My dreams from Monday, 2008-03-03:
First dream. I push my way against the direction of packed lines of
people moving through a train station. A pretty, curly-blonde-haired
girl declares that her name is Morgan Freeman. A girl behind her --maybe
her sister-- stops me, is about to kiss me, but the other girl becomes
her boyfriend, turns to see at the last instant and she has to kiss him
instead so he'll think that's what she meant to do all along, with her
arms up like that and that look on her face. I'm like, /Fine, then./ Of
course she never meant to kiss me; she didn't even see me. Funny.
In the dream the radio station is in an old barracks-like school
classroom. My neighbor Jerry's here, working at a computer with a big
CRT monitor. I squint and try my eyes one at a time but I can't focus on
the clock. I say, "Is it after ten?" Jerry says, "Yeah." I dig the
mixing board and other equipment out from under heaps of old books and
magazines and I start doing my show. Jerry produces a guitar and starts
twanging enthusiastically but unmusically on it. I turn the microphone
down but not completely off and say mock-angrily, "I'm on the air! Shut
up or leave!" Jerry starts playing delicately and very well. I say,
"Or--" like Morey Amsterdam backpedaling after blurting out an
inappropriate skit idea to Rose Marie and Dick Van Dyke.
Next dream. I'm a teenage boy in a rural live-in school. My project
has been to make a magazine --it's done; I want to show it to the pretty
teacher. (An article is about her former career as a model.) The boy in
front of me gets his arm hooked at a painful angle on his
poorly-designed desk-chair. The hook shape is repeated in places all
over the room, and even outside in hooked, banana-bent white crosses on
the grass and one on the spire of a church.
In the outdoor shop area behind the school I see a closeup view of
electrical plasma coming from a hole in a metal tuna-can-like cap on a
four-inch-diameter copper pipe. The shop teacher, an old sea captain,
puts his finger on the hole, lifts the cap-- there's a semi-liquid
surface of campfire coal bubbles inside. Is he not burned because this
kind of fire is not hot, or because he knows a trick to not be burned?
He puts the cap back on and gestures for me to try. I do what he
did-- cover the hole, take the cap off, see the coals, put it back on...
but now the cap has a smaller hole. Wait. He has the original cap. Where
did the extra cap come from?
He nods in approval; I'm doing the right things and asking the right
questions. /Next kid. Come try this./
I climb across the metal roof of a shed. A black teacher in the yard
asks me to give an astronomy lecture with positions of stars and
etcetera. I'm ready for this! I have my old Dell laptop with Celestia in
it and I can show everything I talk about, but... I ask a boy, "What
year is this?" The boy says, "2002." Others also say, "2002."
I realize how slowly Celestia runs on that computer (a Pentium 166
with only two megs of video RAM); even in 2002 this will wow no-one, not
be at all a magical futuristic experience... but I can show the kids
email and program dates from as late as 2008 and so demonstrate that I
have traveled in time. /Why couldn't I have brought back a better
computer? Why did I bring one from even before the time I went back to?/
Next dream. In a post-societal-smash environment people are living
in three or four small house-shaped heavy-canvas tents in mountain
woods. I make several trips with a garden cart to move a pile of wet
firewood into a kitchen tent. I return the stolen ceremonial
stainless-steel dog food dish to where it belongs.
Animals have their own antique sailing warship; they follow a
similar ship that has men on it. Everyone gets ready to fight. I wish
they wouldn't fight, but /they always do/. A sailor in a dress made of a
long t-shirt sails his own ship up behind the animals' ship, crashes
into it and jumps onto it. The animals are confused; they want to fight
the men on the other ship, but this isn't the other ship; it's beyond
their ability to decide what to do. Meanwhile the t-shirt-dress man
marches to the animals' wheel and spins it to the left so the ship
curves around and nearly tips over. All three wooden ships begin to
break up. I realize that this is the source of the firewood and the tent
canvas.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-03-04:
First dream. A math book. A math teacher. The book turns to the
left, the teacher turns to the right... Uh-oh.
A fractal pattern of uncurling flowers bursts out between them like
a dam made of cotton wool packing material blowing out of a giant vacuum
cleaner's air-blower tube; this is accumulated lint coming from the
blower the cools big transmitter vacuum tubes.
Next dream. My mother has a long loft apartment with a high ceiling.
In the dream my mother is rich and skinny and impatient with me; she
expects an important guest and here I am still in my pyjamas. A buzzer
sounds; my mother says, "Carbon sensor... She'll be wearing carbon
fiber." I think of this as bundles of black glass fibers.
I go between various partitions to the front of the apartment and
let the guest in; she's the property management inspector who came two
years ago to check off all the safety items about Juanita's house-- or
she's the actress who played the search and rescue scientist in the
movie /Serenity/, who recorded the anguished message about G-23 Paxilon
Hydrochlorate that they added to the air processors, that turned out to
be such a disaster.
Now there are more people. It's after an event and everyone's
dancing. In the dream I know how to dance; the property manager and I
waltz around the room, occasionally kissing. A total brat baby boy wants
cake and will not shut up about it. I snatch him up and drop him in the
laundry sink water. Everyone applauds.
The dream jumps back. I drop the baby in the water. Nobody notices.
I think of ways to explain my actions to the baby's mother-- by the way,
where is she? Surely the baby didn't come here by himself. That's what
I'll say: /Where were you when your baby needed you?/
Next dream. I wake from sleep (in the dream) in a strange
apartment's bedroom. I find some pants and put them on. Downstairs and
outside I walk around a square block of theaters and restaurants at
night. One theater is running a play called /Xanadu/ --it's not a
musical; it's a science-fiction story. I want to see it so I can write
about it; I go into the plush lobby. There doesn't seem to be any actual
theater in here. It's all interconnected lobby rooms.
Back outside I go to an upscale restaurant and bar place. Mendocino
Theater Company's Steve Greenwood works here; he talks to the people in
charge and gets me work editing a video advertisement for the place,
that someone else got almost finished with before having a nervous
breakdown and vanishing. I watch the work so far-- it's pretty good, if
twice too long; it's video animation mostly sampled from the movie of
the science-fiction /Xanadu/ play --because now it's years later and
they've made a movie and the restaurant is named after it. In the video,
animal people, mostly cat-headed people, dance and fight and dive off
cliffs into the ocean. I make notes about edit points, draw faces of
people sitting at the bar, smoke cigarets that don't taste like
anything. I'm doing a good job. I'm not in a hurry. This is a great job;
how could this cause a nervous breakdown? The earlier editor must have
been a drug addict or had other problems.
My dream from Wednesday, 2008-03-05:
I'm in an old-time military mess tent the size of an auto supply
store. A hated martinet officer walks around the tables, dictating
orders that are instantly printed in little newspapers; I move around
behind him, mocking him, invalidating his orders. At last, all the
pre-World-War-One soldiers twist their little order newspapers up and
toss them onto the floor.
One of the soldiers is a mechanical inventor. He has invented a Jeep
motor --remember, this is like 1902. The motor has a special two-throat,
two-mixture carburetor for like a Honda CVCC stratified-charge engine.
The motor is on its side, with the cylinders going out in a star
pattern, like a World-War-One airplane engine. It's caked with rust.
The inventor plans to hang the motor from the center of a wagon and
use it to directly drive a single wheel to push the wagon forward; the
clutch will be a lever that raises the motor and wheel away from
touching the ground. I don't want to ruin history by giving the man the
secrets of the modern car, but I can't stand to watch him wasting his
time on this bad scheme when he's obviously a genius to have made the
motor in the first place; I say, "It doesn't have to be a separate
wheel." Maybe he'll get that.
It's time to go to war. The development of the war Jeep will have to
wait.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-03-06:
First dream. Near the bottom of an outdoor but somehow enclosed rock
valley, boys climb up and balance on stalagmites. Enemy boys come down
the rocks on one side of the valley to conquer the heretics on our side.
I flee with the others over a wide flat road, flap-flying backward in
the air about five feet up. The enemies ride after us on horses and in
World-War-One-era touring cars, shooting arrows and throwing spears. I
draw fire to myself by staying behind everyone else, and I deflect
projectiles using a magic wedge of power that comes from my
praying-position hands.
The king of the pursuing enemies is drunk. I land in his (roofless)
car and heave him over the side.
Now I'm in a tunnel on a train flatcar that has wooden bench seats.
A man and two boys are also here, looking around for their friend --who
was the king, who I threw over the side, in this case, the side of the
train car. They won't find him; I'm sure he's underneath, dead.
The train starts going. I get off the very back and yell, "Jump!" to
the boys. They run this way and jump. The man and another man who just
appeared --the king? okay?-- run and jump. The train disappears away in
the tunnel. Everyone is okay. Good.
Next dream. I'm in an eerie building whose danger begins as a kitten
that chases your skateboard around and tries to grab onto the back of
it, and somehow this is like the danger of zombies getting you in the
shopping mall in that zombie movie about the shopping mall. Two people
are here with me. We work together to trick the kitten and shut it in a
hallway with both end doors closed, but then I worry that it'll starve
in there. Maybe that's the next part of the danger-- maybe you feel
sorry for it and that's how it bends you to its will. /Maybe that's what
happened to the two people, and now I'm one of them, and this will go on
forever, us tricking new arrivals into trapping the kitten, when we're
the ones being tricked and trapped, and something else uses us as a
reliable source of food, and that would explain why there were only two
people here. For example, where are the others now? I'm alone. See?/ But
the kitten is so cute.
Next dream. I'm in Southern California driving south to, I think,
San Diego, on a busy freeway at night. Big slab-sided trucks bracket my
car and when I weave out of the way and stop, this somehow causes them
to be stuck in front and behind my car, unable to move, and their
drivers are /pissed off/, as though it was my duty to be crushed and not
try to do anything about it.
They have to stay with their vehicles; I don't have to stay with
mine. I walk to the next freeway to the right and make friends with
people who have just avoided death on their own account and are calming
down in a supportive atmosphere in the triangular, marked divider area
by an onramp.
Juanita, I and her friend (Annye, I think) go into a rest stop's
concrete block restroom, where Juanita and I are already here (?) in a
toilet stall kissing and practically having sex against the wall.
We go back out to where we retroactively have set up camp on a dark,
lumpy beach. A big wave comes in. Bad place to camp. We save our
sleeping bags and packs, drag everything up above the beach into thick
grass that obviously is never underwater.
It's winter, late at night, and this version of San Diego is like
Coney Island. We go into a fluorescent-lit soda fountain with counters
and stools along two walls that meet at the corner door. Juanita puts on
one counter an assortment of issues of my old newspaper-- they're in
perfect condition; the paper is not yellowed or brittle. I wonder how
she kept them this nice.
I use telekinesis to sweep all the messy counter's ice-cream dishes
and sundae glasses into a pyramid and float them on the air in front of
me to the other counter where two men work setting things up for the
next shift. I set the dishes gently in the dishwashing sink behind the
counter.
Somehow I see what the men were doing before we came in here; it's
what they do every chance they get-- it's a kinetic parlor game they
invented, played with the grill of an oven shelf, powerful cow magnets
and clear glass marbles in three sizes. I think, /Here's my story, right
here. Look no farther./
-end-
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