My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-04-16:
First dream. A singer who sounds like Nellie McCay reaches
the end of a long high-speed verse and the guitarist picks it up
there and winds on in the same style and pitch range.
In a department store at night, a girl detective is
searching for a dangerous man. She's frustrated; it's a big
place and there are lots of places to hide. She comes to where
I'm sitting with my legs under a big particleboard box, lifts
the box, and of course the man isn't under there, only my legs.
She sighs, looks around, blows a wisp of hair away from her
face. I say, "You can only do what you can do."
A checkout-counter woman keeps punching and knocking down a
crippled man she thinks is the criminal. He tries to get up and
she knocks him down again. /He knows where the criminal is, but
he can't get away from the woman to tell anyone that./ He gets
around into a glass office cubicle and stands up there, and the
woman rams him, through the glass, with a push-broom handle.
This is so not right. I want to step in to help but /helping
won't help/. Just everybody stop moving violently around and
it'll solve itself.
Next dream. An ore hopper about eighty feet long by half
that wide and deep is held hundreds of feet up in the air on
rusty iron scaffolding. The sides of the hopper are rusty iron
screens. I step off the edge and swing around the scaffolding to
the ground.
A woman lands a crop-duster biplane upside-down up there by
hooking it to an underside edge. She owns the hopper; she's
establishing her claim by being there. (In the back-story of the
dream, her brother had almost cheated her out of it.) Now she'll
need food and water to stay there. Also there's the problem of
her brother maybe reacting to losing the game by sabotaging the
scaffolding. I'll just hang around here until I'm sure I'm not
needed.
Next dream. I float around face-down at about head-height
through a giant department store. I go up a ramp into another
part of the store. An old tourist couple watch me coming their
way. The woman is amused at our quaint local customs (like
floating around in the store). She grabs at me --to tear loose a
souvenir?
I fly up to just under the ceiling, go to the other country
at the far end of the store, go outside and downhill to a
bedroom cabin in big rocks by the ocean, where Juanita and I
sleep. Juanita's already here, asleep.
Next day we get up (still in the dream) and go into the
store's diner section. The workers are all jolly and friendly;
everyone who works in the store eats breakfast here. It's like
the pub scene in /Shakespeare In Love/.
Next dream. It's night. I'm with others on the street where
I lived when I was in sixth grade; we're getting ready to fight
a battle using quiet, recoilless machine guns. The barrel of my
gun rocks back about six inches for each shot. I know better
than to hold it up like a regular rifle, but I forget and hold
it that way to fire a burst; it hits me in the cheek three
times, but does no damage and it doesn't hurt --lucky. /Always
shoot from the hip./
We're given clips of tracer shells to practice with. I use a
full clip to punch lines of text from something like an
eye-examination sign at the back of a house's garage.
In an operatic other-country version of Mendo Micro a man
has a high-tech little bomb. He set its timer going and puts it
in the clean shop. I wait till he leaves, go in and take the
bomb apart and make it safe. I worry that he might have more
bombs; I'll have to be vigilant.
I have an implied love relationship with a woman who has
black hair and black eyes and milk-white skin. Other women come
around; they're all war officers' wives. The person I am in the
dream lines up time alone with each of them.
Later I divert attention away from the Don Juan character so
he can escape the wrath of all the officers. The walkway between
the dirty shop and the parking lot becomes the trail that came
out of the trees at the baseball field near the lake at the
bottom of the road where I lived in seventh and eighth grades.
Intrigue. Sneaking around at night in the fresh air. Hiding
and running. Fun.
My dreams from Friday, 2008-04-18:
First dream. Cartoonist Mervin Gilbert has led --transported
blind, actually, rather than led-- about ten people to a hill of
snow and ice in blasting wind and low visibility. We're on skis
and we have folded-up hang gliders. We're supposed to use our
wits to figure out where we are. (I think it's Antarctica.)
Mervin gives one hint: "Go by the wind." Some people unfold
their hang gliders and the wind just turns them inside-out like
an umbrella. It occurs to me to wonder how the travel agency
gets any insurance for trips like this; I'm sure that half of
these people will be killed in finding their way. (I can just
opt out somehow; I'm not in danger.)
Minutes later I'm in a movie theater. Mervin helps me
through the lobby. (My toe hurts.) I say, "Hepatitis?" Mervin
says, "Hepatitis is very contagious." He's obviously not
worried about catching it from me, so it's probably not
hepatitis.
Next dream. A United-States-like country the size of
Oklahoma is being built in the middle of Mexico; it's called
/South of the Border States/, with states the size of counties.
I fly over the nearly completed new country of green farm fields
and a network of roads and arched highway bridges over rivers.
It's beautiful; they've done a wonderful job.
A Lincolnesque man gives a speech from the top of outside
steps, looking back over the top of the theater from the
previous dream. I'm in the lobby with a strange woman who stands
close to me, as though she came here with me, or she's keeping
an eye on me so I don't vanish.
At the end of the speech, all the people inside and outside
cover their hearts and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I hum
and mumble along, embarrassed by the sound of my own voice.
After the political festivities, and just before the
renovated theater's grand opening, I walk inward through the
lobby, using my fingers to eat something wet from a salad bowl I
have. (I'm the privileged son of the theater owners so I can be
rude.)
Later, outside, on the other side of the building, I'm
walking with a Dutch-looking girl (my girlfriend here). I put my
dish on a window counter, say goodbye to the girl and go into
the back of the theater to do my work, whatever that is.
A little Mexican boy is standing near where a duck stands on
a counter/partition that separates a concourse from a departure
lounge in an airport. I see that the duck's head is hollow. I
look closer at the hole in the side of its head; the hole gets
bigger as the head gets bigger-- there's nothing inside it at
all. I say to the boy, "Look at its head." The boy and I watch
as the duck turns and changes some more; now its beak is not
beige but nut-brown, blunt and sealed shut. I say, "Is it a
puppet?" The boy says, "How can it be?" It's a marvel. It's
alive, yet it's hollow.
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-04-19:
First dream. In a circus tent in the basement of a building
on another planet, yellow-gold point-source lights in spaghetti
glass tubes show the effect of time interference of a
golf-cart-like time machine. The lights move and the color
becomes more sepia for farther back in time. Also kitchen
implements and appliances come and go, depending on the time the
machine is in. Now I'm here before anyone knew there was a time
machine, so I don't have to worry about being watched
suspiciously.
I put on a helmet and ride around the circus tent standing
up on the back end of a motorcycle. Juanita watches, worried.
I've been too flamboyant; we're discovered by enemy time
travelers and have to flee. /Get on with me./
We go to a Chinese restaurant run by singer/director Linda
Pack in her /The Mikado/ costume. Two small-town louts hate each
other, bicker like sitcom characters, sit at opposite ends of a
long table to be far apart but continue to interact
dysfunctionally. I move to be in a party of yuppie kids and eat
from the big plates in the middle of their tables.
Where's Juanita?
Juanita and I are in my car. I do a 270-degree U-turn, cross
a gas station's parking lot and go up a street in a strange
dictatorship version of Roseville (CA). This street gets narrow
and goes through a fleamarket in fruit-drying sheds. An Oriental
cop on foot stops me. He says, "Park over there." (He wants to
take his break. He'll search the car when he gets back.) I wait
till he's gone and continue driving.
Next dream. In a dim wooden gym in a cold country a
three-boy band has set up to play music, but they don't want to
be the band anymore. The bass player hands me his bass. The
other two boys also give their instruments away. I turn the
volume up on a homemade two-channel preamplifier and play
repeating bass runs, waiting for the others to catch on and play
along. They probably won't, but I want them to.
Next dream. It's the time of year when they let reporters
come to a party in a mansion of political power. The reporters
are on two levels of power-- the rich and accepted, and /other/.
I'm in a back room that's like the banquet room/kitchen area
of my grandparents' restaurant when I was little. Actress Cindy
Triplett is bustling about, cooking; she's dressed in 1950s
style. I wander around, say, "I'm looking for something..." When
I get to an open oven with doughy melted plastic glop in it, I
say, "That's not it." Cindy laughs.
A reporter who looks like actor Richard Dreyfus comes in.
He's no longer in the elite tier --he's reported the truth about
something and so he's shunned by his former friends. He pulls
the top of his shirt open for a bejeweled former-friend reporter
woman; he says, "Put one right there." /Will she kiss his chest?
Or punch him?/
I say, "I'm going out to my car to get something." Cindy's
worried; she says, "Don't." (Don't run the risk.)
I block the front drawbridge-door of the mansion open with a
heavy glass samovar so I'll be able to get back in. The path
away from the mansion is a tunnel of camouflage netting. I come
to where a security cop woman is directing the flow of foot
traffic of the non-elite reporters' families; she doesn't want
to let me go out the side of the tunnel to parking lot. I say,
"I'm going to my car." She says, "It isn't there." I say, "If
it isn't, I'm calling the police." I push past her and get out.
The parking lot has no cars in it; it's a lookout point. A
few tourists are here taking pictures of each other and their
pet dogs. I go to the rail and climb over it. A tourist woman
reaches over to put her hand on my shoe. I say, "Don't touch
me." (I'm about to fly off the rail and if she's holding onto my
foot we both could be hurt.)
I step into the air and fly out over a camouflaged
industrial countryside. Huge air blowers for the underground
buildings are painted green to be invisible from jet-height. I
curve around in a search pattern. I can't find the way down
inside the mansion again. I'm lost. I'll never get back.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-04-20:
First dream. In a dim theater that's for people to sleep in,
I'm a small naked child sitting in the lap of my dream-only
father or guardian. I have just shat into a toilet on the floor
between the man's legs; he sets out toilet paper on his leg for
me to use. An evil enemy man and his evil henchman policeman,
two rows in front of us, talk about testing my hearing, which is
code for causing me harm. They get up and come up the aisle,
holding knives out before them, feeling their way. (They can't
see as well as I can; they can't see that I'm looking right at
them.) I say, "You come one step closer and I'll kick your
tongue down your throat." They don't hear this, which I
attribute to how mumbly it came out. I repeat it clearly,
perfectly.
Juanita woke me up and said, "Was that enough help?" I
said, "Did I say, 'Come one step closer and I'll kick your
tongue down your throat?'" She said, "Something like that, but
mostly, 'Help, help.'" Oh.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm walking at night in a deserted
industrial park. I come to a place that feels familiar, a door
at the corner of a warehouse. The lock-knob isn't turned the
right way. Did I leave it unlocked when I was here before?
Should I go in and check around for theft? I push the button
down with my knuckle so not to get my fingerprints on it.
Once inside I see a telescope image of the moon. I want to
filter it; I gesture to someone near the curtains. He doesn't
understand. I say, "Curtain?" meaning /Pull the curtain more
shut./ He still doesn't get it... I go to the window and
Scotch-tape toilet paper to the glass, then paper towels, then
aluminum foil. There, /dark/.
My dreams from Monday, 2008-04-21:
First dream. I coast slightly downhill on a dirt driveway,
in a Volkswagen bug, engine off, lights off. The driveway goes
along below my employer Tim's dream-only newly renovated house
on the side of a hill. Now I'm walking on a trail higher up than
the house. (There's a hint of a complicated back-story and a
reason for me being here, but I didn't get to keep any of that.
There's the feeling you have at the end of /Notes On A Scandal/
where Judi Dench's character is about to hang her lonely sick
hopes on another victim, and that's annoying because so
predictable.
I walk east in a place like the Comptche road but with no
towns around. I'm just out for the walk.
Time to go back the other way. I turn around and now I'm
pushing a clothes rack made of steel pipes on two golf-cart
tires, one tire in front and one in back. An elephant follows
about twenty feet behind me.
The elephant becomes a horse. When we come to where
elephants are meeting off the right side of the road, the horse
leaves me to go there. I wonder if there'd be offspring if a
horse mated with an elephant... Probably not. (Of course not.)
The weather gets colder. I come to a mountain bedroom city
of thin-pastel-green-sheet-metal houses made so long ago that
the metal roofs have all been dented and pushed in just by
people going up there to adjust their antennas once every few
years.
I participate in a sit-up contest; in the dream I can do
sit-ups continuously, tirelessly, because I can take a break by
watching myself do sit-ups from across the exhibition hall. I
look like actor Eddie Murphy. I become a local celebrity sit-up
star and make friends with a pretty white girl. Time passes.
I'm who I really am again, not Eddie Murphy. I make friends
with a pretty black girl who spends our entire first date on an
inclined bench practicing her sit-ups. Funny.
Something goes wrong so it turns out that there was a
judging problem and they're saying that I shouldn't have won the
contest in the first place. I don't care; I'm tired of it here--
it's dark night all the time. I ride with actress Kim Basinger
in a slow, self-steering motorboat up a canal toward another
city. (Kim Basinger also is tired of the aluminum city.)
Now I'm flying at night down the first valley, (the one like
the way to Comptche from Mendocino, earlier-- which in real life
is not a valley but a ridge road). An insubstantial female
Medieval-art angel flies next to me. Streamers of faint white
light hang in the air above the north side of the valley. I say,
"That's your brother?" The angel nods meaning, /Yes but no./
We fly over a low-rise, spread-out city like Los Angeles.
There's light in the air around a temple (or theater). The sound
of synthesized angels' voices singing comes from the light. The
angel with me agrees that the man famous for always speaking in
that building, who's speaking there now, is a great man.
We come to a small town where the angel's mortal
ten-year-old little brother is a radio genius; he's working on a
shoebox-size steampunk-looking radio transmitter. We're here to
protect him from the bad angels while he completes his device;
it has something to do with the streamers of light that we
passed on the way here.
Next dream. I walk with Juanita down out of hills to a wide,
flat valley. When we come to a pipe-frame fence with vines
growing all over it, a wave-wall of mud rushes this way from
across the valley. I say, "Hold on to the pipe. That's all you
have to do. Come on." She holds the pipe and I hold the fence
and the pipe with my arms around her. The mud gets this far but
doesn't wash past us; it stops at the fence. Somehow without
having to wait for the earth to dry we go way across the flat
place to a house that has fresh clean water in a swimming pool.
(The mud wave was split by the house and didn't ruin the pool.)
Whoever owns this house is probably not coming back here. We
can live here for awhile. There's plenty of water... But what
will we eat? I think about going back to the hills, to the last
place we were (?), to get my shotgun (?), so I can shoot animals
for food. Juanita hears my thought and says she will never eat
any animals. I say, "You have to eat to live."
There's a low humming. The refrigerator? Is there electric
power here? No, a truck is coming. Ominous.
Much later Juanita and I are walking on a wide dirt road
through fields of green food plants. Policemen/soldiers control
slaves/refugees working in the fields. Everyone sits down to
rest. I say to a policeman, "May we have a leaf?" He goes to a
romaine lettuce plant, breaks off a leaf, gives it to me. I tear
it and give Juanita the big half.
Next dream. There's the sense of a lot of time passing while
I watch and move through a disjointed three-dimensional slide
show of Mendocino and other places I've lived.
I woke up with the Elvis Costello song /Brilliant Mistake/
playing in my head. The first part. "He thought he was the king
of America, where they drink Coca-Cola just like cherry wine..."
I just looked it up. The line is /vintage/ wine, not cherry
wine.
-end-
|
