My dreams from Tuesday, 208-03-18:
First dream. A family of girls lives in a wall of a
three-dimensional concrete labyrinth. Their wall opens onto a room of
black water; a metal ladder goes ten feet down to and into the water.
The family's fat little girl gets into the water and swims downward --to
drown? or is it a trick?
The father and mother (who look like actors Jeff Daniels and Mary
Steenburgen) are terrified. The father climbs down the ladder but can't
swim. The family's smallest girl climbs down the ladder and jumps over
her father, into the water, to swim down after her sister. I get marine
work lights and a yellow power cord and jump in from the edge. Even with
the lights there's no seeing; the first girl is gone. I put the second
girl's hands on the cord and yank twice on it for the father to pull her
up. I swim up.
A third girl and I move around in an endless unfurnished house; we
pull out a panel low on a wall and climb under another part of the
house, with the sense of being watched by a malicious person. There's
no-one, only a Victorian-dressed doll in a rocking chair. I climb
through a vent to get outside.
At the side of this apartment building I'm pretending to be taking a
break from work. I go around the back, climb under the fence. My old
employer John Fremont is up on the second story deck-- he lives here. I
express contempt for him by lying in the sun, in the dirt, to take a
nap.
I go under the deck, back inside. This side of the building is a
restaurant; it's busy. A man comes to a cook/prep table at the same time
as I do. He assumes I work here. He wants more /vegetarian bacon/. I
peel turkey bacon from a big chunk of it and lay the strips on a plate
to take them to the flatgrill, wherever that is. I say to the man "Go
sit down. This'll be awhile."
Next dream. I'm a twelve-year-old boy working with another boy in a
radio station that's a bare gray room in a house up the street from
where my grandparents lived when I was little. An old
generic-grandfather-like character takes over the radio station and
wants to participate, not just run it and take the money. /What should
he do?/ We make him say a different non sequitur word at the end of
every show. The shows consist of refinishing window frames to make them
ready for new panes of glass. We work on the frames, the station owner
watches the clock, and at the right time he steps to the wall between
the two windows and says, "Ha-NUN-go," or, "Puh-TWAH," or some other
word that might or might not mean something. He never catches on that
it's ridiculous.
I use the sharp point of a hooked tool to widen slots in the window
wood. The other boy sees me doing this; he's polite about not pointing
out that I had said we wouldn't need to do this. It turns out that we
need to do it, so okay.
I put too many almonds in my mouth from little cans of them, so many
that I can't even chew. I go to a stainless-steel dishwashing sink's
drainboard, take the almonds out of my mouth and put them on a plate.
Now this is in an underground version of the window room, and it's a
television station, but still with no microphones or equipment or
cameras or anything. In the show that's being made, Singer Judy Collins
will sing a beautiful old song to about twelve children sitting around
her.
I'm Judy Collins. I've just put three plastic parts-organizer
drawers side by side in my mouth, which means I can only hum the song. I
make the children laugh by pulling the middle drawer out and
mumble-grumbling, /This is bullshit./ I get the remaining drawers out
of my mouth and say, "It's supposed to have words... Okay, start
again." I sing the Singing Nun Song and the children all learn it and
sing along. I only know a small part of the song, so it comes out,
"Dom-a nee-ka nee-ka nee-ka yada da da da da da, da dum, da da, na
naah..." and so on to the end, then, "Again!"
My dream from Wednesday, 2008-03-19:
It's cold, dim and wet. I come out of the forest to where I live (in
the dream only), a place like the Whale School but at the bottom of a
valley, not on top of a ridge. I've been away for months or years. The
clearing before the house is a big dark puddle. Can I walk through that?
How deep is that?
Here's my childhood dog Ferd. How long has he been left alone here
unfed? Poor thing. Will there be any food here for him?
I go into the restroom of a church or school or church-school. I
lock the door but that does no good; by the time I'm pissing into a
grate set in the floor the janitor and some nuns and bunch of others are
standing around waiting for something --for me to be finished? /Don't
you people have anything to do?/
Some boys and I go through connected church buildings into a church
that's a toy store. I imagine making an HO-gauge train layout like a
little parking tower with many levels on a small table; I describe my
plan to one of the boys. He says, "So what." I say, "Has anyone ever
done it before?" He says, "Maybe not, but so what."
We're not here to look at the toys; we have an important mission.
Our leader, a serious, determined boy, will take a special magic object
(that changes appearance between being a small steamer trunk, a
grandfather's clock and other things) into another connected church
where people are hiding in a kind of frozen time Laumerian out-of-phase
state to have a meeting. Inside, maybe forty men and women sit and lie
around on the church pews playing card games and board games. /We're
here./ A man is upset that, corrected for the room's being disconnected
from the world for whatever amount of real time has passed, his watch is
off by two seconds --this is a big deal to him; it means that other
things have gone wrong.
Somehow on the way in here we lost Polly, who is a cross between
Ilona Green at the age she was at the Whale School in the late 1980s and
Mia from the Community School in the early 1980s. /We have to find her./
We go back into the world, into the previous church, which is now a
department store. Bad kids from the other team --evil's team-- are here.
While we were outside of time evil has been winning, which shows up as
most of the store being dark, with more lights going off all the time.
We split up to defend ourselves. When a smirking bad kid gets close to
me I leg-sweep him down or flip him down or otherwise knock him down and
say, "Stay!" making him helpless, silent, stuck to the floor. This
doesn't work on everybody; sometimes I have to run to another aisle of
products to hide from pursuers (in their plain sight). But overall we
win enough to light up a little more of the store to a considerable
distance. At the back-corner door we get guns and ammunition from the
gun department to go out to the next part of the adventure. I choose a
heavy revolver pistol and a short semi-automatic shotgun with a nearly
foot-long clip that plugs in up behind the grip.
The dream jumps back to when we leave the out-of-phase church. We
find Polly covered in nearly frozen garbage in a dumpster behind the
building in the cold Whale School place. We lift her out. She comes to
life. /What a relief./
Department store again. Polly, the Alpha Boy and I leave by the back
door and move through a city-size cemetery of columns and statues and
mausoleums, shooting attackers when we have to but mostly sneaking by,
all the while looking for an important magician who will be on our side
but who we know is magically frozen somehow like Polly was.
I knock down two cackling old women, say, "Stay!" and jump on the
taller one's hunched-over upper back, which makes a horrific
all-knuckles-cracking sound. The /stay/ command didn't properly magic
them down-- the woman felt that, felt me jump on her. Oh, no! I say to
her, "I'm so sorry. I'll never do it again." But she doesn't mind; it
was good to have her back cracked. She feels better. I've made a friend;
she and her sister will be on our side instead of on the side of evil.
I walk uphill on the paved golf-cart track out of the this
theme-part of the cemetery, imagining a Monty-Python/Laurel-and-Hardy
skit.
Reunited with Polly and the Alpha Boy, I find the important magician
--or rather Alpha Boy finds him and I become Alpha Boy. Polly stands
guard while I wave my guns over a standing stone monument and artist
Olaf Palm's living face pushes out through the stone as though it's
peeled back from him. He peels completely out of it and sets about
releasing hundreds of magician helpers on our side, who were trapped in
the monuments and plinths and in the cemetery landscaping all around.
Polly becomes Juanita, or rather everything that went before becomes
the story of rescuing Juanita and getting her out of the whole
church-store-cemetery/war-between-good-and-evil place. She and I go
through a magical fence-gate between the dry-climate cemetery in like
Los Angeles into the Whale School (Albion woods) place again, which is
not quite as wet and cold as it was before, but healthy and pleasant.
Everything's fine; we've wrecked our enemies, set everything right and
escaped. There'll be food up at the green house. Flavorless hippie
mush-food, but /food/.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-03-20:
First dream. I'm floating along in the air, with the wind, going
southeast across Mendocino from the headlands park toward the Corners Of
The Mouth food store. I have to go back the other way now, so before
crossing the last street to the store I start paddling in the air,
making great sweeps forward with my arms. I talk with some people down
in the empty lot east across from the post office. I'm embarrassed about
how hard it is to go against the wind-- I'm afraid the people will think
I'm stupid for misjudging the time and wind and going so far. I use a
New Yorker magazine in one hand and a Masonite clipboard in the other to
bite more air. This doesn't help. I land and walk.
I go down Ukiah Street to a dream-only car-repair garage in a row of
businesses that's where Crown Hall is in real life, to find out how much
I owe. My dead stepbrother Craig brought our car in for work; I'm here
to pick it up. The shop is busy. There are five men working on cars and
taking turns going behind the counter that's in the main room of the
shop. I go to the counter, say who I am. A man gives me a yellow bill
that says I owe $575 minus the $120 deposit I gave my brother to give
him, then plus some extra things they didn't write on the bill yet, that
might eat all the deposit... Where am I gonna get $600? I tell the man
that my brother killed himself, so the man will be sorry and cut me a
little slack. I go to a bed with a straw-stuffed mattress in the corner
of the shop, lie down and thumb through a magazine without really
looking at it. I can't even steal the car back because I don't see it
anywhere.
I wake up from sleep, still in the dream, in the straw bed. I get
up, take the magazine and a 1.2-megabyte 5-1/4-inch floppy-disk drive
out into the street and walk then float east. This is almost the same as
what happened before; I think about landing earlier than last time, so
there'll be more time to get back, but I fly all the way to the food
store and past it and keep going...
The dream jumps back to when the man hands me the bill. Here's where
he gives me the floppy drive; it's one of the parts he replaced in the
car. (I wish I'd known; I have some of these in Tim's garage.) I think
the drive must still be good. Nothing looks wrong with it. I'm careful
not to touch the circuit board; I don't want to shock it with static.
Now I'm walking west on Ukiah Street from the cemetery up at the
Highway, through a version of Mendocino that's all a big college. Just
past a cross-street about halfway to the sewage plant, an art class is
going on in a parked bus. The class either lets out or moves into a new
method-- all the middle-aged people in it come out of the bus with tiny
video cameras, pointing them at everything, looking intently at the
cameras' little video screens. /So many video cameras. I should get one
for the theater company. There's probably a crate of them in that bus./
Next dream. I'm in either a rich person's art-filled house or a club
that's an art gallery. A big, tilted-7-shaped wall partition has art
stuck all over it. A girl makes a leatherwork and wood art piece to give
to me. It just fits the only empty place on that wall. I thank the girl
and say it can stay there where people can appreciate it.
Some artists and I talk about the atomic bomb. It's generally
understood that an atomic war is about to start. No-one can do anything
about it. They're all just sipping from their wine glasses and passing
what time is left in good company.
I drive an early-1960s Plymouth Valiant backward downhill away from
the house/gallery and uphill in a busy big city. The brakes don't work
at all, and having pushed the brakes I discover that something has
failed in the gearbox so reverse gear is just freewheeling. I spin the
car 180-degrees and somehow am still going backward, the same way, the
same speed. I jam it into first gear, rev the engine and let out the
clutch to use the clutch to stop the car. This works, without stopping
the engine, and I'm safely going the other way. I'm going downhill, but
the car is in first gear and so won't speed up out of control. There's
the smell of the clutch having got really hot. It's probably ruined. I
think, /Brakes, clutch, $600. That explains it./ (That explains the bill
in the previous dream, which I remember in this dream as real life, in a
future I'm heading toward.)
-end-
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