The Pizza Warmer Circuit. Chinese Dollar Store. $150,000. Door In Door. Surreal. Creepy Soap Toilet. Her Annual Thing. Cop Help. John Callan's Mistake.
Marco McClean
First dream. The disarray of Yasmin's advertising contract
paperwork is somehow linked with the condition of power wiring
in circuit breaker boxes. I disconnect the main power and take
several boxes off the wall. Bare wires spark, though they're
connected to nothing. Tim says something in a Swedish accent
that sounds like, "You shorted the pizza warmer circuit."
A mechanic uses a medical-looking grease gun to lubricate
an /electrical meter/ in my old Chevy Nova. A kittenish white
girl comes from the garage's waiting room and gets behind the
wheel of the car. She can't figure out the controls. She
slides over, beckons me into the car and says, "You drive
it." I look around for a way to lift the car out of being
stuck in a place with no garage doors, a basement.
Next dream. I pass an annoying child, going through a
doorway inside a library or bookstore. The skateboard I'm
swinging around by the end barely misses his head. I say,
"Excuse me."
Now I'm browsing in a Chinese dollar store. The food here
is all wrapped in crackly cellophane. There's pepper salami
and regular salami. I find a /Book Of Impossible Things/-- a
cartoon book showing how to do tricks like getting out of a
locked-and-bolted house by going out a small transom window
and down the roof. A little Chinese girl tells me about how my
grandfather cheated and got her grandfather in trouble with
the law.
Next dream. In a bowling-alley/pool-hall of gamblers and
criminals I learn about a hidden treasure-- a cache of money
stolen years and years ago. I and others run from criminals
/and/ cops; everyone wants the money. There's an ambush
involving a line of gang people and dogs lying down on the
sidewalk. We jump over the line and we're boxed in. Hostages
take hostages. A woman is given the secret of the hidden
$150,000; she and I escape the hostage-cluster situation into
the apartment of a man who allows himself to be killed to save
us.
The woman and I search the apartment, our only clue being
/Alice In Wonderland/ rhymes. In an open closet I find a spear
whose blade fits into a decorative sheath made of three big
metal plant leaves; I say, "Beautiful thing."
I slide apart two small doors down near the floor. Other
doors scissor apart down a tunnel, and other doors beyond
them. A voice from the air sends me around the room picking up
oversized paper money from a hundred years ago. A cross
between Stan of Down Home Foods and Ivor Traber comes in,
looks around, nods, amused. I say, "When you were a kid,
didn't you ever wonder why people couldn't jump up and stay
there?" I jump up and hit my head on the ceiling. Someone
laughs. Stan/Ivor vanishes.
Juanita and I ride in a tiny flying car. She controls our
speed and I steer. I maneuver us through the doors of this
complicated building and get out into the night.
A red-haired girl with red-orange keloid scars on her nose
merges with her undamaged sister into one person. She and I
kiss and fall to the floor of a big dim space, she on top of
me. I say, "We're not doing this." She says, "Why." I say,
"Because I'm old enough to be your father. I'm flattered, but
get off me."
Next dream. My mother has a pet mouse. /Isn't it nice?/
Yes, nice, but I have to piss; where's the bathroom? I don't
have any clothes on. I go through doors with a different kind
of latch on each one, and I go through a concentric door with
an open door in the door itself. Here's a ceramic bedpan on a
microphone stand, but this is an art object; I want a real
bathroom.
My dreams from Sunday, 2006-05-21:
First dream. A funny, mad little dog is itself stolen as
it steals a funny, mad little dog.
I see a scene from a surrealist painting, where strange
people and strange things stand well apart from one another,
each facing a different direction, on an endless gray-green
linoleum floor.
Now I've been walking for a long time through an
indoor-outdoor place that feels high up. I'm with someone
else; we're fugitives suspected of stealing something. When we
try to climb down to the ground through a channel in a wall,
the outside layer of the wall crumbles into plaster bits and
falls away. We cling to what's left. We're fully outside. Wait
till the moon comes up? Or not?
Good-- there's the moon. And there's the little dog from
before, frozen into a little statue. This is obviously a trap.
Wait a little more before climbing down.
Next dream. Juanita and are guests in a magical house. At
the long dinner table we're shown an experiment on mice in a
tray-- apparently someone is trying to produce a race of mice
that can survive suffocation and being pressed into fur-ball
cubes. /This is just cruel./
The woman who lives here gives us paint palettes of candy
pastes to sample. Juanita pokes at a smear of paste that looks
like seagull shit and she says, "This is what we walked in
outside." (Out the window are sea and rocks.)
The king comes home. The woman greets him: "Hello, dear.
You were away so long."
Later everyone is asleep. I wander around looking for the
bathroom and I find one. The toilet is a fancy ceramic
flowerpot fountain on a stem, with water constantly flushing
through it and a flower-carved soap boat floating in it. I
poke at the little boat; result: the water flushes extra
crazily and the boat tips on its side. I think, /What would
have to be wrong with people who would want a toilet like
this?/
My dreams from Monday, 2006-05-22:
First dream. At night I'm on a flat roof that has layers
and layers of roll-roofing on it, all of it peeling up in
strips. Tim and Madeline are with me. Someone's pounding nails
on a nearby roof. I say, "Where's Madeline?" I step down
using a lower roof and explain that I like to get down where I
can step down. Madeline says to me from the roof, "Let me get
down first; I'll get you a stepladder. He won't wait. Or maybe
she's talking to Tim.
The dream jumps back. This time /I/ offer to get a
stepladder and tell Madeline that Tim won't wait.
Tim and Alice are in a car garage hallway crowded with
boxes and broken ceramic things. I put things back on the
shelves and find that Tim has swapped my Bakelite project box
for another. Alice looks like she's about to scream. I say to
her, "Here, Alice, five hundred dollars to just be patient for
a moment." I pretend I have five hundred dollars.
Someone comes into the garage from the other end; I try to
turn the lights out but the switches don't work. It's okay,
it's Mark Hollywood from the old Community School, not a
security guard.
A child and I peek between parts shelves at a behemoth
car, an early 1970s station wagon. Tim runs to the car, bangs
his fists on it. The car frantically backs away. Tim falls
calmly onto his back reading a magazine. He says airily,
"She's doing her [something] and annual thing. Cinnamon
kidnaped and getting a one-sided story." I say, "/Cinnamon
was in that car?!/"
I woke up with the song /The Man/ from Randy Newman's
/Faust/ project playing in my head.
Asleep again. Next dream. I take a shower in a strange
house. The bar of soap is soft, like a marshmallow; I use it
up entirely. I let the water run and run-- it's someone else's
house; someone else is paying to heat the water.
Now I'm in the back yard of the house where I lived in
seventh grade. I'm sleepy; I've been sleeping on the grass. I
stretch, riffle my hair, pick things up and put them down--
rocks, a frog statue, a tennis ball. I go inside. A gang of
troublemaker kids has taken over the house. I use the phone to
call the cops. The cop says he'll send some people right out,
and he gives me a piece of advice: "Bring something to read at
the police station." (He means, if I stick around I'll be
arrested too.)
I go outside and walk along a strange highway that becomes
a hallway in a building. I move around in the building. I'm
threatened by someone or something-- maybe just a sound; I
jump backward out the garage door of the original invaded
house, and fly up backward into the night, swimming in air
with powerful frog-kicks and taking sweeping strokes with my
arms.
Next dream. I'm on Main Street in a strange version of
Mendocino. There's a holiday atmosphere. I think but don't
say, /I love this place./
I point up and back at Brannon's and tell a stranger, "I
used to work right up there.
I and two others lean/crouch against different cars'
bumpers, peeking over the cars' hoods. A Tahoe-seeming version
of Mendosa's Grocery is where the Mendocino Hotel should be.
Somehow from the street I overhear the conversation of two
dock-type guys in a 1950s diner where Ford House should be;
they're gonna take my (dream-only) old Toyota pickup truck to
the docks.
Now I'm walking down the north side of the street with one
of the dock guys. I say, "When and how will I get my stuff
back?" He says he'll mail the information to me; he snatches
an envelope from a store's outdoor greeting-card rack; I must
buy a card. I don't like any of these cards. I go inside and
look at more. Here's one with an eye on it. Two dollars and
twenty-five cents; okay, that's not too much.
The dream jumps back. The store woman reaches out to
change the /open/ sign to /closed/. I go in and say, "How much
for an envelope?" She says, "Ten cents." I let her take a
dime from my handful of confusing change.
On my way down the sidewalk with my hands out in front of
me, the change multiplies into pounds of quarters; I try to
pour them into the right front pocket of my tight pants and
just manage it before the tough people around this suddenly
bad neighborhood notice how much money is here.
Funny clown-men speak and put on a show from their places
within circus posters on the fence around an empty field. One
clown says in a Cockney accent, "/You/ go' a foin any boilah,
/you/ wiw!" Another snorts a laugh and says, "Loif socks."
On the other side of the field a man in a more serious poster
says, "John Callan-- his fust een ken," meaning that the
clowns are as mistaken as John Callan, whoever that is, and
whatever he was mistaken about.
-end-