My dream from Tuesday, 2008-02-26:
There's the feeling of a complicated adventure having been
passed through, then Juanita and I go into a high wooden
warehouse, pursued by whoever we were fighting before.
People are coming the other way in the dark-- not enemies,
but we need to get away from them too. Juanita gets onto my back
and I flap my great long bat wings to fly up through
insubstantial rafters and roof and away to the steep roof of a
hugely tall old house. Time passes; Juanita is replace by Sheila
of Earl and Sheila.
Sheila and I put Christmas lights around the front edge of
the roof. I warn her not to walk on the weak part of the roof,
in back. She walks on it anyway; it turns out to be Ornyte
panels set right down on the dirt of the back yard of a house
outside Fresno.
A dry farm field has rows and rows of folding chairs set out
for the audience of a play. My mother is here. The play changes
so you're supposed to go to seats in another part of the field
where the next act will happen. My mother is bored; she gets up
and leaves with her old friend from when they were little.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-02-27:
First dream. I'm at a school in like the Sierra Nevada
mountains in California. Cops are all over the place,
investigating a crime or just practicing keeping people in line.
A paper shopping bag has all my things in it, including, I find
to my surprise, /two handguns/. I cover the guns, leave the bag
and keep an eye on it. The police go near it, look in, see the
shirts, don't look any farther, pass on.
An officer has done his part in today's operation and sits
on a bookshelf, waiting. I turn a lightbulb into one socket of a
three-way lightbulb-socket splitter and then put the bulb into a
white lamp-cover globe to play an old radio show that I wrote
and recorded at the Community School in Mendocino in the early
1980s. A reverby siren sound comes out of the globe; I say to
the officer, "See, it sounds like a siren down the alley." It's
too loud. Someone's voice in the recording says something about
it being the year 2000.
The officer is bored; he walks away wearing over-the-ears
headphones.
I drive around the back of the library building in my car,
just barely slide between trash bins and R2D2-shaped
metal-and-concrete posts. The car vanishes.
It's raining. I find two audiocassettes in plastic bags on a
park bench-table. Here I think about the year-2000-part in the
show-- I never wrote that; it must be from another version of me
in an alternate time-track; I want it, and to keep it I must
choose which of these tapes is the right one, leave the other
behind, go get the paper bag with my things (and the guns) and
drive away from here. The cops are all gone...
No. They probably will watch for me. Wait some more.
I woke up slowly, unhappy about not knowing what happened to
the real-life little suitcase of my baby movies. It's possible
that was lost during a move. Dammit.
Next dream. A college kid did the right thing by telling
about something bad the government did, but it turns out that
one result was to ruin years of his father's work-- his father
works for the CIA. /It's okay. He hadn't known./
I'm a modern version of David Bushnell who invented the war
submarine, the Turtle, in 1776. My Turtle is also egg-shaped but
it's the size of a three-story house. My wife in the dream has
curly blonde hair --she looks like photographer Laura Julienne;
I don't want her to come with me in the Turtle test. She
insists. I say, "It's very dangerous. You can drown." She
doesn't care; she's going along.
She and her twelve-year-old redheaded daughter will watch as
a scientist drugs me so he can use my mind to see food inside my
stomach. He give me cut-up tomato and mashed avocado to eat, so
there'll be something brightly colored to look at. My wife and
the girl and the scientist get ready to look down my throat.
Once I'm drugged I'll actually be inside, looking around from
next to the food. I don't want to do this. I sit on the part of
a hospital mattress that the sheet has pulled loose from; I'm
thinking of ways to get out of doing it now that I'm committed
to it and it's too late for that. Everyone looks at me with
pity.
Now I'm in Alaska. Led Zeppelin is here to play a concert. I
see inside the band's messy yellow school bus, the kind of bus
with the engine in the front. The band members are probably in
that barn over there. I check to see that the door is locked;
they insisted the bus be locked, as a condition of their playing
here.
My point of view moves outside and swings slowly around the
bus where it sits in a flat valley with forested mountains all
around, far away. No barn or anything.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-02-28:
First dream. My dream-only blonde girlfriend and I are
shooed into a big modern church by the side door. After crossing
in front of the sixty-foot-wide altar I turn and sit on an
antique Electrolux canister-type vacuum cleaner. The girl rushes
to me, sits on my lap with her legs behind me and hugs and
kisses me.
Now my dream-only bearlike Russian brother and I are in
another room in the church building, expecting someone important
to come and make trouble. I eat oatmeal from a
toilet-paper-tube-size octagonal cardboard container. Wait.
Wait.
They're here, outside the door. I step into my work boots
but don't bother lacing them. A flimsy metal flower-stem-thing
moves into the room, opens a flower-size horn at its end and
announces the presence of the Great Noble Somebody-Or-Other. I
reach down and casually break the metal stem. The people come in
all offended at the lack of adoring attention they're usually
met with. I politely take the main guy's gloves and walking
stick and just as sarcastically politely drop them on the floor.
He pretends he didn't see that. He leads the others into a
conference room. I follow, take his leather-ear-flap helmet and
big coat-- and drop them. He's stuck offering things because I
keep taking them; he takes off his shirt, hands it to me. I drop
it. He's in a sleeveless undershirt, revealing his thin, wrinkly
old gray-white arms. His young bride/girlfriend/servant-girl
bends and presses her head into his belly to comfort him.
Pathetic. I'm like, /Well, go ahead, give your speech./
Next dream. I walk through a pottery store. The ceiling is
low and the floor is all overlapped mismatched old rugs. I say,
"Isn't that interesting, that a show would come on about an old
pottery guy, and /boring/, but I'd watch it. One-and-a-half, not
one hour, and suddenly the old man would be talking about how he
thinks about things." I'm saying that having an attention span
makes everything better.
I ride a 1960s Yamaha 90 motorcycle on a remote two-lane,
then one-lane highway, turn off into a gravel parking lot. On
the road cars are jammed to a stop, uphill. A cop car is stuck
in the line with its flashers flashing, but it's not being
pushy; it can wait. What's the trouble atop the mesa ahead?
I ride alongside the cars and go up there. There's been a
terrible accident. I tell the woman in a car I'm next to to
/look at that/*, and I tell about the movie (?) where pottery
artists are fastened to shelves in a prison camp, and "where do
you suppose they put their /help-me/ message?" *A
headstone-shaped rock at the edge of the pile of machines and
bodies of the car accident. So you see, it's all connected, all
the parts of the story.
Next dream. In the dream, Mendocino Cartoonist Mervin
Gilbert lives in a compound of sheds where in real life are the
houses across the street to the south of the old Middle School.
He's paying me to work on the electrical system in his
long-travel-trailer size 1940s car. In the living room in the
back of the car Mervin mimes the effect he wants to get from a
lighting fixture here, that will be controlled by a switch on
the dashboard. I say, "I get it. An /evil/ light." He knew I'd
understand it right away; he has confidence the job will be done
right.
I work with a lot of others renovating my friend Mark's
dream-only new house-- or rather I move from task to task to
seem like I'm working without actually doing anything. Maybe
I'll paint a little.
Except, I end up in a little room, sitting with an old woman
cross between (dead) Barbara Champion and the Scrabble-champion
woman (now dead too) who my mother rented from for a few months
in 2002. The woman is close to dying of extreme old age. I ask
her, "What do you think of me?" She whispers, "You should brush
your teeth."
In an impromptu coffeehouse in someone's garage, several old
Mendocino people hang out and talk about the old days. I flip
through a poetry book written in the 1960s by a woman who was
experimenting with book form at the time; the poems in the book
are lists of titles of other books and movies, in prose
paragraphs-- they almost make sense. It's clever. I like it.
I'm only on my break, here. Now, retroactively, I work
washing dishes in another gravel-floor garage; I return there,
where I have less seniority than the another dishwasher (an
actor who washed dishes in Brannon's when I went back to work
cooking there in the middle 1980s). He orders all the workers
around and is so obnoxious that, when he comes to yell at me for
being late, I punch him in the eye and knock him down.
I go out the back of the garage into the house-renovating
project from before and look around for ice and a plastic bag. I
find a box whose packing material inside is sheets of a plastic
partly-styrofoam ice product, break a bunch of this stuff up
into chunks in a trash bag and take it back out to where
everyone in the business --now not a dishwashing business but a
financial firm-- is having a meeting. The guy I punched looks
terrible; his eye is swollen shut. I give him the ice bag and
say, "I feel really bad about what I did." He can't acknowledge
this now --he has to pay attention to the meeting; we all do.
It's very complicated. A financial computation must be done
using a varnished sheet of heavy blonde plywood that has a grid
of grooves in both sides-- it's like a big Battleship game board
without the peg holes. I lie on a bench with my knees and hands
up, the game board is balanced on me, and the dishwasher guy
spreads his body out on top of the board. He counts the grooves
with his fingers, moving left and right and up and down on top;
I count from beneath to check his work, while I shift the board
around to keep it balanced as he moves. Eventually my head is
somehow above the board and the count has ended up with the
guy's finger pressing the bridge of my nose, pushing a little
toward my right eye. I look at him and /trust him not to gouge
my eye out./ He pushes his finger down to touch the inner edge
of my eye. I wait. He pushes a little harder. I say, "I wouldn't
do it to you." The others wait, say nothing. What will happen?
-end-
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