My dreams from Saturday, 2008-02-16:
First dream. A high-tech Prius-like car has broken down in the
driveway of the house where I lived in Fresno when I was in fourth
grade. In the house's garage a mechanic is taking apart a breadbox-size
device from the car; the car is right /there/, in plain sight, but the
mechanic is surprised when I tell him what kind of car it's from, and
what it does (which I somehow know enough about to tell), but he's
confident that he can fix it if he gets a replacement for a part inside
it, a flexible, molded sheet of rubber like the face of a flexible
computer or telephone keypad.
Time has passed. Now the mechanic is bolting the box-device back
into the side of the car, just in front of the left rear wheel. We're
happy and optimistic; let's try it out. The car starts, but gasoline
pours out of the box; the rubber part might not have been the exactly
right part. The gas catches on fire. The mechanic shuts off the car and
the gas stops leaking. I'm not worried about the small gasoline fire;
I'm worried about the dry grass and the fence. I follow the contour of
the L-shaped house, looking behind shrubs for a water hose and a spigot.
Next dream. John, who I worked for at QED Press in 1997, has an
office in the whole glass front part of the building that in real life
is the RiteAid drug store on Main Street in Fort Bragg (CA). He directs
me to pull a strange kind of electrical cable out the door and down a
lake-dock that goes out into the middle of the parking lot. I pull
enough slack loose in loops to take the end of the cable all the way to
the Safeway grocery store.
A woman who works for John has the key to the computer office in
Safeway, which in the dream is the whole front-right part of the
building. The Safeway supercomputer is under the floor, refrigerated;
cold vapor comes up from cracks where the two-foot-square linoleum floor
panels meet.
I'm supposed to connect my cable end-to-end with a similar cable
here, in a plumbing/wiring box set in the floor in very front door
airlock place. I examine the ends of the cables; they're
metal-braid-shielded bundles of soft fine-stranded copper wire saturated
with a kind of plastic jelly. How do you connect this? John walks
through as if he owns the place; he says, "Just push it together." Okay.
A handheld video device that sees radio noise shows a sandy-twinkly
area around the connection. I guess that's good. I start to put
electrical tape on the bare ends of loose regular wires. When John
hurries back the other way he sees what I'm doing with the tape and
tells me not to do that.
I cover the wiring box and replace the floor panel. I find a
stepping-stool-step-size enameled metal grate for a recessed drain, take
it to the drain, line up its two tabs and set it properly. It doesn't
need to be screwed down.
Back in RiteAid I sit looking at my timesheet. It's blank except for
today, but I see that I'm getting $200. /Not bad./ The result of the
work is that John can now illegally download fuzzy, low-resolution
movies from a company in Hawaii. I see the office of the company in
Hawaii; the people there are elderly versions of John and his business
partner (?). I understand that he's cheating no-one but himself. He
comes out from the back of the store, gives me my check. I thank him and
call him Mister Fancy Pants. He thinks that's pretty funny.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-02-17:
First dream. In a dirty East-Coast-city version of Mendocino there
are old apartment buildings on the block across from the Presbyterian
Church and the gas station. I move around inside them, from building to
building, finding empty apartments and carefully locking all the doors
into them-- the last one I check has several doors to hallways on the
front, side and rear; a bathroom also opens onto and outside hallway.
A family of girls lives in the super's apartment. I'm their music
teacher. They pay no attention to me; I must be here a lot.
I walk west on Main. My jeans are too tight around the knees; it's
hard to bend them. The power in my legs gets fainter and fainter till
it's a great effort to keep going.
I come to an indoor hamburger place and pass it to go to a cheaper
place. I order a big cheeseburger and sit to wait for it to come. My
pants have stopped being a problem.
In this building is an Old West town scene flooded for a swimming
pool. Soft round Mexican woman with long black hair sit on the fake
beach. My legs are completely okay now; I run out into the water to dive
in but it never gets deep enough for that. Some Mexican women are
sitting in the water; I had thought they were standing. The water's only
a foot deep.
At the far end of the pool I climb up a saloon/hotel building face
and sit on the roof of the first level. Now the hardwood floor of the
street below is dry. I climb down, go back to the hamburger place, and
sit talking with others here about how I often dream that my legs are
weak. (Here I remember the earlier part of the dream as a dream of the
night or day before.)
Next dream. Juanita and I are laying out a newspaper by the process
I used to make my paper in the early 1990s: print the individual stories
and the titles and the display ads out of a laser printer, cut them out,
run them through a motorized waxer and stick them to layout sheets. Our
office is outdoors in the otherwise empty lot next to the Mendocino
Cafe.
I'm looking over almost-finished pages. I find problems in a
paragraph at a two-column story's top-right corner. I decide not to
print the whole column again but to repair just that paragraph and save
it in a file with other repairs I need to make, then just go through and
cover up all the problems with their solutions.
Juanita asks me what I think of the job so far. I say, "The titles
aren't very creative, but it's a good start."
My dreams from Monday, 2008-02-18:
First dream. I'm stranded in Caspar (CA) in short pants, no shirt or
shoes, and it's cold out. In the street, in front of the Caspar Inn, I
use a hatchet to split a little pile of kindling out of mostly-rotten
wood.
No-one here is heading south any time soon. I walk up to the highway
to hitchhike. At the corner is a dream-only garage-size bus stop shelter
with fresh, clean, used clothes spread out everywhere by a charity
organization for homeless people. I'm freezing; I'll take a coat, and
bring it back next time I come this way. But if I take a coat I'll have
to take long pants too; otherwise I'll look weird and nobody will stop
for me. The only pants long enough for me are thick brown-green corduroy
and --something's wrong with them; I don't want to touch them. I'm
afraid they'll feel like they're made of play clay.
Next dream. I'm driving on a strange wide dirt road. I pass a turtle
and slow down to look back at it. It wants to come with me; it scrambles
frantically to catch up. It becomes a cat. No-- it's still a turtle. Or
/is/ it a cat? It doesn't matter what it is; I don't want it for a pet.
I leave it behind.
A miracle-making /deacon boy/ gets out of school for vacation time.
The actor who played Ralphie's father in /A Christmas Story/ comes to
the boy's rural rich-kid school in an early-1970s International
Travelall. He tosses the boy's bag in. The boy sits in the back seat
holding a hamster-size fetal infant Dalmatian puppy. The father is
horrified --he hates dogs-- but it's the boy's dog; the only way he can
get out of taking it along would be to leave the boy behind, and he's
not going to do that. The boy says of the dog, in his miracle-preacher
voice, "He opened his eyes when he smelled you." The father stands in
the open driver's door and leans against the high seat, holding his face
in his hands, squeezing his headache. I feel sorry for him.
Now I'm the famous boy of a hillbilly family, home from college.
Father (?) and others and I climb stairs up a hill to the house. Inside
there's food on the table. The place is full of people. (The person I am
in the dream /likes/ to be crowded in with all these people.) I wash my
hands in a sink whose faucet sprays a fine spray of water in all
directions from a crack in it. Everybody laughs.
After dinner I declare that I'm going out. /Going out where?/ To the
dance, of course, and my two older sisters (?) are going too. The father
says to the girls, "I suppose you have dates." They smile and lie that
they have dates, yes.
While I wait for my sisters to get ready, I strip insulation from
wires just sticking out of the plaster wall and use my pocket pliers to
twist them together. I flip the wall switch and the overhead light goes
on. There. See, Dad, I'm good for something.
Now I'm on the bank of a river. There's a ritual back-country race;
men on horses with packs and guns jump their horses off the
ten-foot-high far bank diagonally into the river, splash downstream,
cross to this side and tear into the woods. One of the horsemen is a
scary-big, slightly retarded man with the biggest shotgun I've ever
seen. Some of the other racers try to trick the retarded man, to trap
him in a dark shed's rear firewood room. I get there first and kick the
firewood-room's door open so the man can see that the others are not to
be trusted. He's not all /that/ retarded. I'd like him to win.
Farther along in the race I walk through a rich seaside vacation
suburb. At one house the people are having a picnic on their front lawn.
In front of the next house two dogs lie on a blanket. One of the dogs is
all light-green and has the most beautiful dark-green eyes. It's a very
smooth, sweet, graceful-looking pitbull-mix. I sit down and pet this
dog. /What a fine dog you are./ The dog smiles at me. I don't usually
like short-haired dogs, but this one is special.
In a place of a lot of camp buildings like the Woodlands (east of
Mendocino) business-office people are having a team-building vacation,
and also the horse-racing Australians from before are here. There's a
different loud game going on in each cabin. I go into a cabin where Dan
of /L.A. TheaterSports/ jumps onto a mechanic's creeper, causing a man
crouching on an entirely other creeper to spring up into the air. All
the business people get a big kick out of this. They carry the man
around the room and pluck at his shoelaces. I say a sarcastic non
sequitur --I don't remember exactly what-- something like, /If I didn't
know better I'd think yez were all gay./ The room explodes in happy
laughter.
I wander around outside and go with some college kids upstairs in a
log building, into a windowless pizza/beer-bar place. I pick up a chair,
reject it, pick up one whose legs are all the same length and take it to
a table. A women comes from behind the bar. I order two pieces of
whatever pizza is ready and a Pepsi, but the woman tells me this is a
special occasion of someone dying; everyone's supposed to have this
special beer they sell when someone dies, or that they make out of the
dead person. I'm not gonna drink any beer here, and certainly not any
special beer. The woman squints at me, evaluating me as an unwelcome
foreigner. I say, "Okay. Bring me whatever you want to, /and/ two
pieces of pizza and an can of Pepsi." (In the dream it doesn't occur to
me that they might just spit in the pizza, or put something toxic in it;
I feel I'm adequately protected from rural yokels' spite by getting a
soda pop in an unopened can.)
-end-
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