My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-03-25:
First dream. It's like a Skee-Ball game. I fire small torpedoes
parallel to a wooden quay, trying to get them to go into the eye sockets
of a beachball-size human head about a bowling lane away. I'm pretty
good at this.
Next dream. Boys and girls use a softball to play a football-like
game on a dirt road in a rural place-- a school but with not school
buildings, just rustic cabins. Two boys on the same team can throw the
ball impossibly far, which indicates that there are aliens among us.
Monty Python's John Cleese is a teacher here --probably he's an alien.
He and the other teachers, myself included, have a discussion about /how
many/ aliens there are likely to be.
After I ask about how they communicate with their ship that's in
orbit, an alien man who sides a little with humans takes me to a cabin's
porch and shows me an LED date-and-time display; I'm to meet him
somewhere (?) then and be blindfolded, led to and let in on the secret
of the aliens' antenna.
Next dream. My mother, writer Alex Bosworth and I are in connected
hotel bathrooms, brushing our teeth and getting ready to go somewhere.
Now my mother is driving --or rather sitting in the driver's seat
of-- a white early-1960s Cadillac. I lie across the hood of the car with
my legs dangling off the left side. I steer by reaching in through where
the windshield should be to use the turn-signal --this is like steering
an old video game by using the left and right arrows on the keyboard; it
works but it's not smooth.
And now I'm driving the car normally, sitting in the driver's seat.
A person who's a cross between Alex Bosworth, my mother and the actress
Kate Bosworth is in the passenger seat. We turn off this desert road at
a gas station rest-stop complex, go past a big fenced-off swimming pool,
and I park carefully in the shade of nothing; that is, there are big
seemingly permanent stripes of shade on the ground, with nothing above
to make the shade, and I put the car in a shady place.
I wake from sleeping in the car. I'm the driver for Kate Bosworth,
who is a high-powered real estate woman who has mentally snapped,
resigned and is touring the West. I go to where she's looking through a
pile of our clothes on the asphalt for what to wear today, and I look
for clothes too because I'm naked, of course. (Kate Bosworth is always
dressed in a gray skirt business suit.) I find a pair of
expensive-looking pants that have straps sewn to them that I guess are
suspenders.
A girl and her boyfriend come from the gas station's diner and go
into the bathroom. I smell chlorine from, I guess, the swimming pool.
/Yeah-- I want to go swimming./ Kate Bosworth will want to get back on
the road, though. I think of and reject various things to say to try to
make her think it's /her/ idea to go swimming.
The girl and her boyfriend have discovered a cardboard box hidden in
our car's trunk. I become my stepbrother Mark, move smoothly to deflect
the kids' interest away, and I look in the box; it's full of shredded
office paper. Now I'm who I am. Mark and Kate Bosworth are the same
person, and he/she wants to throw the paper out into a dumpster. I argue
for keeping it; it's evidence. Kate Bosworth says, "That's why to lose
it! Before we're caught with it!" She doesn't understand. It's evidence
against the bad people, not against us. All we have to do is keep our
heads and we can win this.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-03-26:
First dream. After the last performance of a play's run at Helen
Schoeni Theater, the people are gone and the stage is empty except for a
heavy brown canvas lump of distant-hills scenery. It's still light out
(it was a matinee), and all the doors are open. Fresh air. The meeting
about the next play will happen in half an hour or so. /I'm so sleepy./
Actress Cindy Triplett is here --she's sleepy too; she says, "Can
I?" --meaning, can she lie on the floor and take a nap. Of course; good
idea. We lie on our sides with our arms around each other, our heads on
this end of the canvas lump. Sleep.
I wake, within the dream, in the same place. People are coming in.
We get up; I say to Cindy, "My happiest times have been sleeping." She
says somethng I take to mean, /What was another time?/ I tell her about
when I was coming back to California from Wyoming in 1979, on a bus at
night, and the girl in the seat next to me and I just naturally, without
speaking, put our seats back, put our arms around each other, slept
until the next rest stop, got off and got back on the bus and fell
asleep tangled around each other again. I start to tell about falling
asleep with Julie in the pool couch, but enough people are here now and
the meeting starts. Things become vague.
I'm in a much bigger theater, sitting on the edge of the stage with
Steve Greenwood. The meeting hasn't started yet. I start crying and sob,
"I love the theater."
Movies are playing on screens at both ends of this now even bigger
hall; I go toward one end to hear better-- playing here is an extended
preview of a Star Trek movie that has characters from several version of
Star Trek all mixed up together. The movie hall becomes the story and
I'm in it. Someone reports, "Weapons as low as regulations allow." I
climb up the stairs along the wall to a projection booth and without
passing through it am coming down the stairs on the other side /and/ I'm
in my theater seat watching Mister Worf without any Klingon makeup on
(just the barefaced actor) come down the stairs, make a confused,
helpless gesture and vanish. Captain Picard is talking with a stranger;
I interrupt to say, "There's something wrong with Mister Worf." He makes
a /tut-tut/ motion --he'll take care of it; not to worry.
But the worst danger of all has come: everyone's living in his own
fantasy world-- /except/ a bread-dough-faced man with no eyes, who makes
a hole in the mountain clay and peeks in. (The theater is inside a
mountain.) Is the man a criminal? Has he drugged our people?
I go up to the projection booth and this time I get inside. Picard
is here with makeup-less Worf, who close up looks less like Michael Dorn
than like the actor who played the human-impersonating Mangalore soldier
Aknot in /The Fifth Element/, and another person (the criminal dough
man?) and Cindy Triplett, who isn't Cindy anymore, but retroactively my
space-college girlfriend from the back-story of the dream. She and I lie
on a doctor's examination table and kiss. A new-age hippie guy leans in
through a ticket window and tosses everyone Satsuma oranges.
Picard and the others figure out the controls and get the whole
theater, a ship, going sideways back to Earth at what Picard describes
as /pirate-based low warp/.
I wonder if this orange is safe to eat.
Next dream. It's night. I'm pedaling my car, like pedaling a
bicycle, north on Highway 1 to Fort Bragg from about Caspar (CA). It's
hard to keep going --it's a heavy car-- but I'm almost home. (In the
dream my house is to the west of the trailer park on the left. My car's
lights are weak. No houses have lights on; there's been a terrible storm
and all the power is out.
I turn left, southwest, onto the road before the Botanical Gardens.
The road becomes a driveway, and detours on another driveway. Big wooden
doors and walls close in. Trapped?
Someone says that all the residents of this cash-strapped paranoid
gated community want to sell their kittens. They were speculating on the
kitten market and now they're stuck and willing to take a loss.
I wake from sleep, still in the dream, in an unfurnished bare house
trailer that's nested inside another slightly bigger trailer on Highway
20 where the house was that I first lived in when I moved to Fort Bragg
(CA). How cold is it outside? I put the back of my hand against the
window and it's /cold/. At the corners of the outer trailer, louvered
windows let air blow through; soon it'll be cold in here too. A loud
truck goes by below on the road.
Am I safe here? Will there ever be electricity again? Or has the
rotten economy ruined the whole future of repairing things like the
electric grid?
What can I use to stop up the non-airtight windows?
I woke up with the guitar tune from the end of /The Fifth Element/
playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. There's been a disaster and society has
collapsed. I come to the truncated A-frame at Mendo Micro; there's Stan
of Down Home Foods up on the roof with a broom. I say, "Hi, Stan!" But
it's not Stan; it's Jamie from the theater company. Here I have a sort
of memory walk-through of the last time I was here: I went around the
front and inside. No-one was here. I redded the place up and in the
process threw away a dusty dry pile of old chicken bones and string from
the writing desk... Now Jamie and I are near the front door. Jamie
angrily says, "What'd you do with my dad!" (Oh-- the chicken bones and
string. Shit.) I say, "I don't know what you mean." He says, "You're
dangerous." He hates me. I threw his father's remains away. I continue
to pretend I don't know what he's talking about, and I walk away.
Now the A-frame is just south of Fort Bragg in a muddy field. And
there's another A-frame. People are standing around in the mud,
listening to an amplified incomprehensible speech. A power generator
drones. A girl like Candy who used to work at Down Home Foods is
apparently hypnotized into being all stiff and men hold her out over the
edge of the flat part of this second A-frame's roof, so they're holding
her feet and ankles and she sticks out parallel to the ground. /It's a
neat trick but I hope they have a safety rope on her./
I have a mini-disk recorder and a shotgun microphone. I try to
interview some people. No-one has anything to say. Here's a clump of
people around where someone has tossed a boot into a hole that was dug
to drain the field. The boot floats upside down. /Are these people
praying to the boot?/ I can't understand what they're saying; I record
some of it.
It starts really raining. I run to where a man is lying on the
concrete under a back-door awning of a business close to the highway.
When I get there the man gets up to go in. I say, "Can I stay here?"
(Under the awning.) No; it's the entrance to a restaurant. Okay, I
understand that, but /can I just stand here until the rain lets up a
little?/ No.
I go back the way I came but angle leftward to avoid Jamie's
A-frame. I can't go there. I threw away his father.
My dream from Thursday, 2008-03-27:
I'm with Juanita, using telekinesis to move massive, squared beams
of redwood (with furry redwood bark still on all sides of them, as
though the trees grew square, not round). We fit the beams like Lincoln
Logs into a massive foundation under an existing building on the edge of
a hill, lifting the building to shove the beams into place. I wonder,
/Won't the bark disintegrate over time? Won't the building settle a foot
or more, and unevenly?/ Juanita's like, /So what? We'll be gone./ No;
I want to do a good job that lasts.
I'm driving then wading through a flooded community. Gas pumps are
on brick islands in the middle of the street. Everyone's used to this
regular flooding; they don't even take their clothes off anymore, just
go on about their business, knee-deep or waist-deep in dark oily water,
inside the buildings or out.
Men who were sent on an expedition to an alternate world are stuck
there. They discuss the Plains Indian horse-based society they've found.
They vote on using some of their resources to try to send a message back
to their original world, and the yes vote wins.
In the world they're from I watch an absentminded-scientist boy (Don
Robertson, a boy I knew in grammar school) be taken to a government jet
airplane and shown the efforts that are going on to properly receive the
message. (They're getting something but they can't understand it.) A man
in headphones shows the boy teevee static on a round green-phosphor
screen. The boy immediately starts offering helpful suggestions: 1.
Check for a multiplexed signal. There will be duplicates of the stranded
men on /other/ Other Worlds all trying to communicate at once. 2. Look
at other frequencies lower and higher than expected, for sped-up or
slowed-down signals. The alternate universes might run at different
speeds. Etc. The technician is grateful to have something to do besides
fret. Why didn't they call the boy in way earlier?
At the house where I'm staying, the wife of one of the
probably-lost-forever men cooks eggs and bacon for her little girl. The
girl is spoiled and shrill; she's anxious for the truck to come up out
of the valley and bring her music-lesson software she's been waiting
for. (Guitar Hero?) She doesn't want to eat. "Honey, you have to eat."
She takes a piece of bacon to the big wall-window and sits sideways on
the sill, looking out, complaining, nibbling the bacon and swinging her
foot to kick the wall like a metronome.
I say to the mother, "Some of them --maybe most of them-- won't want
to go back home." Even if they could. She says, "I know that."
I want to take a shower. I move around through the big house and
find a bathroom with a shower in it, but I have to go back the way I
came to get clothes. Here's a pile of laundry. Here are some blue jeans
that look like they might fit me.
The bathroom isn't where I left it, but here's another one. I forgot
the pants. I lock the bathroom so no-one will take it (I can always open
a locked inside door); I go get the pants, come back and the door is
open and someone's in the shower.
I wander around and find /another/ bathroom. Something happens so
I've been in this bathroom for awhile in a kind of fugue state, not
moving, not thinking. The little girl comes in and starts working on a
clay-and-sewing art project on the table here. It occurs to me that I'm
naked, but it's no problem; the girl is used to naked people being here.
More wandering around in the house. It just goes on and on. Finally
I have to take my shower in a bathroom with louvered windows for walls
and no enclosure around the shower. In the patio right here, old Italian
or Slavic people sit drinking wine and comparing aches and pains and
talking about the old days. I think these must be the
grown-up-and-grown-old children or grandchildren of the original
explorers who came to /this/ world. I should take a recorder out there
and get some of this. Anything would do-- a cassette deck...
-end-
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