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Marco McClean
Nov 25, 2011, 5:18:56 AM11/25/11
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Subject: Snake-Water Religious Camp. Japanese Islands. Perdition.
Weather Machinery. Wings. Spillway. Balancing Act. Invaded. Telescope
And Change. Expeditions. Dog Disease. Richie Valens Mike Hammer.
Marquee. Waltz. Indian Legend. Blue Light Special. Train. Skewer Fight.
Crazy Ladder Woman. Pet Kangaroo Rat. Umbrella. Bleak Beach. Parking.
Slave Children. Radio Jets. My Copy. Cliff Seating. Ellen Burstyn as
Norma Desmond.
My dreams from Thursday, 2011-11-10:
First dream. I'm in a diner in the woods near the Y of the Caspar
(CA) dump road and Road 409. Some old folks are here, then they're
replaced with small groups of college girls who are all sad about
something --their team lost the big game or a famous singer was killed.
I lie across the space between a barstool and the counter, kissing
a girl in big round glasses. The waitress jealously slams down some
change onto the counter between us. /Funny/.
My point of view floats along a forest trail in a story told by
roadhouse-blues deejay Les Tarr about a blues-historical man named /Cat/
who is tricked to run across logs that are like a row of broken pencils
floating on oil yet somehow stuck out over the edge of a chasm. Cat is
trapped holding still on a pencil in the middle, afraid of the pencils
all giving way and dropping him. His brother comes along and he's not
trapped anymore. Superimposed on all of this is something about a
religious camp I'm supposed to go to for nine months, that for some
reason I committed to. /I don't want to go./ Les Tarr's story includes
someone (Cat? me?) deliberately wading down into root-and-weed-choked
cold water in dark winter, with animals and snakes also in the water,
for a religious camp training exercise. I'm like, /There is no way I am
going to that camp./
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /I Feel Fantastic/ playing
in my head, and I wondered about the cold water in the dream-- can
snakes even live in cold water? I know eels can.
Asleep again. Next dream. There's an outdoor kids' party, like a
birthday party for one of them, happening on the lawn around an isolated
mansard-roof house. I have a scruffy well-behaved dog. I see that I
don't have to worry about it; it snuffles all around but keeps looking
up to see where I am and stay near me. There's a canvas pavilion with
folding tables and chairs.
At a house in suburban hills I demonstrate flying to a group of
kids, using the gradual method: I jump up and take just a slightly
noticeable extra time to fall. Then I jump up a little higher and take a
little more time to touch the ground. And you work your way up to
eventually stay in the air. See?
/Would anyone like to go flying?/ A big strange man wants to try
it. We lock wrists, my left and his right; I lend him some of my flying
power and we step up into the air. The man is surprised and pleased that
this actually works; we're connected by our hands but somehow stretched
out about twenty feet apart, ten feet up. I set us down.
I say, "Okay, I'm going flying out over the ocean; who'd like to
come along?" Most of the kids raise their hands. I choose Ted at the
age he was in the late 1980s at the Albion Whale School, pick him up,
carry him under my arm and fly to another island, to a Japanese girls'
school. Ted's sister is here. I say to Ted, "You okay?" He says, "I
feel sick to my stomach." Oh. Should I leave him with his sister? His
sister says that's up to him. He wants me to take him home, so-- I put
him up on my back and shoulders this time instead of squeezing around
his middle, and I fly between islands that are no longer familiar. We go
over a Japanese town and land in the hills past it, in an art-filled
house of dream-only old friends. Little Ted wanders around, examining
things.
It's time to finish the trip home, but when we get up into the air
again it turns out that weeks have passed. There's been a radio alert
about us having gone missing, possibly crashed in the sea. People in a
town we come to cheer as we appear, and they want us to stay here for
awhile. /Thanks, but I have to get Ted back to his parents. Can you call
them and tell them we're on our way?/
Next dream. A boy has fallen from the sky and is resting in the
front bedroom of like the house where I lived when I was in sixth grade.
A small toy robot-thing fell with him --about the size of an egg-- and
it's dormant, but it's ominous because this is the second time through
this scenario; the first time through, the robot woke up and grew and
caused problems.
Things go the way I expect them to: the robot appears in various
places in a Japanese town-- in a street gutter next to a nervous cat; on
a window ledge, other places. No-one notices or worries as it gets
bigger and more dangerous. /It's already as big as a duck./
The little boy who lives in the house the sky-person and robot
started in goes into the bathroom and has to climb over an
inside/outside wall and down concrete steps to where the toilet is in an
alley open to a street.
Now I'm the little boy and I've just used the toilet in the alley--
or rather I'm sitting on it. I pick up toilet paper strewn around on the
ground and stuff it in the toilet. I'm uncoordinated about getting my
underwear and pants up; my feet are tangled in them. Some bigger boys
come into the alley, go past me, up the steps. A man comes here and is
ready to be helpful but this is so embarrassing. The man says, "Do you
want me to show you what I do when that happens to me?" /No. Thanks./
I feel like this is all getting off the subject of the robot
danger. My point of view floats through the dim town to a bungalow's
doorway where I think the helpful man lives. Here on the welcome mat is
a Netflix envelope with a cut-out address window big enough for the disk
to fall out. The disk is /Perdition/ Something, but not /The Road To
Perdition/. Here's another envelope, also with a big address window, and
also with a large but illegible dollar amount printed on it. Cartoonist
Mervin Gilbert's voice says something about how this guy runs up Netflix
bills of upwards of $528 a month. But I know that doesn't matter,
because the man is a magical helpful character like Jack Harkness of
/Torchwood/ and money isn't important; it's taken care of magically, and
no-one is cheated because, you know, /how could it be that much? $528.
It couldn't./
I woke up with a mishmash of several Jonathan Coulton songs playing
in my head, including /This One Is Not About You/ and /DNA/.
My dreams from Saturday, 2011-11-12:
First dream. I'm telling and at the same time participating in a
story about a nation of people living for hudreds of years in a huge
satellite. The main woman of a secret organization gets into the room at
the highest point of the satellite (down is down), where she can control
all the internal weather. She wants to be the god of these people.
A spindly man like actor Larry Niven in old age is here. I can't
tell if he's for the woman or against her. I stay invisible and watch
for clues as to what to sabotage to stop the woman. I don't know how any
of these machines work. I don't want to wreck something important; I
just want to show up the woman as being only scheming and not at all
godlike.
Next dream. I'm helping my cousin Teedee and others tear out the
partition walls near the back of an old barn. I use a saw upside-down
over my head to separate the sides of an L-shaped wall frame at the
corner; when they're loose, Teedee pulls them to fall over.
I wander around the uneven dirt floor, following the seemingly
random concrete footer /that might be the top of buried walls./ What
will they do with this place? Make a house out of it?
Outside the barn I become fascinated by the 3-D image of a flying
airplane with equally long straight front and back wings and no tail fin.
Next dream. I'm in a bed that's cantilevered out from a high
outside wall of a ski lodge. I'm on a business/camping trip. A
warbly-voiced Julia-Child/scoutmaster-like woman is inside the building,
in her room; she's in charge of all of us children/techies; she's
running the trip.
Out across a mountain lake valley, roaring whitewater pours down a
giant concrete spillway /into/ the lake, churning it up. In the dream I
remember yesterday working on something electrical near that spillway,
and I think, /Interesting how fast your ears get used to loud white
noise and you forget all about it./
Now the lake is smaller and calm. Wild extreme-sports college kids
take turns flinging themselves off ramps and from catapults to fly out
hundreds of feet and splash into the water. Everyone cheers and claps.
I walk next to the lake, find where a long shallow concrete
stairway goes down parallel to the shoreline, and I plan to bet someone
that I can dive in from farther and farther back up the stairs. (I will
cheat by flying a little).
I go uphill to a garage attached to a strange house. The concert I
was running sound for is over. The money from the event will be in a
carved wooden box inside a cardboard guitar case up in the rafters,
where the box-office man was supposed to put it. I take it down, check
that the money is here. The guitar case becomes a suitcase stuffed with
girls' clothes, as well as the money box. /This is Jill Taylor's
daughter Jacqueline's suitcase./ A brassiere falls out, becomes a wad of
wrapping paper, and wind from the open garage door blows it to roll
under a dresser. I retrieve it, put it back where it belongs, close the
suitcase. In the house, a television plays Richard Nixon giving a speech.
I woke up with GLADOS' voice singing /Still Alive/ (from the game
/Portal/).
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm stacking plywood mattresses against
the back wall of a downhill ramp-floor garage by sliding them over the
edge and then shoving so they slide and fall properly and stay leaning up.
And I show off for people in a car in front of a tall garage on
stilts on a hilltop, by pointing at another car, levitating it and,
while doing that, raising the roll-up garage door /and/ floating up
myself to see how to place the car properly in the garage. I want to
look back and down to see whether the people are really looking, but I
don't dare split my attention. If they're looking, they're looking; if
they're not, I don't want them to look because I dropped the car.
My dream from Sunday, 2011-11-13:
A communal apartment is made in the extended partitioned lobby of a
big old abandoned office building or hotel. It's the middle of the
night. I go from my bedroom to the kitchen area. Other college kids are
here. I look in the refrigerator for my food, instead find a mess and
also lots of artificial plant parts like from a crafts store.
Now I'm in bed in my real-life house, but it's steamy-stuffy and
overheated like a winter Midwestern schoolroom. Other people are here,
settling in for the long haul and talking and moving things around as if
they own the place. Two old ladies snuggle in a couch-bed across from
the door, set crossways to my bed. College kids mill around obviously
settling in. I go to the hallway, edge around a man coming this way,
then wait till another man comes out of the bathroom, and then in the
bathroom a thin little boy is sick, lying on the floor next to the
toilet so he can throw up into it when he needs to. I say to the boy,
"You're okay there. Don't get up." (I can go outside into the woods to
piss.)
But now the rest of the house is even more crowded, and people are
lying on /my bed/, watching teevee on a tablet computer. I look around
at everyone, all the activity, and shout, "Ev'ryone! Hear me!" Nobody
reacts. I shout, "Ev'ryone! Hear me now! If you're not paying rent,
/get out of here!/" People start leaving, but as if it just occurred to
them and it's entirely their idea.
Now the house is nearly empty of people. It occurs to me to go see
if the little boy's parents have taken him with them, and it turns out
that they haven't; he's still lying on the floor next to the toilet.
I guess I have to call the police. Or should I just take care of
the boy and adopt him? /I'll carry him to the couch-bed and see if
there's anything in the kitchen to make soup out of./
My dreams from Wednesday, 2011-11-16:
First dream. It's night. I'm in San Francisco, first in a theater,
then on a random series of streets, then in a glass-walled
motel-room/info-booth on a sidewalk. A big interesting twenty-something
girl moves to embrace me where I'm standing leaning against a
shelf-table. I give the standard /Of course I want you, but I'm married,
so this isn't gonna happen/ speech.
I walk uphill to a gas station's parking lot. On the grassy
hill/verge I find coins, a small telescope and folded tripod and other
things, some camping things, all scattered around; someone cleaned his
car out and forgot to put these things back in. I pick everything up in
my hands and arms and go to turn it all in to the gas station attendant.
She's in the office, lying on a bench, taking her break. She becomes a
menace, is joined by 1950s-style gangsters with guns. I jump/fly up onto
the metal roof, climb to the safety of the far side of the roof ridge,
and from here I jog/slide to where I can jump down to a canvas awning
and skate along it on my socks, generally downhill, around between
buildings, to the left and left again up the next street. I jump down
and look around for pursuit. I've lost them.
Next dream. The back-story is about game-like but dangerous
expeditions to computer control rooms in a weird land like the Zone in
Takovsky's movie /Stalker/. I've just come back from one of these
expeditions, and I'm in the empty car-repair garage of an abandoned gas
station, reporting to someone who intends to lead the next series of
expeditions. I give a complicated /wordy/ description of where everyone
stood in the control room, leading up to the flash/problem that I can't
describe to the new guy because that's the end of my memory of it-- but
it's farther than anyone ever got before, so we're learning something,
anyway.
My dreams from Friday, 2011-11-18:
First dream. My mother lives in a big empty metal barn with a dirt
floor. I come here just as she starts to go out into this strange town
wearing only her underwear and a thin shirt. I lead her back inside,
find her clothes, help her get dressed. She's not entirely present; I'm
afraid that I'll have to start taking care of her all the time now, and
I'm not sure I have the attention for that.
Now I'm on Highway 1 just north of Albion (CA). I've just finished
putting out a new issue of my old paper (that in real life I stopped
publishing at the end of 1996). Roadhouse-blues deejay Les Tarr gave me
pages of finished blues-related letters and poetry for the paper; I
realize I didn't even check them over, just inserted the text and laid
it out. I ask him if what he gave me is full of swear words (as if this
will be a problem, like at a new radio station that doesn't know me). He
says no, no, man; nothing to worry about there.
Also out here on the road is a fluffy though evenly balding little
white dog that in the dream I think of as my childhood dog Ferd, though
he was black. I pet this dog and make a mental note not to touch my
mouth or nose or eyes before washing my hands, because the flesh showing
through the dog's sparse fur doesn't look healthy.
Next dream. Musician Richie Valens (in the dream a white-haired
fifty-something Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer book cover guy) has traveled
forward in time from the 1950s to the 1990s and stands looking in
through the corner door of a live music bar. He says with pride and
wonder, "I wrote that song," /and people are still playing it./
I and some others lie sprawled every which way inside a big blocky
1960s car stopped in the left-turn lane at at a stoplight, but this
isn't a problem-- none of the cars are going anywhere; we're not
blocking anyone's way. A white-haired sexy science-fictiony character,
like a girl who was never in /Farscape/ but might easily have been,
climbs into the car, kisses me, feels around for my wallet. Tch.
Next dream. Juanita, I and my grammar-school friend Shelley, all at
our real-life ages, lounge around on the landscaped mound before a house
on a hill/cliff-edge in like Arizona. Either we're talking about the
story of a man stalking singer Taylor Swift or it's playing on the
radio. I get up and hop around on my right leg like a human pogo stick.
Shelley says, "I was born in Arizona in a ranch house-- really a motel..."
I hop higher and higher and land on the house's desert-dry
cracked-wood-shingle roof. /I shouldn't walk on this./ I fly out over
this dry western valley-and-hill landscape. I tell myself to /be careful
not to go too far, into another world, say, and not find my way back./
But I go high and far, and I close my eyes and fall deliciously, then
pull up, and I don't know where I am. /Yup, another world. Tch./
I fly to a modern angular school complex, fly in and through the
central hallway. A boy pushes maliciously at me to try to make me crash
into the wall. At the doorway out, a retarded spaniel-spotted boy grabs
at my leg. The mean boy is instantly here; he pulls the retarded boy
away, lets me get loose. /He was sorry for pushing me./
I fly up into the crawlspace behind an indoor decorative marquee in
a huge multiplex theater lobby. The person I have become in the story,
an officer in an obsolete military service, lives hiding up here with
his daughter. She sees a way for our old military objective to be
pursued again, now that the enemies (who won) are trying again to catch
those of us who fought and kill us. His/my (dream-only) daughter says,
"Let me take this one." (Let her be in charge and plan our moves.)
My dreams from Monday, 2011-11-21:
First dream. Juanita and I are in bed (in the dream). Tongue sex
morphs into our waltzing slowly and gracefully around a strange room,
Juanita standing on my feet.
Next dream. Juanita and I are lying on a bed on a walkway outside
an end corner of a strange apartment building. A flat television on the
wall is playing a drama/comedy anthology show. /Is it too loud?/ /No, I
don't think so./
We go along the building, go into an apartment at the far end, and
I sit in a kitchen sink. Juanita recognizes the famous 1960s /Tom Waits
Show/ on an inside teevee. Someone changes the channel, but that's
okay-- we know where to find it now; we can watch it any time we want to.
A health-food-type man walks by, saying he has to get a /beer
basket/. I say, "What's a beer basket?" He says, "Love handles." (?)
An older woman like my mother's (dead) L.A. friend Lorna is doing a
trivia quiz task about actor Lorne Green. I say, "I didn't really know
him, but he sure could play the accordion." (I'm joking about that, but
the woman says, "He sure could.")
A dry salami sandwich in an open baguette is on a table in a niche
in the wall. The man after the beer basket comes back and gives me a
paper cup of brown potato chips.
Up the street from the apartment building I sit in a top-down
convertible car waiting for Juanita to come out of a bank. Now the car
is /in/ the bank. It slides slowly around the tile floor, gently bumping
and ricocheting off the L-shape of the teller counters.
I ask the haughty bank manager woman if she knows about the old
Indian legend (of what happened on this spot hundreds of years ago). She
calls out, "Bring me the bitch!" --meaning the Indian maiden subject of
love haikus etched on the bank's prized antique glass panels --by this
she unknowingly indicates that she doesn't know the legend, doesn't know
how valuable the glass panels are.
The car has become a dinner table and chairs. Juanita and I hurry
from another bank room (?) to sit at the table before the bank woman can
get and the glass tablets. We make it there first, but the woman is
triumphant about something. /Have we escaped? or does this mean we
misunderstood and are captured?/
I woke up with the /Farscape/ theme music playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. It's night. A car drives past me on a
city street, then my point of view is inside the car, where a
gray-skinned human-like alien passenger with bristly salt-and-pepper
hair /takes over control of the woman driving. He will have her do
secret chores for the aliens.
I go into a French restaurant in like Ohio. A cross between Odin
from the Whale School and Ron from the Harry Potter movies is directing
long tables of aliens in their practice of learning to be human people.
He puts a salty olive in his nose and gestures to the aliens to do the
same. They all emulate this act. /Funny./ An alien woman eyeballs me,
changes the size of the pupil of one of her eyes. /Is that how they
control you? Am I in their power now? It doesn't feel like it, but would
it?/
In a theater lobby I punch an alien in the face. He becomes a
dollar coin, then a quarter, which I bend in half, all of this in full
view of several theater patrons; I have demonstrated that we can in fact
hurt the aliens. We're not helpless.
I trek across a blasted dead mostly dry clay-dirt city and find
where a deep V-shaped roadcut goes down to a mud pit. Aliens as bipedal
bundles of old rags are trapped down there like slugs in a pan of beer.
An alien boy who's been following me grabs me, thinks he has me. I
wrestle him down the roadcut to where it gets steep and /shove/ him over
to trap him with the others.
Some people (humans) gather at the edge of a college parking lot.
Across a drainage ditch the aliens have their trick sewer grate that's
really a doorway into their underground lair, or one of their lairs; you
can tell by the blue light. I go there. The grate becomes a manhole
cover, then a long open half-pipe parallel to the ditch. (It doesn't go
down, but over /there/.) I follow the pipe, catch an alien, punch him in
the face, then twist him into rags. Police and an ambulance come here
--I won't be able to explain any of this to their satisfaction; I fly up
and fly to a marina tourist town, sit on a cafe's roof, rest a moment,
think of getting something to eat here-- nah-- then rocket away over the
water.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2011-11-22:
First dream. In a dim passageway down the center of rows of indoor
livestock pens (like at the Cow Palace) a tall narrow small tram-train
advances. Two hands stick out from the jail bars in front of the train,
aiming or rather /framing/ a laser beam. The train will crush us all at
the end of the passageway. Somehow without going to it I'm running
alongside the train; I jump up to kick and shove at it, jump again and
again, and I manage to tip it over onto its side.
Next dream. An important play is happening in a big old theater
like Cotton Auditorium. I and others sneak around backstage, crawling on
our hands and knees, to get to the other wing. A man with a pointed-wire
sword-skewer-thing is about to go out onto the stage.
Now we all have skewer-swords. Things become vague.
In another place, outdoors on a dark road, there's a big
serious/fun sword fight. I run Juanita's mother completely through the
chest with my sword and let go of it. She and everyone else expected
this, as she deserved it (for some offense in the murky back-story of
the dream). The sword doesn't seem to bother her. I leave her to pull it
out.
Next dream. A sheriff's deputy and my (dead) stepbrother Craig and
I move through an offroad-vehicle showroom at night. Here's a light
utility trailer. I say, "That's useful." The deputy doesn't think so.
Craig and I describe my (dead) stepfather Roland's utility trailer. "It
was about /so/ wide and /so/ long." (Showing with our hands.)
We all go into a party in a roadside diner. On a small stage with
closed curtains behind it someone sings a Danny-Elfman-like song with
the words, "I sing the /mirror waltz/. I sing the /mirror waltz/." The
end of the song's break is arch-sounding, dissonant.
I drive on a twisty road at night high above a mountain lake. Chet
Fite from my grammar school and John Carillo (a new manager of the radio
station that used to be KMFB) come along behind me in another car. I
pull over and let them pass.
The end of the road is inside a house. My car vanishes. I wander
around, go into a bedroom. There's a scritchy-scratching sound at the
window. I pull the curtain aside. The window is open, and a ladder with
muffling rags around its top is leaned here from outside. /Is it Kay?/
No-- it's a (back-story) crazy woman-- she comes up, raises a frying pan
over her head to strike me! I block the blow, clearly call out, "Help!"--
--And I woke up in the real world, gurgle-bleating, "RLYAAAUGH!"
with Juanita pushing me to save me from the bad dream. I was stiff and
shaking before that; that's how she knew.
Asleep again. Next dream. Kay and others I associate with her
(bandleader Bob Ayres, saxophonist Carl Shoen, trumpeter Douglas
Roycroft) are in prison, which is the open seating area in the deli of a
supermarket. I'm sitting with someone Douglas-Roycroft-like, separated
from them by a set of low goods shelves. I say of the prisoners,
"They're desperate to get out."
Kay calls over to me, "Marco--" and here she says something to
indicate this is in reference to everyone's recently being fired from
KMFB when the new owner took over and switched on adult-contemporary
automation (real life); she ends with, "I want you to run my project."
(I take this to mean she wants me to make a place for her in the teevee
show I'll be starting next month.)
Now I'm in bed (still in the dream) with Juanita. She has an exotic
pet that's either a baby kangaroo or a giant kangaroo-like rat; it sits
on the hat atop her dressmaker's dummy, licking it's paws and watching
me. I talk to it, offer to get it some food, and when I get out of bed
it startles and runs down the dummy, disappears into the kitchen.
I woke up and noted that the dummy is really over by the birdcage.
My dream from a nap after I got back from the car repair place. The
forty-something blond wife of my opponent at a dangerous tech-heavy game
keeps reaching over the edge of a counter to try to sabotage me by
stealing an important tool or part. I poke her away with my closed
umbrella, and I tell her, "I don't wanta get shot and I don't wanta get
arrested. I just wanta get paid and leave." She gets this. /Of course.
Sure. Okay./ --But she reaches for the tool again. I bat the side of her
head with the umbrella. (This feel like in Christopher Baldwin's web
comic /Spacetrawler/ where Dimitri keeps giving the pink Cthulhu-like
alien a chance to be on the good guys' side and it keeps blowing it,
trying to kill him at every opportunity, and finally he just shoots it.)
My dreams from Wednesday, 2011-11-23:
First dream. It's a bleak steep beach dune scene with concrete
ruins. I'm like ten years old here, telling another boy about having
been away working for my uncle. The boy is surprised; he thought I only
avoided work.
Now I'm sitting/lying on a sand slope between concrete forms with a
strange tall woman who's wearing a long thin-cloth dress. I'm fascinated
by how sharp the line is of huge ocean waves just before they break, and
I try to interest the woman in this.
The waves are coming in higher and farther up the slope. I warn the
woman, but she just lies there. At last a wave comes in that scares me
into scampering up the hill. The wave washes around the woman, wets her.
She worries that clay in the sand will stain her dress; she's oblivious
to how she might have been killed.
Next dream has the same bleak feeling as the previous dream, but
I'm in a parking lot like at the high school where Juanita and I went to
a presentation last month. Things become vague.
Now I'm driving into the same parking lot. I go uphill, up to the
next terrace, leave the car, walk back down the hill, going parallel to
the street, to read the sign showing when the lot will be closed. /Do
they block off the exit?/ Um, yeah, the lot will be closed in half an
hour and the they block the exit. That's okay; I'll worry about that
then. I can levitate the car out over the street if I'm stuck here later.
It's later and I'm stuck here. I drive to where the hill drops off,
levitate the car sideways over the edge and float down to the street.
Next dream. A grownup who looks like a beaten-down Arthur Godfrey
is chasing us kids (I'm about ten here) through a wrecked city park at
night. I have the feeling that the man is out of favor with the other
wild grownups, and that might make him more vicious or less vicious;
we'll find out. Near what's left of tennis court fences he catches us,
or rather catches me. I turn his steampunk pistol-attached-to-his-arm
back on him and try to shoot him with it; it doesn't work that way. I
knock him down, run away after the others. (Or is he letting us get away?)
The kids live in big abandoned building, hiding from grownups who
use them for slaves. I climb around in hollow places in the walls, and I
come out high in the building on a big balcony floor. A telephone rings
and rings in an information kiosk. The other boy (or girl?) I'm with is
afraid to answer it; he or she vanishes from my attention. I answer the
telephone-- the caller is my mother at her real age. She tells me that
/they/ are disappointed in me. (Probably meaning the Ohio side of the
family.)
Thumping noises come from the floor; other people, big people are
coming here, pursuing us (now half a dozen kids are here). I say into
the telephone, "Mom, I'll call you later," hang up, lead the other kids
to the far back corner of the balcony, open a panel set up near the
ceiling and get all the kids up and into the wall. ("Hurry! Hurry!") I
climb through, pull up the panel and reset it in place.
We climb down to an open space behind a restaurant. To get out of
the building and away we'll have to go through the lobby of this
post-apocalyptic casino/adult place. The Arthur Godfrey man is here;
he'll help us. He leads us through the lobby corridor. We hold our heads
down, all subservient, as though we're Arthur Godfrey's slaves.
We're outside! Arthur Godfrey points at some of us, gestures off to
the left, says, "You go that way!" He points at the rest of us, gestures
off to the right, says, "Go /that/ way!"
Here I'm shown a short film about a wild boy and girl who lived out
here before; the girl immediately gets pregnant and soon of course dies
of it. (I see this as I'm running around the side of the building in
this bleak sand place. I run to the tennis court at the edge of a
New-England-style forest. A wild girl and her tiny little sister are
here. The little sister exclaims about /the white/. (First snow is
falling; it's becoming winter.) I think about how it's nice that I won't
have to be alone, but I know the older girl will become pregnant and die
--I saw this part. /Maybe we can find a building somewhere that has
rubbers in it. (And not have to go back to the adults' casino for
something like that, because I'm not going back there.)/
My dreams from Thursday, 2011-11-24:
First dream. For a carnival attraction they have a high barn where
parents pay for their kids to radio-control six-foot-long inflatable
airplanes. The propeller motors and jet engines all start, and it's
chaos; the kids can't figure out which airplanes they're controlling;
the airplanes aren't going around in a circle but bunching up and
bumping each other and going every which way.
Things settle into a kind of order, with the airplanes going in
roughly the same direction, but one little boy's jet is not working. It
just sits on the dirt floor. I say, "Let me see that." The boy hands
me his controller. I test the nine-volt battery on my tongue-- the
battery's fine. I use my pocket multitool to tighten the screw holding
the jet's antenna. And I try the controller again. Now it makes the wing
parts move; I hand it to the boy and say, "There-- the ailerons are
working." The boy makes the ailerons go up and down while I try to
figure out how to start the jet engine.
The boy's father just sits there this whole time, looking off into
space, bored.
In the house next to the barn I'm with the girl who I was talking
to in the back-story of the dream about /her/ childhood jet project. We
clean and inspect and reassemble her heavy long twin-barrel shotgun. She
loads it, raises it to aim and heft it. I say, "Safety on?" She says,
"Yes," and /pulls both triggers to show me how confident she is that the
safety is on./ She unloads the gun, goes to the window and looks out,
rubs at her lower back as if it hurts.
Next dream. In a hill neighborhood like the Berkeley hills but that
feels like someplace in the Midwest, there's a house by the road and a
guest house down the driveway, in back. A girl who's a cross between
sisters Laura and Lisa from the Community School, in the dream in her
twenties, lives here with her mother (not Laura's and Lisa's real mother
but a sitcom-like two-dimensional professional woman. I'm living in the
guest house, and somehow I've been copied.
Laura lays down the rules-- my copy and I are never to be seen
together even by her because it /freaks her out/.
A Mexican visitor or housing inspector or immigration officer goes
to the back house when Laura is away and I and my copy are in the main
house. I leave my copy sitting on the couch and I hurry around the
center divider to hide, but the visitor comes here, comes in and moves
unpredictably around, so my copy also has to get up and hide.
More people show up: Laura's mother and a bunch of wild but
good-hearted and calm Southern young people (who all know about me and
my copy and are okay with it). Everyone's sitting around on couches and
chairs and on the rug.
Laura comes home and everyone else vanishes. She sees me and my
copy together and gets all edgy about it.
Things become vague. I daydream (within the dream) to try to come
up with a solution, such as-- I get together with the mother and my copy
gets together with Laura, who has become less and less Laura and more
and more a woman who I only saw once in real life, ten or twelve years
ago at a Hit And Run Theater improv show, who was working the concession
stand and who told me how much she liked my radio show because of how
/sexy/ my ad for Down Home Foods was. I struggle to keep looking at this
new Laura-person's face while we're talking, and not look down and
appraise her body, which would be the last rude straw and make her
decide not to have anything to do with me /or/ my copy.
Next dream. A C-shaped niche in cliffs north of Fort Bragg (CA) is
somehow a train car going somewhere, with a dozen people all sitting on
a narrow ledge with their (our) legs dangling down. The Aunt-Bea-like
old woman conductor character comes here (walking on what?); she hands
out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and takes drink orders. /Nothing
for me, thanks./
I'm uncomfortable where I am; I step down onto the shrub-choked
rock hillside --not a cliff after all-- and move to sit on a wider part
of the ledge. The Mexican immigration official who came to the house in
the previous dream is here a helpful friend, worried about me because of
the relationship I blew with Laura and her mother. I say, "I'm fine.
Don't worry." He says we'll be where we're going in four hours.
Next dream. I'm a passenger in (dead) actress Ellen Burstyn's car
parked on Redwood Avenue in Fort Bragg (CA) up by the Employment
Development Agency, but in the dream the street is turned around the
other way, and it's in Mendocino. Alan Alda, at the age he was when he
played in /Same Time Next Year/ with Ellen Burstyn, walks jauntily up
the sidewalk across the street. I tell Ellen Burstyn to look, but she
doesn't want to (or can't) twist her head that far.
She starts the car going and drives with a happy trancelike
expression on her face. She drives blithely right past the stop sign at
the corner. I offer to drive; she doesn't hear me. She becomes scary,
like the Norma Desmond character in /Sunset Boulevard/, turns the car
around the other way and starts talking creepily about the fine
restaurant she's going to take me to outside of town. /If she ever stops
at a stop sign I'll jump out./
I woke up with Cat Stevens' /Foreigner Suite/ playing in my head.
-end-
Weather Machinery. Wings. Spillway. Balancing Act. Invaded. Telescope
And Change. Expeditions. Dog Disease. Richie Valens Mike Hammer.
Marquee. Waltz. Indian Legend. Blue Light Special. Train. Skewer Fight.
Crazy Ladder Woman. Pet Kangaroo Rat. Umbrella. Bleak Beach. Parking.
Slave Children. Radio Jets. My Copy. Cliff Seating. Ellen Burstyn as
Norma Desmond.
My dreams from Thursday, 2011-11-10:
First dream. I'm in a diner in the woods near the Y of the Caspar
(CA) dump road and Road 409. Some old folks are here, then they're
replaced with small groups of college girls who are all sad about
something --their team lost the big game or a famous singer was killed.
I lie across the space between a barstool and the counter, kissing
a girl in big round glasses. The waitress jealously slams down some
change onto the counter between us. /Funny/.
My point of view floats along a forest trail in a story told by
roadhouse-blues deejay Les Tarr about a blues-historical man named /Cat/
who is tricked to run across logs that are like a row of broken pencils
floating on oil yet somehow stuck out over the edge of a chasm. Cat is
trapped holding still on a pencil in the middle, afraid of the pencils
all giving way and dropping him. His brother comes along and he's not
trapped anymore. Superimposed on all of this is something about a
religious camp I'm supposed to go to for nine months, that for some
reason I committed to. /I don't want to go./ Les Tarr's story includes
someone (Cat? me?) deliberately wading down into root-and-weed-choked
cold water in dark winter, with animals and snakes also in the water,
for a religious camp training exercise. I'm like, /There is no way I am
going to that camp./
I woke up with the Jonathan Coulton song /I Feel Fantastic/ playing
in my head, and I wondered about the cold water in the dream-- can
snakes even live in cold water? I know eels can.
Asleep again. Next dream. There's an outdoor kids' party, like a
birthday party for one of them, happening on the lawn around an isolated
mansard-roof house. I have a scruffy well-behaved dog. I see that I
don't have to worry about it; it snuffles all around but keeps looking
up to see where I am and stay near me. There's a canvas pavilion with
folding tables and chairs.
At a house in suburban hills I demonstrate flying to a group of
kids, using the gradual method: I jump up and take just a slightly
noticeable extra time to fall. Then I jump up a little higher and take a
little more time to touch the ground. And you work your way up to
eventually stay in the air. See?
/Would anyone like to go flying?/ A big strange man wants to try
it. We lock wrists, my left and his right; I lend him some of my flying
power and we step up into the air. The man is surprised and pleased that
this actually works; we're connected by our hands but somehow stretched
out about twenty feet apart, ten feet up. I set us down.
I say, "Okay, I'm going flying out over the ocean; who'd like to
come along?" Most of the kids raise their hands. I choose Ted at the
age he was in the late 1980s at the Albion Whale School, pick him up,
carry him under my arm and fly to another island, to a Japanese girls'
school. Ted's sister is here. I say to Ted, "You okay?" He says, "I
feel sick to my stomach." Oh. Should I leave him with his sister? His
sister says that's up to him. He wants me to take him home, so-- I put
him up on my back and shoulders this time instead of squeezing around
his middle, and I fly between islands that are no longer familiar. We go
over a Japanese town and land in the hills past it, in an art-filled
house of dream-only old friends. Little Ted wanders around, examining
things.
It's time to finish the trip home, but when we get up into the air
again it turns out that weeks have passed. There's been a radio alert
about us having gone missing, possibly crashed in the sea. People in a
town we come to cheer as we appear, and they want us to stay here for
awhile. /Thanks, but I have to get Ted back to his parents. Can you call
them and tell them we're on our way?/
Next dream. A boy has fallen from the sky and is resting in the
front bedroom of like the house where I lived when I was in sixth grade.
A small toy robot-thing fell with him --about the size of an egg-- and
it's dormant, but it's ominous because this is the second time through
this scenario; the first time through, the robot woke up and grew and
caused problems.
Things go the way I expect them to: the robot appears in various
places in a Japanese town-- in a street gutter next to a nervous cat; on
a window ledge, other places. No-one notices or worries as it gets
bigger and more dangerous. /It's already as big as a duck./
The little boy who lives in the house the sky-person and robot
started in goes into the bathroom and has to climb over an
inside/outside wall and down concrete steps to where the toilet is in an
alley open to a street.
Now I'm the little boy and I've just used the toilet in the alley--
or rather I'm sitting on it. I pick up toilet paper strewn around on the
ground and stuff it in the toilet. I'm uncoordinated about getting my
underwear and pants up; my feet are tangled in them. Some bigger boys
come into the alley, go past me, up the steps. A man comes here and is
ready to be helpful but this is so embarrassing. The man says, "Do you
want me to show you what I do when that happens to me?" /No. Thanks./
I feel like this is all getting off the subject of the robot
danger. My point of view floats through the dim town to a bungalow's
doorway where I think the helpful man lives. Here on the welcome mat is
a Netflix envelope with a cut-out address window big enough for the disk
to fall out. The disk is /Perdition/ Something, but not /The Road To
Perdition/. Here's another envelope, also with a big address window, and
also with a large but illegible dollar amount printed on it. Cartoonist
Mervin Gilbert's voice says something about how this guy runs up Netflix
bills of upwards of $528 a month. But I know that doesn't matter,
because the man is a magical helpful character like Jack Harkness of
/Torchwood/ and money isn't important; it's taken care of magically, and
no-one is cheated because, you know, /how could it be that much? $528.
It couldn't./
I woke up with a mishmash of several Jonathan Coulton songs playing
in my head, including /This One Is Not About You/ and /DNA/.
My dreams from Saturday, 2011-11-12:
First dream. I'm telling and at the same time participating in a
story about a nation of people living for hudreds of years in a huge
satellite. The main woman of a secret organization gets into the room at
the highest point of the satellite (down is down), where she can control
all the internal weather. She wants to be the god of these people.
A spindly man like actor Larry Niven in old age is here. I can't
tell if he's for the woman or against her. I stay invisible and watch
for clues as to what to sabotage to stop the woman. I don't know how any
of these machines work. I don't want to wreck something important; I
just want to show up the woman as being only scheming and not at all
godlike.
Next dream. I'm helping my cousin Teedee and others tear out the
partition walls near the back of an old barn. I use a saw upside-down
over my head to separate the sides of an L-shaped wall frame at the
corner; when they're loose, Teedee pulls them to fall over.
I wander around the uneven dirt floor, following the seemingly
random concrete footer /that might be the top of buried walls./ What
will they do with this place? Make a house out of it?
Outside the barn I become fascinated by the 3-D image of a flying
airplane with equally long straight front and back wings and no tail fin.
Next dream. I'm in a bed that's cantilevered out from a high
outside wall of a ski lodge. I'm on a business/camping trip. A
warbly-voiced Julia-Child/scoutmaster-like woman is inside the building,
in her room; she's in charge of all of us children/techies; she's
running the trip.
Out across a mountain lake valley, roaring whitewater pours down a
giant concrete spillway /into/ the lake, churning it up. In the dream I
remember yesterday working on something electrical near that spillway,
and I think, /Interesting how fast your ears get used to loud white
noise and you forget all about it./
Now the lake is smaller and calm. Wild extreme-sports college kids
take turns flinging themselves off ramps and from catapults to fly out
hundreds of feet and splash into the water. Everyone cheers and claps.
I walk next to the lake, find where a long shallow concrete
stairway goes down parallel to the shoreline, and I plan to bet someone
that I can dive in from farther and farther back up the stairs. (I will
cheat by flying a little).
I go uphill to a garage attached to a strange house. The concert I
was running sound for is over. The money from the event will be in a
carved wooden box inside a cardboard guitar case up in the rafters,
where the box-office man was supposed to put it. I take it down, check
that the money is here. The guitar case becomes a suitcase stuffed with
girls' clothes, as well as the money box. /This is Jill Taylor's
daughter Jacqueline's suitcase./ A brassiere falls out, becomes a wad of
wrapping paper, and wind from the open garage door blows it to roll
under a dresser. I retrieve it, put it back where it belongs, close the
suitcase. In the house, a television plays Richard Nixon giving a speech.
I woke up with GLADOS' voice singing /Still Alive/ (from the game
/Portal/).
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm stacking plywood mattresses against
the back wall of a downhill ramp-floor garage by sliding them over the
edge and then shoving so they slide and fall properly and stay leaning up.
And I show off for people in a car in front of a tall garage on
stilts on a hilltop, by pointing at another car, levitating it and,
while doing that, raising the roll-up garage door /and/ floating up
myself to see how to place the car properly in the garage. I want to
look back and down to see whether the people are really looking, but I
don't dare split my attention. If they're looking, they're looking; if
they're not, I don't want them to look because I dropped the car.
My dream from Sunday, 2011-11-13:
A communal apartment is made in the extended partitioned lobby of a
big old abandoned office building or hotel. It's the middle of the
night. I go from my bedroom to the kitchen area. Other college kids are
here. I look in the refrigerator for my food, instead find a mess and
also lots of artificial plant parts like from a crafts store.
Now I'm in bed in my real-life house, but it's steamy-stuffy and
overheated like a winter Midwestern schoolroom. Other people are here,
settling in for the long haul and talking and moving things around as if
they own the place. Two old ladies snuggle in a couch-bed across from
the door, set crossways to my bed. College kids mill around obviously
settling in. I go to the hallway, edge around a man coming this way,
then wait till another man comes out of the bathroom, and then in the
bathroom a thin little boy is sick, lying on the floor next to the
toilet so he can throw up into it when he needs to. I say to the boy,
"You're okay there. Don't get up." (I can go outside into the woods to
piss.)
But now the rest of the house is even more crowded, and people are
lying on /my bed/, watching teevee on a tablet computer. I look around
at everyone, all the activity, and shout, "Ev'ryone! Hear me!" Nobody
reacts. I shout, "Ev'ryone! Hear me now! If you're not paying rent,
/get out of here!/" People start leaving, but as if it just occurred to
them and it's entirely their idea.
Now the house is nearly empty of people. It occurs to me to go see
if the little boy's parents have taken him with them, and it turns out
that they haven't; he's still lying on the floor next to the toilet.
I guess I have to call the police. Or should I just take care of
the boy and adopt him? /I'll carry him to the couch-bed and see if
there's anything in the kitchen to make soup out of./
My dreams from Wednesday, 2011-11-16:
First dream. It's night. I'm in San Francisco, first in a theater,
then on a random series of streets, then in a glass-walled
motel-room/info-booth on a sidewalk. A big interesting twenty-something
girl moves to embrace me where I'm standing leaning against a
shelf-table. I give the standard /Of course I want you, but I'm married,
so this isn't gonna happen/ speech.
I walk uphill to a gas station's parking lot. On the grassy
hill/verge I find coins, a small telescope and folded tripod and other
things, some camping things, all scattered around; someone cleaned his
car out and forgot to put these things back in. I pick everything up in
my hands and arms and go to turn it all in to the gas station attendant.
She's in the office, lying on a bench, taking her break. She becomes a
menace, is joined by 1950s-style gangsters with guns. I jump/fly up onto
the metal roof, climb to the safety of the far side of the roof ridge,
and from here I jog/slide to where I can jump down to a canvas awning
and skate along it on my socks, generally downhill, around between
buildings, to the left and left again up the next street. I jump down
and look around for pursuit. I've lost them.
Next dream. The back-story is about game-like but dangerous
expeditions to computer control rooms in a weird land like the Zone in
Takovsky's movie /Stalker/. I've just come back from one of these
expeditions, and I'm in the empty car-repair garage of an abandoned gas
station, reporting to someone who intends to lead the next series of
expeditions. I give a complicated /wordy/ description of where everyone
stood in the control room, leading up to the flash/problem that I can't
describe to the new guy because that's the end of my memory of it-- but
it's farther than anyone ever got before, so we're learning something,
anyway.
My dreams from Friday, 2011-11-18:
First dream. My mother lives in a big empty metal barn with a dirt
floor. I come here just as she starts to go out into this strange town
wearing only her underwear and a thin shirt. I lead her back inside,
find her clothes, help her get dressed. She's not entirely present; I'm
afraid that I'll have to start taking care of her all the time now, and
I'm not sure I have the attention for that.
Now I'm on Highway 1 just north of Albion (CA). I've just finished
putting out a new issue of my old paper (that in real life I stopped
publishing at the end of 1996). Roadhouse-blues deejay Les Tarr gave me
pages of finished blues-related letters and poetry for the paper; I
realize I didn't even check them over, just inserted the text and laid
it out. I ask him if what he gave me is full of swear words (as if this
will be a problem, like at a new radio station that doesn't know me). He
says no, no, man; nothing to worry about there.
Also out here on the road is a fluffy though evenly balding little
white dog that in the dream I think of as my childhood dog Ferd, though
he was black. I pet this dog and make a mental note not to touch my
mouth or nose or eyes before washing my hands, because the flesh showing
through the dog's sparse fur doesn't look healthy.
Next dream. Musician Richie Valens (in the dream a white-haired
fifty-something Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer book cover guy) has traveled
forward in time from the 1950s to the 1990s and stands looking in
through the corner door of a live music bar. He says with pride and
wonder, "I wrote that song," /and people are still playing it./
I and some others lie sprawled every which way inside a big blocky
1960s car stopped in the left-turn lane at at a stoplight, but this
isn't a problem-- none of the cars are going anywhere; we're not
blocking anyone's way. A white-haired sexy science-fictiony character,
like a girl who was never in /Farscape/ but might easily have been,
climbs into the car, kisses me, feels around for my wallet. Tch.
Next dream. Juanita, I and my grammar-school friend Shelley, all at
our real-life ages, lounge around on the landscaped mound before a house
on a hill/cliff-edge in like Arizona. Either we're talking about the
story of a man stalking singer Taylor Swift or it's playing on the
radio. I get up and hop around on my right leg like a human pogo stick.
Shelley says, "I was born in Arizona in a ranch house-- really a motel..."
I hop higher and higher and land on the house's desert-dry
cracked-wood-shingle roof. /I shouldn't walk on this./ I fly out over
this dry western valley-and-hill landscape. I tell myself to /be careful
not to go too far, into another world, say, and not find my way back./
But I go high and far, and I close my eyes and fall deliciously, then
pull up, and I don't know where I am. /Yup, another world. Tch./
I fly to a modern angular school complex, fly in and through the
central hallway. A boy pushes maliciously at me to try to make me crash
into the wall. At the doorway out, a retarded spaniel-spotted boy grabs
at my leg. The mean boy is instantly here; he pulls the retarded boy
away, lets me get loose. /He was sorry for pushing me./
I fly up into the crawlspace behind an indoor decorative marquee in
a huge multiplex theater lobby. The person I have become in the story,
an officer in an obsolete military service, lives hiding up here with
his daughter. She sees a way for our old military objective to be
pursued again, now that the enemies (who won) are trying again to catch
those of us who fought and kill us. His/my (dream-only) daughter says,
"Let me take this one." (Let her be in charge and plan our moves.)
My dreams from Monday, 2011-11-21:
First dream. Juanita and I are in bed (in the dream). Tongue sex
morphs into our waltzing slowly and gracefully around a strange room,
Juanita standing on my feet.
Next dream. Juanita and I are lying on a bed on a walkway outside
an end corner of a strange apartment building. A flat television on the
wall is playing a drama/comedy anthology show. /Is it too loud?/ /No, I
don't think so./
We go along the building, go into an apartment at the far end, and
I sit in a kitchen sink. Juanita recognizes the famous 1960s /Tom Waits
Show/ on an inside teevee. Someone changes the channel, but that's
okay-- we know where to find it now; we can watch it any time we want to.
A health-food-type man walks by, saying he has to get a /beer
basket/. I say, "What's a beer basket?" He says, "Love handles." (?)
An older woman like my mother's (dead) L.A. friend Lorna is doing a
trivia quiz task about actor Lorne Green. I say, "I didn't really know
him, but he sure could play the accordion." (I'm joking about that, but
the woman says, "He sure could.")
A dry salami sandwich in an open baguette is on a table in a niche
in the wall. The man after the beer basket comes back and gives me a
paper cup of brown potato chips.
Up the street from the apartment building I sit in a top-down
convertible car waiting for Juanita to come out of a bank. Now the car
is /in/ the bank. It slides slowly around the tile floor, gently bumping
and ricocheting off the L-shape of the teller counters.
I ask the haughty bank manager woman if she knows about the old
Indian legend (of what happened on this spot hundreds of years ago). She
calls out, "Bring me the bitch!" --meaning the Indian maiden subject of
love haikus etched on the bank's prized antique glass panels --by this
she unknowingly indicates that she doesn't know the legend, doesn't know
how valuable the glass panels are.
The car has become a dinner table and chairs. Juanita and I hurry
from another bank room (?) to sit at the table before the bank woman can
get and the glass tablets. We make it there first, but the woman is
triumphant about something. /Have we escaped? or does this mean we
misunderstood and are captured?/
I woke up with the /Farscape/ theme music playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. It's night. A car drives past me on a
city street, then my point of view is inside the car, where a
gray-skinned human-like alien passenger with bristly salt-and-pepper
hair /takes over control of the woman driving. He will have her do
secret chores for the aliens.
I go into a French restaurant in like Ohio. A cross between Odin
from the Whale School and Ron from the Harry Potter movies is directing
long tables of aliens in their practice of learning to be human people.
He puts a salty olive in his nose and gestures to the aliens to do the
same. They all emulate this act. /Funny./ An alien woman eyeballs me,
changes the size of the pupil of one of her eyes. /Is that how they
control you? Am I in their power now? It doesn't feel like it, but would
it?/
In a theater lobby I punch an alien in the face. He becomes a
dollar coin, then a quarter, which I bend in half, all of this in full
view of several theater patrons; I have demonstrated that we can in fact
hurt the aliens. We're not helpless.
I trek across a blasted dead mostly dry clay-dirt city and find
where a deep V-shaped roadcut goes down to a mud pit. Aliens as bipedal
bundles of old rags are trapped down there like slugs in a pan of beer.
An alien boy who's been following me grabs me, thinks he has me. I
wrestle him down the roadcut to where it gets steep and /shove/ him over
to trap him with the others.
Some people (humans) gather at the edge of a college parking lot.
Across a drainage ditch the aliens have their trick sewer grate that's
really a doorway into their underground lair, or one of their lairs; you
can tell by the blue light. I go there. The grate becomes a manhole
cover, then a long open half-pipe parallel to the ditch. (It doesn't go
down, but over /there/.) I follow the pipe, catch an alien, punch him in
the face, then twist him into rags. Police and an ambulance come here
--I won't be able to explain any of this to their satisfaction; I fly up
and fly to a marina tourist town, sit on a cafe's roof, rest a moment,
think of getting something to eat here-- nah-- then rocket away over the
water.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2011-11-22:
First dream. In a dim passageway down the center of rows of indoor
livestock pens (like at the Cow Palace) a tall narrow small tram-train
advances. Two hands stick out from the jail bars in front of the train,
aiming or rather /framing/ a laser beam. The train will crush us all at
the end of the passageway. Somehow without going to it I'm running
alongside the train; I jump up to kick and shove at it, jump again and
again, and I manage to tip it over onto its side.
Next dream. An important play is happening in a big old theater
like Cotton Auditorium. I and others sneak around backstage, crawling on
our hands and knees, to get to the other wing. A man with a pointed-wire
sword-skewer-thing is about to go out onto the stage.
Now we all have skewer-swords. Things become vague.
In another place, outdoors on a dark road, there's a big
serious/fun sword fight. I run Juanita's mother completely through the
chest with my sword and let go of it. She and everyone else expected
this, as she deserved it (for some offense in the murky back-story of
the dream). The sword doesn't seem to bother her. I leave her to pull it
out.
Next dream. A sheriff's deputy and my (dead) stepbrother Craig and
I move through an offroad-vehicle showroom at night. Here's a light
utility trailer. I say, "That's useful." The deputy doesn't think so.
Craig and I describe my (dead) stepfather Roland's utility trailer. "It
was about /so/ wide and /so/ long." (Showing with our hands.)
We all go into a party in a roadside diner. On a small stage with
closed curtains behind it someone sings a Danny-Elfman-like song with
the words, "I sing the /mirror waltz/. I sing the /mirror waltz/." The
end of the song's break is arch-sounding, dissonant.
I drive on a twisty road at night high above a mountain lake. Chet
Fite from my grammar school and John Carillo (a new manager of the radio
station that used to be KMFB) come along behind me in another car. I
pull over and let them pass.
The end of the road is inside a house. My car vanishes. I wander
around, go into a bedroom. There's a scritchy-scratching sound at the
window. I pull the curtain aside. The window is open, and a ladder with
muffling rags around its top is leaned here from outside. /Is it Kay?/
No-- it's a (back-story) crazy woman-- she comes up, raises a frying pan
over her head to strike me! I block the blow, clearly call out, "Help!"--
--And I woke up in the real world, gurgle-bleating, "RLYAAAUGH!"
with Juanita pushing me to save me from the bad dream. I was stiff and
shaking before that; that's how she knew.
Asleep again. Next dream. Kay and others I associate with her
(bandleader Bob Ayres, saxophonist Carl Shoen, trumpeter Douglas
Roycroft) are in prison, which is the open seating area in the deli of a
supermarket. I'm sitting with someone Douglas-Roycroft-like, separated
from them by a set of low goods shelves. I say of the prisoners,
"They're desperate to get out."
Kay calls over to me, "Marco--" and here she says something to
indicate this is in reference to everyone's recently being fired from
KMFB when the new owner took over and switched on adult-contemporary
automation (real life); she ends with, "I want you to run my project."
(I take this to mean she wants me to make a place for her in the teevee
show I'll be starting next month.)
Now I'm in bed (still in the dream) with Juanita. She has an exotic
pet that's either a baby kangaroo or a giant kangaroo-like rat; it sits
on the hat atop her dressmaker's dummy, licking it's paws and watching
me. I talk to it, offer to get it some food, and when I get out of bed
it startles and runs down the dummy, disappears into the kitchen.
I woke up and noted that the dummy is really over by the birdcage.
My dream from a nap after I got back from the car repair place. The
forty-something blond wife of my opponent at a dangerous tech-heavy game
keeps reaching over the edge of a counter to try to sabotage me by
stealing an important tool or part. I poke her away with my closed
umbrella, and I tell her, "I don't wanta get shot and I don't wanta get
arrested. I just wanta get paid and leave." She gets this. /Of course.
Sure. Okay./ --But she reaches for the tool again. I bat the side of her
head with the umbrella. (This feel like in Christopher Baldwin's web
comic /Spacetrawler/ where Dimitri keeps giving the pink Cthulhu-like
alien a chance to be on the good guys' side and it keeps blowing it,
trying to kill him at every opportunity, and finally he just shoots it.)
My dreams from Wednesday, 2011-11-23:
First dream. It's a bleak steep beach dune scene with concrete
ruins. I'm like ten years old here, telling another boy about having
been away working for my uncle. The boy is surprised; he thought I only
avoided work.
Now I'm sitting/lying on a sand slope between concrete forms with a
strange tall woman who's wearing a long thin-cloth dress. I'm fascinated
by how sharp the line is of huge ocean waves just before they break, and
I try to interest the woman in this.
The waves are coming in higher and farther up the slope. I warn the
woman, but she just lies there. At last a wave comes in that scares me
into scampering up the hill. The wave washes around the woman, wets her.
She worries that clay in the sand will stain her dress; she's oblivious
to how she might have been killed.
Next dream has the same bleak feeling as the previous dream, but
I'm in a parking lot like at the high school where Juanita and I went to
a presentation last month. Things become vague.
Now I'm driving into the same parking lot. I go uphill, up to the
next terrace, leave the car, walk back down the hill, going parallel to
the street, to read the sign showing when the lot will be closed. /Do
they block off the exit?/ Um, yeah, the lot will be closed in half an
hour and the they block the exit. That's okay; I'll worry about that
then. I can levitate the car out over the street if I'm stuck here later.
It's later and I'm stuck here. I drive to where the hill drops off,
levitate the car sideways over the edge and float down to the street.
Next dream. A grownup who looks like a beaten-down Arthur Godfrey
is chasing us kids (I'm about ten here) through a wrecked city park at
night. I have the feeling that the man is out of favor with the other
wild grownups, and that might make him more vicious or less vicious;
we'll find out. Near what's left of tennis court fences he catches us,
or rather catches me. I turn his steampunk pistol-attached-to-his-arm
back on him and try to shoot him with it; it doesn't work that way. I
knock him down, run away after the others. (Or is he letting us get away?)
The kids live in big abandoned building, hiding from grownups who
use them for slaves. I climb around in hollow places in the walls, and I
come out high in the building on a big balcony floor. A telephone rings
and rings in an information kiosk. The other boy (or girl?) I'm with is
afraid to answer it; he or she vanishes from my attention. I answer the
telephone-- the caller is my mother at her real age. She tells me that
/they/ are disappointed in me. (Probably meaning the Ohio side of the
family.)
Thumping noises come from the floor; other people, big people are
coming here, pursuing us (now half a dozen kids are here). I say into
the telephone, "Mom, I'll call you later," hang up, lead the other kids
to the far back corner of the balcony, open a panel set up near the
ceiling and get all the kids up and into the wall. ("Hurry! Hurry!") I
climb through, pull up the panel and reset it in place.
We climb down to an open space behind a restaurant. To get out of
the building and away we'll have to go through the lobby of this
post-apocalyptic casino/adult place. The Arthur Godfrey man is here;
he'll help us. He leads us through the lobby corridor. We hold our heads
down, all subservient, as though we're Arthur Godfrey's slaves.
We're outside! Arthur Godfrey points at some of us, gestures off to
the left, says, "You go that way!" He points at the rest of us, gestures
off to the right, says, "Go /that/ way!"
Here I'm shown a short film about a wild boy and girl who lived out
here before; the girl immediately gets pregnant and soon of course dies
of it. (I see this as I'm running around the side of the building in
this bleak sand place. I run to the tennis court at the edge of a
New-England-style forest. A wild girl and her tiny little sister are
here. The little sister exclaims about /the white/. (First snow is
falling; it's becoming winter.) I think about how it's nice that I won't
have to be alone, but I know the older girl will become pregnant and die
--I saw this part. /Maybe we can find a building somewhere that has
rubbers in it. (And not have to go back to the adults' casino for
something like that, because I'm not going back there.)/
My dreams from Thursday, 2011-11-24:
First dream. For a carnival attraction they have a high barn where
parents pay for their kids to radio-control six-foot-long inflatable
airplanes. The propeller motors and jet engines all start, and it's
chaos; the kids can't figure out which airplanes they're controlling;
the airplanes aren't going around in a circle but bunching up and
bumping each other and going every which way.
Things settle into a kind of order, with the airplanes going in
roughly the same direction, but one little boy's jet is not working. It
just sits on the dirt floor. I say, "Let me see that." The boy hands
me his controller. I test the nine-volt battery on my tongue-- the
battery's fine. I use my pocket multitool to tighten the screw holding
the jet's antenna. And I try the controller again. Now it makes the wing
parts move; I hand it to the boy and say, "There-- the ailerons are
working." The boy makes the ailerons go up and down while I try to
figure out how to start the jet engine.
The boy's father just sits there this whole time, looking off into
space, bored.
In the house next to the barn I'm with the girl who I was talking
to in the back-story of the dream about /her/ childhood jet project. We
clean and inspect and reassemble her heavy long twin-barrel shotgun. She
loads it, raises it to aim and heft it. I say, "Safety on?" She says,
"Yes," and /pulls both triggers to show me how confident she is that the
safety is on./ She unloads the gun, goes to the window and looks out,
rubs at her lower back as if it hurts.
Next dream. In a hill neighborhood like the Berkeley hills but that
feels like someplace in the Midwest, there's a house by the road and a
guest house down the driveway, in back. A girl who's a cross between
sisters Laura and Lisa from the Community School, in the dream in her
twenties, lives here with her mother (not Laura's and Lisa's real mother
but a sitcom-like two-dimensional professional woman. I'm living in the
guest house, and somehow I've been copied.
Laura lays down the rules-- my copy and I are never to be seen
together even by her because it /freaks her out/.
A Mexican visitor or housing inspector or immigration officer goes
to the back house when Laura is away and I and my copy are in the main
house. I leave my copy sitting on the couch and I hurry around the
center divider to hide, but the visitor comes here, comes in and moves
unpredictably around, so my copy also has to get up and hide.
More people show up: Laura's mother and a bunch of wild but
good-hearted and calm Southern young people (who all know about me and
my copy and are okay with it). Everyone's sitting around on couches and
chairs and on the rug.
Laura comes home and everyone else vanishes. She sees me and my
copy together and gets all edgy about it.
Things become vague. I daydream (within the dream) to try to come
up with a solution, such as-- I get together with the mother and my copy
gets together with Laura, who has become less and less Laura and more
and more a woman who I only saw once in real life, ten or twelve years
ago at a Hit And Run Theater improv show, who was working the concession
stand and who told me how much she liked my radio show because of how
/sexy/ my ad for Down Home Foods was. I struggle to keep looking at this
new Laura-person's face while we're talking, and not look down and
appraise her body, which would be the last rude straw and make her
decide not to have anything to do with me /or/ my copy.
Next dream. A C-shaped niche in cliffs north of Fort Bragg (CA) is
somehow a train car going somewhere, with a dozen people all sitting on
a narrow ledge with their (our) legs dangling down. The Aunt-Bea-like
old woman conductor character comes here (walking on what?); she hands
out sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and takes drink orders. /Nothing
for me, thanks./
I'm uncomfortable where I am; I step down onto the shrub-choked
rock hillside --not a cliff after all-- and move to sit on a wider part
of the ledge. The Mexican immigration official who came to the house in
the previous dream is here a helpful friend, worried about me because of
the relationship I blew with Laura and her mother. I say, "I'm fine.
Don't worry." He says we'll be where we're going in four hours.
Next dream. I'm a passenger in (dead) actress Ellen Burstyn's car
parked on Redwood Avenue in Fort Bragg (CA) up by the Employment
Development Agency, but in the dream the street is turned around the
other way, and it's in Mendocino. Alan Alda, at the age he was when he
played in /Same Time Next Year/ with Ellen Burstyn, walks jauntily up
the sidewalk across the street. I tell Ellen Burstyn to look, but she
doesn't want to (or can't) twist her head that far.
She starts the car going and drives with a happy trancelike
expression on her face. She drives blithely right past the stop sign at
the corner. I offer to drive; she doesn't hear me. She becomes scary,
like the Norma Desmond character in /Sunset Boulevard/, turns the car
around the other way and starts talking creepily about the fine
restaurant she's going to take me to outside of town. /If she ever stops
at a stop sign I'll jump out./
I woke up with Cat Stevens' /Foreigner Suite/ playing in my head.
-end-
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