Microwave. Network Wiring. Tilt-Shift Bay. Diplomatic Portfolio. Alley Town. Art. Taking The Dog Out. Kicked. White Hat. Chapman Stick Notebook. Punch Or Milk?
Marco McClean
I'm in a laboratory room with a microwave oven that has no front or
back. The components are spread out all over the inside of the oven in
three dimensions, connected by stiff wires. I switch the power on and
only then worry about microwaves.
I move around the side, so anything spraying out will not reach me,
but what about waves reflecting off metal in the walls, wiring,
etcetera? I reach around the front, put my hand inside and pull out a
cigaret-pack-size block part that's like a medical-instrument power
supply. The fan shuts off, so I guess the machine is off. I hope I
didn't just cook my hand... It seems okay. A little numb, maybe.
My dreams from Sunday, 2009-11-29:
First dream. I'm in a strange old house either high up on a hill or
on the top of a tower. I'm here to wire network cables to jacks on a
plank of one-by-twelve pine, and to a panel inside the proscenium of a
clothes closet. To get in through the side of the closet panel, I break
out chunks of crumbly sheetrock to the left of it.
Other people are moving around in the house. I'm in a hurry.
Next dream. My point of view floats in the air above really big
tugboats, like tugboat car-ferries or tugboat freighters on a
rough-water bay, all in tilt-shift focus to seem like miniature models
in a special-effects set, but I move in close to a ferry and see a
realistic man realistically running along next to a deck rail. So it's
all full-size.
Now I'm walking on a dark city street, maybe in the city around the
bay; I come to the gas station where, in the back-story of the dream, I
left my steam engine project next to a gas pump. Another person has
brought his steam engine project here. His is much bigger and involves a
square fence made of miles of small-bore copper tubing woven on a
lattice of aluminum mesh. I had to make mine with my own resources. The
other person had government money.
I make a brave face of it-- /mine's still better./
I woke up with the Temptations singing /Beauty's Only Skin Deep/ in
my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. Main Street of Mendocino (CA) is in a dim
inland place. I have a confusing adventure involving a political
meeting, that ends with my carrying away a bundle of a big wallet-like
naugahyde notebook, a lady's purse full of plastic vegetables and a lot
of loose office papers. I have to keep kneeling down, putting everything
down (or rather letting it fall) regathering it all in my arms and
starting off again.
Next dream. I'm driving south on Highway 1 in my old 1971 Chevy Nova
that I had from 1975 to 1979. At about where Elk should be, I turn east
away from the ocean on what I think of in the dream as Bear Road. This
is instantly far inland in a strange mountain place. The motor is weak
and misfiring. I'm confident I can fix the problem, but I want to get to
somewhere I can stay overnight first.
Now I'm driving the car from a point in the air farther and farther
behind it. When the car goes into a tiny Canadian town of alleys for
streets, I bump the car into a parked car to stop it.
The tough stoner boy whose car I bumped gets into his car and uses
it like a dough-mashing tool to crush my car, which results in both cars
becoming one mess of metal, then he goes into a building. No-one's out.
I go to the part of the metal mess that was my car and make sure there's
nothing in it to identify me, so I can abandon it where it is.
I walk through to the other side of the town and fly out over a
gently widening flat green valley orchard of giant-tree furry topiary
animals that move very slightly and slowly to turn and watch me pass by
with eyes that are caves in their giant heads.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a hilly town in mountains; it's an
economically depressed art colony. We hold hands and wander through open
houses that are all identical art-gallery/kitch-item stores. It's
getting dark, but the people keep their places open because there are
still some visitors here --us-- and we /might/ buy something. The
people's children sleep on the benches and counters. This is pathetic. I
almost, but don't, point out that they wouldn't be nearly so poor and
desperate if they didn't have so many children. I mean, did they think
things would get better?
The way out of this town becomes the same way out of the town in the
previous dream, which I remember, in this dream, as a dream. There's the
valley and the giant topiary animals. It's really pretty.
Juanita wants to stay and look around at the art some more, but I'm
like, /Honey, they want to close. Come on, let's go./
My dreams from Monday, 2009-11-30:
First dream. It's night. I'm alone in the front office of KMFB, in
wet clothes from walking here in the rain. I take off all my clothes and
hang them to dry on chairs on the front porch, but I keep my wallet.
Now I'm in pyjamas, thinking about going to the store to get food.
Bob and Jerry and a strange girl come in, and we're all in the small
room with the couch and Rick's desk, waiting for something. The girl (?)
and I are joking back and forth about something in the newspaper-- three
things a modern craze entails: pleasuring yourself, pleasuring something
else (?), and pleasuring your dog. I say in a fake Eastern European
accent, "I am chust takink de dog out, muffkin."
(I woke up saying that aloud in the real world as well as in the end
of the dream.)
Asleep again. Next dream. I'm in a country in another world, in the
king's modern house that's cantilevered out over a cliff/hill down to a
mountain lake. I'm here as a researcher, but I've pissed off the king by
helping a miserable girl get away from being mistreated, so the head
army guy has his men knock me down, and he kicks and kicks at me. (I see
this from being kicked and also from above and behind the head army
guy.)
They leave me lying curled up on my side under the edge of the
downhill part of the house. I pretend to be hurt much worse than I
really am (it doesn't hurt at all), but I'm worried that they'll put out
my eyes, which wouldn't have to hurt to be a disaster, so I crawl
farther under the house and come out on the side to flee.
Army guys are already here; they expected this. They drag me into
the house and kick me some more, then they leave me alone again, with an
implied, /Wait till the king gets home; then you'll really get it./
I find an open window, dive through it and fly down to go out over
the lake, but too slowly. The airheaded royal daughters and their
friends are all out the rock beach. One girl has a shotgun; she raises
it to shoot at me. I twist the gun away from her and shoot the next
person who's coming down the hill with a gun. These are primitive
single-shot guns. I somehow reach out about fifty feet, get the gun from
the guy I shot and get ready to shoot the next person. I don't have to;
I'm far enough away now. I drop the gun into the water. Things become
vague.
I've been flying for a long time. I come to a place where they have
an illegal sport of flying past long advertising banners hung over a
dark bowl valley to make the banners billow and ripple. That's great,
because I can do that. I zoom along a horizontal banner and it ripples
perfectly smoothly in my air-wake. The gas-station owner/banner-hanger
man will pay me to do this, to draw customers. But it's still illegal,
so I can't really count on ever getting the money.
Government men are after me. It's dark and cold now. A
flyer-awestruck kid shows me a place on the rim of the valley, that's
out of the wind, where I can stay, that turns out to be the concrete
restroom on the other side of the same gas station. Fine; this this
great-- I just need to lie down and sleep. The kid is like, /Can I get
you anything? Do you want magazines?/ I say, "Hotdogs. Didn't I see
hotdogs in there?" /Hotdogs, then./ "And something to drink. Juice."
/Juice, right./
Next dream. I'm recording myself doing a play-by-play of a
small-town high-school football game for a fad NPR show about this. Some
men in the bleachers above me are suspicious about me, but the game
ends, I pack my invisible equipment up and leave, so no problem.
Later, near the football town but on a flat lake, a forty-foot-tall
retarded caveman threatens people and runs them all off by stomping
around on the waterfront and loading-crane area. I go near to see what
I can do about this, but nothing can be done; I have to just flee. I
jump into the water to float away on a three-inch raft made of a leaf
and pine needles. This confuses the giant --the relative sizes of things
are all wrong; he doesn't know what to do.
I end up swimming miles to another way out of the water. I find a
long white knitted hat washed up at the edge of the water, and a white
sweater, and a white long-underwear shirt that has a hood on it, and I
climb up the steep shore, carrying these things; I can dry them out and
use them and /never be cold again/.
From over the water behind me I hear a 1920s-type movie producer
talking about offering a famous actress the use of [Something] Studio
Number [Something] and a cabin.
At the top of the bank, as I climb up over the rail of a walkway to
a cabin, the actress the producer was talking about and her assistant
girl drive up. I'm sopping wet, but I pretend I've been waiting for
them, to tell them that the actress has the use of Something Studio and
/this cabin/. The actress immediately begins to complain about how
inadequate everything is, how small the cabin is, how drab. The
assistant girl is worried about me; I'm shivering. We all go inside. I
can pretend to work for them, or for the film studio, and stay here.
My dreams from a nap Monday night:
First dream. Either I've just finished watching a lecture/monologue
in Helen Schoeni Theater or I just came in and sat down at the end of
it. I think of offering to record the next time the guy does his show,
but now I see that Kathy O'Grady was here the whole time, running her
video camera from behind a curtain hanging down from the middle of the
stage; she was six feet away from the performer. That's perfect. You
can't get better than that.
Still, I want to talk to Kathy, so I sit in a chair on the stage and
wait while she and the performer and someone else stand talking about
something that's none of my business. While I wait I take out my
spiralbound notepad, make lines on the page for strings and lines for
frets, then hold it to my chest with the fingertips of both hands,
humming and playing the paper like a person tapping at a Chapman Stick
(a special kind of electric guitar).
Next dream. I'm driving south on Franklin Street in Fort Bragg (CA).
I've just pulled all the way over to the left side of the road for some
reason, maybe to get out of the way of the bus behind me; I hesitate to
pull back out onto the road until the bus passes, but the driver stops,
expects me to go. Okay.
Back on the right side of the road, I'm somehow /behind/ the bus and
two other cars. I think aloud, "The important thing to watch out for is
the /last/ car. All I have to do is avoid hitting /that/ one and I won't
hit anything."
At Cypress I turn right.
I'm on a two-lane highway through a strange flat land. A car passes
me with no-one driving it. A man is in the back seat, holding a
folded-up towel to the forehead of his sick son. When that car turns off
the highway, I follow it down a side road and then into a cul-de-sac of
houses. I park next to the other car and get out. The man and his son
are already out, standing in the street. I get a plastic jug of fruit
punch and a quart of milk from the trunk of my car and say to the boy,
"I just came from the store. Would you like this?" (punch) "or this?"
(milk). The man says, "No, thank you." The boy looks wildly everywhere
but at me.
-end-