Distraction. "How Would You Like A Punch In The Nose." Defense Of Britain. Sponge Girl. Randy's Truck. Amuse-Bouche. Birds. Plastic Cheesecloth. Confuse-A-Horse. Time War. Negotiator. Teaching Job. Electric-Eel/Sharks. Foundation. Whitewater.
Marco McClean
First dream. An elaborate adventure [that I didn't get to keep]
ends in my resolving all issues by saying, "So the question is whether
you can /prove/ children are being driven to distraction, or you /are/
missing that bathtub edge, and /are/ being driven to distraction."
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a strange industrial version of
the place west of where Hopper Dairy used to be, just south of Fort
Bragg (CA). We walk up to the highway with Charles Bush (of the old
Mendocino Community School) and a girl who I think is Saqi even though
she's very thin and doesn't look like her. I find my hand on the
Saqi-person's waist and take it away (the hand).
At the highway, musician Louis Demitri and his helper are up inside
something they built-- an iron calliope made out of an old steam-train
engine parked in the road.
My friend Mark appears. We all go into a big old abandoned mansion
where the little store should be, Charles and Mark merge to become one
person, and everyone goes off to explore in different directions. In one
room I find some old-Chicago barbershop-type characters just sitting
around, bored.
Time passes. /Why am I here? And where's Juanita?/
Another original Mark is with me now; he's
Twilight-Zone/Bugs-Bunny-smug about not telling me where Juanita went. I
look everywhere in the huge house and around the side and down the block
and around the other side, which in the dream is like the lot between
back-to-back big-box stores. Here's a truck-size pile of loose blankets
with a man's and a woman's feet sticking out about halfway up.
/Juanita?/ No-- these are not her feet, but just to make sure I rip
blanket after blanket off the people until it's obvious the woman is too
big to be Juanita. Let the people be; they're probably dead (suffocated)
anyway. I reach out to touch and maybe wiggle the feet, but can't bring
myself to do it.
I continue past the stores and slog diagonally up a hill. This is
too slow. I clench my fists at my sides and fly at walking speed up the
hill, going, /Come on, come on,/ straining to accelerate.
I get around all the buildings and back to the Hopper Dairy place.
The not-Saqi girl is here; now she's like Meg. She won't tell me where
Juanita is, but implies that she knows, that everyone knows, and she
leads me back down toward the ocean and into a chain-link-fenced square
behind some buildings in an empty school. She leans to me and acts like
she wants to kiss me. I say, "No! Do you know where Juanita is or not!
If you do, tell me!" She says sadly, "She's being tested. I'm being
tested." I say, "Everyone's /always/ being tested. So what?" She
thinks about this-- hmm. I say, "How would you like a punch in the
nose!" She doesn't even have an opinion about that. This is futile. I
go back to the Hopper-Dairy-place house and wonder, /Where didn't I
look?/ Upstairs. I didn't look upstairs.
Next dream. I'm driving in a water-surrounded city like Alameda but
with wider roads and some hills. Ahead of me a /huge/
science-fiction-spaceship-size new government army jet is towed on a
lattice of dolly trailers uphill to a parking lot and turned left to go
into --and tower over-- a yard of hangars and shop buildings. I go up
behind the jet to see it up close. There's something about this city
being a mechanically-oriented nearly steampunk alternate version of
Britain, and that this whole complicated story is a puzzle, whose
attitude and feeling is mainly, /Where is Juanita?/
I woke up with the Mendonesians' instrumental version of /Slow
Boat To China/ playing in my head.
My dream from Saturday, 2009-10-31:
Post society-collapse, people of all ages but mostly college boys
are camping on the rug in a big dim modern school. I get up, cross the
room, go into the restroom and piss into the last one of several tiled
depressions along the side wall. I have to hold onto the back wall to
keep from slipping in. /What a stupid design./ The depression I've
picked becomes like four feet deep. They're all that deep now. Other
people come in and look dismayed at what's here to use.
Back at the sleeping area, the puffy-white-skinned white-blonde
girl I rescued in the retroactive back-story of the dream has begun to
shrink. We have to get her away from here. We hug each other and fly out
and through a strange 1940s town, alternately kissing (everything about
this girl is spongy, in a sexy way) and looking around at the buildings.
I strain to fly us up over a four-or-five-story brick building, and we
come down in the Marina District of San Francisco, into a house that's a
maze of blue art-gallery rooms. The spongy girl vanishes. The old woman
whose house this is finds me-- she's been waiting for me; she turns
around and expects me to follow her deeper into the maze, as if it's
understood that I'm going to be her personal servant and sex toy. I let
her walk out of sight and I hurry back out into the air to fly some more
while I still can. I fly over the bay and am disappointed to realize I'm
waking up.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-11-01:
First dream. My (dead) schoolfriend Randy and I are in a
residential area in a strange Midwestern town. Randy's early-1970s
blue-and-white Ford pickup truck is parked with its left-side tires on
the edge of a buried concrete wall that's flush with the road surface,
next to a really deep curb gutter. I get in and start to take the truck
away from the danger of falling into the gutter, but in a kind of
experimental self-destructive perversity I let it drift for a moment,
and the left front wheel touches a trigger-like mound of dirt and
destabilizes the buried concrete wall so it crumbles and collapses into
the now six-foot-deep gutter (!) and the truck is stuck high-centered.
Randy and I walk around the corner. A big dog comes out of the
house here. Is it dangerous or friendly? Friendly.
Two men from the construction company that made the weird gutter
and curb show up and are all jokey about it, now that they can blame its
collapse on us. They pretend to inspect things in the general
environment --the house here, a fence wall, driveway pavement, trees--
while they talk about trivial personal things in their lives as though
Randy and I aren't even here.
I signal to Randy to come back to the truck with me; I've thought
of a way to get the truck loose by piling up planks and using the two
bottle jacks I remember being in the back of the truck.
Next dream. In a strange inland version of Fort Bragg (CA) I'm
looking across several streets through what from this perspective looks
like a tunnel made of the building edges and parts of trees in the way,
and I see a roller-coaster track flex dangerously with every train of
cars that goes around it. I point this out to a girl with me, but the
time turns exactly five p.m. and the ride is stopped when the girl lines
her head up in the right place to look.
She goes the other way, out of this school room into the
varnished-Masonite hallway of an old grammar school or a city museum. I
go into the hallway and float up into the air.
In a room on the Pacific Ocean side of this building, a blindingly
bright twelve-inch flat-screen monitor somehow projects a movie on black
cloth laid across an easel and the back of a chair. There's too much
light coming in the window behind the cloth. I tug the curtains to
stretch them closed, and now there's another show playing on another
cloth behind the first one.
The school or museum becomes an apartment building. I get up from
sleeping on the floor. Two strange girls are also using the apartment.
I say, "Amuse-bouche." (In real life I don't remember ever hearing
that term until about a week ago, when it suddenly appeared seemingly
everywhere as though everyone's been going around saying it all the
time. It means something to eat while you wait for your meal. It's the
French term for antipasto.)
My dreams from Monday, 2009-11-02:
First dream. In Juanita's living room she has her real-life crimson
rosella but also a tiny yellow sparrow-like bird. The little bird is
startled by something and flies across the room to stand all pitiful and
confused on the floor. I put my hand on the floor and the bird steps
onto it. "You're okay. There's nothing wrong."
Next dream. I'm in the giant modern house of like European
gambling-gangster royalty. I need a toilet. I find one, but there's a
sliding door on each end of the bathroom, with unreliable latches on
both of them-- also, the door on one end is clear glass, right next to
the toilet, and everyone's gathering in the room outside. No.
I go through the house looking for another bathroom and in one
place climb on my hands and knees up narrow, carpeted stairs that go up
around the walls. A saintly Inara-from-/Firefly/-like Mexican mother
character comes here. I explain to her about trying to find a bathroom.
She warmly understands and goes away. At the top of the stairs are only
small tunnels away-- for animals? No good here, either.
Back downstairs, at the back door of the house, here's a normal
bathroom with a normal door, but even here the door latch is not good; I
don't care anymore. I use the toilet but discover that the water doesn't
work --there's no water to flush it-- and then I notice that others have
been here and been sick in various forms on the floor. I will be blamed
for all this. And there's no toilet paper, but there's this bunched-up
roll of plastic cheesecloth. I use that to clean myself and then the floor.
Outside in the yard is another mess: fast-food waste, spilled boxes
of unopened but long-out-of-date camera film, open old-fashioned
motor-oil cans and other toxic things. I gather it all up with the
soiled cheesecloth in a plastic lawn-trash bag and run out along the now
crowded holiday beach with it. Here's a row of five or six different
colors of recycling bins to separate trash into. Too complicated. I drop
my bag in the regular trash bin on the end and keep running.
I start to fly, and clench my fists at my sides to fly faster and
faster over the sand and through what becomes a long hotel corridor. The
speed-flying-team coach for this Greek island, actor Will Smith, catches
up to me. At a place where corridors come together we meet several
people, men and women all on the flying team, and everyone starts
talking earnestly in technical terms in movie-stereotypical French
accents about the fine points of how to hold your body and shoulders and
hands for maximum speed. I say, "It's possible to over-think this."
Everyone disagrees with me, but they're all really only thinking of
winning contests, while I just enjoy flying. I say again, "You're
over-thinking it." They're all, /You're wrong, you're wrong./ Tch.
I woke up with the Roy Zimmerman song /America/ playing in my head.
"America-ah is a fifty-seven Chevy that veers to the left and lurches to
the right. America-ah is that Norman Rockwell, of a fam'ly on
Thanksgiving, hung on the wall of an Indian casono. America-ah..." It's
very catchy for a list song.
My dream from a nap Monday night:
I'm in an indoor multistory shopping mall in like Iceland. There's
a local holiday/art-project called Confuse-A-Horse, where they mark a
path through the place for customers and little fluffy horses to follow.
The path goes down stairs into the store where I am, where the horses
that will come through will be diverted (confused) into a little corral
made of plastic stick wrapped in white cloth, then the people in the
store will say, "Oh, poor things. Sorry," and they'll let the tiny
horses continue through the store and down another flight of stairs to
the next place where the people there will have set up their particular
holiday-creative way to confuse the horses.
The flight hostess who I've made a date with for tomorrow (the
holiday) comes here to check on our Confuse-A-Horse preparations, goes
downstairs, away. I run after to make sure she'll remember about
tomorrow and to tell her how pretty her dark-blue eyes are. They're like
doll's eyes.
Later, a film crew is using this same mall to make an episode of
/Star Trek/. Alarms sound. A weirdly emotional version of Mister Spock
and a character I don't recognize at all run into a mostly glass room.
Electric fans near the camera are used to ruffle the actors' hair to
make it look like some air has escaped from the room into the hallway
just as the doors shut, as though the whole mall (the ship), except this
marginally safe room, is being depressurized. Spock looks around,
frightened: /This isn't the ship; this is a shopping mall. What's going
on?/ Oh, that's why he seems so strange: he doesn't know this is just a
teevee show; he thinks he's really in danger. Clever director, to do
things this way.
My dreams from Tuesday, 2009-11-03:
First dream. There a gunfight across a basement police station and
uphill to the shelf/floor where you come in. At the tunnel out of the
lowest part, two time-travel tram/sled-cars wait to be used. I hesitate
to shoot the woman leader of the enemy humans and aliens, but she looks
at me and opens her mouth to order me killed, so I shoot her in the
chest and she falls off the shelf to lie broken on the time-sled track.
At night I and some others sneak to an old grammar school and go
in. The voice of actress Lorry LePaul, the next-up leader of the enemy
army, is coming nearer down the dim hallway, giving orders. After a
tense time of my fumbling with the door handles, we get back outside and
hide in shrubs next to the stairs/porch. (Now we're myself, two
teevee-stereotypical inner-city black boys and someone else.
The enemy soldiers are all around. The person hiding nearest to me
on my left is getting claustrophobic and edgy and starting to mutter in
response to things Lorry LePaul is saying on the stairs. I shove him
with my elbow to remind him to /shut up/.
Next dream. American Indians colonized another planet a hundred
years ago. White army people and more colonists come here. Some white
people are separated and on the other side of the Indians and so are
automatically considered by the army to be hostages of an enemy power. I
tell the army to /not attack/. We have to get along. If we're stuck
here, the gene pool is small enough as it is, without killing each other
over something stupid like where you landed or who got here first.
Next dream. There's an isolated rural school of temporary
buildings. Real-life Mendocino County Schools Superintendent-for-life
Paul Tichinin is here working or wandering around-- he's not in charge;
he's just here. I teach at a long table. Whale School kids at the age
they were in the late 1980s talk about how if the sun were where Saturn
is, Earth would burn up in an instant. I know it's about the sun
expanding to Saturn's orbit and in that way burning Earth up, so it's
almost right. I talk about that and how long a time-scale that is on. I
say, "Would you like me to bring in a video of that sort of thing?"
They're all, /Yes!/
I daydream, within the dream, about a brilliant swordfight with an
almost-familiar former student.
Juanita is in bed in a school building, sleepy. I lie down with her
and tell her about the swordfight as though it really happened.
A boy gets a long sword stuck through the empty spaces of himself
and others locked in a tight dance. I get the sword away without cutting
anyone.
Everyone gathers in a central room/shed to hear the news from four
former students about their upcoming wedding. I put my fingers together
bent slightly backward and say, "Are you all getting married together?
Or just two and two?"
Lunchtime. Paul Tichinin tells a story about an animated Toyota
(like Thomas the Tank Engine, but a car). I make a noise with my mouth
like a car motor.
After lunch I'm in charge of a big math class, about forty kids. I
say, "Who has seen a movie about mathematics?" All the kids talk at
once, telling about their favorite math-related movies. I cue an actor
at the blackboard and he behaves like the boy in the story I'm telling
who always is about to cry, he's so passionate about math-- he's /the
kid with a tear in his eye/. I dismiss the actor. He waves,
acknowledging that he is in fact an actor, a ringer; he bows and leaves.
I say to the kids, "I'd like to be able to provide that quality of
educational experience, but I know /dick/ about about math --which means
/nothing/." (In this context, knowing dick means knowing nothing.) I
say, "Wait, that's not true-- I know a lot, but I'm not going to teach
math." Now Paul Tichinin /is/ in charge. He'll get someone else to
teach math. I say to him, "Beverly used to do that."
/Now/ it's lunchtime; before was just a recess. I wonder how much
I'm being paid to work here. I wander down the side of this plateau and
out a little way into the desert. Some kids have also come down here;
they wander off in different directions. They'll be fine. They live
here. They know their way around.
I climb back up to the school. A snarky boy apologizes for my not
liking the party (whatever that means). He gestures to a gag
headstone-sign that says /I.P. Frely/. I turn my hands up, inviting the
boy to explain some more, please. He smirks and turns away.
In the math-class building a girl, who looks a bit like Mama Cass
Elliot as a little girl, drawls in a fake Southern accent to make fun of
a person in the story she's telling some other kids. I tell the
/fabulous story of Mr. Vorpagel/, a man whose drawl was so thick you
could barely understand him, yet he taught criminology classes in
college and was high up in the chess master community; he had a whole
wall of chess trophies. I embellish the story quite a bit, really let
loose, make him nearly a superhero. No-one here will ever think of a
person with a thick Southern accent as stupid ever again.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2009-11-04:
First dream. Post-society-collapse, when Fort Bragg (CA) has mostly
gone back to wilderness, I and another technician go out at night to
service the radio transmitter and antenna, which in the dream are
represented by a soft-grass tennis court within a high flimsy jaggedly
perforated metal fence.
Okay, we've done whatever maintenance we came to do. I go out
through a slit in a long side of the fence and then close and straighten
it up (make it vertical). The other technician comes out by a corner
gate. A third person, a big man of great strength and intuition but
without the sense to tell what's important to fix and what's not has
gathered heavy blocks of wood and stone together at the corner of the
fence, inside an outer fence, and he's propped these things closer
together at the top than at the bottom, using flat rubber rope straps
like giant black rubber bungee cords. The other technician and I help
him push all the blocks' bases to be even. Doing this is probably a good
idea, whether it needed to be done or not.
The tennis court stays itself but also becomes a big house where in
the back-story of the dream I've been living for years, and it's time
for me to go. I'm ready, but my long white knitted hat, which I carry in
a coffee can, has orange juice spilled on it. The bus pulls up; it's
here to take me and some others to an exo-wartime military academy. I'm
nervous about my hat. I run back inside the house, to the laundry room
(to the side of radio-station/tennis-court), to use the spigot to rinse
out the hat, and I run back to the bus just in time for the bus driver
to close the door in my face. We look at each other through the glass,
in a mild battle of wills. When I realize I don't care if he leaves
without me, and so relax, he opens the door, and now that I don't want
to get on the bus I have to. (This is a very familiar feeling and
situation.)
Inside, the bus is huge, as wide as it is long. There's an extended
H of crossed corridors lined with unbroken fishtanks at the sides and
underfoot. Eel/shark-things race through the tanks and shock you with
electricity, right through the glass. This is something you have to
learn to avoid or endure; it's important enough for them to start your
training this way before you even get to school.
My dream-only sister is also going to the academy, she's the
Chinese-American checkout girl at the Safeway near where Juanita lives;
she's resentful of my being accepted so young. She looks daggers over
the glass tanks at me, starts saying something to me and to some others
here about how, "You'll try and try and I'll--" (she's obviously going
to say, /hurt you and make you fail/), but I finish it-- "You'll help me
because we're all on the same side, and you're my brother." This
baffles her. I repeat it, and she grasps it and sheepishly accepts.
The academy is an old ivy covered college. An older mentor person
(possibly of the humanlike but eel-shark-derived species we're fighting)
leads me to an equipment shed out by a playing field and takes out a
hatbox that, he says, contains "the creature that produced a puzzle from
three primary sounds." Either no-one ever reverse-solved the puzzle for
the three original sounds or no-one but this mentor-person ever did.
Anyway, /I will solve it./
Next dream. I've dropped off Juanita at her work, which in the
dream is in a planned community built in and around failed shopping
centers on what I think of as Arden Way in Sacramento. I'm supposed to
get a borrowed truck back to the person I borrowed it from-- how? I
drive my Mercury slowly through a paved schoolyard, between several busy
basketball games' worth of grammar-school kids. My car becomes a tall
bicycle. The kids all crowd around and happily walk and run along with
me until I speed up and leave them behind.
At the parking lot where the truck is, two older kids, a boy and a
girl, are sitting, talking. I ask them to drive the truck and follow me;
we'll drop it off, I'll buy them dinner and drive them back here or
wherever they want to go. Now there's no truck and no car. I have two
disembodied bicycle wheels. Nonetheless my plan is agreed on, and we
start away, walking.
Work and dinner presumably over, we're back in the general area but
not in the same place. The girl says here house is near here; she
wanders away. I start away up the wide road (on foot). The boy wants to
go this direction too. Cars are coming; walking won't work. I crouch
down and sit on my heels-- the boy does the same behind me; he puts his
hands on my shoulders and I use a kind of flying power to slide us along
the road on our shoes at car speed.
In hills like the hills above Los Angeles but green and wet I pull
off the road at a wide place for a rest and offer to fly us from here.
The boy agrees, but he goes to where a sign pole has fallen over and
retrieves a package of something (drugs?) that he left here before on
his way to town.
I lock my left wrist with his right and try to fly. Too much
weight. Maybe try going downhill to the right just to get into the air.
This works; we step into the air and glide down winding asphalt
driveways between the buildings of like a scholarly monastery community.
We fly into and through a library. An angry teacher moves to intercept
us and complains; I wittily dispatch him. Bob Blick is here. He walks
alongside where we're slowly flying and talks about electronic projects
he's working on. He holds the back door of the library open so we can
fly out. He offers me a paper cup he's written the name of someone at
his lab on, a helper who can get me a job. /Really, I appreciate that,
but no, thanks./
The boy becomes Juanita. We fly past a row of film industry
buildings that have obviously been twisted by great heat to break loose
from their foundations in several places. Weather can get into the
basements, but the buildings are still being used, because why not?
Now it's evening; we're going down an asphalt driveway away from a
local holiday event that just happening in the monastery library. Bad,
spoiled, tough kids have stationed themselves around and above the
driveway on rocks and in trees. I move so Juanita's behind me. The pudgy
leader boy gets in my way and slash-grabs at my face somehow without
coming down from the ten-foot-high tree stump he's sitting on. I grab
his wrist, chew a joint off one of his fingers off and spit it out. He
calls others in to attack but only one answers; I throw that one away
over the fence and use some of my flying power to /pull/ the leader boy
off his stump; he tumbles down and lands on his butt, probably breaking
his back. /Sorry about that, but that's what you get for being a hoodlum./
Next dream. In the dream I'm a little boy in a dysfunctional
family. My dream-only viciously clever older brother fixes and cleans
and paints the filigreed parts of our dreamm-only mother's precious
heirloom clockwork device. I see all the (fake, slipshod) repairs happen
in extreme closeup. He sets the device --not a clock, more of a
mechanical calling card or diploma-- on a foot-high model artist's easel
on the coffee table so our dream-only drunken belligerent father will
knock it down when he comes home and so my brother won't be blamed for
breaking it in the first place, but /I'll/ somehow be blamed. I point
all this out to our 1950s teevee-sitcom mother, who's in the next room
drying dishes with a towel.
The boy becomes Juanita's sister Stephanie and says, "But I like
the Culpepper Johnston part." (While the repairs were going on, we were
silently talking about Stephanie's art or school project of pretending
to be --or maybe actually being-- the reincarnation of a
nineteenth-century political Barnum character.)
Father comes home, other dream-only family members show up, and the
entire family goes on a crazy ride in a long, pointy, motorized boat
down a whitewater rock chute. Father (here a 1950s teevee-sitcom father)
is paralyzed with fear. I take the motor's handle and steer us between
the rocks.
The ride becomes even faster. The family becomes Hit and Run
Theater people: Steve Weingarten, Doug Nunn, Ellen Callas, etc. The
channel gets narrower and narrower until the flexible rubber boat (!)
pops out over the right-hand rock wall, and here we are, safe, in the
parking lot at the bottom of the ride. I say, "I call that winning."
Everybody's still wild-eyed and breathless from the excitement; nobody
heard me. I say again, "I call that winning."
I stroll through an old tourist community in and built out away
from a sea cliff. I can fly but I'm keepin that to myself. The dream
skips past the place where I've traded a service (advice?) for a framed
antique French theater-event poster. Here's a nest of little shops like
grapes on the vine that's the stairway going up and out to what's
probably the highest room above and outside the cliff. That will be a
maps and navigation shop; I'll offer to fly the proprietor over places
to draw maps of...
Here's a flat-sugar-cone shape of a big record's wrapper folded
over a small 78-rpm record. It's a novelty record with the number /100/
in the title on one side. /I'll get this for Juanita./ I become
fascinated by a closeup view of erosion damage done by steel needles
dropped onto the record in the same place hundreds of times, and I
become dizzy and /conk out./
I come to myself, still in the dream, looking down from the ceiling
at where the person I was is now a spindle-necked Edgar Allan Poe
marionette character chained to the steps with a handcuff around his
neck. Was I (was he) drugged and trapped? I should get him loose before
I pass out again.
I woke up with the Anton Karras /Third Man/ radio show theme song
playing in my head.
-end-