My dreams from Friday, 2008-05-09:
First dream. It's night. I'm riding a motorcycle southwest on
Highway 80 between Colfax and Auburn (CA). I turn off uphill, north.
Wrong road. I turn around to go back to the highway. I'm holding an
envelope in my mouth. I have no helmet; what if a cop sees and pulls me
over and discovers I have no license? It gets so foggy I can't see to
steer, nor even tell if my lights are on or off. I roll to a stop
against a bathroom sink in a small green-painted bathroom, where
everything is in sharp focus. Out the window is a factory across a river
valley.
Next dream. I'm in a one-story, narrow but long old lath-and-plaster
house. Wind blows through the cracks in the walls. There's a mouse
problem; I use a clockwork Ketch-All mousetrap machine, catch several
mice, open it and fling the live mice out the side door. One mouse died,
stuck in the gears; I get it out and throw it out too.
In the bathroom, the very back room of the house, I'm about to take
a bath-- but I don't have any clean clothes to put on; I go back through
the house looking for clothes. In the house's front office (?) I tell
the office girls about the Ketch-All. One of the girls is Kaylee of
/Firefly/; she's really interested in mechanical mousetraps; she pokes
at the trigger platform with a pencil, which triggers it so its inside
paddlewheel slams over, /BANG/. She sees how startling and rough it
would be for a mouse, and starts to cry.
I go back to the bathroom. It's now huge, just by itself as big as
the whole house where I lived on Highway 20 when I first moved to the
Mendocino Coast. I talk to an old man about my plans for this room: "I'd
split this off; have the bathroom /here/ and use /this other space/ for
a shop."
My dreams from Saturday, 2008-05-10:
First dream. Tourists in bathing suits crowd a lookout platform at
the uphill point of a V-shaped rock valley that opens out to a beach at
the sea. I fly up into the air, startling an old woman. I fly past
people sitting on the rocks of the valley walls and fly higher and
higher out over the water. /I can't turn around and go the other way/. I
end up in a dusty gray narrow room, go out through a garage into a
strange neighborhood, where I'm attacked by two crazy adolescent boys. I
use the bigger boy as a club to knock the other one aside, then I smash
the club-boy's head against the side of a tall SUV.
Next dream. I and a generic real estate guy are rummaging through
the house of a dead black guy, my dream-only old friend (a cross between
my schoolfriend Jeff Phillips and a young Richard Pryor with a poofy
Afro haircut). The real estate guy and I find a big toy train set whose
engine and cars are as big as shoe boxes. The real estate guy makes a
sack out of a purple blanket to wrap up things he wants for his own
kids. I don't have kids, so he feels entitled to his pick of the loot.
I collect some souvenirs: here's a dry, nearly weightless human
skeleton torso with empty paper-wasp nests stuck to it.
In a bedroom on a high bunk bed I find the coverless guts of a
handheld video game, still working! Here's a sound-level tester baton
with two analog meters on it; this is better than a train set.
Later this is my house with a fifty-something blonde newscaster
woman and all her (our?) little kids-- more than ten of them. We're
supposed to go someplace im****tant today; I think of going to the back
bedroom's bathroom to take a shower. A dresser has interesting
electronic on it. Here's a clock radio with the tuners for the different
bands each on its own card in a card cage.
I'm in the shower. There's this sticky translucent orange soap; I
experiment with it, get it all over me. The newscaster woman comes to
see what I'm doing; she says, "Yeah, that soap is horrible."
There are more and more children everywhere. I say to them as I move
through the house, "You ready to go? ...Ready to go? ...C'mon, we have
to go soon..."
In another bathroom a skinny little boy is lying on his back in the
bathtub with his head and neck and shoulders sucked down underwater in
the wide drain. I pull him out. He breathes normally, doesn't gasp for
air. I say, "How long were you under there?" He says, "Seven
minutes." Other kids crowd around. I hug the boy with my head on his
chest and cry and cry. The woman comes in, looks. There's nothing for
her to do here; she leaves. I give the boy a push toward the door and
say, "Go get dressed. He says resentfully, "Gee, thanks."
I woke up with the song /Come Right Back/ playing in my head. "/Come
right back/. I just can't bear it. I need your love and I long to share
it. /Come right back/..." It's one of those songs that make you cringe
with embarrassment just to hear it. It was some kind of a massive hit in
the seventies.
My dreams from Sunday, 2008-05-11:
First dream. I go into a big old labyrinthine school building and I
have to turn lights on to get far enough into the building to check that
the lights have been turned off there. On the way back out, the switches
don't reliably turn things on /or/ off; I'm not sure what position to
leave them in.
Outside I climb stairs and a cliffside trail to try to get to a
watertower observatory where there'll be a telescope, or maybe it's a
lighthouse. The trail becomes narrow and scary. Should I go back? No--
if the path crumbles and I fall, I'll just fly down, and I might be able
to fly across and up and get to the tower. Just keep going. (It doesn't
occur to me to not wait till the path fails and to just push off and fly
over there.)
At the end of the cliff trail is a small town of wooden buildings
and a little alley. This is halfway; there to the left is the wooden
catwalk/stairway path up into the air, to the watertower, which now
strikes me as an indefensible position, as in, anyone for miles around
could shoot at it and blow it up.
Next dream. I'm driving my car in a strange-but-familiar place.
Islamic/Christian-law roadblock cops stop me, arrest me for having such
a messy car. They confiscate it and turn me loose in this suddenly
darker Russian or Afghan environment where I'm a member of the hated and
persecuted minority group. I and another boy (I'm a little boy here) go
into a little cafe where in the back-story of the dream we used to work.
I'm not deferential enough; the customers and the boss find me
impertinent and I'm fired all over again and thrown out.
I climb up a snail-slime trail that used to be a paved road. The
government is entirely religious now; no-one knows how to fix anything
or maintain anything. I come to where a big, clean tourist man is
standing next to his giant car; I tell him I'm an American. He doesn't
believe me. To him I'm too dirty and degraded to be an American. He
won't help me get away from here.
On the ground downhill from some sloppy little apartment buildings
made of thin planks, I find a National Scholastic children's book called
/The Wizard of D'DOS/.
Up in a modern hippie girl's watertower apartment I find a book
about s****s. The girl is startled by a dangerous s**** on her kitchen
table. I hold the s**** just behind the head; I'm wearing a glove made
of s****skin-covered leather. I throw the s**** out the window, but not
far enough; it lands on the roof of a lower part of the same building
and becomes a lizard with only two legs (front legs).
My dream from Monday, 2008-05-12:
I wake from sleep (in the dream) tangled in my sleeping bag in a
field like the field around KMFB's antenna tower. I roll up the bag and
carry it to the way out of the parking lot, where a woman and her kids
are collecting junk and clothes for a rummage sale. I don't want them to
sell my sleeping bag; I get the woman's attention and say, "This is
mine." I put it with the other junk, with confidence that they'll
remember the difference.
Inside the radio station building are two rooms. Laura comes in and
wants a log of last week's kid's show, like the show that's playing now
on a pool-table-size endless-loop horizontal tape deck. I explain that
we're busy just keeping things going; everything doesn't have a record
of it having happened. Laura says that her cancer came back and she's
looking for some t-****rts that I know were lost in a vague
canal/livestock-auction place...
I switch things to the next show exactly on time; it's an old
cowboy, an ancient man playing, or rather screeching, on a fiddle and
telling a story to Derek, about destruction and migration and whole
states covered with wrecked old cars, but somehow hopeful and folksy.
The tape of the previous show is eaten by slots that open up in the
surface of the tape deck. I try to put it all right, and manage to at
least free it, but it's stretched and crumpled in several places.
I go into a church-run version of the Humane Society's thrift store
south of Fort Bragg (CA) on Highway 1. In the back I find my sleeping
bag. It's full of dry grass and stickers. I take it outside and shake it
out. /Are you gonna pay for that?/ "No. It's mine. I told you."
In a bread-line cafeteria I levitate over a loop of curved table to
get to the Chinese buffet. I talk with a combination person of John
Wayne, some boys from my seventh grade class (Cliff Triplett, Jim
Starmer), and Jenny Johnson from the old Community School. The person
has given up on getting the proper treatment for his damaged leg. This
has some connection to Laura being out in the abandoned canal/auction
place. I go out that way and there she is, looking for her lost
t-****rts. I think, /This is when that happens,/ making sense of the
pre-memory of it. She gives up on looking. We sit on the edge of a
trough/canal and talk happily, with our foreheads wrinkled up in genial
mutual acceptance that to each the other misunderstands and will never
understand something vital.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2008-05-13:
First dream. My dream-only little round Mexican/Eskimo mother has
brought me to a boarding school to leave me here. Kids play an
incomprehensible s****ts game on the grass playing field. My mother gives
me two little cartons of milk; I say, "I don't like milk," but I accept
them in case I get hungry later. Or I can trade them to someone who
likes them, for some real food. (I /almost/ know in the dream that this
woman is not my mother.)
Next dream. I'm in a new-age, post-society-breakdown boarding school
where kids are tested constantly in real-world problem-solving skills by
being largely set free to roam around a housing development and cause
trouble. I come back to the several-story-high theater/living-space
where we sleep. One test is to judge your own performance on the vague
last day's and night's test. Most kids give themselves a five out of
five, but one boy honestly gives himself only a three. /That/ was the
test; he's given the total high score /in secret/. He's proud and happy
but he knows not to brag about it, because that would result in other
boys playing possibly lethal pranks on him. (Another layer of the
test(s): knowing when to keep your mouth shut.)
The winner boy is out at night with his Snowy-in-Tintin-like dog.
Bad kids see the dog and move in that direction; I'm sure they'll kill
the boy if they catch him. I'm the dog; I fly overhead but under the
streetlights, watching where the bad kids go, to be able to go to where
the boy is hiding and tell him that street or that way between sleeping
houses is not safe. The bad boys see me, huddle and plot to catch me,
but they have no weapons, not even a rock, and I can fly.
Later, bad kids lead a group of good kids through gym doors into a
gym that becomes outdoors in another place with other natural laws. On
an asphalt court they play a basketball game that has dangerous magical
consequences: painful sinew/slime-bush vines kill some of the good guys.
I become a person again (not the dog anymore) and try to bite through a
sinew/slime-vine; I learn that certain other vine sap makes the magic
danger vines soft enough to bite right through, and I hurry back to the
basketball court to save any boys still alive.
There's another big game happening under piercing lights in the next
street over. Things become vague. I see a closeup view of my finger with
oily, soapy, black-purple fluid coming from under the fingernail.
Next dream. I escape with some others from a genetic laboratory and
flee down into a vast deep dark underground wooden church/gymnasium.
Ineffectual flashlights poke around from the catwalks far above. A
red-haired scientist-witch woman who both escaped and is pursuing us
comes to where we're doing our own experiment. She watches from the side
as she's at the same time down on the wooden floor with her head next to
a boy's head, getting a bucket of candle wax poured into the space
between. The watching version of the woman warns us that we don't know
what we're doing. I say, "That's your story." She says there's been a
terrible calamity up there in the /real/ science place. I say, "Lost
your funding?"
The dream jumps back so now I lead the woman to our wax casting
genetic experiment, to show her the progress we're making.
The original escapees leave in a star****p. Hundreds of years pass.
Our red-haired woman (the escaped version, not the pursuing version)
becomes the legendary mother to everyone on two or more planets. She
becomes a lot like a red-haired Late Night Liz, but with a narrower
face. She jokes about how wherever she goes she's obligated to have ***
with everyone.
One of the fathers of all the woman's thousands of children roars by
on a country road, driving a golf-cart-like car stuffed full of giggling
children.
Psychic thieves invade a science convention in the rental hall where
the Chinese buffet was in the day before's dream. I'm driving the
golf-cart car; it stretches to become a truck made of shopping-cart
mesh. I back it out onto a pedestrian bridge across the chasm down the
center of the hall, and so block the thieves' route this way. It's
really futile to try to catch anyone; they'll get away. And that's okay.
Let them.
-end-
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