Space-Tank Parade Float. Bookkeeping Machine. Brainwashed. Destructive Test. Oakworm. Interpersonal Relations. Bet On The Second. Trampoline. The Clothes Experiment. Giant Mechanical Spiders. Accurate Flight.
Marco McClean
First dream. Sherie's mother Lucille and I estate-out a private
detective's office in an old storefront shop. I take the office chair
and a short hat-rack.
I'm wandering around in a strange suburb. A man keeps his truck-size
restored antique spaceship/parade-float/tank in his side-back yard. The
man sees me admiring it and he comes out of his house with some other
people to get into it and start it up so I can see it running.
Now the tank/float-thing is a regular car. My (dead) stepfather
Roland is in the driver's seat. I'm in the back seat on the right,
crowded against the window by a bunch of strangers; I can't get out.
Roland releases the hand-brake and tries to control the car; he very
slowly bumps it into where the wooden fence meets a fat oak tree. /I
expected this./
Next dream. I'm on foot in the city of the suburb of the previous
dream. In the parklike space between oddly-set buildings I meet a smart
twelve-year-old girl with her black hair cut in a sharp 7-shape. I'll
teach her to fly-- "Look..." (I demonstrate, fly out and up, come back
down near the right building, land under trees.
Of course the girl's mother will have to give permission before we
start this, but the girl is pretty sure her mother will say okay.
Later, people are evacuating Fort Bragg (CA). A car goes by stuffed
full of people, like a trash-bag stuffed with old clothes. I and some
children walk in a corridor down the long axis of an old wooden
building, going south to Redwood Street. When we get outside I see we're
behind Coast Hardware. To cross Redwood I have to get the terrycloth
tie-belt of my bathrobe untangled from the hundred-foot orange extension
cord that's wrapped around my hips and legs and also tangled in the
wrought-iron staircase rail of the building behind me. I have some
trouble with this.
Across the street is a failed school that, like all schools, is a
business racket. Without having been here before, I just /came from/
here and in leaving I'm returning. I have an antique mechanical
bookkeeping machine. The Mexican policeman/new-school-administrator at a
desk in the office is attracted to my machine. I just give it to him.
What good is it to me?
Others here in the office think I'm still on the staff and am here
to start the new school year with them. I say, "I was fired." They're
all sorry to hear that, and good luck and everything, and, oh, gee, look
at the time, so much to do. Well, bye.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-12-06:
First dream. Here's a modern transport car the size of the entire
lower seating area of Cotton Auditorium. Actress Roxann Dawson (engineer
on /Star Trek: Voyager/) has been recovered from being kidnapped by
enemies. Her rescuers are ordered to hypnotize her and brainwash her
back to certain loyalty, using a stand-up mirror. They don't want to do
it, but they have to.
As she goes through the brainwashing process, every time she comes
back to herself in the brainwashing room she sees a little more of her
friend's house (sky-blue walls and gold stars). She's growing angry,
actually being brainwashed /against/ her friend.
I woke up with the /Loituma Girl/ song playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. An overweight cross between actresses
Elizabeth Montgomery and Liv Ullmann is held captive. I'm on the indoor
balcony of an animal barn; Liv Ullman is standing in the straw
downstairs, singing the /Loituma Girl/ song to herself.
Liv Ullmann's women captors appear, one up here behind me (but not
seeing me; I'm invisible) and one down there-- the one with the captive
is Julie Cox, who played Irulan in /Children of Dune/. Liv Ullman is
forced to drink either piss or dirty foamy beer from a big
stainless-steel mixing bowl after having been made to eat spoiled meat
and drink spoiled milk. Irulan says, "Now you know what happens." Liv
Ullmann says, "I can guess." (Meaning, she will be violently ill.)
Irulan says, "Take a walk." Liv Ullmann looks out the open door, says,
"But there's--" (It's freezing cold and there's nothing out there for
miles.) Irulan says, "Get going."
I get that they're putting her through what Kurt Vonnegut called
/destructive testing/.
Next dream. I'm in the house where I lived when I was in seventh
grade, but in the dream it's in a forest, isolated. People are hiding
here from whatever caused society to collapse. Some military men are
here; they're in charge.
A man among us is found to have an oakworm crawling on his finger;
this is taken as a bad sign; he'll vanish and be somehow subverted and
given superhuman powers and turned against us. I need to go to where
they (?) take people to do this, to figure out if it's true, and come
back with evidence against it before the army guys kill the guy out of
stupid fear.
The army guys are constantly busy, probably to keep from thinking.
They've set up a propaganda audio program to play through a speaker on
the back lawn, that's pointed through the house's open back sliding door
into the living room. They don't know how to connect the wires. I go
around the garage side of the house to the front to my car, to get a
jack for their amplifier, so they can just plug their speaker in.
In the bathroom I piss into the toilet; my raggedy gray sleep-shirt
becomes a foot longer than it should be and falls down to block the
stream. I take it off and rinse it in the sink.
In the bathroom mirror I see that my hair is long, reddish, wavy and
silky-looking. Nice hair. /That can't be right./ I can't see my own
face. Maybe I'm someone else, here.
Back in the living room of the house, the army guys are playing a
dangerous game with the neon-sign transformer Francis gave me when they
decommissioned the electronics lab. They've taken the covers off the
high-voltage poles and they're handing it around among themselves /with
it plugged in/. It gives them harmless play shocks, when it ought be to
be burning them and causing them to scream and convulse. /Have they
taken the superhuman oakworm treatment?/
My dreams from Monday, 2009-12-07:
First dream. A man has economic and social problems that are
surmountable up to but not including the point where he needs about half
a gallon of gas for the little tank of his lawnmower-engine minibike and
no gas is available. A white 1950's gangster /fixer/ guy involves a
pretty Oriental woman and another person to bring the try-hard man a gas
kit: a plastic can and a syringe with different-diameter hoses that fit
into and over each other.
I become the try-hard man, figure out a way to use just the syringe,
not the hoses, and so shortcut the siphoning process, fill up the tank,
and bolt the tank back where it belongs in the minibike. The Oriental
woman and her friend, now nearly unconscious from gasoline fumes, will
ride on the back of the minibike as I go to the next place just in time
to solve the next in the guy's series of problems.
Here's is a restaurant in a dilapidated abandoned Disney-ride
building. The restaurant area is partitioned off with white-painted
two-by-four trellises and has an open trellis ceiling, through which you
can see the sleazy ceiling of the indoor ride. An old Italian gangster
boss is very picky about things. He mentions at least three times what a
shitty roof this place has, and he won't give his daughter to anyone who
can't see a simple thing like that.
Now the try-hard guy is also concerned with not being killed by the
old Italian boss, whose daughter he's been married to for some time.
He's solved the problem of the sleazy tiki-lounge/beerhall/restaurant
and just has to bring his ex-wife to her father and, with her, show off
the renovated place. But the ex-wife (the woman I saw in Safeway last
night, who looked wrecked from like, I dunno, twenty or thirty years of
drugs and being poor, but still had a little sweetness in her face) is
unconscious in the passenger seat of the open car (parked indoors,
here). The guy says, "I just gotta move the body..." meaning to put his
ex-wife temporarily aside, replace her with a responsive person (the
Oriental fixer girl, now awake). The ex-wife wakes up peeved. She heard
herself referred to as /the body/, and she doesn't know that her own
father will kill /her/ on sight because of how she's been; she just
hates her ex-husband, who really has been doing all this work for her as
well as for him, and everybody knows it, and she'd know it too if she
hadn't wrecked her brains with drugs.
I take over again for the guy working so hard to solve all these
problems. I think I see a way to keep the ex-wife's father from killing
anybody at all...
I slowly woke up, imagining how things might go with the big boss if
I were to say something to him like, "People are not machines. You're
always gonna be disappointed if you expect them to be something they're
not. You (boss and daughter) loved each other once. How hard would it be
to go back and start there?" He might come around and things might
improve between them.
Asleep again. Next dream. Two fleshy puffy-faced white gangsters go
out to wait in their car for a man in a building to come up with the
money he owes them. He's sure he can't do it, so he dithers around,
getting ready to go to work. Another man is here. I put enough money to
cover the man's debt into an ancient book scroll thing. The gangsters,
impatient, come back in, grab the scroll. I say to the more
dangerous-looking one of the two, "Sorry to make you wait, sir."
A man like actor Peter Falk tells me to bet on the second horse. I
don't ever bet, but I thank him for the advice.
In the next building a man from the theater company here (?)
recommends I bet on something today, something in the /second/ part
--the second race, the second whatever --because the organization that
determines who wins these things is having a day where people can win a
little back; they're doing this to show goodwill, and to donate to the
local community. I say, "I don't even know /how/ to bet," meaning, do I
go to a betting window somewhere? Do I call someone on the phone? I'll
do it; I just don't know how to do it.
Next dream. Sage of Sage's Computer appears standing on a
trampoline-size mattress. I introduce him to someone else here who wants
to edit video and has been asking me about it. A person from the
previous dream, the one in the building with the man who owed money, is
here; he points out that Sage and the first guy know each other already.
I say, "Oh, right. You made a movie together." The man doesn't
remember. I try to remind him by mentioning some of the others involved
in the movie, but I can't think of anyone's name. I think of Sean, but I
don't remember which last name he finally settled on.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2009-12-08:
First dream. The Ronon Dex character in /Stargate Atlantis/ takes
the last of a murdered scientist's clothes (his last experiment), puts
them in an open bag in a car, and goes forward elsewhere with the story,
/not knowing the enemy soldiers were watching and immediately put a
Christmassy box lid over the bag, knowingly or unknowingly destroying
the effect of the experiment./
The last time this all happened, the scientist was not right about
what the experiment would accomplish, so there were no political
repercussions to attract the enemy in the first place.
Two men get into a pointless fistfight (like the fistfight in
/Tampopo/. No-one treats it as a big deal, because it's just not a big
deal. It has nothing to do with the story.
Next dream. In the dream there's a reservoir inside a rectangular
chainlink fence across the highway from the Botanical Gardens just south
of Fort Bragg (CA). I'm in my pyjamas. Actress Rachel Archuletta,
another girl (Juanita?), and Stuart Tregoning (in the dream, Rachel's
father) stand talking next to a car. I sense that they think of their
talk subject as none of my business, so I check that I have the car keys
in my pyjama pants pocket and I say, "I'll just take a walk. I'll be
back in-- ten minutes?" Ten minutes, good. They turn back to their talk.
A man is sitting all twisted up with his arms looking like they're
attached the wrong way around. A sour old lady says, "Frivolous kids!"
Rachel's brother is in trouble with the law again; he's working it off
by driving a thrift-store truck. I use my cheap VOM to test the pins of
the connectors in the wiring harness that goes to the rear array of
lights. (There's an extra wiring harness for this but it stops halfway
back.)
Now I'm in a strange hilltop house's bathroom kissing the family's
mother. A daughter pushes the door open with a long two-by-four. I say,
"That is so incredibly rude."
The troubled brother is freshly back from a trip to Africa. Everyone
sits around in the big main room. I accidentally knock loose some books
from a three-foot-high mountain of books that the boy brought back with
him; I pick them up and say to the family's father, "Pardon me, sir."
Another daughter has a snotty attitude about how people were worried
about where she has been. I say, "Oh, nothing. We're just /late/ for
/school/."
Outside, near a train tunnel downhill from the house, I'm with the
mother again, this time just waiting. I say, "Where is she?" The
mother says, "She and Sherie (Rachel?) are [Russian-sounding word for
driving in cars]." (So we can't call them, because then they'd be
talking on the phone and going seventy miles an hour-- it's too dangerous.)
I appear as another boy here, which is what /causes the giant metal
spiders in the first place-- which means I can't use time-travel to not
have to wait for the girls to show up./
But the spiders come into existence and come this way over the
horizon anyway. The mother and I should move away from the house,
separately blasting them with personal energy weapons. (We're protected
against blanket-blasts of the spiders' bombs but the house is not.)
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /Mister Fancy Pants/
playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. In the vast field that in the dream is
just south of the the Main Street RiteAid drugstore in Fort Bragg (CA)
there's a long paved incline downhill eastward. I hop down this incline,
kicking a tennis ball ahead of me. At the bottom, the incline goes
underground into a basement area. Some other kids and I hop and climb
around the foundation edges of this basement, and hop past and through a
fire-department/town meeting. The men are forbearing; we're just kids.
I run back up the hill and go down again, kicking the ball the whole
time. Climb up again. (It's steeper this time.) By the back corner of
the drugstore I run water from an outdoor shower head and notice several
leaky places in the pipes. I repair these, and refit a blobby rubber
part on the end of the shower nozzle. Try the water again. Nothing
leaks, and the rubber thing inflates but stays put. I experiment with
taking the rubber thing off. No difference, except the water comes out
in a stream and not a shower.
I use a rope on a pulley to climb for awhile and then am /lifted/
the rest of the way up to the top of a water tower, which is somehow now
at ground level. A white woman proud of her American Indian ancestry
appreciates my respect for Indians. She nods her regal-ranch-woman head.
Fort Bragg in the dream is a post-industrial wasteland. People are
out at night standing around, widely scattered, doing nothing. I fly up
ecstatic into the sky and land again. Here's Late Night Liz. I gesture,
/Do you want to go up?/ She nods yes. We hold hands and I fly her up;
we swoop around awhile. I put her safely back down again. Here's her
dream-only niece, actress Amanda Plummer at about fifteen years old; I
go, /Do you want to?/ Yes. I fly around with Amanda Plummer and then
put her down. Okay, that was fun.
A very old woman has been watching from her stuffed chair in this
asphalt scrap-metal yard. I go to her, pick her up in my arms, fly her
around, put her back, happy.
This time I fly up alone nearly out of the atmosphere, and am
surprised to be able to come completely under control back to exactly
where I flew up from --in the same world, yet. /This almost never happens./
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /Skullcrusher Mountain/
playing in my head.
-end-