Breakfast. OH, NO! Glass House. Rusty Old Computers. All The Chwir-led Peas. The Pope. Sweet And Cute. Entrepreneur. Rats And Mice In The Air. Lost Boy. Flight Instruction. Fuzzy Drunk. Eurydice.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm somewhere with my (dead) stepfather Roland. I find
the kitchen, look around in it for food and offer to Roland to cook
fried sliced chickendogs and eggs with ketchup. I become fascinated by a
closeup image of the finished food that keeps changing to have more or
less or no hotdog bits in it, and either ketchup or not.
Next dream. In like a horror-movie/police show, the main detective
man just got out of the hospital, from having mysterious terrible
traumatic injuries, and is coming back to work. Actor Mark McKinney (of
Kids In The Hall) is a shape-changing criminal man; he's not evil, but
mental in some way, a victim himself-- he unpredictably becomes a thick
cloud of bees and then goes back to being a person. There's a sense that
his desire for revenge against the woman cop in the story (?) is really
just misdirected from being anger about what was done to him in the
first place that made him the bee man, and who is responsible for that?
The recovered cop tracks the bee man down, chases him through
apartments and cabanas in a tropical retirement community. In an
apartment he sees the bee man become a tall black guy after being a
cloud of bees. I wonder, /Is this the same shapechanger? Or are there
more?/
The black guy is immensely strong and it's not possible to fight
him. I'm the cop now; I have to flee through a modern low
condominium/duplex-triplex community of professionals. I run through and
past outdoor talk therapy sessions somehow without startling anyone.
In a hallway parallel to an under-apartment-block carport an old
Italian man knocks on a destist's-office door. The bee guy is still
coming-- it's part of his plan that I'm here now; I would naturally
stick around and try to help the old man against him, and so be caught
and killed. Even though I know this, I stay and try. The old man is
killed anyway.
I run, hide, run some more, and I eventually find the bee guy's lair
where he's somewhat vulnerable. He's /not/ innocent-- he plots all kinds
of plots, and he has normal (but evil) humans helping him. I and /my/
helper (?) smash him down. One of the bee guy's helpers sticks a drug
dart thing in my side-- I pull it out, but I might be right on the edge
of collapsing; I yell to my helper, "/Get me out of here, fast!/" as I
stick the drug dart into the bee guy.
Out back of the building, on a deck above a flat river (like a place
in Petaluma --or Novato, maybe-- next to where water drains into the
North Bay), my helper, now a pug-faced black/Mexican man, burns a
rolled-up old newspaper that has the bee guy's /mana/ or essential relic
of his soul in it. The bee guy, on the floor inside, gurgle-screams,
/NOOOOOO!/ but even this doesn't kill him, even having his disembodied
heart, or whatever, burned.
A big housecat climbs out from a concrete statue of interlocking
oversized pet animals; it /meowrs/. My helper says to the woman cop the
bee-guy hates, who has just shown up, "Do you have any hamburger for the
cat?" She goes in to look in the kitchen for hamburger.
I chop an ax through the bee guy's head down into his torso. He
splits down the middle to the waist; the two resulting head-halves'
sides of their mouths turn toward each other the wrong way around and
make a new horrible smile between them. My helper, now a combination of
the Mexican man and a stereotypical piano-teacher woman says to the
bee-(and now two-snakes-like)-guy, "So where do you two guys come from?"
More bad people appear. I and the piano teacher flee and run in
different directions. I come to a road where a car-racing-team man and
his crew see me in obvious distress and stop their
central-aircraft-radial-engine Ford van for me. I squeeze in on the
front bench seat. Away!
But not away. The racing team leader man is on a mission of his own
to bomb his enemy's apartment house. As a hostage in the van I will
participate. I /can/ do it; it just involves throwing a stick of
dynamite out the window. Sure, why not?
We drive to a huge angular modern redwood-beam mansion place. Oh-- I
see; dynamite will do no good-- the place is too big. Also, the
unkillable man and his gang are already here. The racing team man's
enemy is the same bee creature guy, but here the creature is in it's
power and even more formidable. Still, I, my helper cop (the Mexican
one), the piano teacher, the racing guy and his team all rampage through
and smash up the place and plenty of the bad people by swinging around
and destroying precious antique items and ceramic tables and statues and
things. The main old woman (gazillionaire Cindy McCain) (evil--all are
evil here) finally gets upset with her evil immortal monster husband for
making trouble in the mortal world and so causing the destruction of her
precious things. While she is occupied in being conflicted about this I
crack her over the head with a stone table.
I fight my way upstairs and in the highest part of the house I smash
and smash at the main evil indestructible man till he's nothing but bare
shoulder and upper-arm bones and some top ribs, but still he crawls
after me with one of his smirking woman helpers /riding on this bone
puppet thing he is/, and with another smirking woman helper walking
slowly beside them.
The cop is (I am) weighed down by evil people and creatures just
piling on top of me until everything is black.
Now I'm watching from outside the action. Downstairs in like an
elevator lobby a tiled-art wall-hanging thing that I saw the first time
through here has some glyph tiles replaced with glazed bas reliefs of
captured good guys, including the cop. /Oh, no!/ (This is number six or
eight of the series of /oh, no!/ moments.) The cop, all damaged and
unconscious, is tied up in a fat rope and pulled on a pulley back up
into the top of the house.
Somehow the cop wakes up and gets partly loose from the rope and
breaks the big wooden pulley so he falls through the mostly hollow
house, screaming, "/I'm drowniiiiing!/" and splashes into a flat rural
Central California drainage river place, and there's a big old wooden
Viking-like rowboat right here! No oars, though. He pushes off in the
boat and sets little wooden wing-shaped planks to be sails.
Evil creatures slowly ooze out of the bottom of the house and swim
after him. One creature is a fifteen-foot-long metal man-hippo
canoe-thing swimming on its belly. The cop throws heavy rusted bolts and
gears from the bottom of the boat at it, but they just go inside it and
rest in the cavern of its open middle-- it will digest them and go even
faster! The snakelike man (the reconstituted bee man) and some of his
helper women hold onto the sides of what I think of as Heliogabalus (the
canoe-man-thing); they're all together going exactly the same speed as
the Viking boat. The cop suspects he's being allowed to get away. Oh,
noooooo! (Oh, no! number fifteen or so.) /Is this how the cop ends/ended
up in the hospital in the first place with the terrible injuries, etc.?
Is it all the evil bee-cloud man's plan?/
I woke up with a sixties-sounding upbeat bubblegum-rock song playing
in my head. The words of the chorus are, "With your defeat, my rocking
beat, will be indifferent to the explosion..." (and repeat but with the
chord resolving at the end). It sounds like The Archies.
My dreams from Saturday, 2009-10-24:
First dream. I'm in a mostly glass one-room guest house on the lawn
behind a rich family's house. There are several computers here. In the
dream I come here often at night to use the high-speed internet access.
One of the kids from the house comes out and calls me to come there
and have a meeting. The rich kids have a complaint that one kid's
computer is not working right, and they blame it on me. I explain about
how nothing I did can have caused the problems they describe. But my
time is up, here. I have to leave and not come back. Okay.
Next dream. I'm in the concrete side-back court of a strange
building, where there are computers with no covers on them set around on
benches out in the damp weather, all plugged in and running, or fans
whirring, anyway. I closely examine one that's clotted with rust; every
part is flaking rust. This computer becomes a film projector. I set it
by the back door; this is the one I want. Also here are boxes of wires
and adapters and peripheral equipment. I find an expensive-looking
yellow video cable that has gold-plated push-on F-connecters; I want
this too. That's about it; nothing else here is worth carrying away.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-10-25:
First dream. A wide-headed German Spiderman character has to go
through a maze of giant concrete stairwells beside a bleak canal. German
Spiderman is attacked by maybe twenty German snobby but tough kids, and
he beats them all, leaves them lying on stairs or floating in the water
all crippled or dead. I'm a reporter. I think about how to start my
story about all this.
German Spiderman says in a Slav/Arab accent, with the
throat-clearing /ch/ sound, "All the chwhir-led peas we been
visualizing." Funny.
I woke up with Aimee Mann's song /Ghost World/ playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. It's night. I'm looking nearly straight up
at heavy slinky ropes lightning going /up/ from the different antennas
on a radio tower to ground on power lines even farther up in the sky.
It's beautiful, but of course it'll have to be stopped and repaired.
Then its daytime in Italy/Brazil. A metal Sugarloaf Jesus statue is
a radio tower shooting lightning down to the cable-car cable. The Pope
of Rome comes here to bless the statue or just to look at it, and the
Pope's showing up becomes what brings spectators and gawkers. Everyone
goes to the edge of this low ridge to pretend to take pictures of the
lightning statue but really to be near the Pope. I have Juanita's camera
and I use it in video mode to follow the Pope around; he notices he's
being recorded and begins to prance around singing a funny song. I think
that this'll be my excuse to finally start putting things on YouTube. I
should give the Pope a copy immediately, though... How? On my keychain
drive. His tech people can show him how to watch it.
I go down this dirt driveway to a house at the road, which is
Highway 20 (CA), to get my car. I see that my car was parked all night
across behind some other cars, blocking them in. Apparently no-one
wanted to leave. They're Italians, they're hot-heads; if it wasn't okay,
they would've all come out and turned my car upside-down.
Somewhere in here is the story of Gail Hapke (of Gail Hapke's
Scribal Terror Weblog), who in the dream is a nun, and either the Pope
or just some guy; both of them --Gail and the Pope-- are
Barbie-doll-size clay/dough figures, one a lump and the other a little
golem. They /almost/ have sex in order to gain access to vast libraries
of space-alien knowledge. It doesn't work because they're too crumbly
and fragile, but it's not a big deal; their attitude is: it was an
adventure, unusual and funny for all.
Next dream. A ten or eleven year old boy and a girl like each other.
The girl's a little taller than the boy, and much more interested in
being romantic friends.
The boy goes away to read in a room with double doors. The girl just
pushes her way in. The boy must put up with this, to not look like a
mean person. He's sitting in a chair. The girl lies on the bed, nearby.
I think about taking over for for the boy for a moment and putting his
hand out so the kids will be holding hands while they're reading their
books-- but I don't have to; he does it. This is so sweet and cute. I
hope no-one comes in and tries to embarrass them.
Next dream. In the dream Albion Ridge Road is like a stretch of a
cross-country highway in the Midwest. Two or three old women are
traveling, staying in a motel. I don't know why I'm in their room while
they're out, but I am, and as long as I'm here I dig around in a
suitcase and fill my mouth and my cupped hands with coins. Now I have
money to invest in a way to make more money.
I walk down the road at about two a.m. A man comes slowly up the
road in a car, looking for someone specific for some reason-- maybe a
job in films; he'll know him when he sees him. Another man is out here
admiring his own just-finished driveway asphalt job that spills out in a
wide delta onto half the road. The car man asks about the driveway job,
to give the man an opportunity to talk about it, so the car man can
decide if this is the man he's looking for.
I go up a dirt road to the right --it might be E Road. Here's a
three-section small flat outdoor theater area. I'll have a boxing match
with Alice's father Larry, and we'll use the center area between seats
for a ring.
Here's a clubhouse. Local people begin showing up spontaneously for
a community gathering. I ask if anyone has boxing gloves and "those
things you put in your mouth to protect your teeth, ya know? Maybe in a
wagon in your garage or something..." A man has boxing gloves; he goes
to get them. Now we can start taking bets.
Douglas Roycroft is here, sitting at a park bench-table; he has a
tiny can of something to eat. I should eat something, to be strong for
the fight. Douglas says, "Go ahead; I don't want any more." They're
tiny tamales. Douglas tells me, "It tastes like Pierrot [pee-eh-ROH]
sauce." I show him the label-- it's /made/ by Perro, so, yeah-- perro
sauce. It doesn't taste like anything at all.
A 1950s-movie-type policeman and another man show up and walk
around, looking for transgressions of the law. This doesn't have to
wreck anything; I'll get the cop involved, let him be the referee and be
a part of the enterprise.
I organize in my mind how the fixed fight will go: Larry and I will
lazily circle each other, get in one good fake punch, each, then Larry
will knock me down. The betting will all shift. I'll /slowly/ get up,
then hammer Larry with a flurry of punches and leg-sweep him to the
ground and end up with my knee across his throat...
Where /is/ the boxing gloves guy? We should get this going before
the cop decides to start arresting people for selling liquor in the
clubhouse.
My dreams from Monday, 2009-10-26:
First dream. I fly from a high hill into clouds, reading aloud, or
rather hearing myself read aloud on the radio about how conditions in
the upper atmosphere of Earth have changed because of the collapse of
industrial society so very low-density kinds of rats and mice can live
in the sky again the way they used to before we screwed everything up.
I fly along a (cloud) gray-gravel-set-in-asphalt road that becomes
more and more solid until it is the ground, and I turn off it and land
inside a dim, empty library. I remember giving a book to acting teacher
Dan Kozloff, resulting in I don't have it and can't return it now. Oh,
well.
I masturbate into a laundry sink (to completion, which hardly ever
happens in a dream).
There's school going on in the next room. Anyone could have walked
in here and caught me, but they didn't. Lucky. Be more careful next
time.
Next dream. A relaxed country school is established in pretty hills.
On a family open-house day a girl and a boy want to learn to fly. I take
them each by a hand and explain: "Okay, we're gonna start off and try
not to hit that car." (There's a car parked a little way down the
hill.) We step downhill, fly out and up, miss the car, and rise up to
fly over a whole sea of wave/hills, hundreds of miles.
We come down a little and fly through and around and past stands of
eucalyptus trees, and we land to lie down and rest on an indoor (?)
metal awning. The little boy is all cranky and angry about something; he
wanders away, so when it's time to get up and fly back, he can't be
found. The girl and I fly around looking for him, but-- we have to go
back. Leave him.
It turns out to be okay to have left the little boy behind because
we return to another version of the world --not the same world-- to a
place where no version of us ever was and so here we never lost the boy,
so no problem. And it's the angry boy's stupid fault, anyway. And how do
we know he didn't walk back where he belongs? He's probably fine. The
hell with him.
Next dream. I drive across a mountain road to go into a strange
Olympic-style ski resort. Now I'm on foot, barefoot. I walk past
scattered security guards, through corridors between school temporary
buildings, to the base of the resort's slope, and I'm surprised there is
deep, abundant snow, when there wasn't any snow on the whole school
place. I have no skis, but that's okay, everyone else will be renting
skis too.
A bus is parked on a road going right to left.
Now it's not a ski resort; it's just a depression-era town, Detroit,
maybe, and the bus is a diner built into a train car. I meet a coarse
but bright-seeming plumber-like guy and offer to show him how to fly.
He's reluctant until I float up into the air to show him I'm not crazy
and can actually fly. We lock wrists and fly up and along the street. We
go up several hundred feet and I warn him about power lines: "You have
to watch out above and below-- power lines are everywhere. If you're not
careful you'll crash right into one, and /POW/ that's it. Look." (I
point out power lines below us and, incredibly, above us, even with how
high we are.
Back down near the street a woman is in the air with us now. I
suggest the idea of using any power for another purpose-- such as using
flying power to throw something, because technically when you fly you're
constantly throwing yourself and you weigh more than a hundred pounds,
so...
I let go of the man's wrist and he floats gently down the last two
feet. I say, "See, you're getting it." He tries to fly up by himself,
and he can do it! Great!
We go through a gate in a chainlink fence, diagonally across a
parking lot, and into the back of a soup kitchen's dining room.
Time passes. I'm sitting at a table that has a lot of little
electronic parts on it. I'm working from a circuit diagram, soldering
together a mystery device as a test of my ability to do this, but every
time I look away and back at the project it has more chip sockets, and
some are behind and under where I've already put wires across the inside
of the little box, until finally I just decide /I can't finish this; I
did the best I could and I couldn't do it./
Here's a soup bowl full of interesting little analog meters. Here's
a single meter with three indicator needles in it, all on the same
(concentric) shaft, each needle stretching to a slightly different
scale, and there are six contacts on the back, so the needles really are
on separate circuits. /I want this. Are there more like this?/ No. Too
bad. Well, I have one.
Next dream. There's a teevee news article about an epidemic of a
disturbing new disease that makes people act all muzzy and disoriented--
they call the disease /fuzzy drunk/. In the article, people afflicted
with fuzzy drunk have special streets of places they stand (or sit, or
loll) begging for money and selling things spread out on blankets.
A Chinese woman and her friend walk along such a street that ends in
concrete steps. The older of the two develops /fuzzy drunk/ and, trying
to use the rail, swings around backward and almost falls. The other
woman looks directly into the camera, annoyed that it is there to see
her friend's humiliation.
Next dream. I'm driving my Mercury in the area where I lived when I
was in high school. In the dream Auburn-Folsom road is all torn up and
broken into large gravel. I turn left, go up to the crossroads where I
used to go to hitchhike to school when I missed the bus (which was
often). All the roads are torn up.
I go back down the other leg of the crossed roads to Auburn-Folsom
Road and watch for this end of West Lane. Was that it? or just a
driveway?
The road gets narrow and twisty. Even though now I'm in Tim's small
Datsun station wagon I can't go any farther this way. I back up to get
to the road that might have been the right one... Things become vague.
Juanita and I are at a wedding party for some of her friends who I
don't know. I sit on a stool at a kitchen counter, and I point out to
the people around that a pretty good copy of a fifty dollar bill is
printed on a pulp magazine page here. The groom (?) pulls the magazine
aside and hides it; it's supposed to be a surprise.
Now everyone is sitting at tables in a long narrow restaurant
banquet room. I'm sitting at one side of the end of a table. I have my
guitar, and I'm fluidly playing the melody of an exotic lazy
European/Brazilian 1960s song. Servers bring the food; I defy gravity to
somersault slowly backward out of my chair, set the guitar aside and sit
again. We've been given tossed salad, shrimp, very white chicken or
turkey meat, mashed potatoes with peas, and for dessert-- toast and
strawberry jelly. This is great; what a great free meal.
Ominous: /I wonder where Juanita is./
-end-