My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-02-19:
First dream. I'm in a strange version of my mother's house of the
late 1970s. Whoever lives here has two pet cockatiels and a pet
squirrel. The front side of the cockatiel cage comes loose and falls
off. The squirrel comes out of its box on a nearby table (it's not
caged), goes to the cockatiels and lifts the wooden floor in their cage
up with its back, like Atlas lifting the world.
I wonder, am I supposed to put the cage back together? The squirrel
looks a comical /yes/ at me. I dig around in layers of rugs and
newspapers on the floor, find the cage part, hook it on, wait to see if
the squirrel wants to get out. It doesn't; it wants to prop up the left
and right sides of the cage floor, so it can be in the downstairs part.
I'm like, /Are you sure?/ The squirrel is like, (huff!) /Yes./ I look
for something to use for props-- snapped off bits of wooden ruler?
Paperback books.
Next dream. An man is either an actor auditioning for the Captain
Kirk part in the original /Star Trek/ or he's a real space captain in
real danger. Anyway, he rushes to where two rubber-torture-hose-like ray
gun things are on the linoleum floor of a bare room, picks them up and
wrestles them against their considerable will to point down each other's
ends right in front of his chest. The effort to keep them pointed at
each other brings him to his knees with an agonized-Captain-Kirk
expression on his face. If the hose-rayguns are firing, whatever's
coming from them is invisible. It doesn't occur to me in the dream that
he's being electrocuted, though later, awake, writing this down, that's
obviously what was happening.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-02-20:
First dream. I come home from being away for days or weeks and
/someone's been in my house/. Things are moved, things have been
changed. I look around for clues as to who it was. My friend Mark? Kay?
No.
The faucet in the kitchen sink is an upside-down metal bowl --or a
lamp hood-- with flat fringes of red and green rug yarn taped to the
edge.
Wait... someone is still here... where, in the bed? I run toward the
bed, tugging at the light-switch pull-string along the ceiling. The
string becomes a heavy, flexible rope of like bread dough, stretches out
and loops everywhere, tripping me up. /AAAAAUGH!/
Next dream. Each brother at a family reunion did a different thing
to serve his country --the terms of their family were that each one had
to serve his country-- but the first four or five brothers turn out to
have made out like bandits in business, cheating and stealing, and never
had to actually fight. The last one to speak says, "I was chosen to join
the army." He was in danger the whole time and has nothing to show for
it. The others think they're all higher-class people than he is. I'd
like to turn this whole thing inside-out and upside-down.
Next dream. There's a Miata-size Millennium-Falcon-shaped
hovercraft. I get behind the controls (two joysticks and two pedals),
lift the craft up and fly over post-industrial land that's like a map.
Here's a river. Here are miles and miles of refinery and factory junk.
At one point, below me, a middle-aged man and woman argue as they run on
a metal catwalk above and between old factory buildings-- I can't see
the people, but I hear them and see the wake they leave behind them of
rippling, rickety metal.
Now I'm on the ground near a metal house, the couple's house. The
man is gone. The woman is hanging laundry (and she's visible now). I
demonstrate a magic trick similar to hers so she'll trust me: I kneel
with a folded newspaper between my knees, crease the exposed page
corners and wave a cigaret lighter (unlit) near the paper; this causes
me to vanish from her sight, spend a moment invisible, and reappear.
She's interested in the effect but not impressed.
Juanita comes to the door of the metal house. She says someone is in
the hall. I go in with her and look around. No-one's here. I say,
"Someone's in the hall?" She says, "No, there isn't." I take off a
puffy down-filled coat that's way too big for me and hand it to her. She
puts it on and nearly disappears inside it. /She's so cute./
Next dream. On a colony planet a man not a law officer steals a
uniform in order to sneak into a ritual police exercise class. There,
he's twice too tall, with a stupid expression on his face; he's
obviously out of place here but still he's not detected as an outsider.
He goes from the exercise class to a music class, where the homework
assignment is to make a new kind of music.
Later he's back in the back room of his place; he lives in the
colony town's abandoned library. He has stolen heavy wooden church organ
pipes (from the abandoned church), cut them off short and clamped them
up in a corner. He takes deep breaths and /blows/ at them, makes his
music composition for the class.
Now he's one of two boys hiding under a table with a girl. A young
military officer comes into the library, goes into the back, sees the
stolen, mangled church organ parts. I try to talk him into waiting
awhile before turning the boy in for stealing. I want him to wait until
everyone hears the boy's composition. He'll think about it; he's not
unreasonably wrapped up in the law for its own sake. Good.
The girl from under the table becomes older, wiser; she's about
twenty, with straight, soft reddish hair and freckles across her nose.
She sneaks out the front door into the cold night while the officer is
trying to make the project play-- his lungs are big enough.
Out front I say to the girl, "That man is so obviously a good man.
Wait for him to come out, then talk to him." She says, "What should I
tell him?" I say, "Whatever you want to."
Elsewhere in the colony town a boy tries to clean a kitchen that's
so infinitely messy that it's really kind of cool; I open heavy iron
cookpot lids and the old food inside is /bubbling/ with putrefaction.
Industrial dishwasher trays full of dirty dishes are stacked up like
crates. The boy's mother will be okay about coming home to this but his
father won't-- or the other way around. Just leave.
Now I'm the boy, the kitchen becomes my dream-only city apartment
(without dishes and pots and old food but with the same level of visual
clutter), and I'm finding out that I haven't watched the last disk of a
rented video series, nor two of the five show episodes from the
next-to-last disk. (What show? In the dream, I know.) I have to return
the disks unwatched, along with bags and bags of rented 1980s-era
professional video equipment --cameras, tape decks, tripods. In a
microphone case I find melted chunks of hard metal and assorted pieces
of lead movable type. All these things to return; it'll take several
trips in my car.
Without any of the things but the disks I drive with pianist and
music teacher Richard Cooper south on one of the roads just before the
headlands park on the west side of Mendocino (CA). I have a pet monkey
that rides in the crook of my left arm. Giant homeless people sleep
curled up on their sides in the road. I steer wide around them.
The car vanishes. Richard and I walk east across a lumpy field of
deep wet grass. I set the monkey down. It doesn't like being wet; it
just sits there. I say, "Become a cat," and it becomes a beautiful
fluffy but apparently waterproof cat and leaps through the grass ahead
of us.
We go into a library where Rick's music store used to be. I go over
in my mind what to say to the librarian so she won't resent or charge me
extra for sending a kid out to pick up all that I was supposed to have
returned by five-- it's late, dark now.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-02-21:
First dream. I sit up from lying in a bed that's a pulled-out drawer
under a workbench shelf. A green snake moves in the blanket next to my
leg, just under the edge of the shelf. I bop the snake on the nose with
a little tennis racket to make sure it knows to behave and not bite me.
There are two green snakes, the one I hit with the racket and a
bigger one. Wait-- the one I hit is dead. Oops.
Out in the concrete garage of this strange house some others have
made a fire in a recessed fire pit that's as big as a twin-bed mattress.
/They'll suffocate in here./ I prop an outside door open by jamming a
bottle opener in the hinge.
Now the fire pit is in the house and the fire has burned down to a
smooth layer of orange-hot coals. Juanita's sitting at a desk with her
back to the fire, happily singing to herself, working on a jewelry
project, her magnifying goggles pulled down over her face.
Time has passed. I walk with a man and a woman downstairs through
the garage into a lower house that's an art gallery, where they already
are (?) in bed in a (cold) fireplace in the trunk of a car; it's an
installation piece. I pack firewood in around them. Now they're no
longer both in the fireplace and out; they're only out, and the woman
objects to the way I'm putting the firewood in. She starts taking it
back out and I help her. All the wood is on the linoleum floor again.
Now what?
In a place like the connected houses but more of a sporting goods
store I walk past different kinds of plastic tennis shoes on display. An
evil-looking insect (a wasp? a twisted dragonfly?) poses in front of a
stand-up bit of wire on a high shelf at the far end of the room. I shoot
an arrow at it and miss by inches. I shoot again and miss. Again, miss.
A man says, "What are you shooting at?" I say, "Maybe it's just a
dream." The man points his flashlight up there. No insect --but /there
it is on the floor! closer!/ I open a package of clipped-together
suction-cup-tipped arrows and shoot three more times, missing the insect
each time. It's not moving, but it's still getting closer.
Parentless kids come back here from playing in the forest. The
insect is now a tiny half-inch-tall (live) rooster in a brass candle
lamp that's open on the front and back. I say to the children's leader,
"Give me your lighter." I light a plumber's oil-fueled blowtorch, hold
the faint blue flame of the lighter near this side of the lamp to keep
the insect from getting out this way and blast the blowtorch into the
other side. /Why doesn't this burn me?/ But it doesn't, so why worry?
/Because I'm holding the lighter in one hand, the torch in another hand,
and the metal candle lamp in another hand. Three hands./ Don't worry
about it; it's working.
When the children are about to lose interest I put the lighter and
torch down. The insect has become a delicate four-inch-tall blown-glass
wasp-worm creature with silver wire tied around its several waists. /If
it's not really dead this time, what a good trick it is playing./
Next dream. I'm in a series of connected theater spaces crowded by
ragged people like the underground people in Neil Gaiman's book
/Neverwhere/. It's dim and the air is damp, all breathed up. Some tough,
drunken British kids are lounging around on stainless-steel
refrigerators along one wall of a theater. One boy standing on a
chest-type refrigerator tries to kick me in the belly. I grab his leg
and turn with his motion, swinging him off and around to hit his head
and upper body on the end seat of a row of seats. I help him up and tell
him to get some ice or a bag of frozen peas for the side of his face.
I start across the theater to go back the way I came, fly up into
the air and try to stay above the projector's beam, but I make a shadow
at the corner. At the back, other corner of this theater I see that a
second projector is putting out a very narrow cone of light, showing
another movie on a three-by-five-foot screen below the big screen. /What
for? Captions?/ I can't make out what's happening on either screen.
I go into the next theater, and the next. It's so crowded; there are
so many people. I hate this. I just want to get out in the open air.
-end-
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