magic that pulls the
balls around pulls at me.
On the next playing field to the right, the teachers and the
bad man call a truce to negotiate. But the man runs again, and
this time he sends in mobs of clay people from the sidelines to
be smashed in his place. And he is /so/ evil that he has somehow
covered whole live families in layers of red clay and mixed them
in with the lifeless clay people. A family of girls manages to
break the spell; they pull off their dresses and the clay,
reveal themselves. The teachers stop the killer balls and the
pursuit, but even though they broke off the chase while the bad
man was still getting away, somehow there's a general feeling of
finality here, as though the bad man is /finished/ and all the
trouble is /over/. But I wonder.
One small girl is all that's left of her family --the family
of the bad man. Can the family curse get her and make her bad,
like what happened to Sophie at the very end of the last episode
of /Carnivale/?
I say to the little girl, "The others will be furious for me
telling you this, but it has to be said: your father might still
be alive." She already thought of that. She knows to watch out.
She'll be okay.
Now the survivor is a boy. He goes to his private room to
think about things, and then goes to the next room. Here's the
special mug with the T-shaped ceramic straws sticking out the
top... /Has all the other stuff not happened yet?/
And now I'm the boy. They take me on an educational trip to
a truck yard between earthworks on wide natural terraces that go
down to the ocean. Here's a truck where the worker-passenger
sits outside the driver's cab so he can see all around and reach
down to the ground while the truck is moving. He tells me about
how important his job is; he compares it to a historically
important job on a different kind of truck in World War One. He
says, "They couldn't do without us." I say, "I don't doubt it,
sir."
I want to see the results of his work, which I know are
square-cross-section translucent jelly hedges in tangled loops
at road corners. I fly up above the earthworks, see a crossroads
with jelly hedges at one corner, swoop back down to fly near the
ground between parked and stored trucks. I return to where the
man's truck was. The little girl from before and a woman (one of
the brave, fighting teachers) are sitting here on a flower-print
couch in a wall-less, roof-less World-War-Two-era British house.
I land, sit between them, fall over against the girl and pretend
to conk out from exhaustion.
-end-
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