Army Spy. The Nelson Mine. Ghost Tramps. The Waltons In Caspar. Good Lieutenant. Poor Mister Spock. Chrysanthemum. Tidal Wave. Tidal Wave Two: Sewing Supplies. The History Of Work. Uncharacteristic Mom-Son Emotional Problem.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm with a generic dream-only family in a car on a
two-lane road driving into Roseville (CA). Civilization is falling
apart, so we're about to go to the coast to join a community hiding from
the troubles that will come, but we've had to go backward about ten
miles to Roseville to bring a man to his apartment near the Roseville
Square shopping center.
I stop the car. The man gets out and stands next to the car,
arranging some button shirts and and three pairs of shoes on a blanket.
I think two things: 1. That's right, in hiding we won't be able just
get new shoes when we wear them out. And 2. /He isn't coming with us./
I say, "You're not staying here, are you?" He says, "Just overnight.
I'll come tomorrow." I don't trust him.
(As I slowly woke up I ran through several different ways things
could go after that. I could be able to fly the car, and the man could
be a spy for the army and hold me at gunpoint for them to come get the
flying car, and that would endanger the people with me. And I'd pick the
car up into the air, with the man pointing his gun from the back seat.
(He'd have to get back in, for that. So, okay, he'd have got back in.)
And I'd say something like, "Are you really going to shoot the only
person in the world who can fly?" And he'd point the gun at one of the
others and say, "No, but I'm going to start shooting the others until
you put us down."
Hmm. If I have enough power to lift a car full of people, why can't
I use that same power to smash the gun in his hand against his face and
then fling it out the window with his finger still in it.
That's good. I have to open the windows for that. And he'll think
something's up and order me to close the windows. And what will happen
if pulling or pushing the gun makes it go off?)
Asleep again. Next dream. A teenage boy has been approached to work
for a shadowy organization by a salesman/lawyer who carries his own two
sleepy fire-haired little girls in soft denim seats hanging from straps
around his neck, with his arms forward around them, like a woman with
her hands on her own giant breasts.
Now I see from the boy's point of view as he goes to ask a
British-looking girl simply to go out with him. She likes him and she
wants to, but she's suspicious, because she's been asked by the salesman
to join the organization, and she thinks the man, Mister /Something/,
and the organization he works for are despicable.
The boy hasn't agreed to join. Mister Something comes to sit with
the boy and girl (with his little girls hanging around his neck), and
since he's already been turned down by the girl, and he's not sure about
the boy, he says, "So? How about it?" The girl is furious. She thinks
the boy only wants her as part of Mister /Something's/ scheme. The man
makes it worse by looking /confirmation/ at the girl.
She says coldly, "I'll tell everyone about the Nelson Mine." The
man says, "The mine is only one of our operations. Why put two and two
together?"
I think of taking over for either the boy or the man and quickly
straightening out the situation. This sort of thing always happens in a
story like this, and I always wonder why nobody present just calmly
explains.
Next dream. Two farm houses are set at right angles to one another,
near opposite corners of a big rectangular dirt parking lot. The people
here have totally given up on having a normal life, because /ghost
tramps/ show up at unpredictable intervals and stand in the parking lot.
While I'm getting this story from the farmers, the ghost tramps show
up: one looks like a vacuous Chico Marx, one looks like a cross between
Scarecrow and Tin Man, and one is just a shadowy man shape, maybe in a
military uniform. I sense an element of bullshit to all this, and I go
right out to the ghost tramps to confront them. The shadowy man turns
out to be made of wire and cornstarch paste; he grabs at me and smears
me with wet cornstarch. This is both funny and scary-- funny because
it's like a pie-in-the-face moment and scary because the wire can cut me
or poke me in the eye. I get away and go back to the side of one of the
houses where the people are all cowering in trained fear of the ghost
tramps. I get a hose to wash the paste off me and say, "What is the
/matter/ with you people? Just /shoot/ them." The people shake their
heads; och, if only it were that simple...
Used-war-book entrepreneur and trumpet player Douglas Roycroft comes
here with carloads of famous (dead) black jazz musicians who are all
twelve feet tall and dressed in satin basketball clothes. They
graciously bend down to shake hands with me. I'm thrilled that they're
here. /How did Douglas manage to organize this?/
Next dream. A poor family lives on a Midwestern farm where in real
life is the old school and cow fields in Caspar (CA). It's a modern
Great Depression; everything is done on the barter system. The drunken
local doctor comes by to trade his medical services for some Coke
bottles of the little family's homemade pork-based antibiotic ointment,
and he complains, as usual, about the lack of refrigeration.
The oldest boy and his sister have their latest installment of an
ongoing disagreement about whose turn it is to cut up vegetables for
soup. The boy stomps away to the car barn. I say so everyone can hear,
"How hard can it be to cut up some fucking onions?"
The girl says, "He likes to back the truck in." She means, her
brother likes to park the truck so in an emergency he can just jump in
and tear away. I see another time when he was doing this, backing the
truck in between two rows of tall corn plants in the field. I think he
likes to back up to show off because the girl can't back up in a
straight line and he can.
It's hot. John-Boy (the boy has become John-Boy Walton) is lying in
the shade, across the seat of a truck I didn't see before. It's a box
truck, higher than it is long. John-Boy decides to back /it/ up between
the rows of corn, and he almost tips it over, going over a bump. /I
expected that./ As he goes past where my point of view is floating in
the air, I see a cubic yard of spoiling yellow cheese that has been
forgotten on the very top of the truck since since winter, and it's the
end of summer.
Later (or earlier) I'm in the house with the girl; she's been
complaining about what a troglodyte her brother is. She says, "He uses
/cheese/ for /soap/." He goes by outside carrying a towel and a lump of
yellow cheese. Funny.
I go for a walk around the farm, go through the trees, and here's a
Lark In The Morning Music store built into a shed. Part of the outdoor
sign is a stand-up bass fiddle without a neck but with ten strings, and
a peg head with ten little tuning pegs at the top. The shop is locked up
and too dark inside to see anything through the windows, but there are
musical instruments across the clearing, scattered around under a
carport roof. I go there.
Someone else is under the carport with me. Not John-Boy. Dan?
Douglas? I can't see who it is. /Maybe it's no-one; maybe it's the
effect of a hypnotic anti-theft device./
Next dream. A person who's been a good lieutenant in a future
declining feudal military culture decides to get out of the organization
at the earliest available opportunity. Someone says, "You can't get
out," but the lieutenant is confident that he can. I see his strategy
laid out as a 3-D graphic of a complicated model train set. Soldiers in
the detail that will arrest him are blue Stratego blocks in a line
across where a train is parked. The blocks think that when the train
moves they'll reform the line and continue marching the lieutenant to
prison, but by then he'll have thought of something else to mess them
up. His advantage is, everyone else is following orders and letting that
be enough; he's thinking outside the train set.
In a room in this underground country, the lieutenant is put in a
line of people carrying wounded men on stretchers. The king's officer
kicks the line into motion. I'm carrying a stretcher. We're pushed
faster than we can safely go, so whenever we get to a door in the rock
or a bend in the cliff trail, we bunch up and crash into each other. At
the end of the trip, half the line runs up over the rock shelf across
the door to the next underground country, spilling all their wounded men.
We're let in. This new country is a busy gambling casino. The king's
officer goes to deal with the other king. The lieutenant still wants to
escape, but he knows that to do so he must live through this mission in
the new kingdom, which is worse than his, so he actually works harder
for his king-- he finds where the stretcher-carrier soldiers have become
little airline bottles of liquor on a wedding-cake-shaped lazy Susan,
and he checks that their paper seals are all intact, which represents
that they're not drinking. He needs them to not get drunk, in case they
have to fight their way back to the door. He says, "Don't you dare
start drinking."
Upstairs on the surface of the planet, space aliens have begun
taking over by acquiring businesses. One alien has bought a chain of
multi-story bookstores and he's operating them /strictly according to
advice from a human business adviser who came highly recommended/. The
alien hires a load of new employees, which makes the bookstores very
popular because of excellent service, but the more business the stores
do, the more money they lose, so the advice becomes to /fire twice as
many people as he hired, and abandon half his stores/.
I'm in a nearly deserted administrative office, dismantling computer
equipment. We get to keep whatever computers we were using. I have one
blocky desktop computer and two computers that are
ten-inch-cross-section hexagonal tubes on their sides, that clip
together to double the processing power (they can be used separately or
together). I'm winding up all the cords and cables, chatting with the
person in the next cubicle.
Now I (and the computers from my bookstore job, which is totally
over) are in a back room of my (dead) grandparents' house they had in
Escondido when I was eight or nine. Jerry is here from KMFB. I ask him
if it'd be hard to set up these three computers as a whole-computer RAID
system, so if anything failed the rest would keep working. He thinks
about this... He says, "Yeah, should be possible. Let me do some research."
My dreams from Tuesday, 2009-11-17:
First dream. There are cliffs underground. I've jumped across to
another cliff and fallen onto my side. The original Mister Spock, not
the prequel replacement Spock, appears from the chest up, stuck in the
rock in front of me. I say, "I feel a strong pull to the air force,"
meaning I sense the airport in near but can't see it. Spock mumbles
something. I say, "What?" He says, "It's right over there," and
gestures ahead with his chin to the (underground) horizon.
Spock is crying because Captain Kirk is dead. To encourage him to
talk about it, I say, "I can't stand it that he's dead." Spock says,
"/I can't either./"
Poor sad Mister Spock.
Next dream. In a world like the after-death mountain and lake scene
in /What Dreams May Come/, Italian police and I are trying to find an
executive-level employee of a worldwide motion picture association --we
think he's been kidnaped, but it turns out that he's gone rogue and
kidnaped a movie.
I see from a road high up that the executive is on a shelf of rock
far down on the other side of a valley. We shout back and forth. He's
says he's taken /Chrysanthemum/ (that's the name of the movie) and that
it's too late to save it, it's already destroyed, and he says that soon
he'll be dead too.
By the time the Italian police and I get to him, he's become a
three-foot-long fresh turd as big around as a baseball bat, half
underneath a dry shrub next to a hiking trail.
The motion picture association puts on a memorial dinner for the
man, even though his last few acts in life were so ridiculous and such
bad press; they want to honor his life as a whole.
Now he's alive again and he's Mendocino County Schools
Superintendent Paul Tichinin. I'm the emcee of the event. I introduce
him; he stands up and gets tangled in his chair. I say insinuatingly,
"Oh, he had a little problem, there. It's okay; he can stand up by
himself." I tell the crowd that Paul hardly drinks at all anymore, and
that he's responsible for our getting /one whole movie/ this year--
Woody Allen's /Sleeper/.
At another such company dinner, possibly for another failed movie
executive, a blonde administrative woman is a little drunk, just drunk
enough to not suspect me of being here to write a hit piece against her,
and she's babbling goofily to me about /Chrysanthemum/ being destroyed.
I repeat aloud what she says and start to write it down: "Somebody from
a company that has all of a /hundred dollars/ makes a /little/ movie,
and... Oh, are you writing that?" She smiles and wobbles and watches me
write. I say, "Tell me some more things."
Next dream. My schoolfriends Mark Dennis, Mike Bell and one more are
sitting in the branches of a scrub oak tree that sticks out of a cliff.
I'm on a bed-size air mattress below them, in the water of like Lake
Folsom, slightly shielded from view of the far shore by a tiny rock
island. We're all prisoners on a recreational outing, being guarded by
one guard. We're like Bohr and Heisenberg and the other one (?) meeting
in Copenhagen during World War Two. I say, "I think about Leonardo da
Vinci not necessarily every day, but once a week... /Maybe/ every day,
though..." and I start to tell a story about how, if you think about it
in this in a twisted way that I describe, George W. Bush doesn't look
like a complete idiot.
A huge wave come into the bay that the lake has become; I say,
"Tidal wave! Talk to ya later!" I grab the rock above and behind me and
grab the air mattress fabric and somehow pull myself and the mattress
about twenty feet up into the air. Two big slow waves crash /gently/
along the rock wall beneath me, right-to-left.
Time passes. I'm on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. The others
are gone, far away, safe; they must think I've been killed. I paddle the
mattress across to a spit of land to shortcut a long walking trip around
the shore to that place to climb out, and I leave the mattress behind
and start up. Mark and Mike come here from a boat on the other side.
They climb up to meet me. Now the air mattress and their boat are just
two kayak paddles, one on each side of the sharp ridge down. Let's not
go back for them. Let's just keep climbing and get home.
(Two or three times during this dream I remembered the previous
dream about the movie executive and the blonde administrator, and I
began writing notes so I'd remember it later, but then realized that
this was a dream and I wasn't writing anything I'd get to keep. Then the
water story took over and continued.)
Next dream. I'm with some other kids in a tram-car going miles down
a tunnel/valley toward the sea. Something goes wrong with the car; we're
stopped in the tunnel. I can fix it, but no-one else wants to stick
around, so why should I? We climb to the surface and everyone goes off
in a different direction. I climb back uphill, back toward the
dream-only school we just escaped from.
I come to a modern cabin with outside walls made of preserved whole
logs. My mother lives here. She wants me to dress nicer. I'm like,
/Gotta go, Mom. Thanks./
The dream jumps back to where I and the other kids are going down to
the sea in the tram-tunnel. We get to a strange version of the Mendocino
Headlands that has not only the high school but a whole small college
community all the way out to the cliffs. There's been a traumatic event,
maybe only political/financial, but everyone here is acting like there's
been an earthquake and a tidal wave. All the schoolkids are standing at
yard-sale tables, selling school materials and machines and also sewing
supplies --but no thread, just empty wooden spools. I say something
about there obviously not having been any tidal wave here, and there's
the sudden silence of everyone being nervous about that kind of talk in
the current political climate.
Next dream. It's dark but I can see. I'm on a bleak hillside with
some wild kids. They're running around playing. A thin blonde boy finds
a long pointed stick and challenges me to come fight him. Why should I?
I stay out of his reach. He starts throwing rocks. I say, "Don't be a
dick."
Later this hillside turns out to be a day-care center for workers'
kids. In a shed up by the road some parents are sitting with their kids,
waiting for the bus. The stick-and-rocks boy is having a red-faced
overheated angry crying fit. I say, "What good does being upset do?
What does it win for you? Just take a deep breath and be okay."
The boy becomes small, dark-haired, Italian-looking, not dangerous
at all anymore, and his crying is not angry and stupid but just
pathetic. He tells his father (through sobbing hiccups) that I called
him a dick, and his father looks at me for how to take this. I sit down
next to the boy and say, "If you don't want people to call you a dick,
don't act like a dick... But I'm sorry I said it." He comes around and
hugs me from the side. Awww. (Except, will he kick me? He doesn't kick me.)
I fly away downhill and into a big-box-store-size metal building
worksite that retroactively I've been part of a crew fixing up for new
purposes. It's the end of the day; there's hardly anyone here. I float
around inside and end up at the other end of the building, where an old
Vietnamese man is working by himself, using his fingers to split rotten
treestumps along their grain lines into little bits of carvable soft
wood for craft purposes. He vanishes and I do this work for awhile.
Outside, smooth whale-size stumps are on their sides settling into the
ground, rejected for being too hard and perfect. Someone will one day
imagine a purpose for them and they'll be used for that.
Another worker for the building company comes here and we start
around inside, closing and propping closed all doors for the night.
Next day, I go back to the big hallway parallel to the front of the
building and ask about being paid; I'm quitting today and I want my
money. I'm told to go to the bookkeeper. I find a suite of offices where
women are set up to cut hair and paint nails. I have no clothes on. The
nearest woman says I'd be more employable if I got it curled. I say, "I
hope you mean my hair." Everyone laughs. No money, though; sorry.
The other way down the hallway I'm somehow deeper in the building. A
cadre of early 1900s-dressed Japanese men work operating and servicing
rows of tall mechanical computers.
Outside again I fly low along a rural road in mountains, and when a
huge deep valley vista opens up to the left I swing in that direction
and deliberately /fall deliciously down and down/.
Now I'm in an old falling-apart apartment building that, in the
dream, I used to live in. My employer Tim owns it, and I'm supposed to
be fixing it up to be attractive to new tenants. I fumble a
fifteen-foot-long part that's a faded-Chinese-red wooden cross between a
spiral newel post and a rain gutter; it falls over the rail, tumbles,
strikes the next old building and comes to rest in front, on the dirt.
When I jump-fly onto the next building and run downhill (toward the
front) to get the part, I see that the end apartment in the building I
just left is the one where I used to live, and it's perfect inside, all
modern and clean, and someone else already lives there-- the girl who
sings the /And All That Jazz/ number in Gloriana Opera Company's current
revue show runs frantically from one room to another in the place, as
though she's either trying to get away from a monster or trying to catch
a loose pet.
Across the street I come to where young white people in a religious
group, all dressed in sloppily sewn white clothes, are sitting
crosslegged on the dirt sloppily hand-sewing pockets and purses for
sale, but that are useless, made of hard white cloth, with uneven
inch-long stitches. I think sarcastically, /At least they have a job./
Chinese girls in the three-story workhouse to the right watch me. I
fly into a window and am greeted enthusiastically by a particularly
wide-faced girl with big round glasses. All the girls are happy about
having a visitor /who can fly/.
They usher me down a hallway. I say, "Where are you taking me?"
They say, "You should meet Mister Lee." That sounds ominous. At an L in
the hallway I turn and hurry the other way, saying, "I'll be right back.
Just a minute." The girls say, "Where are you going?" I jump out the
nearest window and fly away. The first girl, the round-faced one with
the glasses, leans out the window after me, disappointed: /No, come back./
My dream from a nap Tuesday night:
I'm in my mother's friend Bill's house at night. I think to go out
to my car to get something; I go around the back rather than through the
house, and in back it's an entirely different place, with a lawn going
up to a swimming pool under piercing, point-source lights. My desktop
computer is on the grass with a strange flat-screen monitor next to it.
My mother is watering the lawn with a hose. She squirts water over in
the direction of the monitor and says something I don't quite hear but
construe as malicious, that for some reason makes me swear at her-- not
because of getting water on the monitor, but because /she's contemptibly
clueless/.
She makes a childish purse-lipped /I'll get you for that/ face and
lets loose the full force of the water at the computer things on the
grass, which now include my portable computer (open) that I depend on
for work. We're both horrified at what we've done and she's crying. I go
to the computers, unplug the desktop box (which was running) and pull
the battery out of the portable. Probably nothing is hopelessly ruined,
but I'll have to dry it all completely inside before turning it on to
find out. I say to my mother, "I'm sorry I spoke so loudly. Don't worry
about this; it's fixable." (Meaning both the computer and whatever just
went wrong with both of our brains.) "Please don't be unhappy." She
keeps crying. I turn off the water and say gently, "Come in the house.
We'll figure this out. Things go wrong for everyone sometimes. We'll
figure it out. I'm sorry." She lets me lead her into the house.
I woke up with the Herman's Hermits song /Where Were You When I
Needed You/ playing in my head.
-end-