Game Show Refrigerator. God's Bad P.R. Fruit Depot. The Best-Laid Plans.
Marco McClean
First dream. It's night. I'm in a strange house in patchy, sandy
woods. Dangerous kids roar nearer outside in their vehicles. Should I go
to the door to win a game-show prize? or pretend I'm not here and avoid
the problem?
They're not as near as I thought. I can decide later. I go into the
round kitchen that's arranged as though it was hollowed out of a huge
tree, leaving the center but with holes in it for appliances. The cover
over the refrigerator slides open in layers; inside doors slide up or
down; I have to try each one to find which that door does. (This is part
of the game show.)
Next dream is a long /dreamy/ story about trouble among the gods.
There's a main god, but he's only like the chairman of the board of
gods, not an all-powerful entity, and certainly not the creator of
anything, and there's a main adversary, but he's only like a small-time
agitator for change in the hierachy. Something happens so the adversary
character can get into the main god's house and /hide there, alternately
invisible and seen as different things already in the house-- a toy
plastic duck, then invisible, then a metal bandaid box, then invisible,
then the duck again, maybe, or something else/; while there he sees how
really YouTube-banal the corruption of the system is, how contemptible
because ordinary. He leaves but does so in a way that reveals he saw
everything, and this drives the main god completely off his head in
confused, frustrated anger, which results in the main god /spastically
fucking a man-size (god-size) stuffed toy giraffe,/ thinking that by
doing this he's humiliating the adversary, in essence doing it to /him/,
when in fact this is just doubly humiliating bad publicity for the main god.
That was like the Reader's Digest condensed version of the story.
During the dream, it seemed like a mini-series made from a long novel.
The main god's wife was involved, and the adversary's wife, and an
obsequious bookkeeper god, etc.
My dreams from Thursday, 2009-11-10:
First dream. Juanita's driving a car with me and some others on a
frozen dirt-ice road up into snowy hills. I've been here before, so I'm
navigating. As we pass a gated road to the left I think that's where
we're supposed to go, so I direct Juanita to reverse down to it. She
does this and keeps the car under control even though it slips.
Here's the gate. It's not the right place after all; it's a driveway
cluttered with sawhorses, a wheelbarrow, piles of logs, children's
riding toys. While we're out of the car finding this out, men boil out
of a house to the left, take over our vehicle (now a tall old truck) and
from up on top they laugh at us and throw a heavy wet rope blanket over
us. They drive the truck away.
Singer/playwright Lawrence Bullock appears, dressed as a
Music-Man-style huckster snake-oil-salesman/doctor character. Doug
Warner, who used to run Mendocino Theatre Company, gets us all out of
the blanket. We go to the house, an angular C-shaped structure open on
this side. There's modern-caveman poetry graffiti scrawled all over it
in black on blue.
I'm like, /So, what are we, captives, now?/ No, Lawrence is just
showing us the house. Captives? Pish.
The house is just the entranceway to a huge cold-country depot for
fruit grown on this colony planet. We're encouraged to taste samples of
the different kinds of fruit, but when I bite a (tasteless) pineapple
chunk, a man who works here says, "That's season one," meaning that I'm
obligated to watch season one of a television show about his planet, but
I don't grasp this at first, so I have some more. Later the man comes by
when I'm taking a bite out of something like a cube of (tasteless) apple
or potato, and he says, "Now you're all the way up to season four."
Next dream. On another planet that's like Scotland --or maybe it's
just Scotland-- my job is to keep lots of people quiet during their
sneak rescue out of a Scandinavian warehouse/shop-space/ice-rink
complex. I accomplish this, get the people away, but the evil
murderer/mastermind who caused the problem in the first place gets away too.
A detective tricks the murderer by, somehow without talking, telling
him, "You'll need my bag-- it's in my office, in back." The evil man is
walking on a road through fields, by a lake. At the detective's office,
an ancient stone church, he turns off the road, goes around the back of
the church, goes in, gets the detective's black doctor bag. The
detective's helper girl is now there, pretending to be blind, tapping
her blind-person's cane as she moves slowly around to the front of the
church, leading the evil man by his predatory instinct.
The detective and an older woman arrive. The detective bashes the
evil man in the head with the cane, knocks him down. Is he out? or only
pretending? (I closely inspect the evil man's big squarish gray head. It
doesn't look damaged. Uh-oh.)
Things change so the detective hasn't got here yet. His now three
helper women stand in the foggy churchyard, quarreling, going on and on
about /exactly/ how evil the evil guy is, until, of course, "Look, he's
gone." Shit. Now we have to start trying to catch him all over again.
At another old country church there's a funeral service going on
inside for one of the men the evil man has killed. A man comes out and
steps into a stone paddock in the side yard, goes to the far wall,
mumbles prayers. I have to piss; I go into the paddock and get
two-thirds of the way through relieving myself when the man finishes
praying. I think of how I read somewhere that it's impossible to stop
urinating before you're through, but I have experimented with this
before and know it's not true. I stop pissing, fix up my pants and hop
up to sit on the wall.
Writer Mitch Clogg is here. He looks at my belly (my green sweater)
and says, "Are you down to a hundred-six pounds?" I say, "A
hundred-sixty, more like." Mitch knows the evil man got away. It's all
right; this is only the first part of the story. There's lots of time
yet. We'll think of something.
I woke up with the John Fogerty song /Long As I Can See The Light/
playing in my head.
-end-