My dreams from Friday, 2008-03-21:
First dream. In a dim, windowless, bare-wood basketball gym
a group is rehearsing an opera play where the characters wear
diapers made of thick white life-jacket foam that come all the
way up under their arms. I have a big part in the show, but
unlike the others I'm allowed to wear my regular clothes. We're
opening in a week; we haven't practiced since last week and I
don't remember any of the songs or any of my lines. I /do/
remember that last week I had everything down, did it all
perfectly. Now, though-- is there a script I can use? No.
Just before we start, the woman I'm supposed to sing with
says, "Lead me a little this time," meaning, speak and sing a
little ahead of the beat so she can follow along, for the
musical effect. I think it should be the other way around, so I
can follow along and fake that I know my part. /Why did I get
involved in this? Why do I never remember that I won't follow
through and will let everybody down?/
Next dream. At a World-War-Two navy memorial park an
eight-foot-thick horizontal middle slice of a battleship is held
forty feet in the air by four X-shaped iron trestles and bolts
with nuts three feet across. The trestles stand on a lower slice
of the same battleship that floats barely above the water.
Tourists walk on top in the wind and the painfully bright
sunshine strobing between scudding clouds.
Juanita and I are on a floating dock parallel with the
memorial ship-thing and about a block away; we walk on a
side-dock that goes closer. At the end of this dock there's a
hatchway down into metal rooms, like inside a submarine. I think
it's foolish of them to leave the hatch open; this dock is
barely above the water; if any water gets into the hatch, the
whole underwater part will fill up and sink. Everyone inside
will die.
I go down the ladder inside and call back up to Juanita to
hurry down here; there are inflated-plastic-looking Gray-style
aliens, and Juanita has the cookie dough they we know they like.
We go into an underwater,
underground-but-not-enclosed-feeling land where Chinese people
are putting on a kids' show on a metal stage with metal
bleachers.
Still in the underground world but minus Juanita I come to
an isolated deserted compound of vacation houses. Mitch and Elly
are already here. We're investigating the place as a refuge
because society has collapsed. I'm in the air above the hills
opposite the valley from the compound; from here I can see a
futuristic city in the distance that's also somehow all around
me. A teacher dressed all in white uses a big roach-like bug for
a piece of chalk; the bug screams and makes a stink that clears
all the students out of the room, which is funny, but the bugs
are a problem and the only way to control them is to draw with
them, and apparently that's too disgusting to convince people to
do it. We'll think of something else; we're the ones with the
brains, after all. Except, this was all a long time ago and
we've already lost the war with the bugs and other wars, and
that's why society collapsed in the first place.
I woke up with a calliope version of Bob Dylan's song /Jack
of Hearts/ playing in my head.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-03-23:
First dream. I've rescued four or five children from a mean
crazy woman who's chasing us through curvy up-and-down streets
of two-and-three-story apartment buildings. We go upstairs to an
apartment door. A boy opens the door from the inside and waits
for the password. I say, "We're going to San Francisco." The
boy says, "Are you sure you're not too fat?" He means, are
these children too many for me to carry and still fly. /No, I
can do it./
We go in and the boy slams the door in the crazy woman's
face, but he can only pretend he doesn't know she's there for so
long; we hurry through the apartment to a window where the part
that opens has a piece of plywood over its top half. (This is
where the air conditioner was.) The opening is too small to go
through. We go back down the hallway. I get the kids, now a boy,
a girl and a smaller girl, to grab each other up off the floor
so they don't weigh anything, then I push them up through the
ceiling and follow after. The crazy woman is right behind us.
I shift us to the right, through an insubstantial wall, and
continue forward faster and faster down a hallway; the woman
will do the same thing, to follow us, so I shift us down into a
lower hallway, left and right, up and down --this is a
many-level many-lane freeway of hallways. It doesn't matter what
I do, the woman finds us and follows.
I'm kneeling up on the bed-size deck behind the front bench
seat of a car that drives itself on a country road at night.
Juanita is behind me with her legs sticking forward, wrapping
around my legs and my knees. The car isn't really driving
itself; it's just staying on the road because the sides of the
road are a little higher than the middle. There are turns coming
and we'll crash; I have to get in the driver's seat and steer. I
can't move because Juanita's legs are tangled in my legs. I
say, "Move!" --meaning, /Move your legs./ Juanita giggles. I
say, "/Move!/" We zoom past some dogs in the road. Are those my
dogs?
Next dream. I'm in someplace like Ohio or Nebraska. In the
back-story of the dream I've been here for months, supposed to
be staying at my Aunt Honey's and Uncle Pat's house but I never
even stopped there to say hi. Now I know that they've been in
the hospital, it was serious, and they're back home with nobody
to take care of them. I'm about to go back to California and I
have to get my clothes and things (?) from Honey's and Pat's
house first, and I'll have to face them and their needs. Never
mind; it's not worth it. I have enough clothes.
Juanita and I go in my old 1971 Chevy Nova at night. We're
police. We come to where the criminals are, in a house up a long
driveway with high hedges everywhere. I park in a parking lot
only a little way in from the road. Juanita starts walking up
there. I dig around in the car and get my flashlight and a heavy
pistol. Something changes so I didn't just drive up but have
been in a rumpled bed between my car and the hedge. I get out of
bed and go around the car.
Juanita has come back out the dark driveway; she says,
"Hey!" I sense that there was a criminal hiding in the bed. I
spin and raise my gun. Okay, problems: 1. Was Juanita warning
me about the criminal sneaking up behind me from the bed, or did
she say /Hey!/ because she was just grabbed from behind by
another criminal and pulled away? 2. Can I shoot this person?
No, it's cowardly to just shoot someone, and the criminal knows
I won't shoot, so I'm in trouble. /But if he attacks me I can
shoot, so that's okay./
Now Juanita and I are driving two cars, the Nova and a 1962
Ford Falcon, but at the same time she and I and several other
people are in the Nova. The brakes don't work; I roll right
through an intersection. I drive into the enclosed parking lot
of a country shop and stop by using the gearbox, engine and
clutch.
I fill the brake fluid reservoir and have the boy remaining
in the car pump the brake pedal. Fluid drips from under the car.
The brakes' master cylinder is in two parts, screwed together,
with a gasket all around. The screws are all loose. I tighten
them down. I need to fill the reservoir again. There'll be brake
fluid inside the car shop. But it's the middle of the night. I
have to break in, which is fine because we're cops, but I'm
still worried about being shot at.
Next dream. A boy has a special deal with the dream-only
city government because of tremendous deadly magical trouble
he's been through in the service of the city. The important
people want to give him a special tesseract of an apartment,
with rooms that overlap in impossible ways. The boy knows
they're only doing it because no-one else wants it. He declines
to accept it; he doesn't want any favors from them. I take over
for the boy and think about it a little more. Actually it's
pretty cool. Sure you don't want it?
My dreams from Monday, 2008-03-24:
First dream. In a resort camp like the Lark Music Camp but
also kind of a government-run Renaissance Faire theme park, I
return to an outdoor brick corridor that's half-filled with
garbage, where nuns were supposed to get a make-work job to give
them something to do. They're not here. I go to a firepit-niche
in the wall and find a popped-open metal can and a scorched but
intact cardboard box of some kind of food. I work my way in the
dimness downhill through this trash channel. At the end, below
me, black-sounding men are hooking up hydraulic rams to lift a
giant bin of trash and tip it over onto where I am. I'm stuck in
the trash, unable to move quickly enough to get out of the way.
I say, "Stop! Stop! Stop!" They can't hear me.
Next dream. It's night. I'm with a strange light-haired
version of Juanita, up a dirt driveway north off Albion Ridge
Road. We're anthropologists here to find and gather previous
civilizations' artifacts from a clearing in sticker bushes.
A man out on the road knows we're here; he shouts about his
magical/scientific project. Oh, well, I'd better have a look. I
say to the girl, now not Juanita at all, "I'll be right back."
I go to the road, walk with the man to my car and give him a
ride to his road a little farther down. There's an outdoor
theater here. Anthemic Queen (the band) music plays. There's an
audience. I observe from close enough to have to participate; my
part is to squirt flammable gel from a ketchup tube in lines
around the keys of an IBM computer keyboard. The music gets
louder and wilder. Fireworks go off. That's my cue to light the
keyboard on fire. I don't have a lighter or any matches. /There
must be some matches here./ I go to the audience and mime
striking a light, for someone to toss me a lighter.
There's a funny war between round nerbly creatures in an
environment of apartment blocks and parking lots on a summer
lake. In an apartment above the war I turn around in the
tile-floor hallway and there's a faint /tchitch/ sound; the toe
next to my left big toe got caught on a tile corner and broke
off at the base. It looks like it should hurt, but it doesn't.
Hmm. I'm just worried I'll start breaking off in other places.
Am I that fragile?
Next dream. A traveling salesman with nothing to sell is
looking for work. He asks at a scientific/electronic supply
house.
I'm in the mostly bare front bedroom of the pink house where
Juanita and I used to live in Caspar; I'm doing my radio show on
shoddy, obviously homemade equipment. I've been here doing
reading for hours, but I can't remember anything I read or
played. There's nothing playing now. I grab a CD at random,
don't even look at it, put it on. It doesn't play. I reach for a
record, thinking, /anything would be okay/, but the first record
looks horrible, the next one looks horrible; they all look
horrible. Dead air. Fine, so what.
I have a microcephalic head with a face on it growing on my
elbow. I point this out to a homeless man squatting against the
wall behind some shelves. He makes a fish-face at it and opens
and closes his fish-lips along with the little head opening and
closing its mouth. Yuck.
Late-Night Liz is here. I talk about the poor quality of the
equipment here and the horrible music and how everything is
broken. Liz agrees about how bad the radio station sounds, and
suddenly I'm sorry I said anything. I should be fixing things,
not complaining.
I'm driving a horseless horse wagon downhill on a big-city
street. There are two brake pedals that work by pushing hard
rubber blocks against the wheels. I fly the wagon up into the
air and chase around after a flying plastic hamburger. Inside a
shopping mall atrium a man casually reaches up and flicks the
hamburger with his finger, causing to to fall, lifeless. I ask
him if he knows how much /work/ went into that thing. He's
properly ashamed.
Outside in the forest a reindeer is so startled by a rich
man and his butler that its heart stops and it falls down dead
just like the hamburger did. /The butler is the guy from the
shopping mall./ The rich man makes an investment deal with the
butler in lieu of paying him for both butlering and dispatching
his business rivals.
Now I'm the rich man, but not so money-grubbing. I send the
butler chasing after an uncatchable softball, which is the game
I invented from the idea of the flying hamburger --it's the base
of my Zevo-Toys-like financial empire.
And now I'm the rich man's secretary/worker. The rich man
has a sealed, submersible luxury car filled with camping and
fishing equipment. A rope goes behind it to where I ride in a
little sailboat that's on a set of mover's wheels. The man
starts the car and drives it over the edge of the parking lot
cliff, pulling the sailboat after it to fall into the ocean.
The sailboat vanishes. I'm riding with the rich man on top
of the submerged car. We see a shark that's just been killed by
dolphins; this is something to take scientific note of
--no-one's ever seen anything like this.
Now it's very dark and the car is gone. We swim to ancient
docks of old creosote-saturated logs. The old man gave up his
entire financial empire just to find this place. We climb up
into dark rooms. We've been followed by government men; now we
have to look for whatever we're looking for, and at the same
time defend ourselves against attack. I say, "What /are/ we
looking for?" The old man says, "Madlands." Oh. Madlands.
Right.
The old man dies of a heart attack. I viciously kill our
pursuers.
I survive the expedition. I climb to where new yuppie
businesses have been built all over the top of the ancient
docks. It's getting light out. A high-class shopgirl is setting
out brochures and little vases of flowers on little tables on
the deck in front of either a bookstore or a real estate agency.
I sit at a table. The girl recognizes me; I'm famous. She says,
"You're Jessica deSoto." I say, "I was. A long time ago."
-end-
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