My dreams from Friday, 2008-02-22:
First dream. I'm in a strange little house with Jason and
Juanita. In the dream I'm late for a college class. I become
fascinated by a seemingly endless number of interesting
curio-museum-type things under a bed by the front door.
There's a stone-lined tunnel under continuous buildings that
go over an east-west street in Fort Bragg (CA). An old car
drives itself through this tunnel from Main to Franklin and
emerges. A man who looks like the actor who played Maynard G.
Krebs in /Dobie Gillis/ opens the car's hood, and Ed Wynn's
disembodied voice and the man have a scripted-sounding
merry-Christmas talk. /I want this 1950s recording for my show./
Under the porch roof of a telephone-company building on the
east side of Franklin my (dead) stepfather Roland hands me a
half-finished microphone project he's been working on. He used a
cheap dynamic-microphone capsule from a Radio Shack toy. I
explain to him about the different kinds of microphones, and
--so he won't feel bad about the shoddy start he made-- I point
out that this is my area of expertise. He still has his areas of
expertise that he can feel proud of knowing all about; there's
no shame in his not being good at this.
Next dream. A tough angry boy is in jail for something he
didn't do, but he's making things worse for himself by being
angry and graceless about everything. I say to him, "It might be
impossible to have everything the way you want it," (meaning, to
get out of jail), "but it's always possible to be just a little
less unhappy. Wouldn't that be better than this?"
I walk out of the jail and up a hill, past a small shopping
center of a convenience store and a laundromat and either an
adult store or a used-clothes store, then go up a rock trail to
an outdoor toilet area with a low concrete curb around it. I
piss into a floor drain, and have to hurry this because someone
else is coming up the trail-- a 1940s-era Nancy-Drew-like girl.
The trail is lined with used books. I go to the edge on the
steep side, step off into the air and fly downhill to where
Steve Greenwood from the theater company is in the air, coming
the other way. We hover about two hundred feet above trees and
fields and a crossroads and talk about funny advertising ideas.
I fly down to a bay-edge city and into a pizza kitchen about
ten floors up in a building with no glass in the windows. I
offer to the busy man cooking that I will fly around dropping
pizza-place flyers everywhere, this in addition to his airtime
on my radio show, and it won't cost him a cent extra. He looks
pained by having to make a decision. I say, "You think about
it. I'll come back." I fly out the other side of the building,
between old skyscrapers, and out over a choppy, dark bay.
Next dream. I'm in a back den in a strange house. I have a
shapeless art-eraser-clay-like thing in my hand. When I open my
hand so there's no pressure on the thing it slowly becomes a fat
live clay-dough mouse, nose and face first. A dog comes near and
sniffs the mouse.
I absentmindedly eat the mouse-clay-dough-thing as I wander
through the house. In the dream I work here for a rich woman,
cleaning up. I rinse out the kitchen sink, which is partly
ceramic and partly made of vertically-oriented
lapstrake-overlapped slices of bamboo.
The woman comes out of her office room and wanders around,
picking things up and putting them down, distracted by her
important responsibilities. I say, "I'll sweep the floors."
She says, "You do that." She gets something out of the
refrigerator and goes back into her office. I skate around on my
socks, sweeping.
My dream from Saturday, 2008-02-23:
I'm running with others downhill through a forest, away from
a battle between magical animals. Here come some other animals
the other way on the trail-- what are they? Dogs or lions? Are
they on our side? Or against us?
They're confused; they don't even know about the fight. I
run back up the hill, encourage the dog-lions. They become
bigger and more fully regular lions, get the idea about fighting
and pass me to go up there, leaping at car-speed.
The others with me diminish to two boys, then one. We go
between worlds through special places --dimensional gates-- that
only last a short while; one place we have to go through is a
busy college dormitory building. A boy in the dorm gets
suspicious and follows us. I shove him aside into a room; my
friend and I hurry into the way to the next world, but it
becomes a rooms-in-rooms trap-- this is revealed by what should
be a window to the outside being just a boxed-in niche in the
wall with clouded plastic for window panes. I yell to my friend,
behind me, "Don't shut that door!" (The door to the dormitory
hallway.)
A lot of dormitory kids come in led by the boy I shoved. He
knocks me down. Somehow I humiliate him, eliminating him as a
problem. While my friend investigates other possible ways out of
this world into the next, I address the dorm kids sitting around
in a half-circle on the floor: "Ya ever have that kind of dream
where you go through rooms and rooms and you can't ever get
outside?" Of course they have; everyone has. I say, "This is
like that."
Juanita and I are in a cavern under the forest from before,
in a big under-the-kitchen-sink-like space, beneath a lake.
Sounds come down from enemy people or animals up there searching
for us. We climb a ramp up one crumbly-rock wall, being careful
to be quiet. At the top of the ramp is a doorway to the choice
between two stairways going to different places. While we dither
about which one to take, I fiddle with Juanita's unfinished
necklace part, untangle the tangled bead thread.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-02-24:
First dream. I find a lighted switch with a green
translucent surface to replace the one missing from KMFB's old
Arrakis mixing board.
A spaceman/soldier/agent is sent to a distant enemy
windowless metal air enclosure (maybe on a planet, maybe in
space). It turns out that the people here are not fighting;
they're not enemies at all. The agent wants to use their
remote-console-switching device for recording their
making-friends music project; he radios for help with the
equipment.
A new soldier/agent comes, sees the first one holding up
this strange technology (a box with pushbutton switches on it)
and /shoots him dead/ before he can explain that there's no
point to the whole fricking war! And next he'll go in and kill
all the others! Disaster!
Next dream. There's a knock at the front door of Juanita's
house. I groggily get out of bed, go to the door, turn the
handle-- Jason and his red-haired Oriental-Colonel-Sanders-like
friend burst in so I fall backward to sit on my soft suitcase;
they rush down the hallway into the bathroom and through it,
somehow, out that side of the house entirely. I'm like, /What
was that all about?/
I go back to bed. A little Shar-pei-like tiger-cat gets on
the bed with me; I pet it and scratch the bunched-up skin around
its neck.
Next dream. I'm in the lobby at the top back of a theater
whose floor drops away in swimming-pool-bottom-like terraces to
the big square screen that fills the stage wall. Juanita and
Jason are here too. I know Juanita's seen this theater before,
so I get Jason's attention and make him look down into it.
"See?" I say, "This is what it was like."
In another theater in like a church's or school's
multipurpose room I see an educational film about a little town
that was gradually, inexorably taken over by businesses, to be
no longer a place for people to just live and enjoy life and
instead be like things are everywhere today, where the purpose
of being alive is to maintain businesses. A hamburger place logo
is superimposed on the town's old sign; it becomes the solid
sign and the old one is gone.
I want to write a letter to the mayor to explain that this
process can be reversed. I get a typed-on sheet of paper from
the used-paper pile, reverse it and thread it into a manual
typewriter (that I can smell; I smell /old typewriter/). The
typewriter has two rollers, one above the other; the characters
step back and forth-- some strike one roller, some strike the
other. Two famous writers, Gore Vidal and William Buckley, are
here. I suddenly need to leave; I gesture to the writers that
they should take over and write the letter, which now is to the
kids who'll come back here at eleven p.m. so they'll know what
their responsibilities are as regards showing movies, cleaning
up afterward and locking up the theater. I dust baking powder or
cornstarch onto where the paper goes over each roller to smooth
out the places where the typing comes through from the other
side.
My dreams from Monday, 2008-02-25:
First dream. In the dream Kay used to work for a rich man
who has a house down by the ocean between Caspar and Fort Bragg
(CA)-- she told me to go there and go swimming. Without seen a
house I climb over dunes and rocks and clomp down into a perfect
light-blue tidepool in my work boots, take the boots off, sit on
a rock. It occurs to me that Kay had no right to invite me here;
she only worked for the guy, and she doesn't anymore. Oh, well;
he's probably at another of his houses, in Europe or really
anywhere.
I look inside a dashboard glovebox in a rock and find a
video-paper brochure that plays an animated story about an
expedition down into Antarctic mountain caves and out under ice
to a way to the ocean --the ice the the men row beneath is
called the Mainz, after the city in Germany.
Above the tide pool is now a 1950s-modern house made of
unpainted planks and lots of glass on this side; you can see
through to the volcanic rock other side. Tim calls to me from
far away. I say, "Can I help you somehow?" He comes from where
he's been swimming in an inland pond, with his foot in a big
padded cast. He expects me to have done some work I didn't even
know I was supposed to do. (Tim doesn't live here; I get that
he's here for the same reason I am: Kay said to come here.)
I leave with an attractive late-forties/early-fifties woman
(not Kay nor anyone else I know) who has odd, perfectly
spherical butt cheeks, one of which I grab, out of curiosity. It
feels like a normal butt. The woman jumps at me and wants to
have sex /now/. I lean back against the house rock and say, "I
just have to sit down a minute here." I don't have any rubbers;
I don't want to have sex with this woman without using
protection. Maybe there's a drawer full of rubbers in the house.
I already swam in (or rather fell into) the guy's private tide
pool; it's probably okay to go in his house and look through the
drawers.
Next dream. I'm at KMFB, talking with Oliver Elfhost on the
phone, on the air. Everything he says is another paranoid
conspiracy idea. At one point I ask him about the /clicks/ he's
been hearing-- I say, "When you were in the store and there was
lightning outside, did you hear the clicks then?" "Yes!" he
says, "Yes!" It doesn't matter what I say; he'll take it as
confirmation of his theory. I had meant that the lightning
probably made the store's radio or record player klick.
I have a long, drawn out, onset-of-illness-dream-like period
of waiting for government approval to move to another house. I
have everything already in boxes. I can be arrested if the
police come now and see that I have /anticipated/ getting
permission. You're supposed to get permission before you even
start to pack up.
-end-
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