Compass. "You Never Listen." Swimming Home. Bad Cop. Autism. Magnetic Water. Spotlight Cannon Idea. Telepathic Koala. Bill And Ned. New Type Of Seagull. Pedal-Car. Rocket Plot Foiled. Replicant Dog. Pyrrhic Win. Stalker. Airport Therapy.
Marco McClean
First dream. It's a gray-lit night. Juanita and I are flying along
an increasingly submerged California foothills ridge. We lose altitude
and go too low to be able to see over the rocks and trees of what now
are islands. I check a compass. We're going almost north, though I
wonder why we want to go north. Come on, strain, climb higher, maybe see
something informative.
Now we're over Sierra Nevada foothills. Wherever we were going is
not important anymore. We curve away to the left. It's quiet and
peaceful and totally safe --there's nothing to crash into; powerline
towers are far below, tiny as toys.
Next dream. I fly down out of fog to land in an indoor/outdoor
(roofless war trench) corridor along the side of a perfect
probably-man-made ridge. Everyone here is getting ready for a school
function-- graduation? holiday show?
I've come back in time many years to where I was (in dream only)
laying out Swift's giant (headline-size handwriting font) writing
project-- the speech she'll give? It's not good; section titles are
sandwiched too tightly between sections. Sloppy. I say to Swift: "Are
you happy with the way things look?" She says yes. Okay, then, if
she's happy with it, let it alone.
Along the base of the other side of the ridge is an endlessly long
sports playing field. I sit on some sideways-set bleachers with Swift,
who looks bored. Across the field, singer Charles Tyler (who also has
come back in time) and his girlfriend are hugging each other happily,
floating in the air above a two-foot-cross-section power-transmission
rail (or monorail track) that goes out of sight on pylons in both
directions. I say to Swift, "See, that's what people are looking for."
(Meaning both love and monorail technology.) Swift says, "You never
listen." I say, laughing, "Oh, I listen, I'm just not involved in
others." I fly up and fly over to Charles and we review what we should
be doing here in the past. With all the future to come from, others will
have come back in time to mess up whatever game or ceremony or project
is happening at the school. We have to stop them messing it up, and stop
it in such a way that we're not conspicuous, because that would be just
as bad.
I woke up with the first part of the song /He's A Rebel/ playing in
my head. "See the way he walks down the street..."
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm just getting home. It's dark; my eyes
haven't adjusted and I'm afraid someone is nearby watching me; I say
from my car, "I'm gonna make some food. Please come in and eat." No
response. There's no-one.
It's really clean inside my house. I close the wide-open window
above the bed. Now it's a big strange fancy house; my employer Tim's
(dead) mother Ethel lives here with the woman who takes care of her.
They're sitting in rocking chairs, talking. I'm supposed to vacuum the
shedding fur and dust from a big shaggy dog who's like Ira's dog Buddy.
I get out an antique Electrolux and start by using the machine to clean
itself; this makes it work much better for not having its vents clogged
with solid dust and hair.
The dog lies on its side with a kitten asleep on top of it. I
vacuum around the kitten.
Now the house belongs to a family of precariously rich people who
have accepted me. I wander around, exploring. Here's the entryway room
to the palatial bedroom of the family's rail-thin blonde daughter.
Cartoonist Mervyn Gilbert shows up to teach the girl martial arts so she
can protect herself. /Good idea./
I go out back of the house, where the whole family is standing on
the deck, everyone holding drink glasses, all excited about their
money-restoring plans to go fight in Afghanistan. I say, "Have fun.
/I'm/ not going there." They're all like, /Oh? Why not?/ I say over my
shoulder as I go back into the house, "Because I have read a great deal
about that place-- admittedly most of it fiction." That'll puzzle them;
however they take it, it conveys what I mean.
Now I'm picking up the last of my things to leave the house for
good. Only the martial-arts girl and and her mother Doris Day (or Debbie
Reynolds) are here. Someone says something about Fort Bragg businessman
Bud Kamb's not liking something he heard was written about him in the
paper. I say, "He's an Indian. I understand why he's sensitive." Did
/I/ say something about Indians on my radio show that might have pissed
him off? No... unless-- maybe that article about casinos...
I walk the mother and daughter out to their car. They're also
leaving for good, and also not going to Afghanistan.
Now I'm walking at night on a mountain road to a strange rich
community. There's something here about the electrical system of my car
having been fixed, and the bill came to more than $2700 (I see the bill
and relive shaking my head about it); there's no way I can pay that, so
I can't take my car away. That's it-- give up the car; leave it.
In the dream my mother has been dead for a long time, and here's
her car parked in the lot. I get into it. It's old-- it's been parked
here for years; the dashboard plastic is deteriorated and coming loose
at the edges, but the battery is charged and the car starts when I push
the button. The mechanics must have been using it for a utility vehicle.
The main mechanic has for a guard animal a giant living horse
fitted with a bulldozer motor and hydraulics for its grappler/scooper
part; this comically slowly comes after me as I back out of the lot and
leave. I have to point my toe till it cramps to push the distant gas
pedal. (I'll adjust the seat when I'm a little farther away from the
guard-horse-thing.)
In a country club restaurant I lean/sit on a table, waiting to talk
to the waitress who likes me and will help me get paid what they owe me,
that they conveniently forgot. (I'm calling in all my favors and debts
at once, burning them up.) The waitress sees me, immediately understands
what I want, goes into the back office and, after awhile, comes out with
$600 in hundreds and fifties. /Thanks!/ (No, that was just a wish. She
never comes out. I never worked here.) I straighten the tablecloth I
messed up and go through the place to the way out the other side.
Someone says, "Marco!" Who knows me here? I wave in the general
direction of the sound, continue out and fly up to hide on the awning.
My Uncle Buzz (in the dream, my little brother) comes out the door
beneath me dressed like a 1950s juvenile delinquent wannabe gangster. I
fly down, land next to him. He's really happy to see me. He expects me
to --what?-- get him into a higher-class scooter-trash gang? Like I'm an
important crime figure.
Again I woke up with the song /He's A Rebel/ playing in my head.
And I had the bleak feeling that you get reading the John Cheever short
story /The Swimmer/ that I always forget is not called /Swimming Home/.
It really should be called /Swimming Home/. Here's the story; I
recommend it. http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html
My dreams from Monday, 2009-10-19:
First dream. I come to myself standing, holding a broom at port
arms, in an empty parking lot in what seems like a vast city of
abandoned, spread-out shopping centers.
A policeman drives up. He's belligerent and cocky in his power; he
implies that I'm under arrest, and spreads out an electronic-paper map
on the trunk of his car to show me where people he arrests should stand
and /watch for space aliens/. I don't want to do that. I say, "Is it
against the law to stand in a parking lot? He shakes his head, no. I
say, "Well, I'm leaving, then. Bye."
He walks after me and pokes me in the kidney with like a
four-foot-long black chair leg. I grab it and say, "Why are you doing
this?" He starts to /really/ arrest me for grabbing his stick, but
instead goes to harass two old women in the window of a drive-through
coffee place who saw the whole thing so they're potentially more trouble
for him than I am. I go back to his car and retrieve my broom.
The car door is open. The engine is running. Hmm.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a strange movie house that's like
a high-ceiling room in an old school building. The grass projected on
the screen is washed-out-looking, not as green or as in-focus as the
lawn outside; Juanita shows this to a strange man by pulling the edge of
the screen aside so we can all look down at an impossible angle through
the window behind it-- /that might be another screen/. I think through
this aloud to myself; this annoys some women near me who are trying to
get into the mood of being at a movie and so not interested in figuring
anything out.
Now Juanita and I are sitting in a short row at the back of a niche
at the side of the room. Two men sit in front of us and slightly to the
left. The first movie (after the static one about a lawn) is a short
subject to raise awareness about autism. The schoolgirl main character
in the film can't track what her teacher is saying; her attention (the
focus of the camera) jumps from random thing to random thing in the
schoolroom-- something in the aquarium, plants in a planterbox, a flaw
in the window glass, a bird outside, the teacher woman's sour,
down-turned mouth...
The film becomes about a chubby black boy who's problem is that he
always mis-hears instructions. All the kids are told not to interfere
with the septic project in an aquarium (another aquarium, outdoors, in a
row of them in a park), and the boy dunks his face in the disgusting
mucky water then looks directly into the camera and happily swallows and
licks his lips. /Bleagh./
The movie becomes a live play whose stage is all over the room. A
vaguely familiar sharp-featured actress dressed in gauze, brightly lit
from her other side, walks on the air near the ceiling in the center of
the room to her husband in the corner. As she goes over, everyone can
see she has male sex parts. The men sitting in front of us titter about
that. I say to Juanita, "I think that's a costume."
After the movies and the play we leave the theater and walk through
a concrete parking building where local citizens put on
non-permitted-but-tolerated performance-art shows in hastily constructed
booths. We stop to watch a Medieval-themed religious comedy about a
judge/priest getting caught up with by people he's harmed. They strip
him and crucify him (with ropes, not nails) and build up sticks for a
fire around the base of his cross. They put hotdogs on sticks to be
ready to cook them. Punch-and-Judy-show-like puppet-farce police arrive.
The priest thinks they'll help him, but they side with the people; he's
harmed them too.
This is a way better show than the one we paid to see in the
theater. And there are hotdogs to eat.
I woke up with Cher singing /Halfbreed/ in my head.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2009-10-20:
First dream. I'm on a dim bleak beach with a thin pretty black
girl. She packs her drawing materials into a string bag. I can't stop
myself from moving in the direction of the water, and I end up stepping
into it so the low waves get my pants wet above the knees. The water
should be cold, but it isn't. /Am I drunk?/
Now I'm lying on my side in two or three inches of still water in
the same place, but there are sharp rocks sticking up through the sand,
poking my shoulder and the side of my head. I can't move. I worry that
crabs or something will come and crawl on me and bite me, but I'm not
panicky. I'm okay for now. If the water comes up and covers my nose and
mouth, then I'll panic.
I wonder where the artist girl went. Weren't we here together?
Next dream. In the theater company's rehearsal room, here is a
three-foot-long sausage-shaped metal follow-spotlight. Juanita will be
the spotlight operator, so she's here. It's Kathy O'Grady's play. I have
an idea to flood the shell of the spotlight with propane and use it for
a prop flash-cannon; I say to Kathy, "Would you like to be able to start
the flame with a footswitch?" I show her how it would work-- I turn the
gas on and let it psshhhhhh for awhile, then I step on the switch that
fires the sparkplug and /WHOOOSH/-- fire and dust burst from the muzzle
of the light. Kathy says sarcastically, "Yeah, that sounds great. Let's
do that." (Meaning, not.)
Next dream. I'm wandering around in a house that's a combination of
Kay's and Juanita's houses. It's messy in a clown-creative sort of way.
In the kitchen, blue-and-white dishes are piled up filling the sink and
leaning in an ocean wave shape against the wall. In a bathroom on the
street side of the house are boxes and piles of /old/ electronic parts--
here's a disembodied organ keyboard and its cloth-insulated wiring
harness. Before I can stop myself I pick up a roll of double-wide
bright-red rubber foam tape that's decomposing into a sticky mess; I get
this all over both hands. Will dish soap get it off? Or should I get the
orange soap from the car?
I carry Juanita in my arms to the edge of the plateau the house is
on and then down the incline while she reads her science-fiction book. A
dream-only-familiar family of relatives arrives down here in their
middle-1960s station wagon. I effortlessly run carrying Juanita
diagonally back up to the house.
The relatives are already settled in. Their kids are playing with
toys they brought with them. A boy uses a toy ladder-truck/mobile-cannon
to shoot tiny red pills that expand into red foam pingpong balls. His
brother wants a turn and, when denied, calmly and deliberately attacks
him and takes the toy by force.
Juanita is washing dishes in the kitchen where the bathroom was
before. I'm attracted to a teddy-bear-size chinchilla-soft creepily slow
moving pet koala on the floor; the koala is talking (without moving its
mouth) and no-one's paying any attention. I say to the koala, "Can
everyone hear you, or am I special in some way?" The koala says, "I'm
talking quietly." Juanita looks at me; she can't hear the koala and she
thinks I'm just being cute by talking to it. I take it to her and hold
it near her ear; it shouts, "/Hey!/" and makes her jump.
I apologize. I didn't know it was going to do that.
Next dream. Two very old men, old friends, do their long-running
radio show where they take turns picking what records to play. One man
does most of the talking. It's the way they've always done it. It's
comfortable.
Next dream. Animal-preservation-society people are making a movie
about rescuing a newly-discovered kind of seagull. While the filmmakers'
children play on the beach at like Ten Mile, but near a bay, the main
bird-scientist man sits on the wet sand at the edge of the water,
watching a baby bird squirm minutely around and discover its immediate
surroundings.
Now the bird has two sets of swept-back white wings, like a model
of a dragonfly jet. It's straining to fly but only internally, still
barely moving. The man picks the bird up and runs uphill, up the beach,
holding it out in front of him, saying gently/urgently, "Fly. Fly." The
bird says in the same rhythm but with the sound of a soft seagull
shriek, "Fly, fly, fly, fly..." and the man lets go and the bird sails
off the edge of the sand hill to fly down and out over the sparkling
bay. The camera (my point of view) follows the bird and swings around
it. /How?/ Oh-- the camera is probably on a radio-controlled airplane. I
can hear the airplane's motor whirring. They'll edit that sound out.
There'll be a narrator.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2009-10-21:
First dream. I drive my Mercury up a steep street that's lined with
trees, that goes directly out of the center of San Francisco and into a
rural mountain place. I'm pedaling the car like a bicycle to keep it
going uphill. I see a place to go wide and turn around, but I see it too
late to use it; I'm past it.
The street gets so steep that I have to pedal really gently to keep
the car from tipping over backward.
At the top of the the hill, the driver (I'm not in this anymore--
I'm just watching) stops at a lighthouse/vacation-hotel complex in
Maine. A Maggie-Gyllenhaal-like girl is throwing beach things into a car
with her friends. I'm the driver of the pedal-car again; I tip my
sunglasses up so Maggie Gyllenhaal can see who I am; I'm the guy she met
in the train station in the back-story of the dream. She says in a
friendly voice, "Are you stalking me?" I say, "I wasn't. I can, if you
like." She says, "Come with us. We're going to the beach."
Next dream. I'm trying to get north through an unfamiliar
landscape. I and a generic friend come to a bowl valley cut into a hill.
Our organized opponents set a magical wolf/lion-creature against us. I
make friends with the animal, confuse it, get us past it. We climb over
the fence at the top of the cut and we're safe to continue.
In the back-story of the dream I've been fighting against bad
comic-book-type criminal masterminds who all along have been working
toward launching a rocket with a new kind of weapon in it. The weapon is
on a timer. I get to the rocket in /just enough time/ but have to stand
on a tall wobbly barstool to reach up to uncouple two bits of metal and
stop the timer. That's solved the weapon problem, but the rocket will
still take off; I have to get away before fire starts shooting out all
around.
I run and kind of fly a little to go around the proscenium of a
metal warehouse door and hide in here standing in plain sight against
the wall. A truck-size industrial war robot comes in, looks around. I
breathe shallowly, close my eyes and hold still, to be invisible.
The robot leaves. I climb up into the metal roof supports and climb
along into the next giant soundstage-size room. Here's some
yellow-gold-plastic zipcord dangling, cut. I must get more wire, to
bring this to reach the back of the building. I start to climb down on
an immensely tall ladder that someone set with the feet too close
together. This isn't going to work. I call down to a blonde girl who has
the perfectly-helpful aspect of Oryx from the Mendocino Theater Company,
"Can you pull this out square and then hold it, please." She gestures,
/Of course,/ and comes over to fix the ladder.
Next dream. I have a manila folder of papers whose text is sloppily
laid out-- it's as though someone was in a tremendous hurry; separate
columns are different widths and have boxes around them with a separate
header and footer for each box. /Did I do this? This is awful./
Also in the folder is a story written in pencil on yellow legal
paper by, I dunno-- Aaron from the Whale School? It's my story but his
rewrite of it, so I can't use it in the Chinese-run
civic-worker-qualifying contest. (In the dream, Chinese people run
America, like in the Maureen McHugh book /China Mountain Zhang/.)
Now I'm in a strange bedroom, packing a suitcase with clothes from
a pile on the bed. My mother comes in just as the bedsheets are
revealed; she says, "You're changing your bed." I say, "I'm packing."
And now I'm lying on the ground by a pump-shed at the back of a
flat-land house. Some pet animals come near. Here's my childhood dog
Ferd, my favorite dog ever. I say, "Come here." He comes close. I
say, "Sit." His back legs are weak and creaky, but he sits. I pet him
and say, "/Good dog./ ...Okay." (Meaning, he can get up now.) He
struggles to his feet again. I say, "Pretty good shape for how old you
are." He says in a British accent, "Good shape for a comp of Intel
chips." (?) I say, "That was something like what I was thinking." He
looks around as if wondering where he is. I say, "Poor old thing," and
pet him some more.
My dreams from Thursday, 2009-10-22:
First dream. Farm country on another planet. There's been a war
between humans and a group of several different kinds of other creatures
for a really long time, and humans are a subject race. The superior
races (many of them insect creatures) have let down their guard because
we're so far behind, so a brave and cocky group of humans have
resistance meetings in the very barn/house that the aliens live in when
they're here.
I want to have the meeting quickly and get out, but the boy running
the meeting takes things out of the refrigerator and sets them around
the kitchen, lazily deciding what to eat-- the choice is among mostly
bitter expensive salad greens that I never liked anyway.
Shit, the enemy aliens are coming back. We put the food away and
scatter. I go through the building the long way, come out in the
space-dirigible hangar at the end and sneak out around the alien
technicians winching in the spaceship.
Some other humans and I hide in tall grass near another barn, and
eventually get far away to another farm entirely.
This other farm is crawling with aliens of a type very like humans
but slightly doglike. They're in the farmhouse. I and one or two other
humans hide lying in the low, covered bed of a truck parked with its
nose against the house. A little boy alien and his mother are persecuted
among their own kind and they're also hiding here. Later, when it's a
good time to leave, I break the rules by getting the attention of an old
woman alien to help the woman and boy still in the truck, to get them away.
After even more years a lot of humans are gathering at a deserted
modern grammar school building. There's the general sense of relief that
the trouble is over, that we've turned the tide and won the war. I ask
what made the difference, how we suddenly won after losing and losing,
and a general explains that we've spread a genetic poison that will kill
every living thing but humans on every planet it gets to. I'm like,
/What!/ Everyone thinks it's such a great idea. I'm kneeling on the
grass with my forehead on the ground, crying and sobbing. /The idiots!
That's not winning! How is it winning to destroy thousands of planets!
And what will we eat? You've killed us!/
I woke up with the song /Breakfast At Tiffany's/ playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm running through a simplified parklike
environment, hiding from detection from the air as well as from around
me on the ground. I get to a place where a sloppily-dug culvert goes
under a walled road, and this looks familiar-- I /almost/ remember
coming this way before and climbing under the road to get to the other
side. But dirt has fallen in to make the entry hole smaller, and the
wooden planks that line the culvert are rotten and falling apart. /I'm
not going through there./
I wonder how far I'll have to go to get around the obstacle road.
Now I'm driving a truck with a strange family for passengers. I'm a
kind of guide who leads people through a magical dangerous land, like
the guide person in Tarkovsky's /Stalker/. Of the people in the family,
the daughter of the (absent) rich man has the best survival-sense. (The
magical danger becomes the father chasing after the mother and her
children to kill them.)
The truck vanishes. I can't keep the people together, so I tell
them to stay in this little valley and go generally /that/ way and don't
freak out if an animal comes; you can always make friends with an
animal, even a lion. A black wolf-dog appears, looks like it wants to
play, and the girl runs off after it. That's okay, I guess; she's going
the right way.
I can fly. Too bad I didn't notice this while we were all in the
truck; I could have just flown us over all this. Oh, well.
Next dream. In a modern airport building at night, actor Hugh
Dignon is on his knees, nearly on his face, reaching through a low hole
in a wall-window, shaking/strangling an imaginary person in the perspex
tunnel that goes out into the night, so the plastic parts of the
imaginary person's costume space suit helmet and shoulders are splitting
into even smaller parts and shards and spraying in all directions.
He finishes with this, uh, /therapy/, and sits back, thinking about
it. I ask him therapy-like cryptic questions and establish that he was
enraged by his little brother? younger self? but that he didn't hate
him. I say, "They why were you trying to kill him?" He doesn't know;
anyway, it doesn't matter. Hugh is an airline pilot and he has to go to
work now and fly a small airplane out of here.
It's starting to rain. In the airplane while Hugh goes through his
preflight checklist I unclip a section of perspex from the center of the
base of the windshield and wriggle out through the hole onto the nose of
the plane. Hugh and I coordinate so he puts his thumb on different parts
of the windshield to offer pressure from his side as I push in expanding
pins to lock it in place. Some of the pins don't work right, but most of
them do. This is probably good enough.
From a little aside and above (I'm floating in the air) I look
quickly over the airplane for flaws, find none, give Hugh a thumbs-up.
He nods, /backs/ the plane away from the covered terminal ramp, and then
rolls away toward the dark runways.
-end-