My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-02-12:
First dream. A skinny alien snake/alligator with a short
little horse-lips-hinged mouth on its long tubular head is shut
inside the bridge of a spaceship by a bank vault door that has a
glass window in the middle. The creature is sleepy-- it's
/losing power/-- the ship is /losing power/. I say, "What can
we do to get more power?" The creature is discouraged; what an
idiot I must be to ask such a question. Or maybe it can't even
hear me, nor understand me if it could hear me.
In another room the ship's other pilot, a human, is in bed
on the top bunk. He's suicidal, depressed; the only reason he
hasn't killed himself is that he's too depressed to move. I
climb up onto his bed, kneel up next to him and shake him,
saying, "We need you! You can't do that!" --meaning, we have a
problem to solve to stay alive; there's no time to just lie
there. There's a mechanical pencil in his hand; his hand flops
against the big picture window next to the bed. Outside,
downstairs, is Main Street in Mendocino. This must be the
Mendocino Hotel. /Huh./
Now it's night. I'm in the last room in a long row of rooms
whose doorless doorways make an open corridor down the middle.
Some of the people in bed in this room are talking in low
voices. I say down the hallway in an outdoor voice, "Does anyone
down there need help?" Everybody everywhere talks at once, some
to complain that they're hurt or missing someone, some to order
me to shut up because they're trying to sleep. Gradually the
noise dies down and there's just one man somewhere down the hall
yammering on and on about how I should shut up, how I should
know better than to say anything in here, how good it would be
if I would never speak again, how much better it would be if I
never spoke in the first place, etc. This is just like Usenet.
Next dream. I'm where a dirt road along the coast turns
uphill into trees; I'm here because this is where you come to
join up and be a soldier. Others come here, wait around awhile,
decide, and then go up the hill. I decide against it and go back
north above the flat road, flying in a school desk-chair.
The road makes a wide, square-cornered U to the left.
Dangerous wild kids live here in horse stalls. The alpha boy,
who looks like a cross between Geordy from the old Community
School and Raincrow from the Whale School, comes to the fence
ready to attack me; he chooses not to. I tear a stick off a tree
and reach down to hand it to the boy. I tell him he can fly; he
just didn't know he could and so never tried. I suggest he
practice, make just short hops at first, and watch out for
wires. I describe how wonderful it is to fly at night when the
sky is still a little blue, almost black. "Wires, though. Be
careful."
I'm in a future post-society-smash refugee camp on a desert
lake. They guard the place so no-one can escape; I plan to get
away through a sewer pipe, with help from a Japanese girl to get
to the pipe. (It drains directly into the lake.)
I don't actually have to climb down into the pipe. I walk
away carrying my down-filled sleeping bag, thinking about
sneaking back in next year to meet the actress who played a
lesbian paleontologist in a play I made sound effects for last
year --in the dream she's written a series of science-fiction
books I admire without being able to remember the story. The
actress' friend's name is Nora, so I think, /There'll be a
Nora./ (There'll be someone like Nora here, to watch for.)(Also,
later, awake, writing this down, I realize that the Japanese
girl was Nora, although the wrong shape and size and with black
hair.)
Back in the camp it's Lark Music Camp. Mickie Zekley gives
me a weird big audiotape cassette shaped like an old-fashioned
printer-ink ribbon cartridge but with eighth-inch tape in it; he
wants me to somehow recover the audio from the tape. It doesn't
occur to me to just wind the tape into a regular cassette; I
say, "I'll figure it out." (I'll look it up on the web and find
a machine to play this.)
Next dream. A rough ranch worker who might be good or bad
races in a four-horse wagon through wilderness. The little girl
he either rescued or kidnaped (I'm leaning toward rescued) sees
many horsemen angling in toward them --they're both Indians and
cowboys, and they all have rifles. The wagon driver speeds up.
The little girl climbs back over the supplies and ammunition to
the big long machine gun on a heavy plank off the back of the
wagon. The gun is too big and complicated; she doesn't know how
to use it.
A confident, helpful character like Edward Bloom in the
movie /Big Fish/ jumps on, says something and winks to the
little girl. He swings the gun around and kills everyone chasing
them, blows them right off their horses. Yay!
The attackers' hundreds of accumulated captives come
shuffling up the flat river valley.
A kitchen is set up in a big old rental-hall-like country
house shelter. Everyone has dinner and relaxes to digest.
Garrison Keillor reads aloud a lesson story from an old book. I
try to find the story, to read along in my copy; I worry that
this book was printed later than 1916, which would confuse these
people, who are all from the 1800s, but there's no date in the
book. I can't find the page Garrison Keillor is on; can he
really be just making up a story like this as he goes along?
After he's finished he and I go outside. We walk into the
dry river that the wagon road has become. I ask him, "Where will
they go? Do they all wanta go home?" (I want them to stay here
and start a city.) Garrison Keillor doesn't answer.
I tell him to throw a rock. He throws one; I control it,
bring it back, and I say, "Now we're on the same page." He
throws another much bigger rock --bigger than a skateboard-- and
when I direct this one back I jump on it and surf around on it
in the air. From about twenty feet up I tell him, "I can teach
you to do this, and you can teach them."
Many years later this is a big city spread out like Los
Angeles. There's a clump of tall office buildings. I say to my
mother, "The smallest of those office buildings would make a
perfect house." She says, "No, it wouldn't."
Here's a translucent-white sign on the grass next to the way
into a drive-in movie lot --the lights inside it don't just
switch on and off; they smoothly pulse. That means it doesn't
have fluorescent tubes in it but banks of normal light bulbs.
Waitress Michelle from Brannon's in the 1980s walks through.
(Now this is indoors). Michelle nods in agreement when I say of
the sign, "That's a thousand watts right there." She knows.
I'm in a steel-and-glass advertising agency that's all open
and light. They're having important meetings around big tables
everywhere here. Children are allowed the run of the place. I go
down into the basement to where the /really/ important meetings
are. When I come to the slightly open door at the bottom of the
stairs an alarm light goes on and the door wiggles, startling
me, but it's just air pressure from someone opening or closing
another door somewhere else, and the alarm isn't against
intruders but just to count the people coming here, in case of
emergency. (Sure. That's what they want you to think.)
I and a man assigned to keep an eye on me go back upstairs,
through the building and out the front doors.
The sloppy-Errol-Flynn-like man and I are in the air at
night over a dark bay. I see a full-size 3-D cutaway view of an
antique pusher-prop airplane; the propeller at the tail is
driven by a thick hollow spiral-bedpost-shaped brass shaft from
the motor in the airplane's nose.
Now we have our own World-War-One-era airplane. It flies
through fog while we climb all over the fuselage and wings. A
song plays on a scratchy old record: "Who's flying the plane,
who's flying the plane..." The man sits just in front of the
tail. I'm in front, on the side, hanging on by the (cold)
exhaust manifold. We'd better get back into the seats and go
back.
The man is steering. The fog comes and goes. We come to
waves of airplanes flying the other way and barely avoid them by
swinging down and to the right. When we crash (harmlessly)
directly into another similar World-War-One airplane we don't
fall, just stop in the air, our planes' propellers pressed
against each other, also stopped. The woman in the other plane
is amused but her man is indignant, as if this is all our fault.
I go to where I was before, holding on by the engine's exhaust
manifold, and I push us apart. I and the other-plane man push
our propellers to start them going again and we continue on our
separate ways.
Now the city is all tall, modern buildings. It's early
morning. Two middle-aged British women sit near some big
pumpkins in an alcove of a black-glass building. The women talk
about the two young fliers they had a date with and flew with
last night. They know they were in a crash, but they're vague on
the details.
Uh-oh-- a damp shadow moves across the city. When it goes
through the alcove, the women and pumpkins wither, rot and turn
black. The crash was really fatal to them, and it's caught up
with them as physical consequences, temporarily put off, catch
up with everyone the shadow rolls over.
I realize that /I/ have consequences from the crash. I put
my trench coat over my head like a hood, in case, after the
shadow-change, my head is all cut up and hideous. I fly (without
a plane) slowly between two glass buildings, going back to the
advertising agency. Here's a pretty 1960s-looking office girl in
a short skirt. She looks at me, then away. Am I hideous? I can't
tell without touching my head, and I'm afraid to. The glass
everywhere shows nothing.
The first room inside the front doors of the agency is a
twenty-by-fifteen-foot elevator. The other flyer is here; he
doesn't look too bad; his clothes are torn. A nun comes in with
six children. Two women from our advertising agency office come
in --one likes me; she missed me when I was away (now it was
weeks). She peers at my face, says, "Oh, you got a pretty bad
one there," and uses her handkerchief to flake dry blood away
from a gash on my left cheek and another on my forehead. I know
these cuts, and others that I'll find later, will never heal,
because I'm dead, but I can still do my work and be friends with
this woman. Maybe at night the cuts will go away, or maybe the
reality-enforcing damp shadow is seasonal, or something, and
there's a light shadow that makes things go the other way...
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-02-13:
First dream. I climb down the steep side of a hill, away
from where a man is in a room looking down and out across
mountains. The man is pretending to be a doctor, to be the
doctor for people here. At the bottom of the trail a lawyer
lives in a square-cut ditch; he's uneasy about the man at the
top. I say, "Would you hire a lawyer who was just pretending to
be a lawyer? If he could do it?" Hmm, put it that way, yeah; he
says, "I might. I guess you're right."
I start back up the hill. I wonder whether I should light
the little fire someone's made ready here in the trail, or save
it for when everyone is cold. Also, there's the fire danger; I
won't be able to stay and watch it.
A heavy, puffy-fleshed, round-headed man who lives in this
strange mountain community is also climbing up this ever-steeper
trail. He's in a hurry; he wants to go first. Okay, I let him
pass me. Where the trail is nearly straight up he has a heart
attack or a stroke and slips backward. I stop his slide and
swing him aside to prop him against rocks. I call down to the
lawyer to use his hugely loud bellow to get the pretend-doctor's
attention. (The doctor's room is at the top of the cliff,
cantilevered out over where I am.)
Next dream. It's like a big marriage reception or a school
function where all the parents and older relatives are here from
out of state. Everything is indoors, with the feeling that the
world is frozen everywhere outside. There's a giant
skating-rink-like warehouse/soundstage space with ductwork and
rectangular heat-blower horns facing downward from halfway up
thick lath-and-plaster pillars.
I go into a side room, off the big room, to get dinner.
Almost all the food is gone, but there are two steaks and some
potatoes and salad vegetables. About a dozen people come in from
the cold. My mother is with them. What will they eat? I collect
all the remaining food onto the tray I was just making up for
myself, bring it to the main cook, tell him to cut it (and those
potatoes and tomatoes there) into a big pot half-full of water
and start it boiling. I'll go to Safeway (?) and get a crate of
whatever canned soup is on sale that will mix well. I say, "I'll
be right back." The cook looks nervous; I might be gone a long
time. I say again, "I'll be right back."
I woke up with Joni Mitchell's song /Amelia/ playing in my
head.
-end-
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