My dreams from Friday, 2008-03-14:
First dream. There's an electrical grenade-like thing. The
instructions are to twist the top, insert the device into a slot in the
floor that it just fits, press the round top inside-out with the heel of
your boot and then leap away and swallow as hard as you can. I do all
these things.
Now what? Nothing. Hmm.
Next dream. Seven men and one woman are all that's left of humanity
on a part of a planet that looks like the flat valley Petaluma (CA) is
in. I wonder, can the woman appeal to the men's selfish genes to make
them help each other instead of killing each other over her? And can a
gene pool this small regenerate?
A dead town looks like it's been plopped down into the valley either
from space or by being displaced in time; it's crooked, tilted. One of
the soldiers says to a younger not-yet soldier something about not
letting his guard down or "you'll find yourself all the way on
[Something] street," meaning, I guess, he'll be somewhere in the town,
at the mercy of alien enemies.
All the people are huddled near a fence. A soldier says, "I'm gonna
[three-syllable word for /take the special drug/] and go from
two-forty-seven to negative seventeen." He takes the drug and another
soldier shows him how to squint and defocus his eyes in order to see
"one to one-point-five lights," (smudges of not-quite-black on the
blackness at the downhill end of the valley). Now I'm in the action and
we all see the smudges above where the invisible (dark) western hills
are. Someone says, "How can they get up that high?" I say, "Is the
hill at that angle?" (Maybe we misremember where the hills go, and the
lights are really just on the ground up there, not in the sky.)
The woman and a soldier come back from the vault (?) in the town. I
get the idea that the smudge-lights are traces of an ancient power war.
A man from this place answers a question by pointing to a one-story
school building; he says, "I spent six hundred years confined in that
room." (The schoolroom on the near end.) I understand from this that the
war ended six hundred years ago. The news from the vault is that /it's
open/. The man says, "That's impossible. I'm the only one can open
it." Ah-- the vault is the source of all this time-crossing. This
understanding evaporates the last of our sense of danger.
We'll take the man with us on our spaceship. Being so displaced in
time he's as much of an alien here as we are.
Next dream. People are getting ready to put on a show in Cotton
Auditorium. Three famous singing women have come a long way to be here.
They practice the show's blocking and then stand upstage in a place
lower than the stage to do voice warm-up exercises. They have needs:
dinner is brought for them, and then they go into a backstage area that
in real life is outdoors, to lie on a queen-size bed together and sleep
until the show starts. All the tech-crew kids tiptoe away.
Another day in the theater the original Hit-And-Run Theater people
are here to soak in the church's big hot tub. (The theater is a church.)
I'm with others backstage cleaning up after a show, putting equipment
away, changing batteries in headsets, coiling up cables. Mark Hollywood
from the old Community School wants someone to give him cutoff pants and
go without pants so he can use the hot tub --the rule is you must have
either cutoff pants or underwear and Mark has neither. No-one will
accommodate him. We go outside and walk away. Mark, someone else and I
get all the way to a bridge/dam across a wide river before it occurs to
me that /I/ would like to take a hot tub. I have cutoff pants and
underwear on.
Mark and I go back. The Hit-And-Run people have finished and gone
away. I use a strange cold concrete restroom to get out of my underwear
and give them to Mark. (I could give him my pants, but I'll wear the
pants; it's the less embarrassing choice.)
My shoulder and my side under my right arm are bleeding thin shit.
Wash it off. No cuts. /What the hell?/
Now the hot tub is an above-ground vinyl pool outside on the grass.
I find the sloppy, handmade heater controls. A woman wants it turned up
to 114 degrees Fahrenheit. I figure out the controls and tell her where
114 /really/ is on this scale, (fibbing so I'm really turning it only to
108; I think 114 is too hot). When she goes away I set it to 114 anyway.
The water is littered with floating lawn clippings. The water level
is low. I set a hose running in and go looking for something to skim the
pool with. This is going to take all day.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-03-16:
First dream. I come to myself moving around in a falling-down old
two-story house. Mitch and Elly live in the old movie theater next door.
Telephone wires and Romex power wires and flexible plastic water pipes
all come up in a tangle from under a seat in the theater about halfway
up on the far right.
Mitch thinks he needs power connected from the old house next door
for the telephone to work; I don't think that's true. The man who used
to do a Hawaiian music show on KMFB has something to do with
lackadaisically sabotaging Mitch's campaign for Congress; that's what I
was doing in the old house --Hawaii guy's house-- I was finding out
about his treachery in somehow trying to make Mitch /need/ to have
electric power crossed up between the buildings for his phone to work.
I go out onto a patio of stepped wooden decks. This is in Mendocino
where in real life is the cemetery at the southeast end of town. The
Hawaii guy turns out not to be evil after all. I lock wrists with him
--his right and my left-- and share my flying power to lift us both up
into the night. He clearly has talent to fly on his own; he just didn't
know it. I warn about power lines and tell about how you can't safely
teach children to fly because they're naturally careless and always end
up crashing into something. These are things you have to tell anybody
who you know will eventually learn to fly on his own.
The dream jumps back to where I go out onto the patio. Kay Rudin is
here. I think she wants to go home, which is twenty or thirty miles
north. I pick her up, carry her up into the air and fly following her
directions not north but east. I get that she doesn't really want to go
home but just to be carried. I set her down on the back upstairs deck of
a dark house and say, "Okay, where, then?" She points west, the way we
just came from.
Okay. I pick her up again, get up onto the deck rail, step into the
air and fly west over a stretched-out countryside version of Mendocino
in sudden daytime. There are no houses or businesses. As we fly I
/almost/ say how nice she feels in my arms, but I don't want to
encourage her. I land on a north-south road that in real life would be
miles out to sea, set Kay on her feet and say, "This is as far as I go."
There's nobody around. The Hawaii guy's big perfectly-preserved old
convertible Cadillac is parked right over there; I point to it and make
an /okay/ sign with my thumb and forefinger. She can take that car --and
if she can't start it, eventually the Hawaii guy will show up and she
can take him and the car. Perfect; it all works out.
Next dream. I'm flying around in bluish night, really enjoying it. I
come to a beautiful immense free-standing radio antenna tower that holds
up a wire going north and south out of sight. Other wires are in the
air. I avoid three power wires and /spang/ into another three-wire set.
No shock! Whew.
I land to pay my respects to this place's radio station at its iron
ground plates that are almost completely hidden in tall grass.
I walk into Mendocino from the east, eating from an oval bowl of
soup with fish and clams and potatoes in it. Here's a cafe where people
are sitting outdoors, eating. I fly up and over them, twisting in the
air, flirting with spilling soup on them but not spilling any. It's
daytime now. A giant video back-projection screen that's shaped like a
car's windshield is up in the sky over the street. Mexican men shout
encouragement to me from their hotel window as I reach up and rub lint
away from where it's caught on a flaw in the glass. This leaves thumb
oil on the glass. I go to the cafe, get a bottle of rubbing alcohol and
a dish towel, go back up and clean the glass properly.
Now I have a big swiveling barstool/chair; I fly with it into a
bookstore on the second floor of a dilapidated building. The calm black
African counter clerk asks how he can help me. I say, "Do you want this
chair? 'Cause if you don't I'll just throw it away." He can't decide.
"I'll just put it here. Sit in it later; see if you like it."
The attic of the bookstore is hung with old white acoustic-tile wall
panels for insulation; they're all coming loose, hanging loose in chains
of them, because the skylights have no glass and so rain got in. The
bookstore belongs to Mitch and Elly. I came here to help fix the place
up. It turns out that they've decided to move to another place and leave
this for the next owners to just tear the building down. /Good; I didn't
want to do any work./ I say, "There's a lotta good wood here." Mitch
says, "Nah-no." I say, "Yeah-- these beams." I think about
heat-and-pressure-treating the beams to kill anything living in them and
make them strong and new again. You can't get solid beams this size
anymore. "Mitch, there's a lot of money here in this wood."
My dreams from Monday, 2008-03-17:
First dream. I'm walking on Albion Ridge Road. When I get to my
Employer Tim's driveway, there's Tim walking away up it, and there's my
childhood dog Ferd inflated to the size of an Airedale dog following
fifteen feet behind him. I call to Tim twice but he doesn't react; it
occurs to me he may have become deaf. I call the dog; it doesn't react.
Oh, well.
Now I'm driving in a car farther up the road; in the dream it makes
a T with another road. I kneel at the top of the T and pull down from
the air a newspaper-size silvered movie screen that shows a jazz band's
demo video advertisement for booking them. Things become vague.
I notice I'm lying in the street. I get up and fly nearly straight
up into tall trees, where there's another ground level, and there's like
an army camp's food-prep section. I bring into the building a big
Tupperware plastic bowl with a knife in it. There's a slash through the
bottom and side of the bowl. I tell a policeman a complicated story
about aliens having ruined the Tupperware. He doesn't believe me, but
what can he do? There's no law against ruining Tupperware.
Doug Warner (from the theater company) gets lettuce on a plate and
gets a rectangle of egg salad loaf. /That looks good./
I walk into a strange version of Fort Bragg (CA), carrying a white
five-gallon plastic bucket of nothing. I come to where high-school kids
are standing in three tall, widely-spaced oak trees, cooperating to
unfold downward the next-to-lowest section of a sky-high wooden-framed
cloth privacy screen. They get ready, shout, release the section and
/FAP/ it falls perfectly and quivers in place. The kids move down
through the trees, get ready to unfold the very lowest section. Shout.
/FAP/. Finished safely. /Do they do this every year? Sooner or later
somebody's gonna get careless and there'll be a disaster. Someone will
be killed and the whole interesting ritual will be abandoned. That's the
way it always goes./
Next dream. This feels like a continuation of the previous dream,
but here I come from the army kitchen place through a door directly into
a garage with two modern behemoth pickup trucks in it. One truck
recklessly gets out miraculously without bumping the wall or the other
truck. I get into the back of the remaining truck and someone drives it
eastward through Fort Bragg; during the trip I'm overwhelmed by a
frenetic 1930s-style black-and-white cartoon that fills my vision. We
end up in another garage. Everyone gets out-- they're the Albion Grocery
family. I see that my keys are on a heavy leather strap shut in the
door; I get them out, pocket them. Now a backpack is shut in the door. I
get it out and hand it to Doug (Albion Grocery Doug). Ryan says to me,
"You still have our fifty." He means they owe me fifty dollars for some
work I did for them earlier in the dream story. Someone else gets out a
fifty-dollar bill and gives it to me. /Thanks, Ryan. I would have
forgot./
Now there's no garage, and this is inland, maybe Ukiah. I look up at
the blue sky and say, "It's nice here. It's already warm." I've become
an old Superman character with greatly diminished powers but still
super. Ryan treats me with well-bred respect for his elders; he says,
"Do you ever take anyone up there?" I say, "Not anymore."
Next dream. I'm in an old-fashioned hardware store in a strange
city. Girls work behind the long car-parts counter that goes from front
to back. I need to piss. Maybe there's a bathroom upstairs. With two
pairs of scissors in my right hand I climb up shelves and over a
cluttered balcony rail. There's no toilet up here nor any privacy to
just piss in a bucket or something.
My climb destabilized a bookshelf on the end of several bookshelves
pushed up against each other; I straighten it. A girl down at the
counter says warningly, "Marco." I explain that I'm not knocking things
over; I'm keeping them from falling over.
Doug of Albion Grocery and one of the girls come up some stairs that
I hadn't seen. I say, "Oh, stairs. That'd make it easier." Doug has a
platter of chicken to deep-fry for the deli.
Back downstairs I'm at the counter with an old man I'm supposed to
be taking care of. I buy a slice of bread made out of doughnut material.
The man behind the counter is wearing a t-shirt printed in a
doughnut-icing pattern; he makes a self-deprecating joke about the shape
of his belly.
The old man and I walk through a shopping center. The man
impulsively climbs a wide, curved stair rail. I climb after him,
worried. He flips over and slides down, so I have to do the same to not
be crashed into. He says to me, "I'm an alcoholic." Some people are
sitting at a table, playing cards. The old man talks to them as though
they're his old friends and sits down to play. He's happy here. Let him
do what he wants. I say, "I'll go get the car. I'll come back in an
hour, hour-and-a-half, and if you're ready to go we'll go." /Good./
Except: "Where's the car?" The old man says, "I moved it, put it in a
[garble]."
I walk out and around the front of the shopping center. I look at
the address -- five numbers, one of them is a zero. I look for a street
name. (I don't want to get lost and not be able to get back here.) I
walk up the street.
Now I'm in a car in traffic, driving from the back seat. I push the
visor away from the front-seat left window and wiggle the steering
around to see a little better as I go around a curve to the left just
before a wide street to turn right onto. I'm looking for my car-- that
I'm driving-- and nothing seems odd about this.
I drive through a section of town that seems to be all house-paint
stores. There's a store with a fenced side yard full of hundreds of
ladders, some of them twenty feet tall.
Next dream. I'm walking in another city that's faintly
retro-futuristic. I turn right, into a wide alley. There's a white
spaceship coming very slowly the other way; it fills the alley from
building to building. Three pilots sit abreast behind the high
windshield; the one on the left is having a spaz about something. I
half-remember being that guy, in that position; what was I upset about?
A pretty, chubby, self-confident but lost twenty-something
out-of-towner girl comes here. The spaceship's red warning lights go on.
I step to my right into a shop's entryway and say, "Miss?" The girl
sees she's about to be run over; she jumps into the doorway, next to me.
The ship goes past, turns left.
I walk along with the girl. Between buildings, to our right, we see
the ship in the sky. I say, "Look, it's already ten miles away." The
girl says, "Of course."
As we walk we talk about materials involved in making a spaceship,
about how hard the first one was to build. I use a chained marking pen
to check off items on a spaceship checklist on a plinth on the sidewalk.
I wonder if I am (if the man I'm being is) fibbing about being an
important astronaut, or showing off by checking the list when I don't
(or he doesn't) really have to, or if I'm (he's) just doing his job.
We turn into another alley. A man and a little boy --father and
son-- come the other way; the boy has his school project, his
cylindrical hand-made first space helmet with a little fur padding
around the inside of the top (it's a cylinder). I examine it, hand it
back. I say, "Don't forget that sometimes your head hurts and you can't
reach it." /He won't forget, sir./
The alley becomes a lobby hallway in a fancy hotel. The girl and I
come to the check-in counter; I guess we're getting a room together. The
clerk woman gives me a bill (you pay in advance here); it's a confusing
page of house rules and random numbers. I say, "Where's it say the
amount?" /Here: $75./ I empty my pocket onto the counter and count out
$75 in wadded-up tens and fives. There's a dollar and change left over.
I consider saving face about not having lots of money by making it a
point of principle, telling the girl how unfair it is to get too far
ahead-- having a lot of money you don't need is taking advantage of
people. (I think about saying it, but don't.)
Earlier I meet the girl for the first time in the first alley, but
there's no spaceship. We go the other way, to a print/tobacco booth on
the street. The man in the booth is smoking a cigaret. I ask him about
his medical condition (as if I know him). He stubs out his cigaret; he
knows he's not supposed to be smoking, what with everything that's wrong
with him. I give him a paper from my shirt pocket and say, "Call this
number." He's puzzled. /Oh, wrong paper. Sorry./ I say, "Give me your
business card. I'll contact you." I'm (the guy I'm being is) offering
to cure the man's cancer.
None of this is how it went last time (?), but the girl has
obviously already decided to go to the hotel with me. It was destined to
be.
-end-
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