My dreams from Friday, 2008-04-25:
First dream. I'm in the lower-left-hand corner of a schoolyard
that's laid out like the one at Loomis Elementary where I was in the
first half of sixth grade, but here it's a wilderness. Each child in the
group recites something; when it's my turn I recite Shel Silverstein's
/Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout/. (I'm at my real age, grown up.)
Time to walk back up to the school. I'm wet from swimming in the
weed-filled creek here. The woman teacher walks with me. I realize I
left my hat and shoes next to the water. The teacher says that's okay,
no-one will take them.
Now I'm camping in dry Northern California hills with three or four
others. It's dark but the sky is blue. An airplane like a stubby DC-3
flies over, slows to a stop in the air, tips backward and comes back
this way, then falls; I jump up off my sleeping bag and run toward where
the airplane will strike, shouting back to the others, "Call an
ambulance! It's crashing!"
The airplane is on the ground, missing wings and wheels, a strip
along its side ripped open. Fires start in it. The people are revenants
from the future. Should I pull them out? or do they need something about
being in in the airplane to live in our time (even though it's on fire)?
Apparently they don't-- some of them are standing apart from the
airplane, too bored to even help their friends.
I climb into the airplane and find a carved dark wooden
vase/nut-thing the size of a slightly flattened basketball. This is the
pilot. A faint voice comes from the hole in the top of the vase. I
decide to keep it so there's evidence to show the firemen who will
eventually come here that this is in fact an airplane from the future.
(Look, a talking wooden vase.)
There's mist in the twisted trees. A row of connected old shack
living spaces stand as they have for probably a hundred years, open
along the front, their antique furnishings in perfect condition.
The nut-vase-thing rolls away down a steep, deep ravine. The other
campers, my friends, are here now; they climb frantically down after the
thing, but before I start down I watch to see where it will stop.
We come to a dark building made of thick, heavy wood. Is this a
tavern? It's a restaurant. I sit at a table. A waitress comes and calls
another person at the table /Marco/. I say, "How do you know my name is
Marco?"
Later, outside again, farther downhill, in the V of a rock/dirt
canyon, a waitress who's coming with us now falls and hurts her back. A
Gandalf-like man sprays blue fire from his staff --to heal her? to take
a magic spell away from her?
Another waitress appears. The waitresses talk about adult concerns;
they talk like older sisters talking.
Next dream. I'm in a small town's central big old wooden building,
in a dusty upstairs place, dreading having to be in a theater show here,
wondering how I committed myself to it despite being so careful not to.
(I don't remember promising, but I must have.)
Now down in the main hall I look around and decide to use the place
for a rollerskating hall. It's an isolated town-- things are the way
they used to be here, the way they should be; no insurance or permits or
other parasitical expenses are involved in starting a business like
this; you just decide what you want to do and do it, and either succeed
or fail --probably succeed, since it's pure profit, even if you only
charge a quarter to get in.
Next dream. California hills. A war is happening. I go to a high
place and lance out blue plasma fire from my staff, blasting thousands
of invisible enemies on the horizon, and also blasting their heavy
cannons and other big weapons. The horizon glows all around from the
fires of the destroyed armies.
Later there's a dance at the house/hall of people like Juanita's
Renaissance-Faire friends. In the driveway below the house I talk with a
man who looks like Douglas Roycroft about the rollerskating hall in the
town in the previous dream. I can't remember the name of the town,
exactly. I say, "Humboldt," with fake confidence.
People are walking this way up the driveway. Playwright/songwriter
Lawrence Bullock is here; I say, "Hi, Lawrence!" He goes to where the
magic-staff/sword/religious-thing from the war is stuck in the ground
and reaches to touch it. I say, "I wouldn't." He touches it; no harm.
I say, "You'll meet him inside," meaning the great wizard who ended the
war (who at this point was someone else).
Everyone goes up to the house and goes in. A woman walking with me
says, "If you lie down with the Devil..." I say, "If you believe in the
Devil, you're crazy."
I'm the last one to the door. I have a painful cramp in my foot. A
tall woman in a long purple-gray jersey dress holds the door for me.
When I get inside and the door is closed behind, I realize (and say), "I
didn't want to be out there alone. I was afraid."
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-04-27:
First dream. I'm having sex with a not merely invisible but
nonexistent sex dummy-thing in bed in a prefab temporary classroom. I'm
embarrassed to think that someone might come in and find me apparently
having sex with the bed, but I don't want to stop, so I compose in my
head a fib about how I'm doing this to evaluate the product, to write an
article about it.
Next dream. I walk, dressed only in my underwear, through a deserted
town that has green, well-kept lawns. I go across a playing field and
into a glass-front restaurant that has people at only two of the tables.
Steve Weingarten and a strange woman are at the table on the right; they
and the other customers and the waiter are all looking out and up, past
me, at something in the sky. I don't know or care what they're looking
at. I'm hungry; I want a whole end of hard Italian bread with butter.
Next dream. In a big new school building with tiled linoleum floors,
a lot of people of all ages are working on a play that might have opened
weeks ago or might not have opened yet. I go into a meeting where Tony
(mechanic, lighting person) will give the performers notes. In the
back-story of the dream I promised I'd work or actually perform in the
play. I have a vague memory of carrying something across from
upstage-left. Did I do it or just imagine or dream it? Did I already
miss it? No-one's acting as though I let everybody down; it probably
hasn't happened yet.
Tony tells everyone to settle down, hands out script changes.
Next dream. I'm in a spread-out tropical version of Mendocino (CA).
I float at about head-height south through the middle of town. I come to
Main Street, which in the dream is four lanes wide and has a row a tall
eucalyptus trees. A huge wild Mardi-Gras-like party is going on.
I fly up with a kite-tail of torn sheets tied to my ankle. Mean big
beefy troublemaker boys try to grab the kite-tail. I'm not flying upward
fast enough --the tail is twenty feet long; I pull it, reel it in.
I zoom around carelessly and bump against two power lines at once
(!) but am not shocked. /Why?/
Now it's the military part of the parade that before was just wild
people moving along. I fly eastward, above the parade, carrying two
folded-up light-blue towels. The parade turns left on the street between
the bookstore and the binoculars store. I land to talk to a general; he
doesn't want me in the parade. /But I can fly. Didn't he see that?/ I
unfold the towels, hold each by a corner and shake them so fast they're
like bee wings. I fly south over Russian troop trucks that are going
west. (Now the parade is all military vehicles, going the other way.)
The general shouts for them to catch me. No-one thinks fast enough to
even shoot at me.
I fly high over the ocean, past a stream of office-building-size
inflated space-station-like business logos. I find I can steer but I
can't go back; I'll have to cross the ocean.
Here's an ice-and-rock mountain island. Far below, at the edge of
the island, are street grids of cities. When I go lower, one of the
cities has wrapped candy bars for block buildings. /That can't be real,
so that's not where to go./
In a beautiful place of rocks pushing up through green grass,
Swift's little sister at about eighteen years old helps me by trying to
find the electrical cable I need, looking through a box on her
sales-blanket of old movie cameras and things like from dresser-drawers
in my (dead) grandparents' house.
This whole place is a fleamarket; rummage sales are the entire
economy. I see a sign that says, /DREADFUL SINGLE EARNING SPACE/
--meaning that I can rent a space on the grass or a booth or some other
marked-out area to sell things and become a citizen and live here.
Having nothing, I consider earning my way by teaching people to fly.
I discover it's possible to go the other way; I can go back to the
mainland, but first I want to tour the rest of this place. I fly to an
outdoor temple area of all columns and benches. They're having a
religious ceremony that involves telephone-pole-tall chess-piece-like
god puppets operated by priests. People sit on the benches and on the
grass, watching, smiling. There's a drumbeat. A synthesizer plays a tune
with the portamento turned up too much so the notes slide into each
other and lag behind the beat.
I fly low over ruins of buildings, down to the water, humming along
with the music. I can smell the seawater.
I woke up and got to keep the drumbeat. In the dream it sounded all
mysterious and interesting. In real life it's dull and simple.
My dream from Monday, 2008-04-28:
A school electronics lab has its shelves and workbenches in a big
old wooden horse barn with a dirt floor. A boy shows off his recent
acquisition: a shoebox of vacuum tubes that have tiny video screens
inside them. Electronics teacher Bob Blick tells me they're trying to
clean the place up; he wants to get rid of several wooden soda-pop
crates overflowing with donated mechanic wrenches --he won't give away
just some of the wrenches; you have to take all of them. /I'll take
them. But I need to arrange a pickup truck. I can't get all this into my
car./
I go out through the cafeteria. Bad troublemaker kids stand around,
plotting trouble. I get a rubber band out of a cup on the counter to tie
my hair back in case I have to fight.
Now I'm driving on a road through strange woods. Herman from the
Whale School is riding along as a passenger, then he's driving and I'm
the passenger. It occurs to me that I can fly home; I have Herman pull
over and let me out.
I'm in a not just strange but /weird/ small town. Some kids show up.
Sherie is here with her dream-only little daughter. I offer to fly the
girl and some of the others home. Sherie trusts me to do this and goes
back to work, wherever that is.
The children are all running around playing on the grass. (The town
has no streets, just little cabins and grass.) The older kids are
torturing two Mexican-looking dogs by pulling them up into trees on
heavy rubber bands and pulleys. I run there, try to get the dogs down by
pulling the rubber bands till they break, but they won't break; this is
just strangling the dogs. I use an X-Acto knife to cut the last dog
down. Is it dead? British firemen show up and take over. (I had the
firemen's ladder before they got here. That's how I cut the dog down.)
Now Herman, Willow, Raincrow, Ishvi and some others from the Whale
School are here at their real age as adults, but they have a
Lord-Of-The-Flies-like attitude about justice; also retroactively it
wasn't dogs but some of the boys hung up and strangled with rubber
bands, and they blame me, as though I'm responsible for it. But which
were the ones being tortured? They're all fine, here, whole. I see a
closeup view of a cut and broken open dog head. /Bleagh./
Herman and the others keep me prisoner in a big old white building.
They use me to accomplish tasks they can't do, such as to use
telekinesis to cut an oval out of the ceiling and lift some of them up
through it into the attic. They become used to me doing things like this
for them and their vigilance weakens. My powers are getting stronger and
more focused. Soon I'll just force everyone away from me and flee, but
not too soon; I don't want to get caught and have to start being tricky
all over again.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-04-30:
First dream. Unwanted old video equipment is scattered around on the
linoleum floor of a college classroom. I look through it, want some of
it, and go through a series of other classrooms looking for someone to
ask about it.
In a classroom that has folding chairs on stepped stage risers to
make it into a lecture hall, young people in the chairs are talking
about video history. I get their attention and tell about things we used
to do in the early 1980s to get effects that they use computers to get
now-- for example, we'd plug two cameras into a video mixer and open the
iris of one to overexpose the image, reverse it for a negative and mix
them and get brilliant outlines, and we'd use chromakey (for having a
background be another image), and point a camera at a monitor showing
the result of everything. (Video feedback.) One time we made a plastic,
twisting, stretching, screaming face out of a blizzard of multicolored
static. So cool!
The kids pay attention because of course it's what the class is
about, but they also have a /Sure, Pops, whatever/ attitude. What did I
expect?
Next dream. I really have to piss. I go into a college or golf club
hallway and find a big restroom with all different kinds of urinals and
toilets and basins. A woman hurries in, pushes past me, pulls her pants
down and squats with her back against a urinal. Oh, this must be one of
those unisex restrooms I've been reading about. Okay... Except, I don't
like to piss where people can watch. I go to the opposite corner of the
room to use a long ceramic trough set near the floor. The woman comes
over and starts talking to me. I say something about wanting a little
privacy, please, and she /huffs/ and goes to the door, then just to
spite me she stands in the hallway talking to her friend, holding the
door wide open with her foot. I finish pissing, swearing at her the
whole time.
After the restroom I find Juanita --she's shopping. This is a
shopping mall now. I want to go home, but Juanita drags me into
/another/ store to show me something she found: it's a desktop
audiocassette deck from the early 1970s that has separate speed and
pitch controls, and it does the pitch control with only mechanical
relays and capacitors. It sounds good. How can it possibly work?
Now I'm in another building, walking along a hallway inside a wall
of windows, going to meet Juanita, who should be getting off work from
her new job about now. In the dream she's working at a new
very-low-budget teevee game show, for a man named Jepper-- the show is
called Jepper'D (say Jepper D, like Tenacious D). She's in a diner,
sitting in a raised booth with Mister Jepper, eating and talking. I'm a
little jealous. She'll be along, she says; I don't have to wait around.
I go back down the hallway to the room where we've been staying, to
pack up. A woman with a tiny energetic black-haired girl running around
underfoot blocks the doorway. I get past. Juanita's and my camping room
is now a waiting room, like a doctor's waiting room. No-one has stolen
my dream-only borrowed Macintosh laptop nor my old portable Dell, so
that's something in this town's people's favor. I must separate my
clothes from another person's. Here's a bag of socks and sweaters...
hmm... not mine. A woman on teevee says, "I never even went to a party
before the /ber/-lernd Doctor /Bad/braith Billet."
I woke up with the happy childish theme music from the Jepper'D show
playing in my head.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-05-01:
First dream. I pack for a cross-country motorcycle trip, and tie
bundles to the back and sides of the big hassock-like seat. The
motorcycle is wobbly and weak for how big it is. I ride out into traffic
and then ride on a long straight four-lane street with my mother somehow
riding both on top of the bundle behind me and off to the right in the
air, talking to me in monotonous word-salad gibberish. She vanishes.
I park in a houseless cul-de-sac to rest. /Am I really going to
Ohio? I don't have to; I only said I would. I can turn around any time
and say I changed my mind./ In other words, yes, I have to go and stay
in horrible Ohio for months. A girl with tries to go through a gate but
can't. She goes back to her car, leans against it and starts crying. I
make sure she really wants to go through the gate, then pick her up and
carry her. The skin around her eyes is the color and texture of a
flesh-colored dog's nose-- usually I don't like that, but on this girl
it's attractive. She's pretty, and she likes me. /Was I just tricked
into carrying her?/
Next dream. I'm riding in a covered jeep. The singsong-talking
African guide driving is going at incredible speed and the road is
rough, but the ride is pretty smooth. I compliment the guide on the
jeep's good suspension, though I have to loosen my seatbelt to keep it
from wearing a groove in my hips.
There's a complicated African/Canadian adventure here that I didn't
get to keep. Feeling of duration.
No jeep. The guide is helping me get away, back to the cul-de-sac
from the previous dream, where my motorcycle is. We come to a gate that
you can't just go though; it has special magical rules. I find a
stick/hat/digging-tool-thing and pick it up, breaking a tabu I didn't
know about. The guide is horrified; he will be ostracized for what I
did. /He has to live here./ Iridescent slug-fish-things the size of
trash can lids appear and climb on rocks and onto the wall of a shed. I
redeem myself for my stick-hat faux pas by using the stick to chase the
slug-fish-things out the way they came in, through the gate, which is
the way I want to go anyway. They breed out there, producing more of
them, and that's even better. I'm more of a hero all the time. The guide
decides to continue to help me; he leads the way wading through a clear
water pond with crocodiles in it. He trusts me to use the stick-hat to
chase the crocodiles away, and I do it. They all climb over the far edge
and go away.
Past the pond is a path and then another gate. A man who lives here
comes after us and wants to go through the gate, but it has scarier
rules than the gate we just went through. We have a kind of mental
arm-wrestling match. I win. He goes first.
Next dream. I'm in a car going slowly past a compound of roadside
businesses, and I'm telling the person I'm with about my dream-only
boss, who put stainless steel all over the street face of his bar and
his house, which is expensive, but it's his money.
Inside the bar I'm told to install a water superheater on a
sink-counter in the hallway going into the back. The superheater has an
L-shaped footprint. The counter has an L-shape, but its corner is
rounded. I tip the superheater --now an industrial coffee machine-- up
to check out the fasteners on the bottom, and I take the screw out of
the corner and find a place farther in where it can fasten after going
upward through the counter.
Other workers are here. A waitress who looks like a disheveled Cate
Blanchette or Jenna Elfman comes through, carrying a stack of brown
fiberglass cafeteria trays.
I woke up with the music playing in my head that was playing in the
dream: Linda Ronstadt singing /Long Long Time/.
-end-
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