My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-03-11:
First dream. Juanita and I are walking in a college that's
like downtown Santa Rosa (CA) but mostly deserted. A skinny
Scooby-Doo character-like boy tells his girlfriend that he's
hungry; I point back at the building we just passed and say,
"There's a basket of free apples at the front desk of that
bookstore." (Through the building, on the far side.)
Near elevated train tracks in a plaza, Juanita jumps up and
hugs me tightly around my shoulders; I swing her around and
around and set her down so she smoothly touches the ground with
us both walking again.
In a grass playing field I talk on an invisible hands-free
telephone while lying on my back, holding a full-size blimp by a
rope to the point of its nose. A miles-high water-wave-like bank
of roiling white air comes along, washes over me, makes the
grass into the ocean; I hang on to the blimp and go underwater.
A freighter ship passes by as I surface. They throw cables out
to drag over and catch the now-deflated rag-like blimp and pull
it after them. They go into a dock tunnel. Two indistinct people
in a smaller boat dicker with the captain of the freighter over
salvage rights to my blimp and other things the ship swamped and
then took. I float near, planning-- I'll get up on the dock, run
to the little boat and kick those two people in the head. (Now I
see it's a boy and his father.) Then I'll jump onto the
freighter and attack the captain and, what? throw him into the
water? I pare my superpower needs down to the bare minimum
required to make all this possible. (I'll just have to be able
to fly a little to jump to the ship.) Ready?
Next dream. I swim in air along the concrete girders at the
edge of an underground open structure that's like a car park
tower, then turn down and go into water. I go through and refit
a grate in what's on this side a niche in the wall of a
restaurant in a hospital (underwater on one side, dry on the
other). I'm in a wide drink-bar/hallway between the kitchen and
the dining room. I duck under the bar's drawbridge part and come
face-to-face with a woman coming the other way, who was hiding
behind the bar. She says, "No external duct is needed anymore.
The new system is adequate." Well, /I/ know that. I say, "Some
airships recirculate it. That's why I brought it up." She
thinks I'm an idiot.
Now it's okay to be here; we don't have to hide. I sit up at
the bar on a stool, drinking 7-Up from a Coca-Cola glass.
I leave through the grate, through what's now a hardware
store's back room. I get out my keys and find that they're all
in separate soft-plastic snap-shut covers strung on a
four-inch-long safety pin. I say to a cowboy guy up on a
catwalk, "I like to be able to get in my car in a tenth of a
second." He thinks about this, recognizes that it may not have
been a good idea to have everyone's keys put in plastic covers
without asking first.
In the underground parking garage (the next room) a man
pushes past me and breaks off his own key in my Mercury's
passenger side door lock trying to show me that any key will
work. I direct the man to a pair of needlenose pliers back in
the hardware store to solve the problem he has caused: "The
tools are all in a different place. I found these--" [I mime
presenting a handful of invisible tools] "--in a tool tray.
Where they usually go has nails now." So he has two problems to
solve: 1. get the broken key out of my lock and 2. put the tools
drawer where the nails are. /I know you can do it./
Now there was never any car. A store in a line of them on
the way out sells woven yarn-cloth record players and men's
leather belts. I tell the polished-clean mannequin-like black
salesman here about a dream I had (when?) about a customer here
and these cloth record players. The customer I pointed to says
something about waking-dreaming and hallucinations. I say, "No,
I never have that." He says, "They have a pill for that." I
say, "Good, but I don't need it, because I never have that."
I'm outdoors on the back-lot, bare side of the shopping
center. I climb up a steep trail. The dirt is like cornstarch--
it's squidgy; touching it is irritating, like dragging your
fingernails down a blackboard, like the instant pancake batter
powder they used to stock at Brannon's. At the flat top of the
plateau --lumpy desert to the horizon-- I walk barefoot along a
line of widely-spaced fenceposts. Here are big animal
footprints. I'm at least a hundred miles from home, and all I
had to eat that I can remember, besides the 7-Up, was an apple.
And what if a dangerous animal comes after me? What can I do,
climb a fencepost? Throw cornstarch in its eyes?
I go back down the hill to get better prepared for this
trip. Shoes, water, food, a gun, etc.
In a dormitory for women down on their luck, a woman
reporter gives up any advantage she had over her rival reporter
by telling about the dangerous drugs she has taken; she does
this because the competitor woman is all blithe about how with a
certain drug /her/ baby will have no problem keeping off
overweight for its entire life. /Don't do it. That drug will
wreck your baby's brain./
Next dream. I'm walking at night behind a line of houses
that's like the line of fenceposts in the previous dream. I come
to where a bunch of kids are out running around playing. Their
parents are either absent or just bad parents; the kids are
wild. I decide to go back the other way. A boy and a girl run
after me and tackle me in the dirt-- soft, good dirt, not
cornstarch. We lie here looking up at the stars, talking about
how nice it is to be out at night.
Back at the house where (in the dream only) everyone in my
entire extended family lives, I'm in bed with my dream-only
mother, the blonde actress who played the owner of an unsellable
cafe in, I think, Maine, that she raffled off in a worldwide
mail campaign (pre-web), and who took in a troubled girl-- uh,
and there was a murder, and an abandoned child... (I've looked
and looked; I can't find the title of that movie.) So I'm bed
with my mother, Bonnie-Something; we're lying here with our arms
around each other, talking.
I wake up from sleep, still in the dream, still dressed in
the clothes I was wearing before outside-- black t-shirt and
blue jeans. I wander around, exploring the house. My (dead)
grandfather and my Uncle Pat sit next to each other on a couch
and talk to me as though I'm scaring everyone with my
irresponsible behavior, shaming the family by not performing to
my full potential; they're talking to me as though I'm fourteen
years old. I say, "I'm fifty. I'll be fifty in November." This
surprises Pat; he says, "Oh, you don't look any fifty." I say,
"This is what fifty looks like."
Pat becomes a combination of himself and a man named Chip
who I bought some computer memory from twenty years ago. He
springs like a snake and grabs me around my head. I push him
away and turn but he has one leg hooked around my knee and one
hand hooked over my shoulder, so he spins around me like the
girl in a figure skating team. I don't want to hurt him; I just
want him knock him loose, so I avoid hitting his head on the
wall. He rewards this consideration by pricking my shoulder with
something in his hand. /A drug?/ I hit his head against the
wall, get free and leave; I want to get far away before the drug
knocks me out, if that's what it's going to do.
Along the dirt road away from the front of the house I come
to an old cabin with a huge redwood tree in front that obviously
grew back from the stump of where it broke off and fell hundreds
of years ago. My real-life mother is here. She has an ax. She
declares that she's here to cut the tree down. She thinks she'll
be finished by this afternoon. I say, "With an ax? It'll take
weeks." Also, will I help cut down this beatiful enormous tree?
/No./
Other people come along. My mother chats with them. Even if
she tries to cut it down she'll get tired right away; it'll hurt
her hands. The tree won't even notice a few nicks in it. It's
safe.
Time passes. I come back to the house. A five or six year
old little boy lives here with his mother; she's out working or
on a date. I lift parts of a modular piano thing up over the
rail of a balcony to assemble it up there, and when I'm putting
the last of it together, putting the keyboard on and hooking all
the hammer hooks onto the back ends of the keys, an Oriental
British woman comes home, drunk. This is the little boy's
mother. She isn't even slightly sorry for leaving the boy alone,
and she says she won't go to any more meetings about being an
alcoholic, because she doesn't feel like it, and what business
is it of mine, anyway? I say, "Do you think you can quit on
your own? You can't!" She goes back out, doesn't even look at
the boy once.
More time passes. The boy becomes a little girl sitting up
in bed with her father in a big house's guest house. Her father
is a cross between Juanita's friend Jason and actor Kevin
Costner. They're making a movie. They're at the part where
parent and child have a cute conversation at the end of the day,
like at the end of every episode of /The Courtship of Eddie's
Father/. Jason rushes his lines because it's taken all day to
finish this one shot and the girl is getting fidgety, and she
already doesn't look anything like him --that's another strike
against the film. Finally they get through the scene. They're
waiting for the director to decide whether it's good enough.
Jason quietly sings /Peace Train/ to the girl. I'm like, /Please
keep the film rolling-- this is sweet and perfect. Nobody make
any noise./
Later, months earlier, I'm on the lawn in front of the big
house. The movie is still in the writing-the-screenplay stage.
Jason is writing it. He's stuck and can't progress. His friends
are all here to offer support; they're lounging around in the
house and sitting in the tall, narrow, glassless windows. Jason
comes downstairs inside and leans on a windowsill, hangs his
head down. I say, "Fire up the computer or get out your notepad
and just /write it/, soldier." He says sadly, "Whenever I start
the computer it /talks/ to me." He means it wastes his time
with email and funny videos. I say, "Disconnect it from the web
until you're finished with the project." Good idea. I say to
the others, "You wanta help? Clean the house or make some food.
Don't talk to him."
Everyone gets busy cleaning the house, humming /Peace
Train./
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-03-12:
First dream. I show up at a strange warehouse-like theater
building that has two big rooms turned slightly toward each
other; both can see the stage and screen area. People trickle
in. I remember doing some poster publicity for the event
tonight, and I don't think it was enough.
In the right-hand room, the deeper one, I set up a 16mm
projector to show movies; I direct someone (Steve Greenwood?
David Woolis?) to connect a speaker tower stage-right, pointing
into the other room, the left-hand one. There's already one on
this side.
I don't really have anything to do with this. I've done what
I can. I go away, walking backward, then forward, then backward
again. Things become vague.
I come back minutes? hours? later and people are streaming
toward the theater, getting out of 1960s cars and 1940s buses,
walking here from all directions. Inside, it's packed, dim,
stuffy. There are no seats; everyone's standing. I push through
to the projector table. There's a stack of film cans. I pick a
short film and start it going. I control the people around the
table into helping keep the table from being jostled. I see that
whoever was helping before with the speakers put up another
speaker in the back of this room so people outside, around the
doors, can hear. Good.
After the short subject I go to the stage to ask if the
speaker pointing into the other room sounds okay or if it's
distorted by being too loud. The crowd is a study in Brownian
motion. I wish I had a stage pistol to fire to get some
attention. But no-one seems angry; it's probably okay.
I've gone away and come back again. Movie night is over.
About forty people are all so jazzed by the novelty of seeing
movies that they stayed to help clean up and do whatever else
needs to be done. There's minor construction work going on, with
several people having made executive decisions about the various
jobs. I find that someone has directed contract workmen to frame
a partition wall with a door in it outside in the alley, next to
the dumpster, and so far they've blocked in one corner
wastefully using at least three expensive four-by-six beams for
studs. I say to the workmen, "Take this down. Whoever told you
to do this, never listen to him again."
The next day I'm sitting at a table in a cafeteria. Sunlight
pours in through a glass wall. The first helper from before,
Steve or David or a combination person of both, comes here. We
walk across a strange college. I tell Steve/David that we should
do movies like that on a regular schedule. At seven-fifty each
and a thousand people that's seven thousand dollars --take away
film rental and the hall and cleaning up /and lumber/
(Steve/David winces) and it's still great money, way more than
we get for teaching. What, a movie a week? Two? And we can /use
the school's resources to make movies, and pretend to teach
making movies, which, how hard could it be?/ Money glee.
Creative fun glee. Things-going-right-for-a-change glee.
In a wood-floor sports gym, people are getting ready for a
singing show. Three singers stand far apart against an end wall.
One of the singers is Mendocino actress/newspaper-editor/writer
Lisa Norman. There's lots of electrical crackle in the p.a.
system; it sounds like when rain gets into your telephone-wire
box. I go to a little saint-statue-niche stage in the side wall
away from the door in, where there are three brand-new antique
amplifiers, one for each microphone, and each amplifier runs one
speaker tower --that's this planet's idea of a mixer. I turn all
the volume controls up and down a few times to clean them. It
doesn't change the volume of the crackling. I switch them off
and back on one by one to find the crackling one --it's Lisa's.
She says, "What's the matter?" I say, "This one is crazing." I
meant crackling; it came out crazing. She says, "/Crazing?/" I
say, "Yeah, that's the term we in the industry prefer. It's a
little more precise." (Actually, it's something that happens to
concrete and pottery.) Bad amplifier off, I unplug the input
and output cables and plug them back in. Switch it on.
Crackling.
I wave to Lisa and say, "Sing, please." While Lisa is
singing I tilt the amplifier up and slap it to jar the vacuum
tubes inside. No change. "Now hold still." Crackle, crackle, so
it's not the microphone connector.
I'm gonna wire two of the microphones to one amp. I cut the
connectors off and strip the wire ends. It occurs to me that I
can use the volume pot in the bad amp and everyone can still
have a separate setting; I didn't have to cut both cables for
this. Tch. I cut two feet from a cable and open the case of the
bad amplifier and one of the good ones to run it between the
wipers of the volume pots. Then I'll put the end connectors back
on, and... Okay, now I need a soldering iron.
Anxious show-related people have gathered around me. A man
pulls out the bad amplifier's speaker cable and tries to jam it
into a strange triangular jack in the front of a good amplifier.
/No./ I take the wire away from him. Others begin to offer
suggestions. I say, "I'll have this ready in three minutes if
you /stop helping./ Go have your rehearsal." Soldering iron.
Where?
The phone rang and woke me up. It was a recorded voice
selling car insurance.
Asleep again. The phone rang and woke me up. It was a
recorded voice selling debt-consolidation loans.
Asleep again. The phone rang and woke me up. I didn't even
reach for it --Juanita's answering machine got it; it was one of
her friends, Celine or Cherise or Camille or something like
that.
Asleep again. Next dream (that I got to keep part of).
Someone or some group (Juanita? Pennsylvania?) hasn't chosen yet
between the blue cargo box and the green cargo box. The boxes
represent which (brand of encyclopedia? radio station? kind of
beer?) you go by to decide (to acquit or condemn? who to vote
for? what school to apply to?). In the dream I have groggily
answered the phone and I'm explaining our modern American
blue/green box system to a woman from the BBC. All this time I'm
trying to recall and keep in order the dreams I was having
before the phone rang and between the other times the phone
rang. It all vanishes. It's really disappointing. I don't bark
at the BBC woman, though; I just keep answering her questions
with whatever pops into my head.
The phone rang and woke me up. A nearly incomprehensibly
mushmouthed live woman offered me a free examination by a local
chiropractor. No, thank you, I said, after two or three times
through her opening script, once I understood what she was
trying to say.
-end-
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