Organs Of The Devil. Heater. Her Brave Brother. The Rules. Dog Necklace. Pharmacy Cabinet. Screensaver. Mexican Teevee. Spray Paint Job. Sandwiches.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm with Juanita in a strange city. As we walk by some
shops I look for a newspaper machine, to get a Sunday San Francisco
Chronicle. In coffee shops we pass, there are some parts of the paper on
tables, but I don't want just parts; I want a whole paper with the
comics and everything. I want a fresh, whole paper, rolled up, in my
hands.
After the end of a line of shops we turn right and start diagonally
across a wide road going into the dark at this edge of town. Some bad
kids close in behind us. /Why are we going this way?/ There's a vague
time of my imagining several kinds of fighting for our lives that can
come here, which time resolves in our being back in the lighted area.
The problem now is: a mad bear has got loose and is terrorizing the
populace. All ten or so people in this part of this Northern European
sea town are hiding in one ground-floor apartment. I send Juanita and
the others out the side door while I lure the bear in the front door and
go to the back, into a bathroom. The bathroom door won't stop the bear,
but I'm confident I'll think of something else to do-- hide under the
sink, or something; move the bathtub...
Out in the parking lot of what's now a rural California roadside
convenience/bait store, lumpish large people stand around their dead
truck. I open the hood of my car to give them a jump-start, but the
wide-headed Germanic father of this family says something about how he
only wants the Press-Democrat; he hates all the other papers, the San
Francisco Chronicle, etc. He says, "They are all namby-pamby organs of
the Devil." The oldest daughter is worried that I won't help them; she
says something about how /he gets like that/. I don't care what paper
the man likes. I don't like the Press-Democrat, but of course I'll help
them-- unless the man refuses to be helped by someone of the Devil.
While I hook up the jumper cables I say to the man, "Go inside and see
what papers they have." The girl is relieved and becomes prettier and
less lumpy but stays way too big.
Next dream. I wake up from sleep (in the dream) lying in a tiny
square swimming pool in rocks on the side of a high hill in beautiful
mountains. The sun is behind the hill, and I think, /Perfect,/ because
whoever put this pool here to sleep in is like me about not wanting to
ever wake up with the sun shining on you. A back-story develops, where
this is my mother's property that she has to sell, so this may be the
last time I get to wake up here. Okay.
Out of the water, it's cold. I go into a bare concrete house.
Actress Cynthia Ariosta is here; she apologizes for how cold it is and
offers a phone-book-size self-contained heater thing for me to put into
the pool of water here in the house, so I can get in and get warm. /No,
thanks; I'm fine./
The bear from the previous dream has been terrorizing this place,
too. I walk with a generic friend on a dirt driveway past big houses and
into the paved driveway/courtyard of the last house. Someone in the
house directs me to find Bloodroot back the other way on the drive.
Bloodroot is standing by an old chickenhouse, fretting over how she'll
ever pay to deal with the dead body of someone the bear just killed. /I
know she's talking about my mother, and that my mother just died of old
age, not of any bear, though what's the difference, really? I say,
"There's no law that you have to have a funeral and a coffin and all
that." Bloodroot says, "Yes, there is." I say, "No, there isn't. You
can bury someone in a bag. You know? A body bag?" She's not satisfied.
I get an idea to take a wall of this chickenhouse apart and get planks
to make a coffin and make Bloodroot happy.
Next dream. On a hillside and driveway/road laid out like the
landscape in the previous dream, I go at night, floating a little above
the ground toward some trees. Here's a dark deserted convenience-store
shopping center. A little girl who's a member of the advance army of
magical alien enemies of humans is sitting on the curb, guarding this
place. I cause the alarm she has set at the back of the building to go
off; she runs in and through to see what's there. I fly up, invisible in
the dark foggy sky, and hover about thirty feet up. The girl comes back
to sit in her guard-place, and I drop a koosh-ball (a flexible jellylike
toy ball with tentacles) and make a noise so the girl looks up; the ball
squish-bounces off her forehead. She's like, /Huh?/ She looks around,
finds the ball, and looks up again as I drop another ball with the same
result. This is great fun.
The alien girl's confederates drive up in a little
lawnmower-engine-powered toy firetruck; they're an even smaller girl and
her brother; they're like four or five years old. The same power that
let me set off the alarm at a distance lets me make the firetruck go out
of control, pass where the guard-girl is and start away fast toward the
trees. Uh-oh. I drop down and reveal myself by yelling to the boy in the
truck to grab his sister and jump. The boy does this. He lands on his
back. The guard-girl and I run there. The children are okay. I say to
the little girl, "You're gonna remember this forever. Your brave brother
just saved your life." Everyone's smiling, happy, relieved. The
guard-girl could have killed me when I was crouched down talking to the
children, but she didn't. We can be friends, even though she knows I'm
responsible for the trouble in the first place.
My dreams from Friday, 2009-11-06:
First dream. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts together are getting ready
for a dangerous (maybe wartime) camping trip north of Fort Bragg (CA).
There are strange magical rules about how ordinary things work; for
instance, at one point I can't go forward because I'm carrying a
rolled-up sleeping bag. I try putting it down, and... I can go forward.
Okay-- I'd like to bring /something/; how about these books? Pick up the
books. I can still go forward. Someone else who can't move with books
can carry my sleeping bag.
Other kids are making similar tests and discoveries and decisions.
Next dream. A pet guinea-pig/rat-thing has got behind/beneath low
cupboards. My friends and I have to get out of here, ahead of some
advancing danger, and I want to save the pet. I light a propane-fired
plumbing torch and burn through the flimsy wood backing of the cupboards
to scare the rat-thing out. It runs out the side and I grab it.
Now it's a long little white dog with a chatoyant purple-blue
teardrop-shaped ceramic pendant hanging around its neck. I say to the
confused dog's face, "Do I know you?"
Next dream. There's a narrow, straight road through a forest. I'm
driving a car, leading someone else driving a giant moving van. Trees
have fallen in the way. I get out of the car and can move the trees by
hand so we can get the vehicles through.
The car and truck vanish. The other person and I walk to where the
road ends in an open-door garage. Through the back window of the garage
I see a field and then a big highway going across-- we're almost there!
A skittish orange cat runs out. Old household items are spread
around on tables and dressers and other furniture; this is like the
thrift store that used to be in Ukiah, near the courthouse. Here are two
interesting machines; they're a cross between microfiche readers and
continually tunable /old/ teevee sets. Attractive, but I don't really
need them.
The person with me becomes Matt from the theater company. We start
to walk back up the road, and Matt says, "Wait-- those things are
valuable..." (He means an antique white-enameled-metal pharmacy cabinet,
which, as we all know, Safeway grocery stores will pay good money for,
for the atmosphere of having them up tacked up high on the walls.
Okay. Let's see how much these people want for it.
Next dream. I'm underground or in a big submarine or closed-in
spaceship. I've run the equipment --cameras and light-control board-- to
record a new episode of /Kids In The Hall/, and I'm just finishing
showing them the result, and they're happy with it; they like the show
and they like my work... But I see now that something was wrong with the
color controls so at random whoever is not the focus of a scene
sometimes has just a solid pastel color for a face. The performers don't
care; they think that's cool, that the effect looks on-purpose.
I think of playing this show on a future version of my old public
access teevee show. It isn't clear where to break the show; there's no
obvious stopping place in the action, which is chaotic but smoothly
paced.
Now I'm looking at a beautiful intricate dance of goldfish. It's a
joke that part of the show is a beautiful screensaver. Obviously, break
the show here. Too obvious, though, so not funny. Just keep watching for
a place.
Next dream. My employer Tim and I are about to drive to Mexico to
install an early-1980s Aquarius Electronics biosystem card in a client's
video processor rack in his Mexican television station. It would just
involve plugging it in. I say, "I can do this. You don't have to go
too." He wants to go; it'll be fun. On the way out through this strange
house I find other similar cards in wooden soda-pop bottle crates. Tim
says I can have the cards; he doesn't need them anymore. I say to take
them along as spares, in case the main one is somehow not right. Anyway,
let's get going.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-11-08:
First dream. Outdoors in a simplified environment of blank fields
and some building-shaped buildings, I'm responsible for getting things
ready for a show or an event. One of the things I'll have to do is to
paint a sign, which is a white plastic pipe hung from hooks in the
bottom of a strip of cloth. (The /pipe/ is the sign, not the cloth.)
The pipe has penciled lines on it to mark off the length of
different skits in the show, like the indicator of how much time each
song will take to play on a music disk layout. I realize I don't have
time to do everything; I can get others to do things. A mildly crazy
artist woman who wants to prove that she's useful offers to paint the
pipe. Okay. I go to get white spray paint to make the pipe a blank slate
for her, and I come back with a glass spray bottle with white and clear
liquids in it that won't mix. (Oil based paint in water? or the other
way around?) It's okay; the spray tube sticks into the white liquid, so
it'll only spray that.
Now I'm using the spray bottle to paint a long metal screen on a
frame propped up on the planter boxes outside a diner built into a
house. Doing this gets spray paint on the diner's window screen and on
the walkway rail and plants. None of the people eating inside see this
happen, but they'll notice later and know who did it... I say to the
person with me, "Just finish the job."
The helpful crazy woman is vigorously trimming and edging the ivy
away from the walkway; she works her way around the house to edge the
concrete driveway. She's making straining grunting exercising noises as
she tears out ropes of plants. A man waiting in line for the show says
to the woman, "They're paying you for this, right?" No; no-one's paying
her. I practice in my mind cleverly reminding the man of the danger of
all of us being sued if someone were to trip or slip on the ivy. The man
loses interest and I don't have to say anything.
It's a /Hit and Run Theater/ show. While the show plays inside the
house I'm outside in the ivy, having sex with the crazy, now noticeably
retarded woman. We roll over so I'm on top, and in her passion she
throws her head backward so it presses flat against the ground, like a
soft ball pressing to have a flat side. I feel a little guilty, as
though I'm taking sexual advantage of a woman who is not entirely human,
but she's clearly enjoying this. She says, "Yeah, yeah! Right there!
Right there!" and we're both laughing because, of /course/ right there,
whatever that means.
After the show I and a few others are cleaning up the kitchen area
of this strange theater/rental-hall. A dog-size turtle that someone has
tortured is wrapped in white plastic foam/cloth to replace its shell.
/Will that be enough? Will it last?/ A cat-like bunny rabbit comes here
and looks around for scraps of food. Other pet animals move past outside
the window.
Some show patrons (or maybe benefactors) are sitting in a restaurant
booth at the side of the kitchen. I sweep food crumbs from a prep-table
onto the floor and then sweep the floor. There's no wet food mess, so no
need to mop. I put leftover potato salad in a tupperware container and
give it to the patrons, even though one of them, a rich woman who's mean
and cold, like a Wraith in /Stargate Atlantis/, is probably the one who
tortured the turtle.
Next dream. In the driveway of a strange house I'm sitting in the
passenger seat of a car, with my feet outside on the ground. I'm here to
work for Tim. I go to the covered area at the front of the house and
examine a bundle of phone wires and shielded wires that come together
here. An old line-printer under the corner of the house is being used
for its electronics; it's probably digitizing something from the
analog-signal wires that go into it. Huh.
I clean out a solder-sucker tool that, as I open it, becomes a
padded money-purse. I pull out the solder-encrusted foam lining. Can I
discard this stuff? Or is it part of what makes it work? Throw it out.
I have to go somewhere else to get or do something for the project,
but first I want to wash my hands because of the solder powder. Inside
the house I see part of a story in progress about a mafia boy kissing
his girlfriend, standing at the bend of a stairway. The girl's frantic
angry jealous mafia mother comes down the stairs with a heavy shotgun.
She comes right at me, I get the gun away from her, and apparently
that's enough of that story for the time being, because the woman and
the boyfriend vanish.
I get a sandwich from the kitchen. The girl will go with me to get
the electronics parts. When we're going to the car, a young version of
my Aunt Honey drives up in a pickup truck, coming home from working at
the hospital. She has a long submarine sandwich. I say, "Your sandwich
is bigger than my sandwich." Everyone laughs happily. No food shortage
here.
I woke up with the Faith Hill song /This Kiss/ and the theme song to
the musical /Paint Your Wagon/ both playing in my head at the same time.
They're really very much the same song.
-end-