My dreams from Friday, 2008-04-04:
First dream. I'm lying on a couch-bed in an apartment built
in a long narrow one-car garage; there's a sliding glass door
instead of a garage door. The apartment is like a train car; I'm
thinking about train engines and what years the different shapes
of them were used.
Now I'm with two boys in the driveway on the other side of
the house that's in front of the garage. One boy has a toy
that's two skateboard wheels with a weighted motor on the shaft
between them. He puts it on the concrete, starts the little
motor, and it skitters around and rolls under the fence into the
next house's back yard, which is all plowed up and planted with
strawberries. I worry that the neighbors will be angry if we
step there. The boy isn't worried; he climbs over the fence to
get his toy back.
Next dream. I go down a straight road west of Highway 1 (CA)
between Fort Bragg and Mendocino, to some houses on the cliffs
there, for a wedding. Guests sit around on tuck-and-roll diner
benches in the side yards between the houses. I talk with
Georgia Miklose. /Who's getting married?/
After the wedding ceremony (?) I'm inside the biggest of the
houses, whose entire L-shaped floor is a dining room for the
food reception. One of the buffet items is a pan of boiling
water to poach eggs in --three eggs are already in it; I spoon
one into a saucer and find a seat. The bride's father (?), in a
yellow zoot suit, yells at a man for disturbing the other guests
by saying something that nobody but the father even heard; he
throws him out, looks around for others to throw out and picks
me, points at me. I say, "Yeah, but can I stay till I eat my
egg?" This confuses him. I point at my egg. He can't figure it
out. Stay? Egg? Everyone gets a kick out of how funny it is when
someone gets angry; at every wedding ever, someone gets angry
about something. Good times.
Next dream. In the future I'm in decrepit fairgrounds,
walking between buildings. I go into a skyscraper-tall brick
warehouse and find a big dirt-floor room that has elevator
cables coming down a shaft to just above the floor. I get the
idea to use the cables and their motor to make a carnival ride,
and I direct the other person (?) with me to help gather parts
to make a little ride car to sit in. We make an Italian-looking
two-seater airplane fuselage with no wings or tail.
The mean space-alien police creatures who retroactively have
been pursuing us come in. The person with me flees deeper into
the building. I get in the ride car and use a push-broom to pull
the lever that lifts the car up out of sight. Things become
vague. I stop at various floors and look around. Big empty
building-- empty except for a floor/country of industrious
elves. They're too busy to even say hi.
When I finally come back down to the ground the space-alien
danger is over, has been over for years, but there are other,
new dangers. The other person has become old. He goes with me
out through the front of the building; it's now a lumber and
hardware warehouse. (There are complications and a plot and all
sorts of details here that I didn't get to keep; all I remember
clearly is swinging a cable around my head to ward off enemies.)
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-04-05:
First dream. It's getting dark out. People are playing
baseball on a hillside. They move to where it's lightest, a wide
dirt road that goes straight down the hill; I join five of them
to stand in a semicircle to be the backstop for the game to
start again here. A backstop person who looks like Cat Stevens
in the 1970s breaks down at the thought of failure; he cries, "I
won't catch it!" (Or he's just promising to only be a backstop
and not interfere by catching the ball.)
Two teevee-standard-beautiful women models crouch down to
put their heads together in a sideways cardboard box and have a
girl-talk conference in there. A giant flabby bald man --a golem
made of fat and fabric instead of clay-- grabs us all up into
the air, farts like a released balloon and sprawls dead on top
of us like a tent collapsing.
Now there was never any golem. A boy climbs up the inside
plaster wall that appears on one side of the road. His father
says from the other side of the wall, "You didn't dust the
curtains so I'm tossing them out." From the top of the wall the
boy can see that his father, who he's meeting now for the first
time ever, has a furry animal-like face. And there's the boy's
mother; her face is furry and animal-like too. The boy says,
"You had each other." They had each other and they /have/ each
other. Awww.
A bathroom is inside a house after somehow being out in
hilly woods. A girl explorer has traveled here in the bathroom;
she's wearing a play-Nazi black-and-blue uniform with a
officer's cap and flexible black knee-boots. She goes out onto
the bathroom-terminal house's deck and looks around. /How can
she find the other place, where she's supposed to be?/ The
father of her this-place analog has agoraphobia --he won't go
outside; he tries to talk her into coming back in. She needs him
to tell her where she is; he'll know if he will only look
around. She says, "Come to the edge of the deck," meaning, just
come to the doorway, you can do that much.
Next dream. A dentist with only two fingers on his right
hand tosses a white melamine plate up and spins it on one
finger, then the other. He talks with his patient about his toy
idea, which is to make a plate just like this one, for spinning,
because people like spinning things --tops, frisbees, hula
hoops-- but the plate would have a ring of razor blades pop out
to be the new edge.
I'm the patient, and things switch so it was my idea all
along and I'm selling him on the idea. I use telekinesis to push
the catch in the plate to make the razor blades pop out. He
really gets my idea; /of course/ you'd have to use telekinesis
because, how would you push anything on it while it's spinning,
and then it has the sharp edge, so... Wait. You can extend and
retract the blades by squeezing the top and bottom of the plate.
That would work better, since I'm the only one with the power of
telekinesis. There's a much bigger market for it if just anyone
can use it.
Next dream. I'm driving in a maze of curvy dirt driveways,
following a thirty-something cowgirl who's driving a big truck
pulling a triangular flatbed trailer. The ground is too rough
for how fast she's going; the trailer swings and slides back and
forth. I back off. An impatient car passes me and it almost gets
hit by the trailer.
Now I'm at the cowgirl's house without my car. Her husband
has borrowed my car to do an errand --he returns with his
friend; they're unloading burlap sacks of plastic bags of some
illegal powder drug and putting the sacks into the pickup truck.
The man is friendly; he doesn't even register my complaints. I
throw the last of the sacks out onto the pavement of the parking
lot here.
Now the house belongs to wild high-school kids. I have
Juanita's little car; it's parked on the porch with its back
bumper against the front door. When I try to start the car it
only clicks; the battery is dead. The kids all pile into the
car. I order them out; we have to push it up over the ridge ten
feet away from the house so I can roll-start it down the
driveway. Jamie from the Whale School, at about twelve years
old, gets in front of the car and pushes it backward into the
house and down the hallway; I stop him by reaching through where
the windshield should be and twisting his flexible gray rubber
head.
A strange tall skinny white boy is driving the car and I'm
in the passenger seat. We coast around the front of the house
and through a corner parking lot, building up speed. I realize
the boy doesn't know how to roll-start a car; I say, "Second
gear! Turn the key on! Let the clutch out!" It's too much for
him; he can't think of all that at once. We're on the last steep
part, close to the busy street. I say, "Just stop." Stuck. Oh,
well.
The dream jumps back to where I've just got my car back from
the drug guy, except it's around the side of the house, between
houses, where the gas station would be. I walk to the car. A
policeman is leaning against it, checking off items on a
clipboard. I worry that he will smell that it was recently full
of drugs, but either he doesn't or he doesn't care about that
because it's not on his list. He decides not to give me a ticket
for the dings in the side where Juanita's neighbor's little boy
kicked his mother's car door open into it. He goes away.
I go into this second house, which turns out to be a dim
mazelike Chinese restaurant instantly halfway up inside an old
big-city building. Actor Ed Asner gets out of the elevator where
I just was --he's here to rescue his brother from the black-kid
drug gang whose headquarters this is. Everyone shoots guns. I
become Ed Asner and march through the place pulling guns out of
dead kids' hands and throwing them aside, looking for my (Ed
Asner's) brother. He'll either be tied to a chair in a back room
or he'll be one of these dead kids. I feel responsible for
killing all these kids because I, uh, killed all these kids, but
I don't feel really bad about it. They shot at me, after all.
I don't know what my brother looks like. How will I know
when I see him?
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-04-06:
First dream. Indoors, people are hanging by their fingers
and toes like geckos on a free-standing U-shaped baseball
batter's cage made of chainlink fencing and steel pipes. Some
people are upright; some are sideways. They let go for an
instant, clap hands once, and grab the fence again so not to
fall; is it a religious observance or a gymnastic sport or a
civic ceremony?
My mother and my (dead) stepfather Roland are about to leave
me home, here, for a month. One of them says, "Keep the kitchen
spotless in case someone comes to see the house," meaning a
prospective buyer sent by the real estate company. I say, "I
never touch it," meaning the sink, then I explain that I didn't
mean I don't clean, but only that I don't remember ever going
into the kitchen.
Now I'm with the other people hanging onto the cage, which
is one wall of the kitchen. Everyone's silent, but I'm humming
/Jack and Diane/ to myself. I lean back, holding onto the top
fence-frame pipe, pull my feet up between my arms and flip to
stretch backward, singing out, "--in Ja-pan!" (The song goes,
/Something-something Jack and Diane, two American kids living in
the heartland./ I always expect it to go not /in the heartland/
but /in Japan./)
I flip back over forward to face the fence, dig my
pinky-fingernail into my ear and get out a bit of wax. My ear
still itches. I put my finger in again and this time get out a
little stick-moth made of dry grass. I kneel down bent over on
dry grass and examine the moth. Photographer Garth Hagerman
bends down next to me, worried about me. I say, "Look into my
ear. Here's a light." I hand him a keychain flashlight.
I woke up with John Mellencamp's song /Jack and Diane/
playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm in bed in my old apartment in
the green house in Caspar (CA) with my dream-only wife, who's a
lot like Mendocino actress Heidi Manzanares, who looks like my
mother when my mother was young. We're lying here talking. It
occurs to me that I'm married to Juanita, I don't know this
woman, and now she's older and-- am I in bed with my mother? Oh,
no! I say, "Excuse me," and politely flee.
People line up in the street to have their teeth inspected
by movie-company/government men.
I go into a town meeting in the church. The weather is so
nice, all the doors and windows are propped open. I suggest a
movie plot to one of the movie company men, making it up as I go
along, and it flows on and on without a hitch; talking is like
breathing.
Next dream. My point of view moves through a swamp as though
in an air-boat and goes up a driveway to a team-spirit-building
camp for teaching delicately-built
stewardesses/cheerleaders/models to handle dangerous snakes. I
see a closeup view of a girl's hand holding a crazy-mad snake
about four inches back from its head while it flops around and
twists, trying to get away or to bite her.
Now I'm driving with Juanita up the driveway to the same
camp. The car vanishes. There's an atmosphere of danger. I pick
up Juanita, and though she's too heavy to really fly with I
/force/ us up into the air and curve to the left over a patch of
clean water. I narrowly avoid crashing through hard, pointy tree
branches. Juanita vanishes.
I fly a small helicopter up the parking-lot/driveway of like
Lark In The Morning Music Camp. People are walking both ways,
but mostly away from camp. I'm flying too low; I concentrate to
keep the rotor from tipping and chopping any of these calm,
unworried people's heads off.
Up in the camp, the cabins have paths between them through
well-tended wet grass. A little boy, trying to get at fruit in a
tree, jumps into my way. I swerve to miss him. He rips his cheek
open on a sharp tree branch.
I run into a cabin that's a toy store, go behind two girls'
cashier counter and pull all the drawers out, looking for their
first aid kit. I explain about the boy. The shorter of the two
girls gives me an antiseptic-anesthetic applicator bottle, some
gauze and a roll of white adhesive tape.
Back outside I look for the little boy. I ask, "Did anyone
see a little boy? He'd be bleeding." Someone says, "His parents
took him away." Good. Okay. He's taken care of, then.
Now the camp is old, on rough, rocky, sandy land. Juanita's
with me. Her foot and her ankles hurt. I pick her up and carry
her north through the Ten Mile dunes area. It seems as though
we've been going for much longer than it took to get in; did I
miss the road/trail out and go past it? No-- here's the driveway
up into the snake-handling camp where my car should be.
Everything's dead and dry; it's not a swamp anymore. Juanita
says, "I can walk a little bit." I say, "Why should you? Your
foot hurts." I'm comfortable carrying her.
-end-
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