Gondola Dock. Swordfish. Chain And Bottle Jack. KZYX Quake. Two Bad Ones. Training. Trench Warfare. Get Over It. Black Rubber. Cars Strain To Go. Burger Whales. Cathedral. Ice. Time Camp.
Marco McClean
First dream. This dream is all chaotic forgotten back-story leading
to where Juanita and I are in a stage-prop Italian gondola on water that
is the linoleum floor. There's a dock. Something startling and
/betraying/ happens without motion or sound-- an instant of scary
realization, without there being anything to realize.
I /started/ awake in bed with my arms around Juanita, the same way
as in the dream, but this didn't wake her up.
Next dream. In real life Steve Siler (of the old Mendocino Community
School) and actress Alena Guest are married. In the dream Alena is a
ruthless clever criminal mastermind along the lines of John Travolta's
character in the movie /Swordfish/, and Steve is one of her underlings.
I and some others are held hostage in the tilted room between a
house's angled roof and another parallel roof above it, while Alena and
her crew are getting some equipment they need from a tunnel beneath the
drainage creek that went across the T at the low end of the street where
I lived in Carmichael when I was in fifth grade. When they come back
from that, we'll all go to a government computer in San Francisco and
use what Alena has stolen and learned in order to get a huge amount of
money.
Somehow I talk my way out of the tilted room and am on a lower floor
in the house, in a position to mess up the gang members here. I kick one
of the guards in the chest so he knocks two other guards over; they all
fall into a deep, carpeted hole in the floor and stick down there; maybe
they're dead, I don't care.
The dream jumps back (or ahead) to where I'm in the upstairs tilted
room. Steve Siler is sitting on a slightly higher couch than I am; he's
alert, holding his short rifle ready. I say, "You have to trust me when
I say this-- /It won't work. I know./
He believes me but he wants to talk it over with Alena. He says into
his walkie-talkie, "I'm coming down there. I need to see you, now." I
go to the hatchway in the wall. Guards come up the ladder and get set to
stop me before I can go through. Steve runs away from the hatchway,
downhill, down the slope of the room, whose floor is now the upper roof
and so outside.
I turn the page of where I'm getting this story from; the new page
is a blank pulp-paper magazine that's been shakily hand-written in
print-font letters. I must have written this, because I skip down the
page directly to key words that tell of another of Alena's men running
after Steve and diving after him into the pool behind the house. I'm
confused, here. Why would he run? Why wouldn't he help me? (The other
hostages have vanished.)
I skip back up the page to where it says that the man running after
Steve is a /Titan/ (with a capital T). /Why would this be printed so
shoddily? And why don't I remember writing this?/
Next dream. In the dream, Highway One just north of Fort Bragg (CA)
is instead inland in a cross between the Central Valley and a land of
plateaus cut through with deep valleys, like a magnified cracked-dry-mud
lake bed. There's something wrong with my car. I pull off the road and
turn around to go the other way.
I'm still going the way I was going before. I come to a small town
that's just old convenience stores on the left side of the road. A man
flies slowly overhead, having jumped his car into the air. Everyone
comes out of the buildings and stops driving by to watch what will
happen. He doesn't make it over the valley between this plateau and the
next; he lands in a tree, saved by having a gate chain and bottle jack
looped around his chest; the chain is hooked on branches. The car
continues down to smash far below.
I reach out to help the man to safety, even though he's sixty feet
away. I'll pick him up by the chain.
Next dream. In the dream, NPR station KZYX's office is in the
parking lot of the swimming lake near where I lived when I was in
seventh grade, but the edge of the parking lot is a miles-high cliff
with a jut of rock sticking out. A boardwalk of two-by-sixes goes out
onto the jut to where the transmitter shack and tower are, and the tower
is a crane holding up the reggae-music deejay who's playing the current
show-- he's sitting at a desk dangling off to one side at about
boardwalk level.
I walk out the boardwalk to examine the system. Nothing is fastened
down. I jump experimentally to see if the boardwalk will flex. The cliff
and rock give a single /shake/. The boardwalk and everything attached to
it --the deck, the transmitter shack, the tower-- shift a few feet
off-center and twist slightly. The power cables might be damaged. Power
should be shut off.
I go back to the office, go in. People are doing make-work,
shuffling paperwork, vacuuming, talking. At an old-fashioned post-office
or bank-queue barred window I start to warn about the problem outside,
and the man who thinks he's in charge here makes a face --he doesn't
like me and I'm talking too slowly; he says, "Yeah, yeah, get to the
point." I say, "Your deejay is hanging by a chain and the shed's
shifted. You might want to shut off the power." I leave and let the
spring slam the screen door behind me. The man says something to his
underlings about their not needing /amateurs/ coming around interfering
when they have a /real/ engineer to take care of things like that.
I'm walking on a trail along the bottom of a row of grass hills,
wondering how I'll get hundreds of miles to where I left my car being
repaired in Marysville (?). Maybe I should have asked in KZYX if anyone
was going that way later...
Ilona from the Whale School is riding a little stingray bicycle
across the hill by a house. I turn up this hill to go between the
houses, and Ilona rides along next to me. I tell her about the prick in
charge at KZYX. She's interested in the earthquake part of the story, as
of course she would be-- that's the good part; the other part is just me
whining about being mistreated.
Now I'm on a mountain road that goes past where KZYX has come to be
next to the road (with the cliff still behind it), and it's a hot-season
holiday, and some people I vaguely know have driven up to park here and
got out of their cars in their cutoff jeans and bathing suits, with
their towels and swimming things. I'll show them how to get down to the
river.
I stop at KZYX to talk with the people standing in front, and the
swimmers I was with suddenly are out of sight ahead on the road. They
won't know where to turn down. I hurry along after.
A waitress who is still pretty though somewhat wrecked from a life
of hard work is walking near me. I say, "Do you mind if I fly?" No; why
would she mind that? I step up into the air and can only fly at walking
speed. I try to push the air behind me by sweeping my arms around; this
takes me up a little higher but it's no faster. The waitress thinks this
is funny. She waves an order pad mock-triumphantly above her head. We
come to her friend and she stops to talk; now maybe I'll experience
getting suddenly far ahead by /not/ stopping to talk.
Far below me, to the right, past the oak trees along the cliff edge,
I see a river full of rocks and swimming holes, that's like a cross
between the Navarro a few miles in from the sea and the place where the
American and Sacramento rivers come together just east of Auburn (where
I used to go swimming, the summer I lived in Colfax with Julie, uh,
1978).
My dreams from Thursday, 2009-11-19:
(I had two fast chaotic bad dreams and /started/ awake from each,
disturbing Juanita both times from the edge of her sleep. The first one
is gone; the second had something to do with danger coming from above,
in a circular place, with me and Juanita in the center.)
Next dream. My team and a second team of astronauts have just landed
near each other on a planet with life on it, but noxious life. We have
two yurt-shaped habitats that are also the top of the living spaces of
escape vehicles. We're all outside in environment suits. A woman from
one of the yurts orders a triangular window cut in the side. There's an
argument, but she insists-- she /will not/ put up with a living space
without a window.
I'm ordered to comply. I start cutting in such a way that a
plexiglass panel is sealed into the gap as the opaque skin of the
habitat comes loose.
Others are doing other things. Some people have run a flexible hose
from the top of our yurt to the next one, with a box in the middle to
filter out toxins and force clean air into both yurts, so there'll
always be positive pressure at every airlock.
Something goes catastrophically wrong. We can't stay here. Everyone
does exactly what he's been trained to do, to survive in this situation.
Most people run into the uncut yurt. Someone cracks a pressure vessel to
flush the yurt as two others, outside with me, cut the hose from the top
and pull it away. We run in (I run in last), seal the airlock. I yell,
"Foam!" Someone throws me a hand-pumped spray bottle and /as we take
off/, some others brace around me and hold me up so I can keep the
bottle over my head, spraying cobweb-thin layers across the six-inch
hole in the center of the ceiling, layers that harden instantly, but
we're already high up, in thin air, and the seal result is like the
inside of the top half of a balloon.
That wasn't foam, but something shorter term. Someone finds what I
wanted --a poly-foam bomb-- and gets it to me. I stick it to the inside
of the balloon, pull the handle away. It explodes /PUMPH!/ and now
there's a rough blob of hard plastic foam perfectly sealing the damage
and billowing out a little across the ceiling. We're safe, for the time
being.
I woke up with the Temptations' song /Ball Of Confusion/ playing in
my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm balancing on top of an old car that's
rolling out of control down into a rocky valley. Someone is above me to
the left; he thinks that I'm rolling to my death and he doesn't have to
worry about me anymore. He goes away.
The car rolls up the far side of the valley without crashing into
anything, and as it starts back down the other way I jump off.
My point of view follows a boy crossing the lines in a trench war.
He walks confidently into the other side's trench/tunnel system (an
underground town) and is handed a mail bundle to deliver. The real mail
guy says, "Hey!" The boy ignores him, pretends to be able to read his
instructions in this other language, and starts away up the tunnel,
deeper into the belly of the enemy. This is a good story; I pause it so
I can watch the rest when I get back from work later. (Unlike Juanita, I
like to stop at the good part of a story, because then I'm really
enjoying looking forward to getting back to it. With Juanita, the good
part is /the good part/, and she can't put it down there.)
I woke up with the Beatles' song /For No One/ playing in my head
(again).
My dreams from Friday, 2009-11-20:
First dream. A traumatic event is like fifteen years old. In an
abandoned theater, people on a work team are suddenly greatly affected
by emotional breakdowns (from the event) all over again. Here's a dead
person who jumped from a catwalk. Here's another. A girl thinks I saw
the first death and didn't say anything about it and so that means I
/caused/ the second death.
I go to another section of seats in the theater. George's (?) wife
[Sharon? Karen?] and another woman, and suddenly lots more people, are
/tired of the ongoing bathos about the event never ending-- especially
of the girl on teevee whimpering about it, and the commercial songs
whining about it, and, oh, just everything./
I agree. You people have to get over it some time. Why not now?
Outside it's a cloudy, gray day. I drive out of Los Angeles and come
to a town that a boy I knew in grammar school, Chet Fite, and others in
a religious cult are building on a hillside. I say to the people who
want me to join them, "I don't believe in that crap." They let me
leave.
I come to another town just as religious as the first one. End of
the road. Turn around. There must be someplace to go that isn't run by
kooks.
The car vanishes. People are all standing in a line that I realize I
just cut into. /Sorry./
I and a woman from the team in the theater before come to a guarded
door in a futuristic city. The telepathic guard sees by the woman's
purse (?) that she was on the crew of the fateful fifteen-year-old
event's instigators, the ones who caused it in the first place. I'm
like, /Oh, jeez, give up on that, already. Let it go./
In another place in the future city, someone with me thinks we can
fake out some other-world invaders (alien criminals) by using stage-prop
guns --a revolver and a military forty-five. The criminals will come
from their world through the magic portal, a jagged hole in a garage
door that has a black bedsheet with slits cut in it hung over the middle
part.
Next dream. A one-car-wide dirt road goes through a hilly rural
place. A shiny-black flying horse has a wing stuck at an odd angle; the
horse crashes in the road.
A Medieval knight in black rubber-and-leather armor charges a group
of Mexican bandidos (or police, maybe). He's wounded and crashes to the
ground next to the horse.
The bandidos vanish. Local Medieval soldiers arrest the man (the
knight) and the girl (formerly the horse). They are marched with other
prisoners into a farm pond. They all go under the water and /stay
under/. I fly to where the fat queen of the soldiers lounges with her
officers and sycophants under a tree. I demonstrate causing pain to one
of her soldiers, by projecting a silent blast of fire from my hand.
Juanita shows up after having got the prisoners away by giving them
air under the water. We lock wrists, fly up, avoid trivial telephone
wires, leave these technology-challenged people to their own ignorant
cruel pleasures.
Next dream. I'm driving my old 1971 Chevy Nova in an Ohio version of
Sebastopol (CA). I'm late for a college class. I take a wrong turn, but
here's an auto parts store that's going out of business and having a
sale. I go in, thinking to get a manual for my Mercury (which in my mind
I see parked at Juanita's house).
My dream-only business/study partner (?) comes here, reminds me that
it's /really late-- four-thirty./ The store is closing, anyway. I say,
"Get the guns." (Meaning, go buy all the guns they have left in the gun
department of this auto parts store.)
My partner becomes a clever little girl. Her mother insists she
change the color of the clothes she's packed. I say, "Okay. Okay, she
will." To the girl I say, "Come on." We get into the car, which is now
my Mercury. It starts with no trouble but immediately starts to roll.
The /neutral/ postion of the transmission lever doesn't work.
The girl partly becomes Juanita. She and I are in a strange
two-story house at night, looking for clues. We turn off lights as we
move through the house, sneaking out. We come to my car, the Nova again.
It starts and immediately is going, like the Mercury did before. The
Juanita-girl becomes my generic business/study partner again. I've got
my feet on the ground through the open front of the car, trying to hold
it back. The road my feet are on and that's all around near the car is
not moving but the scenery on all sides is just shooting past-- trees,
houses, etcetera, all going by as if we're going at highway speed. I
swing the car sideways and get us stopped against a hedge. Whew.
Now I'm alone, driving to pick up my mother from where she's been
staying in the house where my just-after-high-school girlfriend Julie
lived. The car will not stay stopped. I prop the passenger-side mirror
against a tree to make the car hold still so my mother can get in.
Because the mirror is on the door, my mother's legs get all tangled up
in getting through the only-partly-open door, but she makes it without
being hurt.
I'm a private detective. I get us to my office, which is in a
tiki-lounge-decorated three-story wooden building-- I came here because
a woman client told me on the phone to meet her here. My mother says,
"No. [Garbed Name] is a Japanese restaurant." I say, "Where?" She
says, "North Hollywood." (!)
I press star-sixty-nine on my dream-only cell phone. The client
woman answers and says, "The champagne is lovely." I say, "Have some
more champagne. I'll be there in fifteen minutes."
Next dream. Near a wooden house painted with sand-filled
sand-colored paint I've made a clay sculpture on wire of a man and a
little boy falling. They're held up by the upside-down man's arm; his
free hand is holding the reins of a horse that isn't falling but
standing next to the sculpture. Michael, my Caspar (CA) landlord from
1982 to 1992, takes over working on this, and I go inside and upstairs
to finish up a sculpture of two football-size whales made all of fresh
hamburger.
I come downstairs. Michael has made a big bas-relief sea scene using
my falling-people sculpture; in it, the man and boy are sliding down a
wave. The faces of two of Michael's women friends (?) can be seen
through holes in the wave. There's seaweed (made of glue and sand) and
another person to the left. Michael asks what color I'd like things to
be. I say, "What color will it be if it isn't painted?" (That's my
answer.)
I woke up with the James Taylor song /Line 'Em Up/ playing in my
head.
My dreams from Monday, 2009-11-23:
First dream. I'm at the wheel of a rectangular gray schoolbus at the
entrance to a spiral drive down a conical hill. I turn the wheel as
sharply left as it will go but I still can't clear the front-right
corner of a similar bus parked on the driveway, pointed at me. I back up
and go back and forth to get my bus to miss the other one, but I keep
running into it very slowly in the same place every time.
Now I and my passengers are in the other bus, or the first bus
turned around the other way, sliding backward down the spiral road. We
go around several times; at the bottom of the hill the bus falls over
onto its side and vanishes. We're inside a giant concrete cathedral. All
the riders, sitting in the same place relative to each other as they
were in the bus, link up in a chain of side-by-side sitting pairs, then
split into the pairs, then we all lift up into the air. The girl sitting
next to me and I peel away from the direction everyone else is going; we
fly out through a window in the concrete.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a warren of apartments on splitting
and intersecting hallways. (Dead) Barbara Champion's apartment door is
half-plastered over. I get in anyway. There's nobody here. /Of course
there's no-one here; Barbara Champion is dead./
In another apartment on this same hallway I find a shower in a glass
room. I take off my clothes and wash. I find part of a mushy,
waterlogged bar of soap and use that. Hot water is so good.
Now I'm outdoors on the road near where two years ago my mother
lived on a low cliff above the sea. I'm still naked from taking a
shower, but it's been only a minute or two, so I'm not cold even though
it's like the inside a freezer out here. There's snow and ice
everywhere. /I'll be cold soon; I might die./ Tourists drive by, gawking
at the local naked person in the snow.
I find a discarded refrigerator that might be useful for shelter,
and I break ice loose from inside it... This won't be good enough. My
body won't make enough heat.
Here's my old 1980 Chevy Citation. I break ice loose from around the
rear hatch and get it open, then break loose layers of ice from under
the inside of the hatch. /There will be tools and wires and parts and
things in here. I can hotwire this car and run the heater and not die./
/Don't forget to clear away anything blocking the exhaust./
My dream from Tuesday, 2009-11-24:
First dream. It's mealtime at like a government cafeteria. I go
there, go inside, but now it's the big backstage area of Cotton
Auditorium, still a kitchen, but the line started at the other way in,
so I've just cut into the front of the line. No-one makes a fuss,
because there isn't any actual food. I give up and go back outside. Why
wait in line? I'll just wait out here and then come back when the line
is shorter. And there might be food by then, too.
I'm in a flat place of boardwalks and wooden garages --maybe they're
boat-sheds. In the dream my teeth are all partially capped with little
metal corners and edges, some of the caps are joined with plastic gems;
I find this out when all the metal bits come loose at once amd I spit
them into my hand. I find this /funny/ but at the same time I'm worried
because I have no money to go to a dentist, and my teeth will begin to
rot and become infected. I walk along the widest of the boardwalks,
thinking up scheme after scheme to raise five thousand dollars. (Steal
something and sell it? Offer to work for someone for like six months for
the money in advance? Etcetera.)
At an army camp version of a MacDonalds hamburger stand, a retarded
man stands at the lunch counter, shouting incoherently at the workers.
The man's father comes to control him and apologizes to everyone. People
are sitting at camp bench-tables that are pushed together in long rows.
At the end-of-row table nearest me, college kids sing a song about fast
food that's all funny new made-up swear words. High on the joy of
singing, they get up and march around the counter, through the kitchen
area and back to their table.
In another part of the camp, an outdoor stage/bandshell is held up
on lines of old wood-and-aluminum canoe paddles set on end on the
ground, paddle-ends up. Something happens involving aliens and
time-travel, so I have to sneak across in front of the stage in plain
sight to get under it and turn all the paddles to point the right
direction to be a reflective antenna. I do this.
A time-traveling man's prehistoric bearlike shaggy dog waddles
slowly into camp, wowing everyone with how ancient its kind is. (It's my
landlord's dog.)
Two delicate, weightless-seeming white-blonde girls (like the
actress who played Daisy in the teevee run of /Dead Like Me/, but young,
flat-chested, move together without walking, embrace, kiss, and smoothly
merge to become one girl facing both ways at the same time.
/Can I see that again?/ /Sure./ They separate into two, move
apart, move together, hug, kiss, and merge into one.
/That's some trick./ They're like, /Yes, we're rather proud of it./
-end-