My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-04-22:
First dream. I'm in a British subway train. A woman looks
sad and confused. I say, "May I help you where you're going?"
She doesn't know where she wants to go. We get off the train and
wander around in a vast underground parking lot with concrete
pillars holding up the ceiling.
The woman sees something she wants to do-- kids are rolling
plastic dishes in overlapping recessed trolley car tracks,
playing a game like marbles. I buy a plastic dish from a little
boy who's so good at the game that he's won a whole armload of
them, and I give it to the woman. She gets ready to roll it.
She's /so happy/.
Next dream. I ride my bicycle on a paved path south through
a haphazard housing development on the coast. After a party is
over, I help photographer Liz Haapanen clean up. In the
refrigerator is a box of leftover /cake cookies/ (flat pieces of
cake left stuck to the bottom of the box). I offer the box to a
strange woman who just walked in; she takes it.
Liz and I go out of the kitchen and down narrow, rail-less,
wooden outdoor steps. She's going before me; she loses her
balance and falls from about thirty feet up, but the grass is
soft and she's not killed, just shaken. I pick her up and carry
her.
She vanishes. I park a utility trailer frame on the outside
of where a road makes an L. A big tractor-trailer rig leaves the
road at the L to go down into an industrial place; the shaking
of its passage dislodges my trailer so it rolls down the hill
and crashes into hay bales. Other little trucks and wheeled
things suffer the same fate; they all roll down and crash in the
same place and make a crumpled heap. The truck driver offers to
put everything right, so I change my mind about showing off for
a woman here by using telekinesis to lift the crashed things
apart, and instead I levitate the woman's cat to fly it around
just under the high ceiling of her apartment in this
otherwise-warehouse-like building that has grown to encompass
everything --the road, the hill, all. I levitate the woman too,
but get careless and bump her head against the ceiling. She's
okay. No harm done. She knows I didn't bump her head on purpose.
Next dream. A casino hotel has a tricky owner who cheats his
employees by playing them against each other. At the end of a
session of gambling, people line up at the cashier/clerk's desk.
A man in line knows he'll be tricked if it can be done, so he
holds his money rolled up in a rubber band in his hand where he
can see it. The woman in front of me in line owes the hotel some
money. I ask the cashier how much she owes. He won't tell me. I
say to him, "I have seventy dollars coming," meaning to pay her
bill with that. I turn to the woman and ask her if seventy is
enough. She doesn't know.
I walk out through a cluttered L-shaped office where they've
lined all windows --a lot of windows-- with pale-green plastic
on the outside of the glass. I tell someone with me about a rich
kid buying panels of framed stained glass. As I tell it, the kid
was careless with money; he focused on the task he was set,
which was to decorate an office with stained-glass things. He
just marched into the stained-glass store and said, "I'll take
two of /these/, and /this/, and /these three/..."
In a dark dusty inner office a funny Zero-Mostel-like
business crook enlists his cleaner/carpenter to deliberately
mistake one business paper for another in an insurance-policy
scheme that's like bank-check kiting. They do this sort of thing
all the time. They don't need to go over what to do.
Next dream. People stand in several lines in a yard of low,
blocky school buildings. As I walk by, someone I don't want to
look at asks me, "How was it?" --meaning, /How was the trip to a
Chinese city? How was the city?/ I say loud enough to be heard
as I go away around a corner, "Very clean... except for the
blood... and the occasional dissident's arm or leg part..."
The woman I helped with seventy dollars in the previous
dream is here in sharp focus; she's like actress Tricia Helfer
(Model Six in /Battlestar Galactica/) but twenty or thirty years
older and with big makeup-flesh-colored moles on her face and
neck. I'm a reporter. The woman is paying me back for helping
her, by using her pass card to get me up into a high-class
shopping level up in a skyscraper. Okay, we're in. I have an
hour, then I have to meet her back here at the entry port, at
the elevator.
The stores are all Christmas-themed. One store sells rugs
that are slightly post-Reagan-era political cartoons. At the far
corner of this store, Kay Rudin is sitting at a table with her
friend. Kay sees me, calls to me and starts talking a hundred
miles an hour in her scratchy Peppermint-Patty voice. /I'm
trying to be secret here./ I gesture for her to shut up. She
doesn't get it. I scurry out.
I'm late getting back to the elevator. Old Model Six is
getting in the elevator with the others going down. I'm late.
She's worried for me, but she warned me and she did what she
agreed to do, so there's nothing to be done about it; I'm stuck
here.
I go to an emergency escape ladder-tube that goes /up/ from
the ground floor. I haven't been up in the building yet; I'm
trying to get up in there this way. I pull the weighted ladder
down out of the tube. A homeless man comes down. The tube goes
nowhere; there's just enough room for someone to sit in it on
the retracted ladder to get out of the weather. /I need to find
some high-class person with a pass card to get me up there./
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-04-23:
First dream. I have a closeup view of a wristwatch that has
a white sticker stuck across the glass. I pull the sticker off;
it takes the glass with it and now the watch is a frightening
diorama with life-size white papier mache dead people in it,
arranged as they might have been found in the bottom of a stone
well.
In a dungeon, government men shake the watch (now it's eight
feet across and there are more papier mache people every time I
look); this is part of a murder gangster's punishment. The
legend is that he signals his innocence on certain special days.
They'll execute him soon, and I'm anxious because of course they
should wait until they've observed an innocence signal, just in
case he's, you know, innocent, but /how do I or they know he's
the gangster? He might even be one of the government men and
they're tormenting a lot of innocent papier mache dead people.
/Why does this always happen?/
Things become vague. I'm shown lists of single words, each
one of which is evidence /against/ the conviction of someone (a
different person for each word) who is already in prison. Most
items are highlighted in pastel colors, the way previously
visited web links are, meaning here that they've been read and
checked for veracity, but nobody's paying attention to this. The
people will never be let out of prison.
Okay, so we should /bust/ them out. And when someone says,
"What if some of them are guilty?" I'll say, "So?"
It's just a watch. With sticky paper on it. Huh?
Next dream. A movie-stereotypically-pretty wild
twenty-something girl and her friend confer over how best to
care for the girl's new baby. They find that they have two weird
plastic bottom-heavy alien dolls the size of a computer CRT
monitor --one more than they need-- and the baby's mother gives
me one. I hand it back and say, "Give this to your little
girl." It never hurts to have a spare.
It's night. I'm in an open three-car garage on a plateau.
Two or three people lie down to sleep on cots. A man who used to
walk back and forth all day between Fort Bragg (CA) and
Mendocino playing his guitar sits up smoking a cigaret. In the
back-story of the dream he and I worked together at Brannon's
Restaurant in the early 1980s --he was a dishwasher while I
worked on the line. I say, "You were always so /conscientious/.
You really seemed like you were paying attention to every dish."
I pace around on the gravel lot in front of the garage. I go
to the edge of the plateau. Here's a thick-glass bottle broken
in two big pieces and smaller pieces down to glass dust. I
gather the small bits in the bigger ones and carry the glass,
spilling some on the way, to trash cans full of chunks of
concrete.
I wander around the radio tower next to the garage. (A
painfully bright floodlight halfway up the tower provides all
the light here.) I'm not sleepy.
Here's my Mercury. Others drive up and get out of their
various vehicles. A man see my guns that are on top of the pile
of clothes in my back seat. One gun is a long twelve-gauge pump
shotgun. The man says, "Better put those away." I say, "I just
got them out of the field." More people drive up. Time passes.
The gun-warning guy and the guitar guy talk about our
experiences with guns. I tell about my schoolfriend Randy, who
was killed, shot to death by crazy boys in 1995. I say, "Randy
tried to teach me how to shoot. I could use a rifle, but I never
could hit anything with one of these." (The shotgun.) "We'd go
out twice a month." (Shooting. In the early-middle 1970s.)
Two little dogs, both a lot like my childhood dog Pepper,
but different colors, yap and run around. Everyone chuckles
about how cute they are. I compose in my mind an explanation of
why everyone thinks that kind of dog is cute --something like,
/It's their human-like flat faces and how far apart their eyes
look./ But too much time has passed since it occurred to me to
say something about that; I'll have to say something else.
Next dream. I'm upstairs on the balcony of a very old
bare-wood rectangular theater, where the stage and balcony are
on the long walls, not the short ones. There's one dim gooseneck
lamp for over the sound and light controls; it's not enough. I
find a regular desk lamp, but its energy-saving twist bulb's
tube is broken open at one pole.
A pasty-white naked boy who looks a little like actor Brad
Pitt runs across a dry valley, occasionally dropping to one knee
to fire a rifle then getting up to run in a new direction.
Somehow three men, two with military flamethrowers, get close
enough to be dangerous, but Brad Pitt turns at the last instant
and shoots them all.
Now he's in his apartment, which is the empty old wooden
theater; he's in bed, boredly masturbating using his hand in a
sock for a handpuppet. An exotically beautiful Dutch-looking
girl with blonde hair and dark eyebrows comes in by a side door,
so there's the frame of a wall mostly cutting off her view; she
thinks her boyfriend is having sex with someone else and she
gets all upset. He goes to her, shows her the sock. They both
laugh about how they almost had a fight about nothing.
Something happens here so the boy hasn't gone out into the
dry place to run and shoot yet. He's alone. He steps under a
wooden frame that will hold a parachute and his sword, then puts
on a long trenchcoat over the frame. I become him and experiment
with walking and running, determine that there's no way to look
natural in public with all this stuff hanging on you.
I go up onto the roof where another man and his wife are
having trouble figuring out their parachutes. They're going to
jump off the building on the jungle valley side, so that's /base
jumping/, so the parachute pack should go on your back, not over
your belly, but the man thinks it goes in front. The woman looks
at me and gestures like, /Can you believe I married this idiot?/
The place belongs to another person entirely now. Bad people
come to kill him and the Dutch-looking girl; the person and the
girl jump out of bed, run up the inside back stairs to the roof
and jump and claw their way down the heavy Z-timbers outside and
down into the jungle. They move like wolf-tiger-creatures. The
danger is gone. I climb down after them.
Now, right after the naked running an shooting (and the
flamethrower men), the Brad Pitt boy is rounded up by a cross
between the Stitch Hessian character in the /Jaynetown/ episode
of /Firefly/ and KMFB's Les Tarr --a big bear of a man who says
he's taking Brad Pitt to the FBI. Brad Pitt says, "I'm going to
jail, then." Les Tarr says, "First you're gonna turn yourself
in, son, then you're goin' to the City to find some kids..."
(Les Tarr is giving Brad Pitt the same deal Vin Diesel was given
in /xXx/: do a police job and have your crimes erased.)
Two men are riding a powered
children's-illustration-biblical-ark boat up the river in the
jungle valley below the theater/apartment. They come to where
the river is so shallow that rocks stick up all the way across.
The guy who just got on the boat says, "How do we get past
that?" Boat owner says, "We pump air." He operates a control
that fills the smashed-in lower part of the boat with air; the
boat rises entirely out of the water and floats over the
problem. (I watch this from the riverbank, puzzled. What makes
it fly?)
I'm one of the boat guys. We have to take our blood out and
put it back in. We have plastic tubes and hot-water-bottle
bladders. The other guy is leery of using these crude things; I
am too, but we have to do it. I push the tubes into my left arm
and fill the bladders with my blood.
Okay, that's enough. Now I have to put my blood back in. I
use a plumber's oil torch to sterilize the ends of the tubes
(which somehow at this point haven't been stuck in my arm yet),
and while theh plastic is still soft I stick the tubes in and
hold the bladders up above my head. This works fine; all my
blood is back where it belongs. The other guy shakes his head.
He starts doing it to himself.
The Dutch girl from before is younger than the guys on the
boat, but she's the mother of one of them. The boat speeds away
upriver into the danger that required the blood project, leaving
the Dutch girl on the bank in this strange country. She goes
into what looks like a shopping mall, which is the home of the a
woman like Ellen on /Slings And Arrows/-- the woman is the ruler
here; she's very sweet to the Dutch girl; she understands
culture shock. "Do you want something to eat? What do you like
to eat? Do you drink milk?" The mention of milk reminds the
Dutch girl of the blood in the plastic tubes and she becomes
nauseous. Ellen says, "Ah, no. Come on, I'll show you where you
can lie down. You don't have a thing to worry about."
I woke up with an elevator-music instrumental version of
James Taylor's song /Sweet Baby James/ playing in my head.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-04-24:
First dream. I'm on the courtyard in the center of the
whole-block roof of an office building. I have a circuit card
that's half-populated with multi-pin chips; government spies who
work here generously offer advice about getting the remaining
chips for it. They correct the part numbers I was given. I would
have got the wrong chips. /Thanks./
I climb down inside the building with a boy who's a natural
expert at spying. He leads me through the building in a way that
lets us watch a business presentation without being detected.
After everyone has gone, we're going to get into a
/super/-secret place, using another method the boy knows: you go
out the front doors into the hot morning sun, blink hard twice,
run up the street to the way into the next place, stop, blink
twice, and go in. We've done this, but we made a mistake
somehow, so we have to go out, blink twice, run back to the old
place, blink twice, go in, turn around and start all over again.
This time it works. The spy expert boy, one other boy and I
are welcomed by a group of tough spy women; they mistake us for
well-trained recruits they've been expecting, and they give us
the job of going on a dangerous mission to Central America.
(They might even know we're impostors, but we're obviously
expendable, and we're /here/, so...)
We're given ragged string-tied pants to wear. Our t-shirts
are okay, so we keep them. They give us white sailor hats. A
younger, less-tough girl will lead us to the boat and send us
off. On the way there, the girl takes us aside into a room in a
warehouse and tests us, for her own satisfaction, as to whether
we're who she thinks we are; she says, "What does my sister
teach?" I think of ways to answer-- I can be cocky and say, "I
could tell you, but then I'd hafta kill you," or should I be
honest with her and try to get out of the job? I say, "Pretend
we're fakers and brief us." This way we'll know enough to
actually do the job. Really, how hard can it be?
We're all on the boat, going. The girl has come along to
help.
Next dream. There's been a low-level normal disaster in a
port city. A crane swings me out over the worst of the smoke and
vehicle wrecks and etc. (all normal and common, but this
directed view makes it seem much worse). I'm cooperating with
others by radio to do funny fake news reports about how this is
practically the end of all civilization everywhere... but in the
middle of all this, little animals are streaking down through
the sky at simultaneously tremendous speed and a dead stop; I
see a closeup view of a mouse --not Mighty Mouse, just a regular
mouse-- in the air.
Now it's all a serious disaster, an alien attack, one aspect
of which is these animals in the air. I foil the attack by
removing the flying mouse with Photoshop.
The civil authorities are getting services back together
again. They can handle repairing and rebuilding; they don't need
me. I go to my car where a residential road makes an L. I hear
on the radio that people who are using long extension cords can
go back to living normally. I figure, living normally would
include plugging in heavy loads like an electric heater once in
awhile, so I feel okay about using this extension cord from the
city to top off the charge in my battery.
A car comes this way. I hide behind my car. The other car
lets out a furtive boy and goes away. I get into my car, lock
the doors, duck down. I watch from overhead (?) as the boy
sneaks around through the bushes at the side of the road and
appears at the driver's window, pulling on the door handle. He's
all surprised that I'm in the car; he was just going to steal
it.
The others from the radio project before are here now.
There's no car. We've captured the thief boy and we're walking
up the road to --I dunno-- turn him in? He swears up and down
that he will never be bad again if we will just take him home.
Where's home? Right up the street, here, where we're going
anyway.
He leads us into a house, down the hallway to a bedroom, and
into where a corner-bunkbeds-shaped dresser-thing has key-locked
drawers, and he uses our key (the one of us we call The Priest
has a key) to unlock a drawer at face-height and he viciously
jerks the drawer out to hit The Priest in the eye!
We're all like, /We trusted you!/
Next dream. I'm in a strange city that's like a mixture of
Burbank and the Sunset District of San Francisco. In the
back-story of the dream I recently wrote two stories for the
Anderson Valley Advertiser, and I expect that when Bruce
Anderson shows up he'll pay me.
Bruce and others, including newsman Ed Kowas, Macintosh
repairman Chuck Wilcher and poet Bill Kovanda, arrive in a car,
returning from a political/newspaper-related road trip. Bruce
pays me with a few fives and tens and when I put the money in my
wallet we both see a photograph of Bruce Anderson in a business
suit and with his hair slicked down in the old style, that he
used to give out copies of like public radio premiums for
subscribing. I don't need it; I say, "Do you want to sell it
again?" and offer it back. /No, thanks./
They all go up a walkway to a row house. Bruce turns and
says, "What did you think?" --meaning, what did I think of the
photo? I say, "I think you look very presidential. In a 1920s
kind of way." Funny. Well, bye. Thanks for the money.
I jump into the air and fly leisurely up the street,
steering by kicking away from buildings on opposite sides. A
pretty but fuzzy-thinking hippie girl travels along behind, at
first on the ground and then in the air, telling me about
dragons in stories and movies, all the dragons she knows about,
and how all these stories and all this information /ironically
tightened/ something for her. In the air between some green
trees where the Melting Pot building should be (in Mendocino) I
gently mock the girl by balling my fists as though twisting a
rag and saying, "[...How it] clenched up." She says, "No..." I
say, "Ironically tightened." She says, "Yes.
Next dream. I leave a vague situation, maybe a dance, and am
walking south on the sidewalk of Franklin Street in Fort Bragg
(CA), then sliding at faster than walking speed (while still
walking), then riding in a convertible car in the street, then
driving. Traffic --all convertible cars-- grinds to a halt just
before the Safeway grocery store. I levitate my car and speed
over the top of the car in front of me, scaring the woman in a
car that levitated at the same time as I did but turned in front
of me. I apologize. She apologizes. Nice.
Next dream. A political meeting dinner in a big house is
over when I get there. The food is mostly put away. A serving
man obsequiously gets a tray of pickled mushrooms out of the
fridge for me. /Thank you, but I don't need that. I'm fine./
Things change so the rooms where the meeting/dinner were are
upstairs in a two-thirds-finished new house in a new housing
development in a dead rock valley in like Colorado. A
two-dimensional shiny bare-metal car (meant to be seen from the
side for a movie shoot) rolls up the street, from the right. In
front of the house the boy hiding behind and rolling the car
makes a mistake and flips his bicycle over in front. The bicycle
vanishes. The boy pushes the car away.
I'm in this corner turret staircase area, watching out the
window for troublemaker gang boys. A cross between Raincrow and
Ishvi delivers the small card-pack of sharp metal rectangles
that the builder ordered. Raincrow/Ishvi wants to know what
they're used for. I use my pocket folding pliers to bend one in
accordion pleats to make a cleat out of it, and I explain how
you hammer this on edge to be even with the surface of two bits
of wood and it will hold them together. "They all used to be
this way. You had to bend them yourself. It works just as well."
-end-
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