My dreams from Friday, 2008-04-11:
First dream. I'm riding in a dusty truck with my (dead)
stepfather Roland to my new job, which is to record political
meetings for a city government's archives. I have no recording
equipment, but that's not a problem because we're not there yet.
I think through my options. My first choice is to go straight to
whoever's in charge of the event and say, "Give five hundred
dollars to your driver and tell him to go get [list of things:
camera, recording media, tripod]."
Bumpy road. California Central Valley. Grapes of Wrath.
Next dream. In a flying hotel room, a Victorian woman has
left an electric heater blowing noisily. She comes back in with
her friends; each one turns on something electrically wasteful.
They're all excited about what they'll do when the hotel finally
gets to /Brunswick/.
I'm the house troubleshooter. I go around the room switching
things off without calling attention to myself. I go downstairs
to the front desk and get the clerk to phone ahead to
/Brunswick/ and make sure the women have reservations, so we
won't have to keep the flying hotel there, grounded, just so
they can live in it.
Next dream. In the dream the old Community School is in a
dormitory where in real life is Matheson Theater. Gypsies talk
about kids having to protect grownups from what goes on next
door.
Next door is a bar. Two boys go in and become two
twenty-something girls. The bartender gives them the job of
running the place and goes into the back to take a nap. The
girls happily drink with the customers and play pool.
An expert pool player demonstrates his impossible tricks,
including one where a bowling ball acts like a sheepdog to round
up all the regular pool balls.
Boxers come in with gym equipment. It's their turn to use
the room. Everyone else picks up and leaves.
Next dream. Movie people down on their luck come to stay
with me and some others squatting in an abandoned building. A
wild amoral man in the mold of Dennis Hopper in /Blue Velvet/
takes me and someone named Gus in his taxicab, which becomes a
Winnebago with curtains all around including in front of the
Dennis Hopper; he tells me about Gus' drugged night, which
explains why Gus is dazed and sick to his stomach. The blind
Winnebago careens around corners.
An antenna mast that comes down through a hole in the roof
is reinforced by a brace made of two-by-fours bolted to the
wall. I inspect this.
Retroactively several others are along on the trip. Everyone
has gone up a walkway between plaster apartment buildings.
They're taking a long time doing whatever they went to do. I go
there just in time to see the man they're all bullying fall
behind a stairway. I run and push the Dennis Hopper character to
fall after the man he just killed. They're both down in a deep
shaft between the plaster stair rail and the concrete box
holding the landscaping back.
Gus says to me, "Will you turn us in?" I say, "/Turn/
you?!"
Cops have come and processed everyone. My former wild
friends, released on bail, I guess, all drive away in a VW bus.
I go into the apartment that the cops appropriated for the
investigation; I'm looking for a woman cop to tell everything
to, and so straighten everything out. The women at the front
desk just aren't right --they're more like cheerleaders than
cops; they only want to wrap up their part of the business here
and go home. At the back of the room, actor Richard Dreyfus (a
cop) sits talking with his two little boys. He's out of a job,
discouraged but not broken. I say, "I'm here to change your
life." He says, "I don't need that. I need a friend." I say,
"That's what I meant. Come on out here; I wanta show you
something." What will I show him?
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-04-12:
First dream. I'm lying on my side in a plaza or patio next
to a big modern house. Kids come out in a pack to play. A little
boy standing inside, looking through the wall-window at where I
am on my small bed, says to someone behind him, "I'm scared of
that man."
Now I'm on the same bed but inside, in the living room. I'm
naked with only a red sweater to put over my middle. I slept
here and I've waited too long to get out; everyone's awake and
coming downstairs. A smart older girl on the couch next to my
bed is amused at my being embarrassed. That makes it okay.
The house is mirror-flipped and becomes a multipurpose room
--a gym/theater-spacein a school. All the kids from before are
putting on a musical play. I'm in the play, in the same position
as before on the bed but I have clothes on now. My part is to
lie here and pretend to be asleep. The kids sing a version of
/At The Hop/ with all different words, that makes it seem like
something from /West Side Story/ or /Rent/. Two boys run around
behind me and emerge with my wallet, looking through it. /Hey!/
Next dream. Juanita has been nursing a thumb-size aquatic
mouse-weasel-hedgehog creature back to health, keeping it wet in
a stainless-steel dishwashing sink. It's drying out. I run water
over it, go get involved in something else (email?), remember
what I was doing and hurry back to find the water is over the
animal's head. I let the water out. The creature is breathing,
still alive. /Relief./ I roll it over and over on doubled toilet
paper. It's cold.
My dream from Sunday, 2008-04-13:
As a condition of being saved by grant money, a theater
company like the one in the teevee show /Slings and Arrows/
agrees to have three days of its existence recorded by a
Twilight-Zone-story-like process that traps them into living in
just those three days over and over. But the same things don't
happen each time. Confusing.
My dreams from Monday, 2008-04-14:
First dream. In the back-story of the dream Juanita and I
have been traveling a long way on trains or buses or spaceships.
Now we're walking on park grass in a strange country. We're
naked, holding hands --the people here have a problem with this;
people don't ever touch each other here, and they never take
their clothes off. I pick Juanita up and fly up into the sky to
go to another city; the whole country can't be crazy.
There's a secret laboratory where they encase people in
little cocoon-like boxes in refrigerators and modify their genes
to make them passive. Juanita and I cooperate to lure a
low-status scientist away from the others and tell him that the
police will be here in twenty minutes.
Next dream. Juanita's seriously performing an /explosion
drop/ experiment that involves fine wire laid out in all
directions throughout a small Midwestern town. We go to
different places marked on her map, set up a little catapult and
calibrate it, then use it to throw a plaster egg that explodes
like a grenade when it hits the ground. Now an Oriental family
is helping, has been helping all along. I'm afraid they'll be in
trouble later for having helped foreigners (scientists not from
here, the Midwest of China)-- also, the next place we're
supposed to throw an exploding egg is a schoolyard full of kids
standing around looking bored.
Things change so Juanita is sleeping on the grass in the
park. I call off the experiment. The Oriental family is
relieved; they start walking home, but I say, "We have to wind
up the wire." They come back, each takes a crank-spool, and we
go off in all directions, retrieving all the hair-fine enameled
copper wire.
There's also something here about a barn with shelves and
shelves of terra cotta pottery.
Next dream. Two burners on a stove have been left on to dry
out an upside-down toaster-oven-thing. A cross between theater
techie Nora and Tim's bookkeeper Nang tends the toaster
rehabilitation job and tells me, in happy, childish sing-song
chatter, the story of a tiny ceramic Pomeranian dog that went
two hundred fifty miles all by itself.
I go to a busy narrow L-shaped roadhouse bar that's all dark
wood inside. In the back-story of the dream I have introduced
music into this place; I'm responsible for the bar having a
piano and a bass guitar. Tonight's musicians show up with lots
more instruments, so, okay, my plan is working. As I leave I
say, "You guys have a nice New Year's?" A man at the bar
grumbles, "That was three weeks ago."
I come to Mendo Micro from the parking lot. Someone has put
a fence up that's like a long zigzag set of house walls with
doors in them for gates. I use a screwdriver to chisel
latch-holes so a knob-latch and a deadbolt fit right. /What's
the point of a deadbolt here? Anyone who wants to can just climb
over, or go around through the garden./
Next dream. I'm walking in socks through a strange city.
(The character I am here walks in socks and no shoes for health
reasons.) I cross a wide intersection where several streets come
together. There are water tracks painted on the road by car
tires from nearby places where it rained or firemen put a fire
out. A mean criminal man who looks Neanderthal (like Neil Young)
comes here in a /wide/ old pickup truck and tries to run me
down. I fly up and come down hard with my heels on the truck cab
roof's thin plastic stained-glass roof window, crush it in. I
jump down to dent the hood in. The driver is baffled by this; he
could see me to aim at me and try to kill me but once I left the
road I became invisible to him, so his truck is destroying
itself.
I fly toward the ocean down a street lined with tall jagged
juniper trees; I slalom between them, pretending to be swinging
like Spiderman.
Saqi is on the ground but somehow while I keep flying we
have a face-to-face conversation. She's peeved about something,
but she won't say what.
A sign where the street makes an L to the right says /Rahul
Abu Ibn Habbibi Road./ Sand dunes. Patches of iceplant.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-04-15:
First dream. In the /next/ part of the ordeal, the people
being tested go into a room and a cartoony white plastic robot
face says slow low-pitched nonsense words, then shoots the
people with a gun that's inside the same mouth that was just
talking. Wow! Harsh game.
Kay and I are outside a community play on the north side of
Highway 128 in Boonville (CA). Kay drinks from a jug of wine,
puts it down and wobbles around it. To keep her from kicking it
over I put it in the cage that holds trash cans together.
It gets too dark to see. I bump into Kay and apologize. Kay
just keeps talking and talking like the robot was earlier (in
the play), but at normal speed. It's still nonsense.
/When will the bus get here? I'm cold./
Next dream. An old man, /Ol' Grampa/, sits in a chair,
staring at nothing, drugged or senile or both. I and some people
with me are the last to go up to a house on a hill.
Spaceship soldiers have thick plastic rings around their
necks, by which the enemy controls them. They stand at
attention, four abreast, fifteen deep. The ones in front lie
down, the next few rows duck; they all fire their guns.
I come back down to Ol' Grampa's house to report. Some
others are already here and have gone crazy from the stress of
war and by resisting their neck-ring control. A fat old soldier
gets up out of Ol' Grampa's chair --Ol' Grampa has become this
soldier; he pulls a baking pan of grenades from a slot next to
the kitchen sink, and he /throws/ it out the door at other
survivors just arriving. Good thing he didn't pull any of the
pins! /But he might next time./ I turn him upside-down, kneel,
holding him up with one hand around his neck and the other
twisting the back of his pants, and I pound and pound his head
on the floor, saying --grunting, rather-- "You! Fat! Fuck!
....You! Fat! Fuck!" --over and over until I'm sure he's dead.
Next dream. A former soldier shares his stories of fighting
in the Philippines. In a story, or after the telling of the
story, Mendocino local character Strange Bob pushes a
wheelbarrow of watermelon-size rocks down a hill, leading a
dozen tired soldiers. In the house at the bottom of the hill, my
college friend Dan's little sister Jeannette's schoolfriend
Paula is at the age she was in the late 1970s but she has dry
gray hair; she's old and crazy. A pill instantly makes her sane
and we talk like patient and therapist about the voices she
hears in between pill-times.
Now we're on a cold beach. I say, "Look at that sunset!"
(It's the orange sun shining through a glass globe on a rock.)
Paula wades out into the water to see the sun closer. She
becomes Mendocino actress Jill Taylor. A water swell comes in,
goes back out and goes /way/ out, like just before a tidal
wave. I shout, "Jill! Jill!" She doesn't hear me; she's
watching the people on the beach that's farther down where until
a moment ago there was ocean. I can't help those people; they're
too far out. I shout, "Jill! Come now! Something bad will
happen!" The pill is wearing off; she's just gonna stand there.
I run to her, grab her hand and start running away from the
ocean. Jill says, "Is this my boyfriend?" I say, "It is now.
Just run."
We get to rocks and go up a dirt-rock cliff. At the top,
blocking the trail, is a rotting house. I pull rotten wood away
to make a big enough hole to go through, to go farther away from
the ocean.
It isn't Jill anymore. It's somebody else entirely.
Next dream. Juanita and I are kissing, leaning against a
cafeteria kitchen counter. School's out. We go out, cross a
street, get into, or rather onto, a tiny squared-chalk-shaped
motorized cart. I drive the cart up stairs that are also a
ladder. I say, "Wait-- is this where to go?" No.
We get off, move the chalk-cart across to the other ladder
and go up that. Tracy Burns and a strange man are far below,
comically arguing about something and sneezing.
We get to the bus that will take me to movie camp. Oh,
dammit, I didn't pack any clothes or a toothbrush or anything.
/Bye, Juanita! I'll call you from there!/ Why am I going away
from Juanita? This sucks.
At movie camp in a big meeting cabin in mountains the main
movie guy and his helpers strut around reciting moviemaking
aphorisms. A last helper finally shows up. The main guy tells
him, "Play the surprise first thing in the morning." Another
helper swings a saw the way you swing an ax, to chop at papier
mache Star-Wars-character heads on pillows. Time for bed.
I hope they have a shower here, to take a shower in the
morning. I wonder if I have time before then to just go back
down out of the mountains and get my clothes. Or maybe they have
extra clothes here. Like in the props and costumes department.
(The costume room at the Whale School.)
Next dream. I and another boy (I'm twelve or fourteen here)
are partners in entering a movie-making contest. We rehearse
pitching our idea for a movie that's about a ray gun --in the
way Black Beauty is about a horse and The Iron Giant is about a
giant robot; it's a /wonderful, history-changing ray gun./ Other
teams are scattered around a big camp place in a mountain
valley, all working on their pitches.
We climb down from the top of a log-cabin-like
sculpture-foam diving platform and go to where all the movie
kids will stay overnight in cabin dormitories.
It's night. A warm soft Midwestern-looking girl with
dirty-blond hair secretly meets her boyfriend in a dorm cabin
vacated by all the other kids having gone out to some camp
function. I'm this girl's boyfriend, a ghost; I hug and kiss her
from her left side while another ghost hugs her from the other
side and nuzzles her neck and ear. (I'm both ghosts.) (The other
boy has become the girl; she's my teammate now.)
Okay-- it's time to go out and show 'em what we've got,
which are magical sky-filling electrical special effects that we
don't actually have but that I feel confident I can will into
being when it's our turn, or I can at least describe them. I
imagine the aurora borealis roaring up out of the ray gun
--which... oh... Did you bring the gun? Where's the gun?
-end-
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