Justice. Tuesday, Not Tuesday. Hybrid Victrola. Hillbilly Chef's Fork. Lepidoptera. Nazi Workmanship. Thread. "You!" Camel-Nose Statuette. Seal. Value-Added Theft. Diplomacy. Frogs. One in 70,000. Car Show.
Marco McClean
First dream. In the dark a war game or a real war is being
conducted in vast landscaped gardens where in real life Arden
Way comes near Highway 80 on the way into Sacramento. My team
captures a bunch of the other guys, and it turns out that the
treacher who has stretched out the conflict long beyond where it
would have wound down to peace is /one of our guys/.
I have the other-team guys released and let them watch as I
put one pistol shot in each of the evil man's wrists, ankles,
elbows and knees.
Everyone nods, satisfied. The fighting is over.
Next dream. In an office space upstairs from a car garage
I've just finished laying out the flats of my biweekly newspaper
(which in the dream I'm still publishing). I have the flats for
Doug Warner's paper done too. Wait-- I was supposed to give him
his work finished on Tuesday (I think /Tuesday/, but my mental
calendar image of the week shows Tuesday as Saturday); now it's
Tuesday, three days later than /Tuesday/. Why didn't Doug call
and remind me? Now I won't be paid.
I look through my own paper, curious because I can't
remember what I've just been doing. I don't recognize any of the
advertisers' names or products. Nothing makes any sense.
Next dream. Kids run around playing at night in a strange
little school of wooden decks around temporary buildings. Rocky
Nelson is here at the age he was in seventh or eighth grade at
Franklin Elementary; he has a portable record player with
clockwork for the turntable but that at the same time runs a
little internal electrical generator for a transistorized
amplifier. What a great idea-- what a great thing.
I don't work here. I'm just visiting. There's the sense that
this school was put together after the war in the first dream
ended. It's okay; they're doing all right.
Next dream. I'm in the banquet room of a farm-country
highwayside convention/wedding motel. I want to find a restroom
but it's hard to make any headway through the crowd of Gypsy
wedding revelers. I'm with a goofy, pretentious amateur poet I'm
trying to ditch. There's the door. I duck out into a quiet
night.
Quiet highway. Moonlight with no moon. Silently blowing
clouds. I fly up and fly along the highway. /Power lines!/ I'm
horrified to find myself doing what you're never supposed to do:
I go up between two wires and my arms brush them both at the
same time. But nothing happens; the power must be off. Whew!
Lucky.
I fly for miles to the mountains and light down in the grass
in a ditch where the road turns uphill out of the farm fields.
Someone else is already here in this ditch-- "Hi!" Startled, I
release the lighter-than-air football I've been using to fly; it
shoots up into the clouds. Now I'll have to fly under my own
power. I can do it; it's just harder.
For awhile I'm a wind-whipped leaf shooting around in
circles on the windward side of the ridge. At the top, a baby
hillbilly boy wants to fly on my shoulders for /one hour/ to get
out of having to do his chores. Okay, I pick him up. I go
through his half-finished cantilevered house to launch us out
into the air, but the last room is the hillbilly family's dining
room. Everyone jumps up; we have to avoid the lot of them. I get
out through a series of window screens on the in-hill side of
the house; at the last screen --a screen door-- I say to the
oldest hillbilly boy (who is sympathetic about my desire to
escape), "Would you close that? I tend to forget."
I put the baby down. "There ya go. There's your hour." He's
dizzy from all the excitement; he thinks it's been an hour. I've
fulfilled my obligation.
I go through a string of dusty sheds filled with antique
bottles and pottery. The angry father of the hillbilly family
comes after me, orders me to get off his property. I say,
"That's what I'm doing." He menaces me with a chef's
two-pronged meat fork. I say, "You think you're gonna stick me
with that?" He thinks about it. /Uh-- naaah./ We talk about how
in movies great honking long swords often apparently have no
weight at all.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2005-02-23:
First dream. In a house with no walls or roof, like a
campground camp but with normal furniture and plumbing, I find a
bottle of clear liquor with a safety-seal pull-off cap under the
regular screw-on cap. I suck down big swallow after swallow from
this bottle but the level of liquid inside doesn't go down.
I say, "Lepidoptera." A tall, all-white furry man like an
upright white wolf-dog turns his head sharply, mechanically left
and right --not looking for something but popping his neck.
Next dream. In a going-out-of-business sale in a failed
shopping center underground in a cold country I find and examine
a clockwork-operated meter instrument the size of a pack of
cigarets, that among other things magnetically measures how worn
out tape heads are. It has a screw-adjust to set it for the
head's original gap (the printed table of various manufacturers'
head specs is missing), and it works from there. The device
impresses me as an example of Nazi-era German workmanship; in
the dream it doesn't occur to me to wonder why someone would
need an instrument like this when you can see how worn a
tape-head is by just looking at it.
Next dream. The people of the town along a dead-calm,
square-edged lake wanted a dome-shaped visitors' center, but the
contracting company built something else instead: a rectangular
rocket-construction hangar. The opening date is coming close but
the hangar is not quite finished. My press pass allows me to go
through keep-out places; I go between the vertical slats of a
safety fence and away from the project.
Behind the next building's glass display-wall is a
forty-foot-tall sun-yellowed bas relief of Jim Carrey as the
Grinch wrapped in a U.S. flag. Near the ground, below the
display, are pull-out shelves of plastic-wrapped underwear and
socks for sale. Slim is here; he says, friendly but creepily, "I
want you to play hockey." I say, "Okay, good idea," and sidle
away. "I'll be right back." Not.
Out at the end of a cross between the Table Mountain
driveway and someplace in Switzerland in the movie /The Sound of
Music/ my friend Mark is having a big community clean-up to make
the property ready to sell. Along the drive is a row of backhoes
painted in nursery-school colors-- one is blue, one is red, one
is yellow, etc. Do they work? The red one has a decorative
arrowhead devil-tail on its scorpion shovel arm.
Now it's the tired end of the clean-up. In a yard-sale area
Linda helps people choose thread from a table of hundreds of
spools of thread. She's not just selling the thread; she's
teaching a class in thread. Here are big molded plastic
containers in shapes that make you wonder what they were
originally meant to hold-- folded-up animals? And over here
little Peruvian Indian girls sit on a piano bench idly poking at
the rusted controls of a dead /thread typesetting/ machine. The
chorus of the They Might Be Giants song /He Ended Up Sad/ plays
from somewhere on the other side of a fence. (It's a happy,
silly song. Sad words, happy tune.)
My dreams from Thursday, 2005-02-24:
First dream. It's getting light out. Juanita and I are
staying overnight in a big window-van in her rich friends'
driveway. Juanita goes out to pee, then goes into the house to
get something to eat. I have a lot of 35mm camera equipment in
the bedding. A boy comes up the driveway, looks in the van
windows, sees me, says, "You!" I reach over and lock the door.
Next dream. I want to paint "God of Peace/ Love of Row" on
the side of an Arab food store, and my artistic idea is to keep
all my painting within the black-and-white-cow-spot-shaped areas
that have been prepared by the lazy painters' having wiped the
wall with damp towels, lost interest and gone away. On a folding
table electronics repairman Art displays his diagrams to
plan/promote /big/ art projects made of plywood. I say, "Big for
the sake of big?" Yeah. Exactly.
A camel comes whose nose is a molded leather statuette of a
mysterious Arab desert fighter woman in a black shroud. Someone
describes this statuette; he says, "Owl constantly at her feet,
on watch." Someone else says, "Or /watching/." But it's not an
owl; it's a little ceramic dog salt-shaker.
Next dream. I push my old aqua Rambler by the door handle at
walking speed while Juanita steers to a row of gas pumps printed
all over in a strange language. Is this self-serve? No; a
Mexican-looking woman and her teenage daughter come out of the
kiosk. "Tree-dollah, tree-dollah." To fill the tank? Only three
dollars? They want more... twenty dollars? How much? I only have
a twenty. They jabber at each other and at me. I say, "I can't
understand anything you say."
The teenage girl switches to English; she says, "Did you see
my story?" I walk around the gas pumps and look over her
childishly-executed but fascinating accordioned-partition
display of photographs and crayon drawings, the result of her
friend's having asked her to witness and photograph the
situation in --Iraq? Mexico? Patagonia? The story shows in
cartoon form how natives told her and her friends to mind their
own business.
Now the art display is inside a yuppie grocery-store/cafe
where everyone's panicked by a young person (male? female?)
hurrying in past the counter line to get away from a
Charles-Manson-like wild character outside. Art takes charge,
goes out, takes the man by the arm, hits his eye on the rearview
mirror of a truck and shoves him toward his own gold-flake-brown
SUV. The man is stunned by how easily he was subdued --and by
being hit in the eye, of course. He drives away; he's very
thoughtful. He'll never be out of control again.
Back at the booth-table inside I tell Juanita that I found
Dylan Beach at another table; I'll get him and be right back.
She's happy, eating her ice-cream sundae; she'll wait.
On my way to where I remember (?) Dylan is I pick up a
rubber band and throw it toward a trashcan but it lands on the
green apron of a cook kid sitting with other workers at their
break table. The cook flicks the rubber band against the wall so
it falls into the trash. I try to cover up for my not
remembering that that's the way to do it, by saying, "It caught
on my finger." Sure it did.
Dylan and another person are at a tiny round table eating
ice-cream by the ethnic method they prefer here. Dylan says,
"You eat it on bread." (You dip a biscuit into it.) We carry the
table across a vast hard-dirt school playground back toward
Juanita. As we go through a tunnel between buildings Dylan and I
talk about the Monty Python /Spam/ song. He says, "What was
/that/ all about?" I say, "Everyone just thought it was funny
there was a teevee show about spam."
Now I'm in bed in a cool green-screened garden shed version
of my bedroom. A dense little creature --a rat?-- runs up and
down through the springs inside my bed. I get down below the
foot of the bed, peer through the green cloth screen into the
cotton-rats-nest landscape inside the mattress. I can't see the
rat. It's hiding. I curse it, muffled by my suddenly numb teeth
and lips, "/You horrible little fucknut!/" --But it's not a
rat-- it's a beautiful cat-size silky-furred gray-and-black
little seal/otter creature that just wants to get out. Awww;
poor thing. I hurry to the bathroom to get my Swiss Army knife
out of my pants-pocket to cut the mattress screen and let the
seal out.
"I'm sorry I swore at you. I'm sorry I swore at you. Come
on. That's right. Awww."
Next dream. A Gabriel-Byrne-like Irish Gypsy man steals but
provides value in return-- he cleans out houses where people
have to move away too fast to keep all their stuff. So he gets
things to sell in return for the people getting their cleaning
deposit back. It's right, but he doesn't tell anyone he's doing
this so it's not exactly legal.
So he's cleaning out a woman's house, scrubbing and
vacuuming and spackling screw-holes in the plaster and etc. I'm
outside, watching for cops. Cops drive up and park across the
street. I nonchalantly play with my dream-only big
German-shepherd/wolf-dog. The cops smile and drive away.
Inside, the house is spotless, gleaming. The Gypsy is gone.
I find something he left behind for me, my payment for keeping
cops away-- it's a stainless-steel, brass and woodgrain-plastic
curtain-rope pulley with two concentric roller bearings. It has
an odd screw-tap-like hub. It's useless but /so interesting/.
Thanks! Wow.
Next dream. Romulans have somehow kept Vulcans on a rocky
mining planet as part of a plot to get an unnamed third
Vulcan-like race and humans to mistrust and bomb each other.
Later in an unsuspecting Earth city, the Earth ship's (?)
information officer walks out through a parking lot to tell his
captain (out in the street, in the staff car) to break out all
the laptops; he says, "They're our most important tool."
A ghostly spaceship thrums down to hover low over the
defunct, boarded-up drive-in hamburger place. The Earth officer
returns through the parking lot, hangs his yellow Fluke V.O.M.
on a peg. I say, "I'm going with you." To knock on the
restaurant door?
The restaurant is suddenly all lit up and operating. Waiters
and waitresses at the back door are friendly but they're at work
and don't have time for us; one says, "What do you want?" I
say, "We want to talk about your ships and our ships." Good;
that was the right thing to say.
Rebecca of /Tangents/ is a waitress; here she has dime-size
patches of black fur to the left and right of her weird fistlike
folded-under nose. Another waitress bangs out through the screen
door, says out of the corner of her mouth as she passes us,
"You'll be talking too." I say, "We expect to do some of the
talking." Someone says, "You'll be expressing things
subliminally." This is all going too fast for me. I'm out of my
depth.
My dreams from Friday, 2002-02-25:
First dream. It's daylight but dim. I and a person who's a
mixture of Antonia Lamb and Late-Night Liz have stepped across
from a hillside to the tops of maybe one-tenth-scale
architect's-model skyscrapers; they're like white plastic
telephone poles. I show Antonia/Liz how to continue, stepping
across to the porch around another kind of skyscraper whose
Russian onion dome top splits open to reveal clacking plastic
monster action toys. Dangerous? I close the dome up, stuffing
the monsters' appendages back inside.
Some monsters got out, though-- these are actual living pet
frogs that were in suspended animation in there. I put them into
a murky but functional aquarium. Graphic-artist/actor Mervin
Gilbert is upset by everything that's happened. I bring him a
to-go waxed-cardboard container of food. He watches suspiciously
as I set it down on the linoleum and open it. He puts his
half-eaten chocolate bar in his shirt pocket and works himself
up to be crazy-mad that /I didn't bring him the right food; I
didn't bring him what he ordered/. Antonia/Liz watches how I
handle this crisis --I'm being tested. I hug Mervin, pickpocket
his chocolate away and try to calm him down by sincerely lying
that I would never fib to him in order to control him.
What do you think-- was that the right way? Antonia/Liz
thinks about it.
Next test...
Next dream. I climb down out of the Himalayas with /one out
of 70,000 people left of civilization/-- meaning there are ten
of us. (I do the math in my head and there should be 100,000,
but maybe they mean something special by /civilization/; maybe
they don't count everyone.) We can fly a little, which makes
climbing down possible. I'm not the most magical of the group; I
need to be babied along. At one point I get stuck at a narrow
crack down into the lower world and someone must come back up to
help me through.
In the valley at the bottom we travel bundled in cold furs
in canoes flying slowly at about chest-height above an ice
river.
Next dream. I'm driving a red 1972 Ford Pinto that's been
converted to run on batteries. I carelessly drive in through the
automatic doors of a Costco-like store. "Sorry." Y-turn in the
aisle and outside again. In a car repair garage I talk with Joey
Seidell (at the age he was at the Whale School in the late
1980s) about what he needs in order to construct an electric
pickup truck. He wants a /very powerful motor/ so he can pull an
equipment trailer. I say, "I don't have it," meaning that would
make the project prohibitively expensive. Joey says, deadpan,
"You don't have it."
I walk around in a three-dimensional catalog/car-show of
electric sports cars all built on AMC Pacer chassis. One exotic
car looks like an upside-down catamaran; each nacelle has a
driver's plexiglass bubble with a driver wearing a motorcycle
helmet inside it.
Juanita and I drive away from the car show in my old 1977
Toyota through sunny wet fields of steaming hot-green plants.
Something's wrong with the car-- ah, I find high gear; that's
better. The road becomes a brush-hog-mown strip through a green
cornfield. Actor Sam Neill drives a tractor pulling the
brush-hog ahead of us. I turn to cut across to a paved highway.
Before the highway is a wide water-filled ditch. I walk
barefoot through the muddy water, leading the car by the
driver's-side door handle, like leading a reluctant horse by the
ear. My right foot cramps but I have to keep going.
-end-