My dreams from Friday, 2008-02-29:
First dream. A strange woman and a monk who looks like my (dead)
Uncle Jack have gone too far for comfort into a series of caves; they
think they can go forward and get out another way. The climb a ledge up
the left side of a wide place.
Now I'm the monk. The woman and I go into a darker and darker and
more constricted place. The light (from what?) is far behind us. At the
very end, ahead, in a niche that might have a way out to the side or up
but might be just a dead end, there's a ghost/octopus head with an
asymmetrical black smile ripped into it. It see us and comes this way
fast! /YAAAAUGH!/
(No wake-up. Just scream and end.)
Next dream. A Southern family returns to their home from a far-away
funeral, riding in a horsedrawn wagon. Someone in the wagon is worried
that when they get home their old neighbors will be surprised and
embarrassed in the act of theft; another person says no: "They'll know
when they smell the several overlapping layers of cologne and perfume."
(In their clothes, from the funeral.)
A tiger sits in deep grass to the right of the cart track. Now there
are only two people in the wagon. I say to the woman from the previous
dream, "He's yours." (The tiger is a gift to her from the estate
trustees.) I worry that the tiger will kill her; I say, "Stay on the
other side of the wagon." But she rushes to the tiger. It runs to meet
her. They tumble and wrestle in the grass like puppies playing. /The
trustees thought she'd be killed and they'd get to keep all the money./
Huh.
Back on the wagon and closer to the top of the hill, the woman
starts telling me about all the things /Trevor/ (her boyfriend --from
the funeral?) got her; she's trying to make me jealous, but why should I
care? I don't know her or anyone else in this area of the country.
Here are several houses on a red-dirt shelf on one side of a small,
forested valley. These are all the woman's estate. The woman becomes a
money-and-property-obsessed version of my mother; she gestures toward a
one-room adobe house with lots of windows and says, "I hate that he
closed up this house." (He? Roland? My dead stepfather?) She rushes
around, delighted at the things the trustees (from the funeral --whose
funeral?) got her for gifts and left all around here-- tractors, dead
cars, a pony. I say, "What about Roland?" She looks across the valley;
Roland is working hard building something over there. She wrinkles her
nose, makes a childish /do-I-hafta?/ face. (Does she /hafta/ think about
Roland, care about him?) I speak persuasively: "He can't help how he is.
It's what happened to him. He's doing the best he can. Look at all the
things that happened to you. Look at all the things that happened to
/me/."
Later Juanita and I are in bed in the adobe house that had been
closed and empty. It's dark, late at night. Someone comes this way from
what's now a small junkyard of cars. I go to the sliding door on that
side, balance and jump /way/ down to the ground, remembering only now
that I had been told to watch out for a dangerous drifter. I say to the
man, "Can I help you?" He goes past me, reaches up, slides the door
shut, puts a clamp-lock on it, and he keeps the key. /Uh-oh./
I want to think he's a trustee agent. He says, "Watch out-- there's
a man been seen walking around this area, and he has a screwdriver." I
say, "Who are you?" He says, "I am from God."
/Uh-oh, again./ I say, "Did you drive here in a car?" He says,
"No-- I walked."
I'm unaccountably terrified. I scream like an opera singer.
I woke up making the strangled fear-gurgle that a clear scream or
shout in a dream usually turns out to be.
Asleep again. Next dream. In an airless empty tilted Safeway produce
department my dream-only space family is here in space suits to have a
picnic. I have the plastic ball-bat. My dream-only little sister throws
the ball; I hit it. It goes around the next aisle.
A bad crazy kid has sabotaged us somehow. I hit his helmet with the
bat.
Now we're in like a moon-buggy/station-wagon. The captured crazy kid
is folded up and taped immobile in his space suit. There's air around
us. I worry that the boy will suffocate, shut in his suit; I blow air in
through the hole I broke in the back of his helmet. It's hard to tell if
he's alive or dead.
Sparkly shredded paper waste blows around inside the car.
Next dream. I burst up out of brick pavement in an alley and join a
community of 1950s-era West-Side-Story-like street urchins. There's the
feeling of adventures and problems solved and duration without memory of
anything actually happening.
Several streets to the left of my arrival place I come up out of the
floor inside the house of a famous old left-wing writer and his wife,
who are only protected from the authorities by the popularity of the
writer's work, and it's been awhile since he wrote anything. In the
dream I know the stories and essays he wrote, even the ones in the
future. (His future.) I will help him. (He's like a cross between Noam
Chomsky, Norman Solomon, Robinson Jeffers and Kurt Vonnegut.)
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-03-01:
First dream. Juanita and I run out of a house on a wide city street.
Bad zombie kids run after us. As we come to my car I fumble the keys
somehow so we can get into the car but I don't have time to start it. I
put it in neutral and we roll backward, downhill. I turn right (turn the
wheel left) to get onto a wider road that goes more steeply downhill and
we're soon far out of the reach of the zombies. When a single car comes
the other way I have a moment of confusion as to which side of the road
to go on, then decide correctly. I turn onto another street, stop the
car, start the motor and just sit here. I think of the part in /Master
And Commander/ where actor Russel Crowe pulls the boy up out of the
water after his frightening mission to light the decoy raft's lamp and
then swim for safety, and Russel Crowe says, "Tell me that wasn't fun!"
Next dream. In a back room of a strange house I change the diaper on
a deformed, legless baby girl. She's watching my face carefully for cues
as to whether to start crying or to be okay with being handled like this
by a stranger. Having never in my life diapered a baby I feel justified
in doing a sloppy job. (I don't even wash the baby's bottom before
wrapping her up in the cloth.) She gives me a shrewd look-- should she
start crying about my lousy job? I hold up the last pin for her to see
it. Nope, why cry. Wise choice, kid. Funny.
Next dream. I'm in my mother's friend Jean Welden's house, which in
the dream is near the ocean, and its floor is flat-set concrete
rectangles with green moss growing up in the two-inch-wide cracks. The
couch I'm sitting on is also made of concrete rectangles and green moss.
I get up and say to Jean, "Is there anything I can do for you? Some
small job that might only take a minute?" My mother is jealous of my
taking Jean's attention away from her; she says under her breath,
"That's dumb." Jean doesn't hear that; she says, "Yes, there is
something..."
Around an inside wall a ladder leans against a curtain rod under a
high-up cupboard door that opens out from an attic room. I use the
ladder to slide boxes up into the attic. I'm hot, sweating in my thick
outdoor clothes. I wrap a clothesline cord around a metal spar that
sticks out and weight the cord with a can of paint, to use this as a
pulley to automatically pull the door closed when you let go of it.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-03-02:
First dream. White ceramic bamboo-textured cylinders are game tokens
in one of many board games that are used in the dream-only society to
decide and value everything, including to decide which game should be
played next.
Now the ceramic bamboo bits are treated with suspicion-- they're
everywhere, in all the games. Are they being used to cheat? Or are they
cheating of their own volition? Or are they everywhere simply because
they originated in the best game, and it's a Darwinian thing?
Next dream. I drive slowly through Mendocino to where some musical
equipment is lying around in the field south of the Mendocino Cafe.
Here's a full-width piano keyboard instrument with a tiny LCD video
screen /set to play text/. I load it and some other things into my car.
Now I've been in a strange house in strange hills that are like the
foothills of the California Sierra Nevadas. I drive downhill away from
the house. The road turns. I want to go /that/ way, to get on a road
down there, but there's no way without flying the car, so... I fly the
car up, over the fence along the road, and down and down over dry grass
lion's paw hills.
It's dark out. Someone's in the car with me. We come to a deserted
post-industrial land where a Seattle Space Needle-like structure has
been taken partially apart for repairs and just left in iron and wooden
sections leaning up against each other.
Something happens about electrical relay switches in power boxes in
the base of the needle.
There's no car. The person with me is my friend Mitch-- a
middle-aged British woman joins us. We fly farther downhill, over a
ridge, into /another world/. The woman wants to talk and talk; I tell
her to be quiet at least until we know whether we're alone here. (There
are radio-astronomy buildings, all dark, and a pre-dish microwave horn
antenna.)
We'd like to get back to our regular world, but is it two or three
or more worlds behind? I deliberately shift us to another world at
random as we pass over a wire fence into a tilted field of stone statues
that have mostly fallen back into the earth. We fly through a big
roofless ruined brick building whose floors have no integrity, and we
stop to look around in an amateur topographer's drafting instruments and
books and personal things. He is, or was, squatting here, rent-free. Two
troublemaker boys are climbing around higher up in the building. We
avoid them.
In daylight in this same world we come to where people are working
at wooden tables in another roofless brick building. I show my pocket
change to a man here. He's seen pennies before, so others from my world
must be able to come and go from here-- or does that follow?
The British woman wants to stay here --it's normal enough; she can
be happy here. She doesn't miss our regular world. I tell her that /I've
been way more lost than this before and still got back./ She smiles and
goes to the main person in the job, whatever the job is they're all
doing --it's not obvious-- and she asks to work here. The man hands her
an apron.
Time passes and adventures pass. Retroactively I've been lost in
these other worlds all this time with Juanita; we're in /another/ other
world. We need some local money. I fly up above where people are sitting
on park benches. Two old people enjoy seeing me fly. I mentally direct
Juanita to go ask them for money. But she isn't where she was anymore;
where did she go?
In a train-terminal-tunnel space in like a dormitory I apologize for
squeezing a girl's breast (when we passed in the air). The girl and I
examine a clockwork Victrola and shuffle our feet, shyly make friends.
She wants to go out with me. We go down a side corridor so she can let
her roommate know she'll be out late. (It's four a.m. now.) I go out the
end of the corridor. It's nice outside. I call back to the girl, "I'll
be outside." She's gone into a room, leaving the hallway door open wide.
I fly with Juanita in a small open-cockpit airplane over a
quarter-mile-wide, straight, endlessly long strip of farm country in
otherwise formless nothing. I want to go down and fly just above the
crops, but I need to pick a place where it's far enough away from houses
or populated picnic places.
Juanita and the airplane vanish. I walk at night to a deserted
barn/house of stone and wood. A man temporarily hiding here has his
pockets stuffed with candy bars. I find out that he can travel between
worlds. He's an idiot-savant-- /he can choose which world he passes
into; he can navigate/. To make him like and trust me (and let me use
him to find home) I agree to play a game he likes to play that involves
stones and a scratched-in-the-ground gameboard, and you use little
eyeglass screwdrivers for peg-hole counters.
Next dream. I'm in a house's bright-yellow front-corner kitchen in a
tract-house neighborhood. In the back-story of the dream there's doubt
about who a young blonde woman's baby's father is. A midget like Bijaz
in the book /Children Of Dune/ usually takes care of the baby when the
woman is away, and there was a problem before about the midget thinking
it was a great joke to hide the baby and have a caterpillar or something
like that in its crib when she came home from work. /Never again./
She comes home. The midget is standing on a box, washing dishes,
pretending nothing's wrong. In the baby's crib, on the bare mattress, a
thin, nearly translucent mantis bug struggles weakly to get to its feet.
The young woman picks it up with a soup spoon to take it outside. I
say, "Kill him," meaning, kill the midget for breaking the
not-hide-the-baby rule. This reminds her: "Where's my baby?"
(Also in the back-story sometimes a big duck would take care of the
baby.) Up on a high corner flowerpot shelf, there is --a duck? No, a
little fat pink-orange African Pygmy man hunched, nose to corner, over
the woman's little black baby, so that's fine; the baby is fine. No
problem. I climb up onto the drainboard to get it down from there; I
push through my squeamishness about touching the fleshy-potato-bug-like
Pygmy man to pick him up in one hand and pick up the baby with the other
hand.
-end-
|
