Transport Thirds. College. The Grandma Room. Anti-Drugs Film. GGR Lecture. Deer Spirit. Trilobite Cat. Rich Man's Video. Money-Distorted Family. Celery Squid. Fidelity Issues. Dog Into Silhouette Birds.
Marco McClean
First dream. The song /There's No Business Like A Show Business/
plays while a technologically sophisticated possibly space-alien girl
experiments with simultaneously compressing a single instance of
teleportation and splitting it into three parts. My group's part gets to
Las Vegas, but a version of Las Vegas that has been through a disaster
and has no people left. I vote against going back and trying again,
because of our stuttering materialization. The process is erratic. Let's
think about this before rushing into a dangerous solution to the
problem.
Now we're underground in a claustrophobic situation that feels like
the first episode of both Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe, where
people teleport in but not out.
Next dream. I'm in a class that I'm not prepared for. I'm listening
carefully, not daydreaming, but I can't tell what the class is about.
Another day, I'm outside in a college of wooden buildings. I'm just
skipping and skating around on my shoes. I've missed class again,
because I've gotten used to just living and not going to a set place
every day.
A counselor woman is going to the house where I live (in the dream).
I go there first. It's a bare-wood ranch-style house. I make a fire in
the firebox and open all the inside doors so the whole place will warm
up.
My dream-only Oriental parents come home. The school counselor shows
up. I'm not invited to be part of their discussion about me. I walk up
an alley to where dogs are kept in an 1800s frontier fort. Some dogs are
on the ground, some are up on the roof of the main building. Here's a
dog like my childhood dog Ferd; I pet him and scratch under his collar.
I'm really happy. Maybe I can have this dog. Who will notice if one goes
away?
Next dream. My childhood family lives in a dark bare-wood house, but
one room in the back is painted white and has white curtains. My (dead)
grandmother comes in and she's too sleepy to stay standing up, she
collapses across a mattress-size pile of blankets and lies with her head
on the floor, bent at a painful-looking angle. I help her up onto the
blankets and ask her if she wants a blanket over her. /Yes./ Okay, I
put a blanket over her.
In a situation like in the book /The Paper Grail/ by James P.
Blaylock, a man is brought to the meeting table of the general enemies
if all that is good so they can get his power working on their side. A
narrator voice says, "They threw open the roof to let the fresh night
air in and let the stuffy afternoon air out." (He's being sarcastic,
really saying that they left us open to attack from above.)
I wake from sleep (still in the dream) outside under the awning of
an abandoned gas station in a clay city that's familiar from a dream
that seems years ago. I pick through a pile of old clothes to find pants
and a shirt that fit, and I go into the gas station's restroom to see if
there's water pressure.
Next dream. In a strange version of Fort Bragg (CA) a girl
skateboards at high speed down the side of a straight horse-race track
(like a dragstrip but for horses) where Oak Street should be. A boy is
making a rainy-day school anti-drug-use film; somehow he moves his
camera along beside the girl and he asks her, "Could you smoke dope and
competitively ride a horse?" She says, "Of course not." But she's not
riding a horse; she's going forty miles an hour on a skateboard. I don't
get it.
I woke up with the song /This Guy's In Love/ playing in my head.
I've always been embarrassed by that sort of song. How could anyone have
ever sung it with a straight face? Probably they added the cloying
orchestra later. He was probably just singing and playing the piano.
My dreams from Friday, 2009-12-18:
First dream. Gloriana Opera Company has been taken over by new
management. In a courtroom-like theater, instead of the usual short
outline of the upcoming production, we get a /Glengarry-Glen-Ross/-scene
lecture about legal this and legal that and the need to focus on the
money and etcetera, all from a man like the horrible Ray character who
Mason eventually had to kill in the teevee show /Dead Like Me/. I roll
my eyes about how predictably amusingly disgusting this development is,
and I wander out the side door.
Somehow from outside and away I see the Ray guy turn into a fat
hairless hound dog with hairless rubbery human male sex parts; it rolls
over onto its back and waggles its feet in the air. Do the new
management people think this freak dog act is more competitively
commercial than shows like /Wicked/ and /The Music Man/? Apparently yes.
Next dream. I've been staying in a strange art-gallery/house. I
examine an interesting sand-colored art clock and other things that the
house's owner (?) has accumulated.
The new theater management people will be coming here. I see that
the moldy diving wetsuits are laid out as if to dry so their condition
won't be seen as my fault.
A girl comes here, needs to stay overnight. Another person living
here gives the girl a sleeping bag from props. To please the girl I
mention that the bag has a knife pocket in it. (Adolescents like to keep
a knife near, for defense, or to cut themselves; it's up to them what
they do-- it's their life.)
The smarmy Ray guy from the previous dream and Philip Seymour
Hoffman as Truman Capote are sucking all the monetary value out of this
place too, just like they did with Gloriana. A deer-spirit American
Indian character asks Ray if he really intends to use up all the life
energy of the vine-root plant in the planterbox under the corner of the
house (knowing he does). Ray smirks and says, "Yeah." The Indian uses
telekinesis to lift Ray up into the air, roughly but precisely lays him
out flat on the floor and says, "There's a color that comes out when you
do that," meaning, when you take the life out of a plant, and he takes
the life out of /Ray/, making him old and gray and tired. See that? See
how it feels?
Later something like that happens where I'm the Indian guy and
Truman Capote is the money-focused legal guy. I take the life out of him
so he's not entirely old but not pink and young and all cocky anymore.
The vine root Indian deer-spirit guy comes in from outside all young
again but with amnesia. I tell him to go to the others (in the theater)
and ask them to give him useful something to do until he remembers who
he is and gets his powers back.
I woke up with the Beach Boys' song /Be True To Your School/ playing
in my head.
My dreams from Saturday, 2009-12-19:
First dream. I come to myself walking through a swamp to the side of
a wide river with a small island nearby. The island is floating, trying
to pull away; a rope that goes between a stump on it and a tree on land
is taut.
I'm on the island now; the current pushes it around on the end of
the rope to come to shore. There are clean mountains all around this
river/lake valley. This side of the lake is more and more crowded with
hikers; there's a parking lot for RVs and camper trucks. Across the
lake, to the right, visitors from another country arrive out of caves in
the mountain; those people are all dressed in gray.
A blonde girl and her friends walk near me, disagreeing among
themselves over the proper use of a word. I tell them how to use it, and
use it in a sentence. The girl says to her friends, "See?" Now they
want to know what time it is. I look at the sky and say, "Ten, eleven
o'clock." The girl laughs happily-- right again.
Some time passes while I look around, and when the kids are still
near me I'm startled; I'd been daydreaming and thought I was alone.
Hot wind blows through the valley. There are more camper-vans and
cars than ever, some park right down next to the water. I want to go
across this narrow place-- can I cross on those black rocks? No. Swim?
No, the water's going too fast, and... the water is /hot/.
I'm across the water and in the caves the gray people came from.
Train tracks go through all the rooms; this is a mining museum. It's
hotter in here than outside. I take off my white knitted hat and my
sweater and pull an antique chair out of the path. Here's an antique
dresser/desk, some famous dead person's desk.
Now I'm here with other tourist/expeditionaries before it became a
tourist attraction. We're discovering it. Everything is a marvel. Here
are some hot, miserable, /sweating/ wild housecats. I say, "Cats are
desert animals. Why are they so hot?" One orange cat becomes a shiny
cat-trilobite creature. I say, "That is no cat." The girl from before
(by the lake) says, "It's a cat." I say in a fake Irish accent, "If
that's a /cat/, I'm Mither Theresa."
Next dream. My house in the dream is in a place like Table Mountain,
where the Whale School was. I go to the new rich neighbor's fancy
mansion-house, bringing Christmas lights to use to fix his outdoor
silent telephone (or door) ringer, but there are already Christmas
lights here. Why didn't he say so?
I go back up the path to where I dropped my box of Christmas lights
(?) in the grass, go to the mansion, go inside without knocking and look
around. In a corner room I play a videocassette and fast-forward and
rewind around in it at random to get clips I want for a project-- also
I'm supposed to do something related to this video for the rich guy. The
video at first seems to be mostly news articles, but it becomes
vignettes and stills of the Tom-Petty-like man with his friends from
Hollywood work. In one vignette he holds his Middle-Eastern-looking wife
close and tells her he loves her. In a still picture he stands in a blue
court-case suit, smiling at the camera with a bunch of greased
weightlifters in a gym.
There's nothing on this tape I want. I rewind it to the beginning
and put it on top of the video deck. I notice that my shoes have got a
lot of dirt on the light-blue rug. I shuffle around to spread it out and
make it invisible.
The owner is here, sleeping on a lawn chair in the front yard, right
outside the windo. I'd thought he was away. /I hafta get out of here./ I
sneak out a side window. A little boy (the owner's son?) is watching me.
I act as though I belong here.
Outside the window is still inside the house. I go through another
window, deeper inside, and fly/float between and through rooms. In one
room a lot of Middle-Eastern women are sitting in two facing lines of
folding chairs, anxious, watching as their children in the next room are
being ordered around like army boot-camp conscripts.
I go into an angular courtyard that has a way out above, but I can't
just leave now because comedian Harvey Korman, the meanest of the
British military boss-men, is here mistreating the rich man's little boy
--not only yelling at him but slapping him. I push between them. Harvey
Korman lunges to attack me and I use telekinesis to lift him up, toss
him backward and drop him from about six feet up. He doesn't understand
that I did that; he's defiant, thinks he's still the boss. I pick him up
and drop him again. Now he's confused-- /isn't/ he the boss? I say,
"Stay away from the kids. In fact, clear out entirely. I don't like to
kill you, but I will."
Next dream. A 1950s-style white gangster/businessman and his wife in
a dim restaurant booth pay me ten dollars. I'm like, /No./ Now it's a
ten-dollar bill on the stack of bills in a paper bag. /Better. Okay./
Outside I'm walking up a sidewalk in a strange city with a bunch of
kids I've been taking care of and teaching. A boy like Herman from the
Whale school kicks up his heels and runs happily ahead.
My time of taking care of the kids is over. They split up and go
different directions, on their own now. Some cross the street at the
corner. Two girls cross the other way; they're hit by a car (that
doesn't stop) and have their heads broken completely off! I /will/ all
the children to get together again and pick the heads up and put them
back on the right girls. (One is black and one white. This should be
easy. Let them figure it out.) I'm fascinated by a closeup view of the
way the top of one girl's head --more broken apart than the other one--
automatically fastens itself closed with a seam like the seal on a
plastic-bag zipper; a big cartoon head-bump appears in the middle of the
top, inflates and then deflates. Finally the hair goes down all around
to cover the damage.
Now I'm the big gangster's little French or Oriental wife, fleeing
on the sidewalk of this same street with my two small children and a
perambulator with my coat draped over it (maybe a baby, maybe
belongings). A side pocket of the coat flaps open exposing a sheaf of
money. I use an origami crease in the cloth to make the pocket stay
closed.
My lawyer appears and advises that I /do nothing/. I get the same
advice from a messy homeless woman sitting on the curb. Her horrible
father, Harvey Korman from the previous dream, says to her, "You're
drunk." /I'm supposed to do nothing, I keep going,/ but later I
confront Harvey Korman at a low stone wall at the edge of an outdoor
hillside restaurant of concrete walkways and steps and platforms. He
says mean things about his wife (the woman who fled with the children
and money). I sock him in the mouth; he falls backward and hits his head
on the bottom of the wall, to lie with his neck cocked at a sharp angle.
/I've killed him in front of all these people./
All of a sudden in dying he's sweet and polite. He says, "Who owes
you something?" I say, "What?" He says, "I do. I owe you." I say,
"Why are you saying these things?" He says, not contrite at all, "I
dunno-- to help me get to sleep?" I say, "Arrgh!" and I go away up the
concrete ramp between the tables of people eating, to where a strange
man, maybe Harvey Korman's and the small woman's son, grown up, is
standing in striped pyjamas, brushing his teeth at a bathroom mirror.
My dreams from Sunday, 2000-12-20:
First dream. I'm sitting at a park bench-table near a hill at the
edge of a field. A friendly rat pushes against my leg-- no, it's a dog.
I pet it. It sees chickens near the door at the opposite corner of this
/indoor/ field and tenses to attack.
Other little animals are scattered all over the field. I'm talking
on the telephone; as I walk to some school buildings I say, "She's got a
million pet animals here. Wild hamsters running around, ducks, and over
here--" I go between facing corners of buildings and come up hard
against a tall terrarium wall with a giant
octopus/squid/celery-stalk-thing standing sucked to the glass, glaring
out. Wow. Is that really alive? And if so, the glass doesn't look thick
enough to even hold it up, much less keep it confined if it wants to get
out.
It's not alive. It's an art piece. Cool. Some clever kid made this.
Next dream. I'm in a room in a big sealed-up building in a
cold-country college. I see things from the point of view of a young
girl teacher here. Actor Johnny Depp comes up from downstairs. The girl
offers to go somewhere with him. He's nervous (guilty); he says he
should go take care of his child.
Now I'm who I am, in the same room, talking to the young teacher.
She'll go out with me, but /she's/ nervous and guilty-- about her
husband? her boyfriend? I say something about Juanita, feel a little
guilty myself, and then say, "--Oh. Right. I see what you mean."
Johnny Depp comes upstairs from the same place he came from before.
I say to him, "How would you like to escort this attractive young lady
wherever she wants to go?" That's fine. The turn to leave together. I
slap the girl on the butt, turn and go downstairs to where Juanita is
exercising with weights. I have broken up coconut-candy chocolate bar
bits in my mouth and in my hands...
Here's a flashback to before, when I come into this downstairs gym
with coconut candy, and Juanita looks at me suspiciously because I
/loathe coconut candy/, but it's okay; it doesn't taste like anything at
all, just the suggestion of chocolate.
Present time again, or another time. I look around the gym. There's
a door to a dormitory with cots and mattress pads. Juanita's here (I've
found her after looking away from her; a thing that in the dream I know
only rarely happens). I have the sense that all's right with the world.
I woke up and wondered why I didn't get in the dream that Juanita
and Johnny Depp must have been having sex on one of those cots before he
went upstairs. Huh.
Asleep again. Next dream. With the sense that Juanita is next to me,
I'm skiing on a moving strip-map of industrial river Russia in a giant
mechanical arcade game. The icon (where the tips of my skis stay) is at
the center of the moving image; I want to have that be farther backward
in the frame so I'll have a little more time to swerve around obstacles.
In the game, I'm supposed to set mines and destroy danger spots. All
during this, the John Hiatt song /She's Crossing Muddy Water/ plays.
Next dream. It's a cold night. I drive through wet forest brush
across a hillside to my real-life employer Tim's dream-only deep forest
house. My job here is to put like a hundred old car batteries either
into the box of the back of this moving van or take them out of the
truck and stack them somewhere else.
I come away from the truck, forward to the back of the truck (?) and
someone has tried to be helpful by putting several wheelbarrows here.
/It's really hard to use a wheelbarrow for heavy things; it's
top-heavy./ I say, "I hate wheelbarrows."
Now I'm uphill from the truck and off to the right, outside of the
safe stable-ground area. Here's a huge, freshly-cut-down tree. I and two
other kid workers should just go back, but I /will/ the tree to have
been cut into sections, then I use telekinesis to move the sections
through a wall, into a garage that's where the truck box was. The two
other kids drag smaller tree sections on a heavy stage curtain. When
we've got all the wood into the garage, Tim comes here. I demonstrate
using telekinesis to put together two-foot-long strips of the ripped
edge of the soft, spongy tree, and fold them over and over and compress
them ultimately into a bit of good hardwood the size of a marble. Tim
bends to pick it up. I say, "Don't touch it; it'll be really hot." He
picks it up and isn't burned.
Tim and I walk down a logging road. Below us in a clearing, Pam (from
the Whale School) is out with some of her friends, walking her
dream-only golden retriever dog. I use telekinesis to help the dog hop
through the grass and float impossible lengths in the air. The process
quickly gets out of control and the dog leaps up one last time, goes up
into the sky (daylight now) and breaks up into a hundred silhouette
birds that scatter against a blurry sun-shape and dissolve. /Oh, no./
But Pam and the others didn't see that /because it was too weird for
them to acknowledge./ I say to Tim, "How can people...?" Tim says,
"That's normal. It's the way people are."
Some time has passed and I'm going back up the hill. Here's Pam,
sitting on a rock above the road. I climb up to her and try to apologize
for what happened to her dog. She leads me to her modern redwood and
glass house, saying that /the dog was old and dying anyway./ Inside the
house, she shows me some complaints she has with the cabinetry, as
though she expects me to fix it all. Ah, I get it; she doesn't mind
about the dog, but I still have to do something to make it up.
Earlier (or later) I'm with Pam going down the road to the clearing
at the bottom. Here's a house, and a lot of kids are playing in the
field. I go to them and explain about the dog; the explanation drags on
and on and now I'm in the house with Pam and her grownup friends, one of
whom is in her late thirties and very /vivid/ and hard to look away
from-- black hair, tight black-and-white jersey clothes. /Try not to
stare./
I'm outside again. Here are my cousin Doodie and his wife Diane,
young, in their twenties. I teekay Diane up into the air and only then
remember the golden retriever (because of Diane's 1970s hairstyle), and
remember that /I never learned to control the power./ I carefully
withdraw flying power and Diane swings around and stops with her back
against a tree, luckily just gently enough to not be hurt but just
excitingly enough to make her shake her head and say, "Whoo!" Doodie
says happily to her, "Was that fun?" I'm relieved that I didn't kill
her, but I keep my mouth shut about that.
I walk up the hill, and here's Pam sitting on a rock above the road.
This seems familiar. I go to apologize about having turned her dog into
a bunch of birds. (The dream begins to loop here.)
The phone rang and woke me up.