My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-05-06:
Next dream. In the dream the sea cliffs around Caspar (CA)
are much higher and accordion-folded (vertical creases) for
maximum surface area. I go to the edge over Caspar Creek and
start to climb down. My old roommate Tim Givon falls from the
top and I see him falling in windblown slow motion. The people
(?) who were chasing him are horrified --this will look bad on
their record-- but they're not sorry. I climb across to where
Tim struck the rock halfway down. He's definitely dead --also
he's not Tim; he's somebody else.
After going north on a road that in real life would go over
Caspar Creek about three hundred yards east of the highway, I'm
in a strange house with other college kids, getting ready to be
taken to a test. I don't have any clean clothes; I've been
climbing and dealing with a bloody corpse... Someone gives me a
too-big black t-shirt with an incomprehensible Chinese rune on
it in white. /I like this shirt./
In the old school in Caspar we're given test booklets and
pencils. It's all essay questions-- this is perfect.
(The only question I remember: "What if the /squirmers/ just
naturally started cheering, and you couldn't stand that, so you
started a fight?" The /squirmers/ were doughy, sperm-cell-shaped
little dumpling things in a green-water aquarium.)
Next dream. My mother wants me to stand exactly in the same
posture and same place as a girl did in an advertisement. She's
adamant that I do it the way the girl did it. /Okay, Mom. I'll
be fine. Thanks./
I and some other expeditionaries to Antarctica are at the
edge of a cliff, on weak, shifting ice. I lie down and hold a
pole that sticks through to the underside of the cliff. My
colleagues carelessly stomp around. I gesture and say, "Go
/that/ way. Please."
In a cavern, three native troglodyte boys frog-walk me
across crates of laboratory equipment, twist me around and hold
me against the wall. The boys, and others who appear here, all
think I've been too hard on KZYX, saying bad things about it on
my show on KMFB. All these cave-boy and hillbilly hicks act all
superior the way they always do when they have you with their
overwhelming numbers and nothing else.
One of the hicks disappears down a crevasse.
On a beach in Antarctica but also Caspar (CA), Kay directs
her (lone) henchman to kick sand off the cliff at the edge of
the beach... The sand comes down toward me and Kay, where we are
in the crevasse, having retroactively fallen into it. I object.
The henchman, a boy from the cave before (which is now above me)
starts that superior-numbers thing again, but is puzzled when it
doesn't work so well without all his like-minded friends around.
Sure the sand will get in my eyes, I push Kay away from me,
insulting her and her entire oeuvre, and incidentally knocking
her farther down the ice crevasse, where she can't give orders
about sand anymore. /Now/ I can flee.
Next dream. About twenty people are camping in the
bedroom-size bathroom in the house from the previous dream, the
house where I was given a t-shirt. I go into the bathroom to use
the toilet. It's in its own tiny, tiled cubicle with no door or
privacy, and it's a ceramic coffee can set into the floor. /I'll
find someplace else./
Outside I and another boy (I'm about twelve years old here)
run up the center of a strange city street at night to where
ladders and flimsy scaffolds go up the side of a churchlike
office building. We climb up.
Police come to rescue/arrest us. The boys who were us a
minute ago escape on a kite on a long rope up into roiling
clouds. Most of the police drive away to do something elsewhere,
leaving one of them, actor Bob Hoskins, to deal with this simple
problem. He wants to go with his friends the other policemen; he
hands the rope to my friend and says, "Here. If they don't start
coming down, cut it." I say to my friend, who has become Bob
Hoskins the policeman and who was just handed the rope, "Are you
gonna take orders from a guy who would say something like
that?" He looks sheepish, says, "No." He hands me the rope.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2008-05-07:
First dream. In a U.S. civil war era steampunk-decorated spy
situation I'm hiding under the bed in an enemy's apartment. The
occupant and his commanding officers come in, talking. The man
finds me, but instead of revealing me he just takes his boots
out from in front of me, puts them on, and everyone leaves. /Is
he on my side?/
I sneak out into a fort, impersonating a woman, with two
local young women who like me. Should I tell them that I've come
from the future? No; what purpose would that serve?
I crouch down against a log house, under a window, talking
on a cell phone. My schoolfriend Shelley Reader comes out and
around the house. I realize she was just inside the window and
heard everything I said-- but I can't remember what I said.
Shelley says, "She's /what?/" meaning that I must have said
something about her, not necessarily bad-- she's something, or
she's a something. Is she upset? Sobbing? No, she just coughed,
that's all.
I'm like, /Well, you know, there's work to do here. There's
a war./ Shelley thinks about whether to help me or not.
Next dream. I'm in Caspar (CA) in a borrowed old battered
Honda Civic. The detritus of my life is lying around on the
ground near the cow field fence and along the road-- boxes of
electrical things, stacks of newspapers, two old pianos, etc.,
all of it has been out in the weather for years. I promise the
old couple living in the house where Juanita and I lived in the
late 1980s that I'll pick it all up and take it away-- but how?
Certainly not in this tiny car.
I just drive away north with a passenger I don't look at, so
I don't know who he is. Suddenly we're miles up a dirt road to
the east; this is not the right road. And the car is inside a
backwoods church that's also an abandoned car-repair garage.
This car has a smart gas gauge; it tells that there are only 575
yards worth of travel left in the gas tank. That's not enough.
I'll just fly the car. Once it's in the air I can turn the
motor off and not even use it until we get to civilization. The
person with me becomes Stuart Tregoning.
I walk diagonally across the field behind the church in
Caspar. Ted is here at the age he was in the Whale School. In
the dream he's a watchman, sitting with a rifle across his
knees. I get to the art gallery, sit down on a bench and use
paper shears to cut a stretched diamond-shaped window into my
right pants leg from the cuff to the side of the knee. A train
wails through in the night. I train Nile (Whale School age) to
use telekinesis to control a solid iron beachball-- it's not
hard for him; he's done this sort of thing before. I get the
attention of the important people here, turn to Nile and say
seriously, "Nile, tell them what you did." (In the back-story of
the dream, two years ago he trained in telekinesis under a bad
man, a dangerous criminal.) Now everyone will know the same true
story and we can finally get some peace around here and not have
everyone going around afraid of his own shadow.
Next dream. Juanita and I help an old woman to the
microphone on an outdoor stage; she's going to speak to returned
army men who sit scattered across a cow field.
A famous (?) rock band sings an a capella Celtic-sounding
war song. As they sing, we all see a frenetic animated movie of
jeeps and guns and frightened faces and destroyed houses: war
scenes. Everyone pays close attention.
Either in the movie or after it is the story of one of the
army men with PTSD. He's had a bad drunken night; he wakes on
the pavement of a supermarket parking lot, minus one of his
sleeve-length leather gloves. The missing glove is tied up high
on a metal pole that holds up the roof at the front of the
store. He (and we) get from this that /he could have hanged
himself but he didn't./
Now the field is the one between the Tarbell's house and
Caspar Road, and there are open-sided sheds and a blacksmith's
shop here, a little Vietnam-era/Medieval village. A woman is
miserable about just having found out for certain that her
husband is dead in the war. I sit down and tell her about Lynn
Wright, who, when she was a girl, married a boy and got to spend
one night with him before he went to Vietnam. He was killed in
the first action he saw. She became pregnant. She had a girl.
The girl was killed by a car at, I think, nineteen years old,
the same age her father died at. And, oh, by the way, are you
hungry? The woman is hungry. "I'll make you some eggs." I go to
an outdoor electric stove, cut a green onion into some butter
and cook an omelet for her.
Without any transition, the field and sheds are all inside a
big rough building made of planks and used wood. I and some
others are carrying a long banquet table up and down stairs and
through hallways. Oasis lets go the table and gets in front to
guide us down a final set of stairs. We lift the table
gracefully over the heads of men eating in a restaurant dining
room and set it down in a corner. The men eating cheer and clap.
I tell the table helpers to go back for the benches.
My dreams from Thursday, 2008-05-08:
First dream. There's a time-travel scene in like a Doctor
Who show, where the characters are thrown way back in time and
must /strain/, leaning forward on hands and knees inside a
shipping crate, to get fuel from the future to power their trip
back /to/ the future. (The fuel is a steaming lump of anthracite
hovering in space just out of their reach out the open end of
the crate.)
As another scene is being shot I ask a man --a famous old
film-crew man who's worked on all of these shows-- how much it
cost to light the entire Enterprise (the Star Trek ship).
Someone else says, "Shhhh!" In the scene, the members of a
Space-Family-Robinson-like family take turns singing an
impromptu prescription-drug-related song to further the plot and
also for the sponsor (like Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble
singing about and smoking Winston cigarets). In this show, the
snaggle-toothed Danny-Bonaduce-like character is embarrassed
about his poor showing in the singing scene. He asks if they can
do it all again. No-one else wants to; they're all happy with
what they did.
Next dream. I'm with other prisoners on a middle-floor
zoo/footbridge/jail that goes next to other bridge/jails across
under a future coliseum on another planet. An animal-like man
who is on our crew (from the ship that we were kidnaped from)
gets into our bridge/jail by just acting like an animal and so
belonging here, and now that we're all together, we break out.
Before we're anywhere near safely away, we stop to play a
childish trick on one of our enemies who thought we were dead.
Next dream. I advise a man that he's being fooled by a
confidence artist. We go through a long one-level house. On our
way out the door, one of the con man's hypnotized employee
crooks insists on knowing how I know everything about their
plan. I lie that /I/ was once taken over by his boss the
mastermind and am still working for him. The crook accepts this,
but wants to know where we're going. I say, "To work." He
says, "Where?" I give him a hint by making a beautiful sandwich
out of sliced meats and bread and things that occur naturally in
the yard and environment. (A path-side rock, sliced open, is a
deli plate of meat and cheese. Other things grow on bushes.)
Next dream. I wander through a church/theater that's so big
I can't tell if it's indoors or outdoors. A religious show
begins, where teenage Oriental/East-Indian nuns troop through,
singing, and a man loses some of his brass bells when a
twice-too-long couch is dropped; everyone goes through the
religious act of searching for the bells, which of course turn
out to be under the couch.
Also the ceremony includes a mock gun battle between
Keystone Kops teams chasing around on horses.
In another much smaller church/theater I sit in a pew with
my date, a pretty but airheaded hippie girl. While we wait for
the show to start, she leaves her body on the floor and sits
back up with me, solid as before, but there's her body on the
floor. Some people sing church songs; the girl says, "Oh!
Listen! It sounds like a bus station!" (The wall to our left
rumbles, and that together with the singing equals /bus station/
to her.) She gets up and wanders away. I wait for awhile with
her crumpled body left behind at my feet, become bored, go into
the next room. I'm a representative for a company that makes a
new kind of universal CPU chip that only needs a pin adapter to
work in any computer ever made. I talk glowingly about
investment opportunities. Listeners are skeptical. I'd be
skeptical.
Next dream. In dim light and cold weather a boy stands in a
green field of brown-black-and-white cows. British double-deck
buses have harnesses to be drawn by cows. I'm the boy; when the
cows stampede I get behind a bus and somehow flip it sideways so
not to be trampled. A bus comes back to the yard and the driver
unhitches the two cows from it.
I walk to a stone fence. The buildings along the fence are a
school for rich kids, kids who don't have to tend bus cows.
Packs of kids are leaving a dance. No-one even looks at me; I'm
just the cow boy.
I walk down a lane of rock houses to my house, go in through
the dream-familiar heat-lock of a slide panel and a blanket
curtain.
Later I watch from outside the action as the lonely cow boy
talks to himself behind his house's fence so the neighbor will
think he has a friend over. A friend actually comes, but is
immediately smashed behind a windblown gate. --No, that was his
practical-joke magic trick; he's fine. The boys sit drinking
beer and talking.
I go back in and look around in the house, now not familiar.
There's a little fire in a plaster fireplace. Fuel must be
scarce here --no trees. I imagine sleeping in the plaster
half-loft between the fireplace and the wall. It would be warm
but cramped. This place makes me think of Carol Root's old
house, even though that was wood, built in a row of chicken
shacks in a forest.
Next dream. I'm in a college movie theater after midnight
with a lot of other college kids. We're all waiting for the cans
of film to get here; we don't have anything else to do and it's
warm here. I go into the projection booth and enjoy looking at
the banks of old planetarium platform controls. Maybe I'll go
down to the lobby and see if I can find something to cook in the
snack bar. I imagine announcing that there'll be pizza or roast
beef sandwiches or something, and being a hero. There's no food
here. I go out and walk away down the street.
In the dream my mother lives in a little stone house off the
west end of the L-shape of Main Street in like Mendocino (CA).
In the trellis-and-hedge-enclosed pathway to her side door I
show her a cross-your-eyes 3-D gardening magazine cover
photograph warning to be careful against being poked in the eye.
The caption reads, /Can you spot the danger?/ She can't see the
danger, even when I turn the magazine upside-down and it's
obvious. (The high hedge branches are camouflage for each other;
one is sticking almost straight out toward the camera, ready to
poke you in the eye.) That's all right, Mom. Just be careful.
My mother is up this late because she's waiting to hear an
old radio drama on this /special night/. The car radio plays
only static. I tell her not to change the dial, so when the
power company lets the station go back on, the radio will still
be tuned.
Inside the house I look out the window at the sea. The
window is at the edge of the sea cliff. A big tugboat-shaped
ferryboat goes straight for the rocks. It's towing three metal
barges. It doesn't crash, but turns left (north) to stay in a
low-tide channel in the rocks. Through its U-shaped path out the
other end of the channel it bounces crazily off rocks at sides
and bottom and almost flips. It makes it --but it comes back to
make the run again! I say, "I've never seen anything like this!
Mom, come and look at this."
She comes to the window. Other boats --fishing boats,
jet-skis, all different kinds-- appear and drive into the rocks;
they seem to be cooperating to wear the channel deeper and wider
so they can ride their boats right up to, uh, those houses that
I don't remember being there before, to the north... I say,
"What do they hope to accomplish? That's /basalt/." They're just
going to ruin their boats. And why are they doing this tonight?
/Or do they do it every night?/
My mother is not here. She's probably gone back out to the
car to see if the radio station has come on yet.
-end-
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