My dream notes for Monday, 2008-04-07:
First dream. A six-or-eight-lane road goes down the side of
a cliff, out of rock mountains. It's the time of day (or night)
when all lanes go down, none up. Cars stream down.
I can't walk on the road; it's too dangerous. I climb back
up a narrow rock-and-concrete stairway above it. The stairway is
not attached to the cliff; it leans out a little. Scary. Move
slowly.
Inside the cliff a woman shows me and the other person here
(?) her wonder discovery/achievement-- what she calls /a wombat
on a dead cat/, which is an animal like a badger sleeping on top
of a sleeping or dead gray cat on a Masonite serving tray.
I look through cupboards and drawers in an office-supplies
room. One drawer has all different kinds of pens and an
expensive-looking car audiocassette deck whose chassis is cast
aluminum.
Farther into the rooms inside the mountain, across a big
room and through a doorway, someone whose voice I recognize is
working, talking to himself-- is that Dan?
The cat moves; it's not dead and wasn't asleep but was
recovering from being stunned. The woman says, "It's being
looked after," meaning that it's okay.
Diagonally across the big room is a door open to an
outdoors-but-underground country. The cat and the badger jump
off the tray and chase each other out that door, then a dog and
a fox run in through the same door, tear around in here and hide
under a sloppy stack of long wooden benches. In here becomes
outdoors with trees crowded thicker and thicker.
Next dream. After a silent shooting war, in the
cat/badger/dog/fox place from the previous dream, I will guide
refugees to carry war wounded on wagons to someplace safer; I
promise to eventually get them all home --but first I have to
find something out. "Wait here. I'll be back in a little while."
I and two or three others climb out the original hole in the
mountain down to where the many-lane cliff-cut road was; here,
now, in the moonlight, the place below the cliff is a linoleum
floor with water channels through a kind of medieval
machinery-of-the-spheres metal landscape, like the wheel side of
the famous Flammarion woodcut of a robed scientist, at the edge
of the Flat Earth, seeing outside the crystal sphere of the sky
to the clockworks that run weather and the stars and everything.
We go down into there and it's dark and blue and cold. Someone
throws something; this results in the machinery throwing apples
that turn to darts, stick in and unbalance the main wheel.
Everything crashes down, stopped, frozen in time. Wise men and
angels, operators of this place, were mottled with shadows when
the the machines stopped; they're now only partly present--
where they were in shadow they have gaping holes in their
outlines. They and we walk across solid water... It's a magical
dim mechanical swamp museum environment.
Back up in the country inside the mountain, the wounded have
all died. The refugees and I find old magazines "hand-painted
not typeset" and look through them. A circus/theater troupe
raises ancient Rome scenery up on ropes and pulleys. The
refugees try to help but just get in the way. Someone says, "You
stepped on the glorious banner." I'm standing on some scenery.
Sorry.
Cartoonist Mervyn Gilbert is hungry; he says, "I must have
meat!" I find meat in the landscape-- a granular Spam-like
processed sausage. You can dig it out of the ground with your
fingers and peel away the spoiled parts that were exposed to
air. I try some; it's bland. I hand a chunk of meat to Mervyn
and joke that it's "salami nibbled by rodents." The problem of
how we will eat on the trip having been solved, we jog, then run
faster and faster, increasingly out of control, downhill into
further underground valleys.
The dream jumps back to a combination of the wrecked swamp
machinery-of-the-spheres place and the theater backdrops place.
Kenneth Clark is filming a segment of his /Civilization/ show
here; he walks in fisherman's wading pants through
fire-suppression foam down a water channel like inside a
Disneyland ride, talking about having tried this before with
regular wading boots, giving up and doing it again with this
better suit, and how it still isn't working, because the gases
from the chemical foam make his voice crack.
Next dream. I'm in a big, closed-in, windowless,
cold-country indoor space. In a niche in the wall here's a
fifteen-volt DC power adapter that might be useful. And here's a
shoebox-size twelve-volt power unit for old video equipment... I
have enough DC power supplies; someone else can have these.
I go up an elevator to a floor that's a bookstore and cafe
on this end and the other way is a furniture store floor fading
off into dimness. Jazz musicians play for the four or five
people in the cafe. I wander away between the display furniture.
My friend Mark is here. We discover eight-foot-long D-shaped
books of shaggy rugs that have rugs inside them for pages. I
find a rug book that has the sun on the cover rug and the
different days of the week on the rugs inside: the moon, Thor,
etc. Mark says, "Comics." We fold the rugs back up and leave
them the way we found them.
I go with a pretty thirty-something women, our arms around
each other, through an old movie theater into a new fancy movie
theater and then around in a loop the other way. Here's a picnic
place for Midwestern families (this is all still indoors) with a
long steel superslide that has five or six lanes. Halfway up the
slide the rails are cut away to leave a way for small children
to walk to the middle lanes there and not have to go all the way
to the top. Noah at the age he was at the Whale School in the
late 1980s slides down from the top of the slide, but does it
with his legs up over the rails of the lane he's in, so when he
gets to the middle his legs drop and he crashes into the
beginning of the lane rails for the lower part of the slide.
/Ow./ I imagine a doctor sewing up lots of kids who get hurt
that way.
Outside the picnic area is the actual outdoors-- a long
empty train-stop platform. I walk up the platform in cold night,
carrying a little dog. (This is either the woman's little dog or
she became the dog.) I decide to fly hundreds of miles home, but
I consider that the people (family?) I left in the jazz
bookstore/furniture store will worry... but won't they know to
telephone home and say they lost me?
I fly up but go back over the top of the giant building I
just came out of, go back into this Siberian/Midwestern town and
land downhill from the business district. Old buildings and
houses are on old streets here. Weather has washed the earth out
from beneath higher streets, leaving concrete and brick cloud
shapes suspended out over the hillside. I walk on a street that
becomes the renovated inside of warehouse-size building shaped
like an inflated Victorian house. People who live here look at
me but don't mind that I'm walking right through their house.
Now I'm flying around the the other end of the building. I
go in under a second-floor overhanging awning roof. A strange
friendly Midwestern-looking woman is waiting in the glassless
window frame for me or someone like me; we hug and kiss. The
vampire landlord watches this, annoyed.
Deep inside the building again I try to interest some bored
kids in creatively rewiring some radio station equipment in
wooden racks high on a wall.
A track of two wooden grooves in the floor goes straight to
and under a wall. The woman I was kissing thinks I'll have to
take the wall apart to continue going that way, but I just go
around the wall. At the side-back of the building, on the ground
floor, people stand around as if in a transportation terminal. I
tell the woman to go to /that/ window to see me off; I climb
outside through a hole low in the wall and go around the corner
under jungle trees and plants. It's hot outside now, not like
before. There's the woman in the window. I wave goodbye and fly
up.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-04-08:
First dream. In a low-rent hospital a horrible old woman
patient in a wheelchair is complaining in a voice like a
circular saw. I get her attention and mimic her tone, but I say,
/Heeelp! Heeelp! Heeeeeeeeelp!/ She stops complaining and
screams in outrage at being mocked. One of my fellow workers
comes out of a back room with a forged letter of evidence
against me. I put the letter in my pocket and rhythmically push
the man so he backpedals down concrete steps and then falls in
the street. He crawls under a car. I pull him out and slam him
on the ground, then throw him up in the air to land on the car.
Now I'm coming up a long hill toward the hospital. Workers
laugh at my trouble (I've been fired). A black administrator
with a long face, who knows that the evidence against me was
made up, but who fired me anyway, stands on the steps, glaring
at me. I use a cheerleading cone to say to him, "You'll be sorry
later when you find out what a mistake you made." (I'm not
threatening him; I'm trying to persuade him.)
It's days later. I'm in like a bus station with other
people; we're all out of a job. I read on a low-resolution web
appliance that the administrator has been fired. That doesn't
make anything any better, but at least it's fair.
Next dream. I see an episode of a black-and-white
/Outer-Limits/-like teevee show about an alternate world where a
company or political party can see into very similar alternate
worlds and so get information to use to cheat in business and
politics.
I'm reading on the web about the show. My browser inserts a
link labeled /whore/ in the short horizontal list of links under
every item's title in a website like boingboing.net or
neatorama.com.
I half-remember unwisely clicking on and installing a
Firefox plugin that seemed like a clever thing at the time. I
know better than to click on the /whore/ link; it's probably a
virus. I try to ignore it and just read about the show, but in
and after an article about an episode of the show in a
particular Central California town the link appears more and
more in the body text, not just under the title.
Juanita's working at her computer about fifteen feet to my
right and back a little. We're in a farm field outside the town
the show is about. I tell Juanita about my link problem. She's
like, /Oh, Marco.../ --as in, /How could you not see that this
is an indication of infection./ She's right; it's probably the
cause of her browser consistently crashing; our computers are
connected. My fault.
Well, let's solve it.
Next dream. In Caspar (CA) sheeplike animal-people have
socks with tiny lines on them that you need a magnifying glass
to see. I go west down a dirt road to where the land disappears
into the water. Here's an old lady's house that's at the very
end of its life here --the land under it is being washed away;
the house will break off and fall into the water soon. Actress
Gina O'Feral is here; in the dream she's a real estate
counselor. The old woman won't leave her house. She wants to go
down with the ship. Okay. It's her choice.
Gina and I walk back up the road, talking. She vanishes. At
the pink house, here's my childhood dog Ferd, all healthy and
young-- or /is/ it Ferd? No, it's too big. /What's your name?/
No tags.
Now I'm in the air over Mendocino, wearing nothing but a big
t-shirt. I fly above a busy steamboat or layer cake of a
three-story restaurant. On Main Street Harry Rothman has just
finished presiding over a whole-town traditional holiday-time
gambling game. Everyone's happy and tired. I fly down the street
at about ten feet up and at the end turn north and rocket
instantly past Caspar, Fort Bragg, Cleone, Westport... A town I
don't recognize has a theater and some other connected buildings
that they're using for a college. Musician Philo Hayward is
teaching a drama class. I go into the theater's restroom and
marvel at how much they must have spent just on the flashy
plumbing and light fixtures in this one room.
I go outside, down to the water, walk and climb along rocks
under the dock pilings that hold up the buildings. A little boy
rides to a dangerous rock ledge on a tricycle with purely
decorative wings. Someone's selling tomatoes the size of
softballs from a cart. Things become vague.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-04-09:
First dream. A man in a business suit stands in the dim
parking court of a square apartment or motel building. Menacing.
I go into a dim soundstage that's a business set up like the
/Time Tunnel/ control room but with folding tables pushed into a
big squared U-shape for the woman in charge to stand in the
middle. I'm here in the night, in their off-hours, to straighten
up the tables and make sure the computers are working right for
when they all come in tomorrow.
As I climb under the left corner of the U of tables I see a
financial advice show superimposed on this room, where stage
risers are set so a second similar business can be run by a
second group of people up four feet and forward from these
tables. The audio is an advertisement to invest in that second
business, which is innovative in that "it is not on the web, but
instead has people actually doing something."
I move across the linoleum floor under the center section of
the tables, periodically shoving a long continuous table to fit
it snugly against the risers' legs. (The second business has
become solid.) This under-table is here so the people standing
at the folding tables can put a foot on the bar that goes across
and relieve back strain.
Next dream. Dark night. Bad weather. A time-traveling
archeological/anthropological team is hiding in the top of an
impossibly tall tree, waiting for the perfect time to go down
and observe a historical event. I'm up here on the very edge of
the available sitting space. A woman shifts to relieve a cramp
and grabs the support branch where I already have it; she almost
falls by grabbing somewhere else so not to grab my hand. I say,
"Ma'm, if we're all hanging onto the same branch, we're in
trouble."
Down on the ground, on the edge of a plateau with a
perfectly straight edge, Juanita stands in the wind in her
wedding dress. The dress vanishes. We're lying in the grass
kissing and licking each other --this place is somehow also up
in the tree.
I'm driving a car and then riding in the back seat with the
other archeologists through a post-apocalyptic wrecked Central
California town. Wild kids throw rocks at the car. The driver is
being too careful not to run over kids in front of us; if they
see they can stop us, they will, and then of course they'll kill
us. /Get going. They'll get out of the way./
I come on foot to a school quad. Wild Lord-Of-The-Flies kids
are having a war, throwing rocks at each other. I use a tennis
racket to deflect rocks that come my way. Two-handed grip.
Later the school's open house party is winding down. Juanita
and I are in a corner of the quad, in tall grass. I discover
that she has a folded paper dinner napkin taped with medical
tape up between her legs. I say, "Did you invent this?" She
laughs and says, "You thought I was coming on to you." I say,
"I did. And?"
The sky is a beautiful Maxfield Parrish dark blue.
Next dream. A man is chased down by government agents in an
alley and killed. I go to him, hoping he's not all-the-way dead,
but he is. /I'll be in trouble for having seen this happen./
Raised bowling-ball-return tracks go across the inside of a
store on like Laurel Street in Fort Bragg (CA). I work here,
selling either things that come out of the wall on tracks, or
the tracks themselves, or shoes. (The window ledges are stacked
with shoeboxes.) An Oriental policeman comes in, asks questions.
I answer sarcastically. I'm fired.
I go back to the dream-back-story restaurant/hardware-store
run by my uncle Pat. My cousin Teedee is here. Pat serves a
table and gestures angrily for me to come with him into the
kitchen. I'm fired here too, which means I lose my dream-only
apartment.
I go out in the cold world with only my clothes. Time to
start over-- /again/.
At the train station I'm harassed by an old policewoman. I
startle and mystify her by flying up into the dark, then I fly
menacingly down at her where she has fled into the glass-roofed
side room of the station. She becomes hysterical. Her police
partner, an old man (maybe her husband), walks her around,
trying to calm her down by telling her she's acting crazy, which
doesn't work.
This is what life is like here in the Midwest: awful. But in
the dream it doesn't occur to me to just leave and go to
California, to /fly/ to California. I have to wait for a train
to hide on the roof of.
Next dream. I'm standing on my house's roof, reassembling my
stovepipe with new sections of old-fashioned single-wall
stovepipe. There's a mirror at the top and the bottom; I can see
light out the top by looking down. One section of flue slides
onto the next too easily and goes down around the lower pipe,
which makes the whole thing is too short. I pull it all back
apart and try again.
Now I'm down on the ground next to my house in a strange
Russian village of little houses. I adjust the pipe so the seam
goes up the side that will face the corner inside the house and
so above the roof the seam will go up the side away from the
other houses.
An old hillbilly woman is directing her big strong retarded
son to load and carry irregular chunks of firewood in a garden
cart. My employer Tim walks over here to inspect my work. I'm
talking like the woman and her son, asking them, "Fahh towked
lahk thih-yus, would ah foo-will you thet thih-yus w'za why ah
towked alla tahm?" The woman says, "Huh? Whuh?" I say more
--street names and things you might say on the telephone, like
for business-- and my fake accent mutates into a sort of
movie-stereotypical New-York/Midwest accent with D for TH and
then T for D. Tim is impatient; he wants to go back to whatever
he was doing at another house. I think of telling him that I'll
be finished with the stovepipe in five minutes. I know I'm on
the clock, but I'm having too much fun blathering at the old
woman.
My dream from Thursday, 2008-04-10:
Everyone is lounging around in a strange suburban house,
about to have a pre-meeting about putting together a theater
show later in the summer. I have a toy that's a sheet of
electronic paper, a touch-screen (touch-paper) computer, with
the titles of popular 1940s and 1950s magazines arranged pressed
against each other to fill the space. I hover my pen over a
magazine title and that title expands slightly to indicate a
mouse-over --it's a Flash game-- and when I tap the pen on a
title, music and sounds play. /I'll use this toy to make sounds
for the play./
A dream-telephone bell wakes me from sleep; still in the
dream I answer it. Doug Nunn is calling. He plays unevenly
sped-up video sound into his phone, then gets back on the phone
and says something's obviously wrong. I say, "Another file goes
with it. If that's missing, strange things happen." Doug wants
me to come to his house and fix it, and also they're having an
after-show party for the Hit-And-Run Theater show they did last
night; he invites me to that. /Come now, why don't you?/
I drive east through fruit-tree farms, cross Highway 1 (CA)
at about where Caspar is, and instantly this is dry Nevada
desert. Jerry is hitchhiking to the party; I stop and pick him
up.
Jerry gestures for me to pull over; I turn off into the
sand. I hear water running, a river, but can't see it from here.
KMFB's Late Night Liz climbs up from under a bridge and walks
toward the road. She's in a bathing suit and carries a bag and a
towel. /This must be where she goes to bathe./
I have to piss. A gas station appears. I go into its
restroom and figure out the high-tech toilet, which is a bowl of
slowly swirling water in the center of the floor. When you stand
near the bowl, the water not only swirls but continually
flushes. Move back to the doorway and the water becomes quiet
and just swirls. Huh. I reach from the door and wave my hand
near the bowl. It doesn't flush. /Does it use capacitance to
sense, or light, or what?/
A truck and another car are parked by my car. I run there,
all energetic. Everyone's meeting here.
I discover that I have a cufflink-like piercing in my right
shoulder; an inch-long metal shard goes in and out of the skin
to hold a metal ring there. When did I do that? /Why/ did I do
that? I pull the shard out and put it and the ring in my pocket.
Most of the people here are hippies who I don't know. A girl
who looks like Karen Katz (Jordie's older sister) drives up.
Someone says, "Karen came down to pick up [Three-Name Person]."
I effortlessly jump three feet up to balance on the rear
bumper of the truck. I say, "I feel /great/. I got plenty of
sleep."
I want to go swimming. I move away in the direction of the
sound of water, go under the bridge, climb around the right side
of the hill. Water comes from a spring and runs down to a river
far below. I put my head in the little creek near the spring,
hold my breath and wash my face and hair.
Horns honk. I run back to the road, doing impossible
martial-arts leaps and flips. A man on the little ridge next to
the bridge apologizes for watching my martial arts practice.
(This martial arts expert is awestruck and humbled by how
amazing what I just did was.) I tell him it's nothing, that I
just feel good today.
More people drive up.
-end-
|
