My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-04-01:
First dream. There's a fun, running, childish but deadly fight that
ends with my fleeing through brush down into a valley that has a natural
theme-park aspect to it; it's like a model-train-layout valley. I fly a
long way up the center of the valley, carrying on my back someone I've
rescued, with the superhero The Flash flying alongside. I explain to The
Flash about how I don't really fly but merely glide. He wants to say
something about how that doesn't square with my gliding /uphill/, but he
politely controls himself about that, and lands to do some secret work.
It's nearly dark by now.
I turn right, uphill, out of the valley, and fly at about
head-height through buildings. As I come out of the buildings onto a
wide way up to the theme park's parking lot, three college girls are
walking the same way. I set down my passenger so they will take care of
him. They ignore him, walk right past him. Awww.
Now I'm on Main Street in a version of Fort Bragg (CA) that's
stretched out so the buildings are far apart. Two non-cartoon crew
members of a time-traveling /Futurama/ Planet Express ship have
materialized in the doorway (doorway only) of the ship to bring some
crates outside into the vast parking lot here between Down Home Foods
and the liquor store. I wave to get their attention. A boy --the one I
rescued before?-- helps me carry and cart garbage to a fenced-in
dumpster area, then we'll see if we can get taken out of this era with
the time merchants.
Garbage put away. Look back. The ship has already entirely vanished,
probably causing the problem it was sent back in time to solve in the
first place.
I go into the back bathroom of a Victorian house that's a bookstore.
I start to piss, and hear someone coming here from the back alley. I
lock the door. The person rattles the knob. I say, "I'll be with you in
a minute." /What a bad design it is to have the way in go though the
bathroom. I mean, I can understand why someone might want to use the
toilet immediately he comes inside, but would it kill anyone to have to
go through just one more door?/
I'm really sleepy. People stand around a car in the dark. In the
back seat are a tower computer case and books and blankets. Can I crawl
in and sleep there?
The people are jazz musicians. Juanita is here. We're all here to
see a famous historical jazz musician play in a bar somewhere up the
street. I'm not interested; I'd really rather sleep. I can take a nap
and then go there, but exactly where is it? (I don't want to lose
Juanita and not be able to find her again.) I say, "How far down is the
music?" Everyone smiles condescendingly and they go away down the
street. /Go after them? Or get in the car?/
Next dream. A little girl military general peers into a rectangular
parakeet-cage mirror the size of a finger, using it for a sextant to
navigate through imaginary tactics and come up with the right thing to
do. Without taking it away from her I examine it and look into it. It's
only a mirror with a light-jade-green plastic frame. Or is it just that
I don't know how to use it?
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-04-03:
First dream. I have a bright-yellow plastic cell phone. I fold down
the bottom part and look it over, but it's flimsy; the top cover of the
bottom part snaps off all the way to the hinge. I realize that someone's
talking-- opening the phone answered a call that was coincidentally just
made. It's a telemarketer woman who wants to talk to /Irene Iverson/
about a special deal. I look around at some indistinct people in this
foggy wrecked industrial place; I say, "Is any Irene here?" The woman
on the phone --now a speakerphone-- says something about her headphones,
but the damage to my phone now makes her voice crackle and cut in and
out. I order the woman to never call me again, by saying, "Call this
off."
Next dream. An outdoor movie/music-poster store/booth is under a
freeway overpass. More customers than usual are here because of a local
eco-warrior event. Here's the poster for the event: it shows a
repulsively musclebound painfully grinning Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I'm leaving. My hip brushes some rolled-up posters; I'm embarrassed
by the disgrace of being clumsy; I say to anybody who saw that, "I got
my leg caught on your muscle."
Now I'm with others behind a fence across a wide street from the
poster booth, which is now a cafe. I climb over the fence, cross the
street. In the cafe, translucent-white snakes the size of fungo bats
with faces like abyssal-depth sea creatures are tied to the ceiling
(there's a ceiling now) by their tails. They wiggle around and I tug at
one to see if it will stretch --it does; it's like slimy gummi-bear
candy. People laugh. I say, "I was gonna show him how to fly." (I was
gonna let go and let the snake snap back.)
Pursued now by cops I jump/fly out of the cafe through a slot in the
chain-link fencing over a window; I'm flying by the power of squeezing
two invisible pliers. The greasy-makeup Greek-looking woman with me (?)
laughs and wants a picture of us flying, getting away, for later, to
show people who might not believe it.
In another place by a road Gypsy man jumps up and grabs my legs. I
kick him loose and swing way up into the sky as if the pliers I have
were attached to a rope.
Cars and trucks line up into two trains that converge on the
vanishing point. On a frame close in front of me I patch the empty
places that are missing a car or truck with a cardboard drawing to make
the trains complete, at least in two-dimensions, from where I am. I move
left and right and the patches hold, so the complete trains can be seen
from any angle. This is an art show. I overhear some people talking
about my art, but I can't tell whether they like it or not.
Kay and Shirley from the Community School have taken a
math-and-general-knowledge test that I was meant to take-- they did it
to cover for my absense. Shirley says, "Remember when you were asleep
this morning--" [when she was driving the car] "--and you said [long
gobbledegook word]?" /I, uh... huh?/
Now a strange woman is driving. She steers into student parking,
which is free; I say, "Clever." But we're all scattered again by
government cops chasing us. I get away flying with two others,
strangers, one of each of our hands stuck in the side of a long narrow
food can. I use telekinesis to slice the can and get our hands out. It
becomes a flat sardine can inexhaustibly full of powder-dry fibrous
spinach. I say, "Feed it to Arnold."
Next dream. I'm about twelve years old, with two other boys,
exploring a failed housing development that never got much beyond the
house platform stage. I find a toilet, sit on it and shit out powdery
sawdust, as if I'm made of it, like the White Rabbit in the Czech movie
/Alice/.
The oppressive-government martinet traffic-control boy who's been
making trouble for us in the back-story of the dream comes near an
iron-rail fence; I reach through and strangle him against it. Now we can
go to the forbidden side of the housing development and take our
firewood and cans of food back; we do that, and I fly away into the
night.
Next dream. In one room of a continuous all-indoors place I try
different ways of stacking the modules of a heavy reel-to-reel tape
recorder, to have it work and also have a surface to cut and splice tape
on. I start repairing actor Bob Cohen's damaged tape of the musical
comedy he produced in 1961, using splicing tape /and/ clear liquid glue.
A man passing by stops and offers dumb suggestions. I just keep working.
This has something to do (?) with the old children's stories about
Strewel Peter: I rescue a pack of children by following a complicated
naval-ship operator's-manual sequence of mechanical actions involving
pump motors and stage-prop pressure doors, then I'm in a
hotel-room/shipboard-cabin with Juanita and she refuses to get out of
bed and talk on the phone I'm holding out to her. A Village-People-like
gay guy comes in with a black dial-type phone and looks around near and
behind the bed for someplace to plug the phone in; he says, "Where's the
jack? No jack?" No. No jack. Why do you think /this/ phone is /over
here./ I say, "Juanita has to get up and go to the phone. Stop
helping."
In another room/cabin I disassemble a wall clock that's needlessly
complicated. I see where a plastic direction-key has snapped off, and
there's no fixing that, but I'm confident that I can still make this
clock work.
Now I'm in a bigger room, an engine room, or rather a simplified
soundstage set of an engine room, taking apart a
blower-fan/ductwork/electrical part. I loosen a clamp and pull the
accordion duct out so it stretches to become clear plastic, and I get
more parts loose and take them out, beyond my ability to remember how it
all was. /This is okay. It's a familiar feeling. I almost always can
figure it out, whatever it is./ There's some pressure to succeed --a
dictator character is watching-- but he knows he can't rule if nothing
works, and /he's/ not competent to repair anything, so...
Next dream. I'm traveling with Juanita but I don't know where she
is. I walk into a kind of Chinese Disney stationary musical parade,
where a Chinese girl musician directs me to bend over. She puts a
combination instrument stand and microphone stand on my back, puts my
hands on it to hold it there, and then she adjusts the volume of the
music coming from the band by adjusting my position and the position of
the stand-thing.
A boy in the band is gleeful at my humiliation. (I wasn't humiliated
until he started calling attention to how humiliating what I'm doing
is.) I humiliate him in return by calmly insulting him. He throws down
his trombone and physically attacks me. I knock him down. He flees to
hide in plain sight on some five-gallon cans of peanut oil under a table
against a wall. /I win, man. There is nothing more humiliating that
that. And he knows it, too. Total win./
I go to my first-ever car, a 1971 Chevy Nova. The ignition key is
not with my other keys, so I can't start the motor; I coast it downhill
and around a metal building. Fence. Trapped.
I levitate the car, fly over the fence, and collect kitchen tools
from trees and the sides of buildings as I zigzag through a strange town
of only alleys. At the end of the alley next to Crown Hall (in
Mendocino) two boys who look like the /South Park/ and /Team America/
creators look over my collection of serrated knives magnetically
attached to a pan (some of the things I got). They want to buy the
knives. They're going to their first day of work in the restaurant where
Crown Hall just was. I say to them in a fake U.K.-something accent, "Oi
think it's just unfair when it's me old da, an' it's Bettenham not
Bardenham and he's about to be put on notice for callin' the 'elpers
/old trade./"
I woke up and wrote the spoken line word for word, to be sure to get
it right. Funny. Very nice.
Asleep again. Next dream. Upstairs in a very old building I've taken
a plank up to reveal inside the floor a (mummified human leg? a
mannequin leg?) with masking tape on it; it's hollow and being used as a
section of conduit for power wiring that continues in a straight line
under the floor, out /that/ door. My instructions are to cut into the
line at the leg and bring it over to provide an electrical outlet near a
stone fireplace set in the corner of the room.
Now I'm sitting with Juanita in sports bleachers, watching a concert
from across water, a quiet river. The concert is David McKay playing a
banjo/guitar/bass-thing and Jamie Carr (who used to write for my paper)
playing violin as though playing a guitar, moving the bow up and down
between his legs to bow it. It looks like masturbation but it sounds
pretty good.
The Irish tune they're playing gets faster.
David becomes someone else, someone like Seals of Seals and Crofts;
he plays very low bass notes on a cable fastened to his now-much-bigger
instrument with turnbuckles. He pulls a white string with a thumbtack on
it to release a catch, so the bass string (the cable, now a threaded
bar) that he's plucking gets longer and longer out to his right, and by
the time the cable reaches inside a metal shed it's gone down in pitch
to below the threshold of hearing and /ripples the water/. Wow!
At the end of the song, Seals shouts, "/This is a gift for you,
Ukiah!/" He pulls the ends of all the white strings, pulls the
thumbtacks completely loose, and lets the tacks and strings sink into
the water below the stage. Tremendous applause.
Somehow I'm on the stage side of the water. I go into the shed.
Seals doesn't want me here; he's in a hurry, breaking down his
instrument and packing it to go back to San Francisco. I say to Jamie,
"I'm going there too. I have to be there in four hours." A retroactive
back-story to the dream develops as I continue talking: "Yeah, you won't
believe it-- I'm in a boys' music school for violin. I live in a stuffy
dorm. Every day it's different; like, we'll get a piece of paper that
says to go to such-and-such an address and there'll be an old man there
who teaches us to file a special angle on the bridge or something. And
he's the only one in the world who knows how to do that thing, whatever
it is." Jamie's interested but Seals is getting more and more anxious;
I'm slowing them up.
I realize that I left Juanita in the bleachers. There's nobody over
there now. I /translate/ back across the water and wander around a weird
town of small buildings with four-foot-high doors, looking for her.
-end-
|
