Cold Water. Reverse Sale. Needles And Magnets! Mailman. Blue Moon. Debtors. Storm. Mic Hose. Escape From Grafitti Gang. Kay Look. Cellophane. Sinister Capybaras. Mouse Damage. Writhing Insect Candy. Texas. Peaceful Hot Rod. Escape.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in a strange old messy dimly-lit house in Caspar
(CA). My mother comes here and clearly disapproves of how I'm living. I
can tell her that this isn't my house (it isn't), but why should I
bother; she's not real. My point of view moves outside. A futuristic car
is stuck nose-down in a deep ditch. I look at it from several angles.
/How can I get that out of there?/
Later the same night, out on Highway 20 near where I lived with
Julie when I first moved to Fort Bragg, I rescue a little boy from his
horrible father. We get away riding in a rickety go-cart that won't go
far. The man and his older son follow and hunt us in their pickup truck
and then on foot. We abandon the go-cart, run, hide behind trees and
outmaneuver our hunters, to reach a house where police are already here
dealing with five old people who have been imprisoned in freezing water
in a dumpster. The old people are freed but comatose. I have to politely
wait for the cops' attention, to tell them about the boy's father and
brother, who'll soon show up and probably lie like a rug about
everything. /If that happens, I'll insist that the cops arrest all of us
and sort it out later./
I'm standing here tapping my foot, waiting. Cops go back and forth
with old people wrapped in blankets on emergency gurneys. This is taking
fricking forever.
Next dream. In the dream, Rebecca of the /Tangents/ and /Ananse
Village/ stores has been running a thrift store for years in a big old
building on Main Street (Fort Bragg, CA) and has finally lost her lease
and must empty out the shop. But somehow this becomes her /taking in/
goods. A steady stream of everyone she's ever helped or given a bargain
comes to the back alley door, carrying used things and furniture and
machines in. People congratulate her and thank her and leave. Here are
some musical instruments, including a stand-up bass.
Next dream. I'm in a low-budget business in the labyrinthine old
unpainted wood building on Main Street in Fort Bragg, where Rebecca's
thrift store was in the previous dream. I'm looking through a brand-new
issue of my old newspaper-- I've started it going again. It's not bad.
Some of the columns are just taken from the web to fill space, but this
is a new beginning and local writers will start sending articles again.
Stuart Tregoning says nice things to me about how at another place
where he just came from they were all praising me.
The back of the building has a basketball gym. Some American Indian
kids are running around, playing. I balance, spin and /skate/ on a
shimmery-liquid-filled bounce-ball the size of a basketball. I bounce on
the ball, bringing it up into the air with me by clutching it with my
feet, and I land on a series of unfired clay pots, bringing /them/ up to
stack them and then spin the whole stack of them. A skinny very old
white religious woman is /pissed off/ about what I'm doing; she says,
"Needles and magnets! Needles! Needles!" I say, "There's no damage.
Quit with the /needles/. Sorry, but..." (Meaning, I'm sorry I've done
some disrespectful taboo thing, but it's done, and what good is it to be
all angry?)
At the back corner door, bass player Daney (say DAY-nee) Dawson and
some others set up their instruments to play. I find a brightly-colored
science-fiction adventure book; this is Stuart's. I look around for him,
to give the book to him.
My dream from Tuesday, 2009-11-10:
First dream. In rural hills I'm about to go flying with a strange
tall girl. We go into a house cantilevered out over the side of a
mountain, and we walk through a room where people are dancing. I dance
with the girl, using a little flying power to pretend to be graceful.
At the back door a silent Santa-Claus-dressed mailman guy gives me
two canvas bundles of mail and a note to explain the situation: he's
made me the new mailman, and there'll be some money in this for me.
Another guy here asks me lots of questions, getting more and more
agitated. He wanted the job. He expected it. I don't see how he thought
he'd actually do it, though, because, can he fly? No, but to him that's
beside the point. Also he wanted the girl who's with me. Tch.
Next dream. Juanita and I are kissing, rolling around near a wall
on the seamless linoleum floor of a soundstage or warehouse. I put my
hands up under her shirt, push it up, kiss her belly. I tell her about a
dream I had (?) about a noir ship-travel murder film, and I make wah-wah
brass-instrument sounds with my mouth, to the tune of /Blue Moon/ but
with a klezmer lilt to the ends of the notes.
I woke up hearing the Benny Goodman Orchestra version of /Blue
Moon/ playing in my head, and I made two conversational-volume brass
wah-wah note sounds in real life.
My dream from Wednesday, 2009-11-11:
I'm in a strange house's bedroom at night. All the
1930s-Chicago-style gang bosses in the city file in, follow the walls
around and go to sit in the sliding-door closet to my left. They're
shielding their faces. I say, "Sorry," and switch off the light.
Okay, are we all here? To work, then-- a typed list of enemies and
people who owe us money is distributed so each of us can deal with one.
I go into the bathroom to take a shower, to get ready. I turn on a
shower spigot that spills not into the bathtub but directly onto the rug
between the bathtub and the sink cabinet; I let it run while I puzzle
over /why this is like this/, then suddenly realize that doesn't matter,
just shut it off! The floor is soaked. Jeez, Marco, have a little
presence of mind, here.
Now all the gang bosses are out on the job, tracking their debtors.
I follow one boss down a narrow busy foot-traffic street. This boss is a
mean little bald-headed man; he's like a cross between actors Danny
DeVito and Joe Pesci. I realize that the debtor he intends to rob and
kill is Steve Siler (from the old Community School). I fake-confidently
go right into the building with him as though I'm doing the him a favor
by helping, but the person here is not Steve Siler. Steve has been
clever and has paid an artist, a sculptor, to /be/ Steve in case
something like this ever happened. Still, killing the guy is out; I take
over the money-getting process, lift out of reach a gun the victim tries
to get. Tense moment. How can I keep the man from being killed? I say,
"You will work for us." /Please just say okay so I can get this guy out
of here and we don't have to kill you./
I woke up with /Blue Moon/ playing in my head again, but this time
it was the Billie Holiday version.
My dreams from Friday, 2009-11-13:
First dream. A storm is coming toward a house on top of a high
hill; the wind is gusting harder and harder. The mother of the strange
family here starts out to somehow protect the things in the
garage/carport area, but the boys want to do it; they go, and send her
back inside.
They try to hang tarpaulins, but it's obviously not going to work.
I suggest using plywood; there's lots of plywood here. A long-haired
white cat comes out from under a car and moves sleepily toward the
house. I say, "The quiet cat crept into the crypt, crapped and crept
out again." Everyone looks at me. I say, "It crept, the cat, then
crapped... Or crapped first... I wasn't there." Everyone looks at each
other, like /huh?/ I say, not quite laughing out loud, "Cats crap, ya
know. They creep, they crap, they crawl in crypts." Okay, enough of that.
Other boys come here, including a rule-following martinet one.
/Plywood is not allowed./ It doesn't matter; this storm will be very bad
and everything here will be wrecked anyway. The wind is blasting
constantly now. All the boys hide in a car rather than try to get back
to the house. I prop a sheet of plywood against the wind side of the car
and pile up bicycles and angle iron and a tool cabinet full of tools to
hold it there.
In the house, the mother and father and their teenage girl stand in
the middle of the lowest level of the living room. The basement door
rattles and the people are /alarmed/. The father has a gun.
I go upstairs into a den/library, climb up on a ladder and stand
with one foot on the ladder and one foot on the high back of a barstool
and adjust the architect son's school project tower (or rocket) so if it
falls it'll fall against the wall and not all the way to the floor. The
father (with the gun) and the mother and the daughter come in, look
around as if hunting an animal. They can see me but they pretend not to.
They have to put up with my being here but they don't like it.
Next dream. In a place that in the dream I think of as Lawrence,
Kansas, 1950s-looking police raid a mini-golf-course/whorehouse-motel
complex. Two or three fifty-something Japanese women bosses of the
business are taken away. The policeman in charge of the raid is
confused; he's forgotten something important. I give him the keys he
needs to get into the swimming pool supplies shed. He looks at the keys
in his hand, remembers the next thing to do, gives the keys back, and
kicks the shed door in.
In the shed there are things that interest me-- old electronic and
mechanical things. Here's a tape recorder the size of a wide shoebox,
that has a see-through panel on the bottom. Inside it, the two places
where on the sides it looks like microphones are built into the box go
to sections of garden hose that make a T with a short hose that goes to
a single microphone fastened to the main circuit board. /It was cheaper
in those days to use all these hoses rather than use more microphones./
I go to the motel's cafe and find a seat. People here are not
enjoying the police raid, but apparently it happens all the time, and
they just go about their business. The police come into the cafe when
they're finished arresting all the women and processing them and putting
them right back where they dragged them out of. Everyone sits around
having breakfast and drinking coffee and smoking cigarets, and then
it's, /Well, bye, then. Bye, Tom. Bye, Gladys. See you next week./
Next dream. Two juvenile delinquent boys use marking pens to sketch
graffiti on inside and outside glass and metal walls of an abandoned
building in an office park. Somehow without their realizing it I get all
the marking pens away from them. Now, of course, if we are caught I will
be found with the pens.
We go to the parking lot under one of the buildings. A boy no
longer wants to work for the gangster overlord who has taken over this
town, but he doesn't know how to get away. The other boy, the bad one,
finds an unlocked car and orders us to get in.
I'm not sure how, but I get rid of the bad boy. I drive the car to
the last enclosed courtyard of this complex, stop and watch the
clown-decorated tunnel that the adult gangsters use to move contraband
and stolen goods in and out.
Now I'm in the back seat and the boy who wants to get away is
driving. I say, "I'll fly the car." I use some flying power to lift
the car up, but I can't get enough speed to go high enough to get over
the wall. I say, "Step on the gas." That's better. We zoom up and out
over telephone poles and wires and trees and houses. Away!
Next dream. In the dream Juanita and I are teenage brother and
sister exploring our dream-only family house that we just inherited.
Juanita goes into the kitchen. I go looking for a toilet. Here's one in
a room that has a big recording-studio window in the wall. The toilet
has a low partition around it, though. This'll have to do. I pull down
my pants and sit.
Someone knocks loudly at the front door. Juanita comes from the
kitchen, goes to the door. I stand up opposite her in the recording
studio window. She gives me what I think of as a /Kay/ look (one cheek
pulled up, amused/resigned) and opens the front door.
Next dream. I wake from sleep (in the dream) in my real-life bed. A
repairman, or a policeman or criminal masquerading as a repairman, has
taken the lock out of my front door and walked right in. He goes into
the back of the house.
I sit up, barely able to move. The guy comes back, sees that I'm
awake. He looks a little like the Syler character in /Heroes/. I
gurgle/growl deep in my throat. He growls back at me. As power flows
into me so I can stand up on the bed, power flows out of him so he
twists and falls over between the bed and the bookcase. I step off the
bed onto his exposed throat, which makes a crackling sound like
crumpling a cellophane lettuce bag. /I didn't mean to do that./
My dreams from Saturday, 2009-11-14:
First dream. In an ocean or maybe just a really big bay someone is
in the water in a sinking seaplane. An enemy in an identical seaplane
flies over and drops a bomb; the bomb falls into the water and continues
down-- it's a depth charge. From where my point of view is floating in
the air about a hundred feet away, I use telekinesis to try to pull the
seaplane back away from where the blast will come up, and can move it
only about twenty feet before the explosion comes, which fortunately is
small and weak, just a spout of water.
Now I and the girl from the seaplane are in a warehouse or
soundstage that has the familiar seamless gray-green linoleum floor. We
explore this enemy place, and in one partitioned-off room we capture a
sleepy (drugged?) enemy girl, who I immediately decide has been
kidnapped, but the seaplane girl doesn't trust her. Okay, that's
probably wise.
Here's another enemy (or captive); this one is a big block-headed
black-haired Russian version of the drugged girl; she's in a hospital
bed with electrodes stuck all over her head. The seaplane girl and the
first enemy have merged into one person; she advises me not to
interfere, but I pull the electrodes off the woman's head so she can
wake up.
She wasn't the enemy either. She was being controlled by aliens.
She gestures to big cardboard boxes at the other end of this hospital
cubicle. Sinister capybaras push out through the cardboard and move
around on the floor. /They're giant, mutated mice./ One capybara becomes
a sleek, sweet-natured dachshund. I pick it up in my arms and it slowly,
gently, creepily puts its mouth around my left forearm. I get my thumb
and forefinger around the dog's head to pinch its jaws open and pull it
off. My arm is shining with watery blood. The dog's teeth are thousands
of tiny needles. So it's really not a capybara or a mouse or a dog; it's
more of a leech.
I show my discovery to the other scientists who retroactively have
been having a holiday party here.
Next dream. Juanita and I are getting ready to leave a strange big
cold isolated house that, in the back-story of the dream, we've been
staying in for a few weeks. With the feeling that I'll find something
wrong I look through the house one last time. I find that mice have
destroyed the upstairs bathroom, thrown everything around, broken things
open, bitten holes in the sheetrock walls. It turns out that the alien
capybaras from the previous dream had been keeping the mice down, and
without them around, mice have become a problem again. I think about
this, then just go back downstairs to get Juanita and leave. /I'm/ not
cleaning up the mess. It can just as easily have happened after we left.
Next dream. In a dim, very quiet, after-hours San Francisco
Fisherman's Wharf area I carry a half-baseball-size plastic shell-dish
of food? congealed dish soap? out of a storefront shop and into the next
shop. Here are long folding tables. I hear people talking and go around
a wall to the right. A school electronics lab. No people, though. Ah,
there they are, in the teevee screen of an old console
record-player/teevee set. A malicious person moves to fill the screen
and makes a /you-can't-get-me/ face. I leap to put my boot through the
picture tube-- this never connects. Things become vague.
Same place. The plastic food shell has hard but melting honey-candy
in it. I eat some and then use a table as a backstop to push the lump of
candy back into the shell, which becomes an eighteen-inch-tall cherubic
bird/insect-shape that squirms and writhes on its back as the air forced
in by the candy escapes from the flowery limbs and clothes of it. (It
moves like a potato bug on its back.) I'd like to get some video of this
and call it /Where Honey Comes From/. There must be something around
here I can use to record video.
The bug-thing begins to make faint squealing sounds. It's more and
more Halloween-hideous. /I've got to record this./
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-11-15:
First dream. Franklin Roosevelt is in Northwest Oregon on business.
A reason develops for him to fly to Texas, but it's getting dark and
he's tired and he just came from there. I'm his replacement
small-airplane pilot. I go to the corner of the airport building and
look out across a bare dirt field to Texas (it's right over there).
Better just continue to get the plane ready. We'll probably end up going.
Next dream. I come to the story in the middle. A police agency has
been trying to capture a wily, sinister man who uses advanced technology
to shoot from hiding in an another, invisible world. A man and woman cop
move down the long carport of a place that's a cross between an
ivy-covered British school and a Los Angeles apartment court. There's a
wavery blast of energy and the thin blond woman cop /ahead/ of the main
characters falls down. The right side of her face is melted and pushed
in as though she were made of plastic; she's dead.
Now I'm one of the cops. A thin black-haired woman who's been
helping the evil man even though she's in the police agency (because she
loves him) is tricked into going into a house's garage, to just the
right place to be /shrunk/ with a shrink-ray booby trap. Good; we don't
have to worry about her causing trouble anymore.
My point of view follows her as she wakes up in a miniature
arcology, a long clear-material-enclosed cabinet or display case to
confine troublemakers and also make them an exhibit. I can see the giant
room outside the case, and the hills of a futuristic rural community
through the windows out of that room. A tiny antique aeroplane flies
overhead (inside the cabinet); the pilot rides in a flat box woven of
copper wire. /That is so cool./ I follow the plane to get a closer look.
Later, it's dark. The evil man is here; he's been captured and
shrunk too. The woman doesn't trust him; she's figured out that he
pretty much /gave her up/ to the police to get them off his trail. But
he's a genius and he's worked out a way to get out of here so he can get
to a place of undoing the shrink ray and live in the real world again,
so the woman goes with him. Maybe he really does love her. I think of
warning her about how evil he is, but he /will/ get out and she wants to
get out, so... go ahead, honey. She follows him climbing up the
worked-metal support for the now-rounded walls and ceiling of this long,
high concourse, and at the top he throws a glowing, electrified rope
/through/ the covering material, tears a slit in it, and they're out!
But they're high up (to them), in a dangerous position. I think, /They
could use the aeroplane, but how to get it here?/ Things become vague...
It's still dark. The woman and man have reached the ground and even
got outside the building around the display-case prison, to a hillside
of plants that to the tiny people make a forest. They come to a sleeping
shanty-town of all the others who have ever escaped from the cabinet.
Now I'm the man and the woman is Juanita, and we're not evil but from
the cop agency, and retroactively /we/ were tricked into being shrunk,
and we need to live to find a reverse-the-shrink-ray place, and we face
the added danger of every (tiny) person we encounter hating us for their
having to be here...
We go into the communal park restroom of the shanty town. An
important man is in an expanded toilet stall. Juanita and I crouch down
near the floor to see what he's doing in there that's keeping him so
long at like three a.m.-- he's a big fat white Southern Big-Daddy
character sitting on the toilet masturbating into a loop of glowing
electrical rope. Juanita and I give each other an amused look like,
/Okay, I didn't need to see that./
Someone else comes in and somehow we get out without being seen.
The next room is the convention-hall-size bedroom of the Big Daddy guy.
We hide behind the open door of an armoire. Big Daddy and a group of
political flunkies come in and everyone engages in flailing stretchy
lengths of electrical rope to kill pesky seagull-size gnats. We're in
plain sight now but nobody looks right at us, so we don't move, but
Juanita starts talking nonsense in a crazy sing-song voice. I shush her
and she just gets louder. /She's not Juanita; she's a local Southern
white girl with weird light-colored eyes. Juanita was never here./
Everyone's gone around the other side of the toilet stalls in this big
bedroom. I let go of hugging the strange girl to my side and run out
alone into the forest.
Next dream. I wake from sleep at the street end of a quiet shopping
center parking lot, and I start walking west out of a strange town,
intending to get to the coast and then home. My (dead) schoolfriend
Randy walks along with me for awhile; we're laughing and talking about
things --teevee shows, mostly. Randy vanishes.
I come to a road that's like a cross between Auburn-Folsom Road
where it went past Randy's driveway and the Comptche road at about the
driveway to Surprise Valley Auto Wreckers. Ilona Green, from the Whale
School but at her real present-day age, comes out onto the road ahead of
me, riding a giant horse, with her little daughter sitting up in front
of her. Another horse wanders out onto the road behind them, crosses to
wide shoulder, and a wild little boy with a mop of black hair runs out
after it and jumps to grab on and get up onto it. I'm sure this will be
a disaster, but the boy gets on and all is okay, except Ilona didn't see
that and she doesn't know that her (dream-only) son has come along.
Things change so it's just the horse without the boy. I get onto the
horse and speed up to let Ilona know her horse got out.
At a soaked-wet-grass hillside, people are gathering for a
community event. Here's Ilona. Now I don't have the horse; I tell her
about its getting out, she goes back to deal with that, and without
Ilona here the event gets out of control. Some big kids use shovels to
move the grass and cover over the deep chasms between thousands of pier
pilings that come up even with the ground, that /are/ the ground; the
kids have made a dirt racecourse out of what had been a really dangerous
place-- but it's still dangerous, more so because now you can't see
where not to step. All the horses will step through and break their
legs. Or not; nobody seems worried-- maybe they know what they're doing.
I climb over pilings that didn't get covered at the edge of the
racecourse, where they're really uneven. A big tough boy laughs at me
rather than help me get up over a hard place to get past. I'm like, /I
don't need help from retards./
I go back down to the road and continue west. Here's a barn that
they've made into an upscale tourist rest stop and wine-tasting
establishment. This could be practically anywhere. /How far away from
home am I?/ Well, I can fly, so that changes everything. I step into the
air and fly past some appreciative rich tourists, who toss apples to me
for something to eat. I fly away, clutching an armload of apples to my
chest, through an aerial minefield of low power lines and telephone
lines, avoiding all of them. An eagle watches me do this, worried for
me; I give the eagle an apple and it goes away.
Later it's getting dark and it might rain. My flying power is
getting weak. Here's the eagle again; I ask it if there's somewhere near
here I can stay for the night, up off the ground. It gestures uphill and
says something about an owl. I fly uphill, find the owl, and she leads
me to her elaborate rusty-iron-hoop nest atop a telephone pole. It's
about to tip over in the wet ground; it's obviously been here for years,
and it was only waiting for someone as heavy as I am to come along and
tip it over-- but I catch some tall rocks it falls against and use
flying power to drive loose things in for wedges and make it strong
again, if tipped a little to one side. The owl retrieves for her baby
owls all the apples I dropped and thanks me for saving her home. /No
problem. Sorry I knocked it over./
Next dream. People are having a small-town family/town sleepover
reunion in a place like Comptche (CA). Kids and adults are scattered
around in the fields, talking, figuring out who will stay at whose
house. I go away up the road to where two cars have been parked in the
weather for years. One is a generic mid-1960s family car; the other is a
late-1960s muscle car, a Dodge Challenger. The Challenger has a
rectangular plastic-rubber cover over where the engine sticks up through
the hood. I take the cover off and look inside; there's some rust but
nothing looks ruined. There's plenty of tread left on the tires. There
are no seats in the car; it'll need a driver's seat. I want this car. I
want to fix it up and drive it. I wonder if it'll just start.
Snow starts to fall. It's peaceful.
Next dream. I'm with some others at night at one end of a long,
low-ceilinged library/office room. Here are some computer parts. I find
a programmable keyboard, and I plug it into a mid-1980s IBM computer and
start it, to play with it. I follow instructions (?) to set a gray extra
key at the bottom-right of the keyboard to be a second /escape/ key. It
doesn't work. I try again. Still no good. Maybe I did something wrong;
try again. Nope.
I will keep trying until it works.
-end-