My dreams from Friday, 2008-03-07:
First dream. Juanita and I are in the dining area of my
(dead) grandparents' house in Burbank, but here this is the
front of the house, and the room is upstairs. Big wood-frame
windows swing inward suspended from closet dowels that unhinge
twice to extend over the middle of the room. Juanita's sewing
something on a small, antique sewing machine.
I go into what in real life was the bedroom side of the
house; here it's a big commercial kitchen leading to more rooms.
On a range, a chicken or turkey thigh-leg joint is burning on a
dry, rusty iron pan. Juanita asks if I'm sure I want to cook
that. I set her looking for oil while I look for a hot-hand or a
towel or something to move the pan off the fire, which won't
shut off.
We're attacked by 1950s-science-fiction-movie goons in
stretchy bald-headed hoodie-shirts, and I knock their
leader/controller down and use a serrated-edge bread knife to
try to saw his head off, to deactivate the lot of them. Blood
everywhere. Bleagh. /This is harder than I thought. You really
need a saw./ But do I have to get it all the way off? I mean,
he's totally dead. Two goons are still running around after
Juanita. Yes, I have to get the head all the way off.
Next dream. A complicated video shoot is going on at night
at the line between a farm field and some trees near Clear Lake.
I drive there and look around in one of the
equipment-and-bunkbed buses, then go to where singer Charles
Tyler is talking with Keats from the old Community School. While
they wait for their part in the work, they do an impromptu
Vaudeville comedy routine. I tell them I want them to do that on
my show, but Charles can't be at KMFB on Friday.
A shy local girl asks me why Charles has to go away after
tonight. I say, "He has a gig at the lake." (Another lake.)
She's disappointed. I say, "That's all right. He'll come here
again. Why don't you go talk to him?" She's so shy, she's
miserable just thinking about it. I give her a little push and
gently say, "Go on. /He/ wants to talk to /you/."
My dream from Saturday, 2008-03-08:
I'm in Berkeley at night without Juanita; I must have driven
past her offramp and continued all the way down into the Bay
Area. I should find a payphone and call her to let her know
where I am, but I only have enough change to get a hotdog and
I'd rather do that. The whole place has a carnival atmosphere
and the businesses are all in old-movie ballroom and alien
palace sets --big bare rooms and bare floors. The celebration
occasion is to honor a recently-dead counterculture hero, a
combination of like Timothy Leary and the future adolescent
piratical hero Alec in Kage Baker's book /The Life Of The World
To Come/. I have a notebook to take anthropological notes about
all this to tell about every tiny detail on my show next week. I
go into a movie theater where the movie's already playing, go to
a seat four rows back from the screen, start to write, but have
to flatten my notepad and hands against my chest to not make a
shadow. (The front rows of seats lie back almost flat so the
movie can use the screen all the way to the floor.)
I can't understand what's happening in the movie; it's all
just gray shapes. Are you supposed to cross your eyes to see a
3-D picture? Or are there special glasses... No-one else has
glasses... Maybe you have to take a drug. Forget it.
Outside I fly up between buildings to an apartment's deck
where a boy is being kept against his will by his crazy
religious father, who kidnaped him to get him here. The boy
wants to run away. I crouch down so he can climb up onto my back
and we can fly, but now there's a roof over this level. I carry
the boy through gardening rooms to where there's flexible
plastic for the roof of a greenhouse. I use my Swiss army knife
to cut an L-shape in the plastic, lift the boy up through and
climb up.
This level is indoors too. We climb across the greenhouse
rafters and go into a vast barn attic filled with oats and oat
dust. I taste an oat. It tastes like nothing (like a real oat).
/Huh. So this is where oats come from./
The religious-colony-apartment oat worker guards see us and
wade this way. We go out through a hole in the other side of the
barn and here's a football-field-size asphalt roof to fly across
and then we'll be out over the bay and can go anywhere. I can
take the boy to his mother's and then fly to Juanita's house,
and come back and get my car later. The boy gets up onto my back
again and I jump into the air.
Chess-game-like horse-soldiers ride out onto the roof but
not directly toward us; they go to the ends of the roof and pull
trap catches to lift heavy ropes up across, almost as high as
the boy and I are flying (about ten feet up); I think that when
all the ropes are taut the soldiers will be able to flip the
whole thing over and have it pull a net over us. I can't go any
higher and the sea-edge of the roof seems to extend so we'll
never get there. Cut a rope? No way; I don't even slow down to
try that. The boy says, "We're not gonna make it there." I
say, "Yes, we are. Just don't fall off."
Three more ropes spring up. I get the idea that the soldiers
don't even see us, that they might be just pulling the ropes up
because it's the right time and they always do it now, that it's
like a flag ceremony. There's no net, after all. Where would it
come from? Out of the asphalt?
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-03-09:
First dream. In a Central American or South American country
a bus is stopped on a jungle road. Police jeeps are parked all
around; they're investigating a crime, something about missing
kids.
I ride in a carlike bus, sitting next to one of the
criminals. I'm a secret cop, trying to save the children without
involving the regular cops who'll probably get a lot of people
killed. I ask the criminal how much money he'd take for all the
kids, meaning just buy them and release them, but of course this
sounds like I'm another criminal offering to buy my way into the
operation. The girl on the criminal's other side rushes to the
opposite corner of the bus and huddles there staring at us.
The other passengers turn hostile and want to get out, so
not to have to be in the same place with us /criminal
kidnapers/, and I can't set them straight about my not being one
of the monster criminals because I need to deal with the
criminals as if I am one. The other problem is, the real police
will arrest me as a criminal. /Why is it always like this? Why
does this always happen?/
Next dream. In real life my grandmother used to have a
portable manual typewriter that had a cursive italic typeface
and let you switch between typing in red and black with a
ribbon-height lever. In the dream my mother is using this
typewriter to write her memoirs. As she types, she says, "Buzzy
had soul-- Bob Selmenakka never did. I traded one crash cow for
another." She reaches for a dictionary, pages through it; she
says to me, "Can a man be a cow?" I say, "A /crash cow/? Yes.
Or-- even if it wasn't, it's funny. Keep it."
I go outside. The house is yellow. I walk to the bathroom,
which is another house up this dirt driveway. I'm humming /Take
A Walk On The Wild Side/. A gray rainbow appears in the gray sky
and fades when I tilt my head, like reflected glare fades when
you turn polarized glass.
This place is filled with spring weeds and pollen but it
doesn't make me feel allergic. Maybe I've grown out of that.
The bathroom house is just another one-room shelter; there's
no toilet here. Why did I think there would be? I really have to
find a toilet. Fly to town? Or just crap in the weeds? Toilet
paper? Tch. /Foresight, Marco. Think ahead./
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a strange car riding in
fog. Someone else in the car always keeps a seat empty for his
/muse/, his imaginary companion, to appear. I can't tell if the
car is going anywhere or if it's stopped, even though I'm in the
driver's seat. I roll my window down.
We're on a flat beach that goes far inland up what might
once have been a creek valley. Here's a little dog that seems
familiar; it goes to nuzzle the nose of another dog that I think
of as Pepper, my first childhood dog; Pepper is incredibly old
and looks like frozen-and-thawed meat with a threadbare fur sock
around her. I realize that there must have been at least two
Peppers for there to be one now, all these years later, and it
interests me that I can't remember at what point they were
switched --when was the hand-off was between the original Pepper
and this one? The other dog that was here a minute ago is gone;
that one was probably Ferd, who'd also have to be around forty
years old...
I sit on the packed sand near the sea, leafing through a
coffee-table book about airplane ideas, some tried and some not.
Here's an airplane shaped a little like the space shuttle, but
with no wings --or rather, there's the airplane out over the
water; it has tiny fish-fin wings in the very front and the very
back but no main wings and no vertical fin. What keeps it in the
air? Nothing; it's in the water, engine dead. /If I could get
there undetected, I'll bet I could fix it and start it going
fast enough to at least hydroplane./ I look around; no-one's
watching me. I inch toward the water. (I'm like a cross between
Mr. Toad and the Frog character in Sally Cruikshank cartoons.)
My dreams from Monday, 2008-03-10:
First dream. I'm riding a horse between scrub oaks in bright
moonlight, leading on ropes two other horses with a sleeping man
tied across each one. I come to where to turn downhill. It's
very steep at first; I get the other horses even with mine and
start them all together running down so not to fall, and then I
keep us going fast after it levels out, at least until we get
past the open area and into more trees.
Where an arbor goes over the trail the two men wake up
rested, untie themselves. We lead our horses through the arbor
into a little clearing, reaching up behind to leave our swords
on the arbor. Some men come out to meet us; they and the men I
brought are all great kings --we came here to pick up the
brother of one of the kings with me. For a handshake, everyone
takes turns putting their hands on each other's head and
standing there for a count of three. One of the from-here kings
puts his hand on my head. I start to put my hand on his head,
but I'm not his equal, so I don't complete the motion. He grabs
me up in a big bear hug that I don't know how to interpret. I
say with my face smashed into my hand against his chest, "Please
don't be mad at me 'cause I don't know how to do it right."
Next dream. I'm in a place like the home-team bleachers that
go up the side of the playing field plateau above the main
football field at my high school. This place is like a Russian
fiefdom. I work for the royalty; I'm in the diplomatic corps or
something like that.
Here come a bunch of important people in a procession
stepping diagonally up the bleacher benches. Something's gone
wrong. Danger. I remember that I was supposed to give a set of
keys to another diplomat. The keys become my
folding-pliers/multitool in my hand; I toss it to the other man.
He bobbles the catch and has to scrabble for it at the feet of
the procession. /We're all incompetent./
Later I sit at the top of the bleachers to try to figure
things out. My immediate boss (?) comes here, says, "I will
thrust the sword sharp and fast." /He's telling me that I'm to
be executed and he'll do me the favor of making it quick./ He
goes away.
There's a cross-country running trail around the other side
of the football field, down there. Trees... I jerk aware from
daydreaming (in the dream)-- /why am I waiting around to be
killed?/ I run down the hillside to the right of the bleachers,
run toward the fence past the field's end zone and the oval
track. I'm thinking: /If someone stops me, I'll say I'm just
going to run on the trail. I'm just out for a jog./
More kids are down here, some leaving the school this way,
some arriving. I turn to go back uphill a little to go around
the inner-fence end and so not have to climb the fence, which
would look suspicious. A dark-curly-haired boy sees me,
recognizes me, becomes a rich important (royal) Russian kid.
He's furious. They must have told him, told everyone, that I'm
responsible for whatever went wrong before-- maybe someone was
killed; maybe they've framed me for it. He runs at me, shouting
incomprehensible vengeful gibberish. /I don't want to kill him
but I might have to./ I say, "Let me explain," and then we're
wrestling and punching in earnest like any two schoolboys who
hate each other. /I don't have time for this; I need to get away
from here./
Next dream. I walk into Fort Bragg (CA) from the north, go
into Fiddles And Cameras, which in the dream is a thrift store.
Here's an elaborate country-music mandolin. I cross Laurel and
go into the store on the corner of Laurel and Franklin. In the
dream this is Bruce Clark's music store, but there are no
instruments. I sit at a table and read the old newspapers.
I need a car. Bruce comes out of a back room and I give him
fifty dollars for his old late-1960s Dodge muscle car and then I
hitchhike east on a road into the Sacramento Valley to go get
it. When I get there, Bruce (the same Bruce) is sitting at a
table in like a Depression-era shack, rebuilding a one-barrel
carburetor for the car so it'll use a lot less gasoline. /That
is so thoughtful. Thanks./ I admire the work done so far, then
take over doing it. Bruce goes outside and shouts to someone up
the road.
I woke up with the Counting Crows song /Round Here/ playing
in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm near the ridge along the edge
of a flat, quiet valley at night. A bear comes toward me. I fly
up but I can't get any altitude; I run to some trees and
fly/climb up a tilted sycamore tree. The bear climbs right up
after me-- but now I'm high enough to really fly from; I push
off and fly up the ridge, into a thick cloud layer. Above the
clouds the sky is clear but the clouds go on forever; I remember
being warned about trying to go this way-- I won't be able to
cross the mountains because I'll crash when I try to land, and
if I go so far that the mountains aren't a problem, I'll be over
the ocean when I run out of flying power.
I go straight down very slowly to land back on the ridge,
and I walk diagonally down it to a motel's restaurant, watching
out for the bear the whole way.
It's really nice in the restaurant. It's late and there are
no other customers. I tell the waitress all about my terrible
night. She waits until I finish and she says, "God damn bears."
I say, "But you can't shoot 'em." She says, "No, you can't
shoot 'em." We look at each other like /why not?/ (Why can't
you shoot them?)
Next dream. It's night. A field is strewn with furniture;
it's a whole small town of houses and businesses, just without
any buildings. I have a big reel-to-reel tape deck set on its
back on a couch; I'm ready to play the sound effects I've made
so the women who are running a play can decide whether they like
them. They're missing someone they need for some other part of
the job. I know that painter Eduardo Smissen can do it; I say,
"Do I have to get Eduardo?" /Yes./
I walk around looking for a twelve-volt car battery, until
it occurs to me that I don't need a car battery an other
materials to make a telephone system; I just need a telephone.
I've walked all the way to a junkyard. Here's a phone.
I woke up with the Steven Stills song /Sit Yourself Down/
playing in my head.
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