2023–05–21 through 2023–06–09

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–05–21:

First dream. Dim, black-and-white soft-focus foggy quiet concrete catacombs under a rural stadium after a political meeting or sports game (or both). The last few stragglers are going to the parking lot. A girl turns back inside to get something she forgot and is lured to be cornered by a crook with a needle to drug her. I take over for her. I imagine shooting the guy. I run over it in my mind a few times to decide how it will turn out.

I must have shot the guy. He’s crumpled on the floor. The girl’s boyfriend come back in looking for her. He helps her (helps me) wrap the body up in towels and drag it out to shut it in the trunk of a circa-1960 DeSoto next to the abandoned farmhouse where the parking lot just was.

We’ve taken the car while at the same time leaving it behind with the body in it. I drive to the highway, deciding not to stop and unsmear the windshield — it’s not that bad.

Eventually we come to a place where the road is a ramp up to another road, and it’s blocked with a giant sheet of cardboard, so they can have an election up there without worrying about cars coming through. We leave the car. The other person vanishes. I climb around the cardboard and spectate as the candidates and their small-town-meeting fans, arrayed up a steep embankment, debate the common issues of the day.

I immediately favor the prettier candidate. (They’re two forty-something women.) The other candidate tries the trick of asking something that only she knows all about, to try to make her opponent look ignorant. I get everyone’s attention and say, “Is anyone here familiar with advanced math?” I mean for someone to pose a math problem that I’ll be able to answer on the spot (by using, I dunno, ChatGPT and a glasses-based computer) and show why that debate technique is unfair. /I should have already had the glasses ready before I began this./

It’s late. The debate has wound down. Everyone’s lying down in the dirt to sleep. I lie so my foot can go thirty or forty feet diagonally up the embankment to touch the good candidate’s shoulder under the blanket of shrubs. The other candidate’s right there and can see this. She doesn’t care.

Later, I’m back in a corridor under the stadium, but now it’s a cattle pen corridor. Two karate pros, here to protect an Asian cattleman, detect where enemies have put a tiger behind a door. The karate guys coordinate to pull the door open and stab the tiger in the eye! Oh, no. Tch.

Out on the porch, I’m one of the karate guys. The cattleman has the tiger. It has blood on its face, but it’s not hurt; both its eyes are okay. What a relief!

So the reason this genetic expert cattle breeder hired us to protect him is, years ago he foolishly accepted $100 from a mafia person and it’s come back to be trouble; no amount of money is enough to pay it off now. My advice to him is, go to Canada. That’s all I have to say. He can be trusted to follow instructions and not be sloppy or high-profile. Just go to Canada, change your name, start all over.

I woke up with the Flight of the Conchords song /Mermaids/ playing in my head.

Asleep again, next dream. There’s a vague story about a man in charge of a nuclear power plant who discovers something odd about the composition of rocks nearby — an unknown problem, like the unknown problem of lead in city water.

An old scientist with a big hangdog face is in his study, a soundstage-size empty room, leaning, bent over sideways, with the side of his face against a wall, crying quietly about something. His assistant, whose job is to keep people from bugging him, goes out the door to answer the place’s front door, comes back and tells him the power station guy is here. This is important. He straightens up, goes out.

He’s become thin and small Doctor Rush of Stargate Universe. Young people, in a class he taught a long time ago, want to help him not be a depressed hermit; they’ve dragged him out into the world to see a show in a crowded college-town-bar-like environment. Oh, shit, /this/ place. He’s had a bad relationship history with the woman who runs this bar. He tries to hide his face, but she sees him. Oh, well.

Now the bar is more like the big study room before, but cut at an angle so the stage for the show is a wide corner. I’m myself, but younger, in this other world where there’s no Juanita. A girl who likes me has made me come out of my house to see a show and be in public. She’s sitting in a theater seat. I’m on the floor in front of her, embarrassed about how I haven’t taken a shower for a week and my long hair is greasy and stuck together. While we wait (forever) for the show to start I try to untangle my hair with my fingers.

A man can’t get past me to get out. I have to stand up. I might as well go outside and walk around. It’s the middle of the day in a city of two-story-high rectangular shop buildings. The city is dead; there’s no activity anywhere but close around the building the theater is in, except this one place is packed around with cars and trucks. The show will be a comedy musical about the Peanuts comic strip characters. It was supposed to start at 10:30. My watch says 1:30. I shuffle-walk back and forth, up and down the street, swinging my arms around to try to make my left arm not hurt, daydreaming, within the dream, about a mean woman not letting me come back into the theater, in preparation for if that actually happens. I have a ticket. In the daydream, though, I can’t find it. /Then what would I say? I don’t know the name of the girl I came here with, to ask for her to come and vouch for me./

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–05–22:

First dream. There’s the familiar feeling of going to work at Tim’s and not being sure what I’m supposed to do, but knowing that whatever it is I’m nowhere near finished and it was supposed to be done a long time ago. Well, it’s a huge job for the college, scanning and organizing a science/writing/history project.

And the workplace merges with a numinous field scene south of Main Street in Mendocino. Here’s a mid-1960s Cadillac with plush but hard black leather sofa seats. I try to fake doing the book job — this part of it is connecting stories with an index of funny Old-English-like words. I can’t keep anything straight. I’m just jumbling things up and making a mess. I wander away.

Next dream. Juanita and I are in the desert on the other side of Yosemite. We walk on a trail away from where tourists are milling around in a dirt parking lot. The trail goes down into a rough valley. More trails cross. A woman on a motorized mountain bike zooms past. /This is for mountain bike races./ I say, “We should get outta here.” More mountain bike people zoom through. Juanita has no trouble but I struggle to get back up the steep part. I’m afraid I’ll hurt my back, and I have to be careful of my real-life fucked-up swollen finger.

Now we’re by a bathroom/gazebo on a shrub-shrouded little peak. /Where are we?/ Juanita says, “Albion.” The valley downhill to the west is like the Albion River valley but has high craggy buttes along the north side — I say, “There’s nothing like this anywhere near Albion.” (So, wrong world. I don’t want to lose Juanita here.) In the time it takes me to look all around, Juanita has run around the gazebo and down a trail. A man gets in my way, as if it looks to him like she’s trying to get away from me because of domestic violence. I push around him.

Down on the floor of the valley Juanita and I are walking toward the sea with others, either away from or toward an event. I remember my phone, take it out, try to look up where we are. Nothing works right. Juanita tries to help me do it. She can’t make it work either.

A tall drunken man comes even with where we’re walking, grabs my hand to shake it and says something about how he’s one of my best customers. I say, “From what?” He says, “KMFB “ I guess: “You bought the old reel-to-reel decks.” No, but close enough. “Well,” I say, “It’s been great seeing you.”

Next dream. Two girls, best friends, with a weird both British and California /Valley Girl/ accent, have run into each other in the numinous field in Mendocino from the first dream, and are catching up. One got a high-class business job and stole a bunch of plastic-jewel-encrusted stage-dressing cotton batting mesh. It’s inside her car (the Cadillac) and all over the trunk of the car, like it’s meant to be Christmas decoration snow and ice. I push it around a little to loosen it up, like loosening eggs in a pan, so at least the part outside will blow off when they drive away, and they won’t get in trouble for having it.

Later I’m on the remote steep mountainside that is the business place of the job the one girl has. People are scattered over this slope in little business-conference clumps. I’m on my side. I have a cobalt-blue bowl that I shouldn’t have — another thing that the girl stole, that I’m trying to return, in my further efforts to keep her out of trouble. This bowl, though, symbolizes something embarrassing (age-related forgetfulness? commercial masturbation fantasies? being poor?).

I spin the bowl and release it so it skitters down the slope between the groups of workers, on a path that could have come from anywhere, and I’m getting away with this, but a Roger Laing-like man (Roger who convinced George Anderson to fire all the hippie deejays from KMFB in 1984) owns the company here; he appears from his office (a hole in the mountain) looks at the dish rolling away and then at me, and chuckles cruelly. He knows.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–05–23:

First dream. In the back-story of the dream I set up a bedroom-size tent made of blue plastic tarpaulins next to a dirt road, to live in. I return to it in dark night; it’s bright inside and the light leak out through long cracks where side-tarps meet and roof-tarps imperfectly overlap the sides.

A stranger comes here and is let in. (I might be the stranger.) I take my clothes off to have sex with a hippie gypsy Indian princess, but that doesn’t happen —now I’m supposed to do it with her mother instead, who’s like mid-forties, kind of heavy, attractive, but quietly sinister… I hesitate, but, okay, sure, let’s go.

I’m knocked out by a drug. I wake, still in the dream, in another, nearby tent, captured and tied up by 1950s criminal/fake-Indian drug gang men. Things become vague.

I’ve escaped. I hide downhill over the edge of a mountain road. The Indian girl perfectly follows instructions to set a crying broken deer to lure the gang’s logging company boss, so I and someone with me can capture /him/.

This will take awhile. We wait in a suburban house’s garage for the bad guys to come here, to spring the trap. There’s no trap, though. The main bad guy comes into the garage in the dimness and confidently, menacingly, slowly walks toward me. I shoot him in the chest with a handgun. He keeps coming. I shoot two bursts of three shots each, high and mid and low, to get around any armor he must have on. No damage. He’s still coming. Am I missing him entirely? Is he turning flat-sideways every time just as I shoot?

I woke up with Flight of the Conchords /Mermaids/ playing in my head again and realized it was playing through the entire dream.

Alseep again. Next dream. At night in the dirt parking lot of my work I try to start a VW station wagon whose ignition key lock is very worn, to the point that I can turn it with a big flat-head screwdriver. The car becomes a lawnmower-engine go-kart. I think about starting it from sitting in it by pulling the starter rope /forward/ over my shoulder. No good; there’s no leverage. I’ll just walk home. I have to go to the City with Juanita tomorrow, in her car, and I don’t want to be up all night messing with vehicles.

My employer Tim is up late in the A-frame, sitting at a computer under the back window, going over the book scanning and indexing work I did in a dream last week. He seems unhappy with it. I go back out, get a covid mask to put on, go in and lie on a camp cot. An Eleanor-Cooney-like woman, but not her, rather somebody’s mother, comes in and stands towering over me. She has commentary on my visit to the doctor last Monday; she’s misunderstanding but commiserating about what a curmudgeon he is. (She’s thinking of my doctor from years ago, who has long since retired.)

Tim is exasperated because people are talking while he’s trying to think. I say, “Sorry. Sorry.” I go outside again, this time barefoot, which will help the vehicle situation. I /start/ the VW and back it around to get it out of the brush that’s grown up around and through it. It becomes the go-kart again. This time I stand up, put my foot on the motor, pull the rope and /it/ starts. Let it warm up and smooth out.

Walking the lady toward Tim’s mother Ethel’s house morphs to taking a shower (alone) in a weird version of the A-frame, where the bathroom rug is pushed up against the door to keep it from swinging open. I hear Tim and Eleanor in the other room. /They’re still here?/ I notice that I’ve been showering with my boxer shorts on. Oh, well.

Next dream. (The /Weird Family/.) I’ve been hitchhiking north through the California Central Valley. I’m in a car full of children, driven by their Polish/Mexican father Charles Bronson. Vague difficulties and adventures occur, resulting in the father being dead and gone, and I’m responsible for taking care of all these intelligent, possibly quirkily-superpowered /weird kids./

We’re out at the beach, where the ocean has dried up, so the little rock islands offshore are rock hills sticking up out of the sand. The kids are playing a game about /What if we lived in these rock caves?/ Everyone has his own cave. I start one of several catchphrases in this show: “I’ve got /one thing/ to say to you…” I put one finger up, wait for it — wait for it — then say just anything, at random. (I don’t remember what I said here.)

We’re in the middle-back room of my grandparents’ restaurant from when I was little — the banquet room, that was also a work room and laundry-press room when nobody needed it for an event. The smartest of the kids, a little girl with short wiry hair, is unhappy because the other kids have been mean to her about smoking weed. We’re all sitting around on wooden chairs. I say to her, “I just have /one thing/ to say to you…” I put up one finger, wait, and say, “There is nothing wrong with you!”

(That reminds me: There was dream fragment from last week that I see I never wrote down. I don’t know where it goes in the timeline, but I was lying on a normal (thin, cheap) Swedish couch with my head propped up on the arm. A hassock was to my left, and a little orphan blonde girl with long straight hair, who I had rescued from som something, who was maybe Carrie Miklose as a little girl, was lying across the hassoc and my chest, sleeping. I was waiting for a lady from the social services offfice to come and help figure out what do do with her. My arms were at my sides, my forearms up, so I was fiddling with my phone, trying to see it over her ear, to read my book without waking her up.)

Later we’re all in a bedroom off the side of the middle room. The kids are all sitting on or around the smaller-than-queen-size bed with a thin blanket with a field of tiny cloth balls woven onto it. The boy who’s been the most trouble is very close to realizing that we all have to pull together to make this family work. I say, “I just want to tell you /one thing/…” I put up my finger. The boy puts up his finger. I get ready to say, “Bullshit,” and the boy anticipates this and says it first: “BULLSHIT!” This was the breakthrough moment. We’re a family now. His finger still up, he says, “I just wanta say /one thing/…” He and I and all the kids put up an index finger, and all say happily, “BULLSHIT!”

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–05–25:

/Run Around/ by Blues Traveler is playing throughout this, mostly the part about the nervous physician waiting in the wings or the game show contestant who could not believe his eyes because of the crappy parting gift.

I’m on top of a rock-and-ice mountain in a sea of mountains, on a structure that might be the high end of a chairlift or ski gondola mechanism. There’s nobody anywhere around. I have my blue milk crate of extra radio-show papers and materials that I always bring with me but hardly ever use anything out of again except maybe a book. I’m not sure how I got here; I need to start thinking about getting down the mountain.

There’s no cable. There’s only one chairlift, and it’s hanging from what now is a bilaterally-symmetrical back-and-forth labyrinth of electric-stove-coil metal, like the path of a small-carnival roller-coaster ride but upside-down. I imagine climbing down into the chair and riding around the path, swinging outward from the tight curves. Imagining is good enough; it looks flimsy and dangerous.

Now this is the solid top of a tall building. Over the edge there are big windows all around, like an airport control tower. I don’t remember getting up here, but why did I not bring a rope or something to get down to an open place with? I’m in pyfamas. This is the Himalayas. Why am I not cold? Maybe because I’m dying. I’ve got to get down.

Things change so the building is in L.A. in the area where my grandparents lived when I was little, but everything’s changed from a neighborhood of houses behind the business street to modern two or three floor office buildings with parking lots and decorative trees. A woman getting in her car sees me up here, I think. I duck to hide. My building is only a little taller than the others, where before it was like a New York skyscraper. But there’s still no way to get down around the sides, so there will have to be a way for workers to get up here to fix the roof — look around…

Here’s a hatch set flush with the roof. Lift the edge. There’s the hidden side of a hanging ceiling and sounds of activity. I lie down, reach down and pull up an acoustic panel. It’s a radio station. The sounds and talking are coming from automatic machines. There one college-age boy here, shuffling papers, walking back and forth. He sees me.

The roof is only eight or ten feet off the ground now. I use a wooden fence to get down, walk along the top of the fence to the parking lot and jump down. The radio station kid is here, pissed off at me because he’s busy. I smile and make up a story about how I got kind of [whistle to indicate crazy or drugged and gesture vaguely at the side of my head] because it would be too complicated to tell him all about the chairlift and the Himalayas and everything.

Oh, fuck, I left my box of papers and things on the roof. /Please don’t call the police. I just need to go back up and get my box of papers./ I go to climb back up on the roof, thinking about whether my bank card will work in whatever place or world this is.

/…and a nervous physician waiting in the wings…/ (mangled lind from /Run Around/)

—

My dream from Sunday, 2023–05–28

I attend a party of like college staff people at a strange big cheaply-made modern house in the forest. The people throwing the party, who live here, have a little boy. Everyone ignores him. There are just too many people here; I go out into the side yard. The grass is strewn with the little boy’s toys and projects. One toy is three big, thick wooden chessboards attached in a row, that open separately into cases for pieces for games to play on them. There’s about half a set of roughly made wooden chess pieces, where the king and queen are six inches high. /The little boy made these./ I walk around the back, and come back, and the chess pieces are on top of the board on the right, now, and they’re made of dark gray, not quite dry clay.

I go downhill away from the house, past the barn. A woman is standing under a tree here, looking away down the driveway. I think about flying past her to show off.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–05–29:

First dream. It’s dark but there’s light enough to see the edges of the sky and just a little bit close around me. I’m on a Californa summer-dry-tall-grass hillside. A rope swing goes up so high and far that there can’t possibly be a tree branch up there. I keep the rope in one hand as I take my shoes and both shirts and my pants off, leaving my torn green pyjamas and socks on.

I have a sense of where the land ends and the water begins, and I know that I’ll see it when I get down there, but I don’t know how sharply the water gets deep, so I’ll hang on longer than I want to, even if it takes me too high up. I grip the knot in one hand and the rope just above it in the other.and /run down the hill/.

There;s the water line. I swing out so far and so high I’m afraid to let go. Swing back, hit the ground running and run back up the hill… The rope vanishes. I find my things by the faint light of my phone screen edge glowing from my pants pocket.

It’s difficult and slow getting all my clothes back on. A truck with high lights is coming along a driveway left-to-right that I didn’t know was here. I haven’t got my shoes on yet; I carry them and run past some brush to lie down and hide. /This feels very familiar. I used to do this when I was a boy: go out at night and wander around and hide when someone came./

Voices are coming. I’ve got my shoes on. I go past a radio transmitter shed, hop over a gate in the wire fence and — here’s Mitch Clogg, walking along with a man I take to be a radio engineer. Mitch has just said that he missed dinner. I tell him I’ll give him a ride down the hill. (I’ll share my flying power and fly us down.)

Next dream. I’m in a strange small town that’s a deliberately constructed, designed community. My job is to simultaneously take a general-knowledge/citizenship/fitness-for-living-here test /and/ demo the test for some [unseen] officials so they can administer it themselves when prospective citizens start showing up. Most of it is like a driver’s information test at the DMV, but a later test problem is, I have an open soft-ball-size hole in my upper belly, with a snake head clamped in my fingers, coming out of the hole that goes down into my intestines. I have to solve something else in the test that requires more than one hand, so for a moment I let go of the snake, and it slips down a little farther. I catch it by the nose but I won’t be able to hold onto it. I’m really trying to figure this out, how to keep the snake from taking residence in my intestines — maybe if I had some wire, or a paperclip… In the dream I’m not in tremendous distress, but apparently my body was, because Juanita got up from her computer and shook me awake. I said, “Bad dream.” She said, “I guess.”

Next dream. I’m in the town’s little old-fashioned church, getting ready for a show that will be starting here tonight. I’ve been living here. I take my boxes of stuff out and put them in the lean-to storage shed. The more I take out, the messier it is in here. My clothes are all over the floor.

Now I’m in another, larger church. This one has blue indoor-outdoor carpet. I lift the light rows of wooden pews aside, one after another, to vacuum, and put them back. A divider develops between what was the whole church and the main, much larger part of the hall. I set up a borrowed video camera that uses cartridges of tape that you load the whole blister-pack of tape in. There’s only one available. I don’t see how this can last even half an hour. Oh, well, do what you can.

As I step through the camera’s setup menus the menu screens are duplicated on a projection screen at the very front, the stage (altar). Time zone, Australia? No, what are my other choices… There are no other choices. Sure, Australia, then.

Next dream. With the feeling of continuing from last dream, I’m sitting at a table in a schoolroom-like apartment. My real-life Canon Vixia solid-state-memory videocamera is on the table with the play’s video in it. (I must have run to get it, to use it.) I bounce a dime-gumball-machine superball off another fixed in a dish, so it bounces away in random directions. I can always catch it. A cat appears on the table, interested in the ball. I roll the ball to the cat. It stops it, thinks about it, pushes it to roll back to me. I roll it to the cat again. I want to turn the camera on to capture this but I’m afraid something will go wrong and it’ll start recording over the play. I start my phone recording video, prop it against the camera, call to Juanita, “Come see this,” roll the ball to the cat again, it rolls it back. Juanita shows up. This goes on and on. Sometimes the cat rolls the ball back and forth between its paws before it rolls it back, but it understands that we want a lot of video of this to work from. It knows this is what to do.

Next dream. I’m in my bed where I lived when I was in 7th-grade. I get a phone call from Lawrence Bullock. He’s working on video at the school (?) computer. Harry Rothman of Hit And Run Theater is there too. They can’t quite articulate the problem they’re having with the equipment. Lawrence makes a sound like he forgot something important that he has to drop everything for, and he hangs up.

I go there. A desktop tower computer and a 24-inch monitor are on a metal school desk on a covered walkway next to the bus garage of a strange grammar school. Nobody’s here. Lawrence left in such a hurry he left a whole carton of milk out.

The computer has a familiar blue Windows desktop showing. I think about what I should do before touching anything. I decide to make my own logon account and copy Lawrence’s and Harry’s video to it, so I can learn how to help without screwing anything up for them.

—

My dream from a nap Monday night. Everybody’s running and shooting. I hide in the wall of a forest crater. Inside the ground, casually-dressed soldiers (rebels? oppressors?) are getting their orders and leaving in different directions to do their jobs. I select a short-haired old-hippy soldier to come with me, to help me, please. We go to a cave mouth in the side of cliff. I take his hand, fly us out, drop us down in freefall for hundreds of feet and zoom around the hill to the right, to not give anyone watching the cave a shot at us.

We go back inside the ground and fly, holding hands, through a vast bluish underground /tube/ of openings to other worlds. /There./ I land us in a gray-mud-lined place scooped out of the wall of the tube.

What now? Why did I need the soldier to come with me here? Split up and look around. For what? I don’t know, we’ll know it when we see it.

—

My dream from Tuesday, 2023–05–30:

I’m in a strange city where Mendocino should be, but it’s inland and it’s a grid of like 1950s suburban development houses. There’s a problem with the telephone system, so every once in awhile all phones in several blocks, wired or not, ring at once, but nobody’s calling.

Now I’m in a strange house. I have the idea that the phone system problem has something to do with a pair of old tabletop dial phones stuffed with potted electronic equipment so they’re heavy is bowling balls.

I’m fixing a kitchen sink drain. I’ve just let myself in without knocking or anything. Lee Edmondson comes home — this is his house. I realize that I have no permission to be here and this is one of the familiar dream situation where I’m somewhere I don’t belong and the person has warned me again and again and they’re exasperated and pissed off and I have no excuse. I start to cry. I say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me…”

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–06–06:

First dream. In a post-apocalyptic vast rural complex of mostly empty many-level (some sky-scraper-high) metal warehouses, there’s a competition because of the time of year. One of the tasks is to get down to the ground from being shut inside a very high level. A little boy runs and jumps and crashes with his shoulder and hip into part of the wall over a small opening, to try to break out through there, but the metal, though mostly rust, doesn’t break. He uses a long pipe and a two-by-four to pry at the the opening like using a can opener. Nope. No good.

I and a strange man are working together to do another of the tasks. It occurs to me to use a vertical hydraulic ram thing to compress the heavy metal shelves above it upward, which works, but then shelves are jammed and won’t slide back down. Here’s the pipe the boy used before. I reach up with it and pound on the top shelf and on the rails. It won’t break loose. And I’ve damaged the corner of a big tube-type audio compressor from an old radio station, like one I used to have.

Electronics engineer and teacher Bob Blick is here. I’m climbing around the upper metal shelves and talking over the edge to where he’s working on building something on the floor, doing /his/ part to get all this metal shit loose…

Now this same warehouse, but on the ground floor (paved with asphalt), has been having the yearly flea-market they put on here. I and somebody else — not Bob, not the boy, not the other man — are here after everyone is supposed to have left. Now it’s an industrial kitchen equipment show. Participants are setting up the show, bringing things in, screwing legs on prep-tables and attaching water and gas pipes. A no-nonsense security-type guy kicks us out.

We go out the side of the warehouse; it’s like where the grammar school was where I went to seventh grade crossed with the parking lot area of the Cow Palace in San Francisco. We come to a corner of fences where the path is blocked by a fallen tree held up above the ground by ends I can’t see. I could go under it but I jump up on top and jump down the other side. That is easier for my stiff back.

Things return to the fleamarket time. Two girls are here in a confluence of couches for sale. I tell them about the old AM radio station’s monaural compressor. I gesture to demonstrate the size of the giant VU meter in the middle of the front, and, “When you opened the back it had like 200 vacuum tubes in it…” The girls are not even slightly interested; they wander away as I say, “It sounded like honey. It sounded like Bing Crosby.” One of them says something sarcastic with /Bing Crosby/ in it.

The warehouses become an unfinished factory or refinery. Retroactively, I had finished assembling a complicated plastic-pipe-inside-a-plastic-pipe part with a bend in it. Now I’ve sneaked back into this place to /fix it right/, but with it apart again, and the bends in it, and the parts-inside-parts, and how close it is to the wall where pipes come to it and go back out, it can’t be put back on once it’s off again, and I don’t have a pipe cutter nor pipe glue. I have some parts, couplers and things, but a coupler wouldn’t work because, see above, there is a pipe inside the pipe with a threaded end that needs to be screwed in to the next part, and that needs to go in first and then the other things put on over and around it, the way I did it before… /I’m trying to figure out a way to do this with what I have./ Also I’m like twelve years old here and my neighborhood juvenile delinquent friends are standing around waiting impatiently for me to finish so we can go play somewhere else.

A suspicious big strange man in a hard hat saunters in smoking a cigarette. This is after I experimented with breathing in some of the oxygen coming out of the pipe (no effect) because I can’t get to where to turn it off and I’m trying to fix it while it leaks… The man comes to the foot of the ladder I’m on, looks at my work, and says, “What are you doing about the T.O.C. levels.” I don’t know what that is. I shake my head like I’m too busy to answer him. He says, “You’re not doing anything with the /T.O.C/ question?”

I say no. I gesture down to my friends to take a picture of the man so we can tell them about him at the front gate. We might get in trouble for being here, but I’m sure the man is up to no good, and I don’t want to be responsible for anything happening to the plant.

I woke up worrying about the leaking oxygen and the man’s cigarette. There wasn’t that much leaking and he was not right next to the leak but in hindsight the cigaret here was another indication that he was no engineer. He was a spy, all right.

Next dream. I’m riding on a flat square lawnmower-like motorized skateboard thing where you sit with one leg bent sideways and one knee up. The brake is a tiny finger lever by the front right wheel and the throttle is a finger lever by the back left wheel. It goes pretty fast. This is fun to ride. I go to a chrome-and-glass-and-brightly-painted-masonite restaurant that I was told needs workers.

A pretty, gray-haired woman backs out from parking to leave. I have to go wide around her car. She looks appreciatively at my toy vehicle. /She would like to try it./

Inside the Chinese restaurant the first room is a loading dock area. I’m a time traveler or an interdimensional traveler from a corrective agency. I’m pretending that I already work here, in order to adjust where black phone wires goes into a gas-pipe-controlling machine low on one wall. The enemies of my agency have rigged it to explode somehow. I can’t fix it in time. I run away deeper into the restaurant telling everyone to clear out /that way/. In the corner of my eye, but more like in a quick cut of the movie story of this, somebody or something pulls a restaurant guy away from the bomb and out of the picture, so I assume /that guy will be coming back later in the story./

The neighborhood and city of all this is mostly two-and-three-story apartments like some places in L.A. when I was little. It’s not a rich place but it’s a hopeful future where, except for the bomb, things feel light, there’s a pastel gentleness; it’s easy to live and not have to worry about medical problems or food or shelter or anything. It’s Venice, where the artists live.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–06–07:

First dream. I’ve come into Mendocino from the north on foot. I’m not sure why, but my goal is Heider Field, or where Heider Field should be. I go through a weedy yard around the south side of the old Dutch bakery. Some street people are standing by the fence at the sidewalk, talking. At the back of the yard, next to the hole in the fence I’ll have to go through, is a big canvas backpack with the bottom flap open. I take an artistic deck of playing cards out and admire them, but realize that I just went in somebody’s pack, and I put them back. Nobody noticed, but I feel like apologizing, so I get the guy’s attention (one of the people by the street, a skinny, crackhead-looking guy) and /now/ the problem starts. He’s like, “Why did you do it!” I say, “I don’t know, but I did it and I apologize and now I’m leaving.”

In the middle of town where in real life there’s mainly nothing but the post office, here are massive hotel-like buildings made of old timbers. I float-fly over a fence into the backyard of a nunnery, where nuns are inside a picture window having a conference around an office table. I fly over the plants and grass in the yard. There’s a short decorative brick wall for roses to grow against. The yard is organized and well-kept but there’s a single wild sticker bush. One of the nuns comes out to shoo me away and I have a conversation with her about how they (meaning religious businesspeople) clean every environment up so you can’t make any decisions except ones they like. “And there’s always a berry bush with stickers on it because that teaches you a lesson…” Does she get it? Or does she roll her eyes and go back in? I don’t know and I don’t care — I’ve already flown up over everything. I rocket away to the east.

I’m at an afternoon football game in a newish football stadium for a public school. I climb the hill next to the bleachers, go to the school buildings, modern brutal concrete rectangles; the walkways and aprons are paved with concrete not asphalt. I come to the main building where the principal’s likely to have his or her office; I should find whoever’s in charge here and talk them into hiring me to teach people to fly… But I’m wearing only a long t-shirt, um, that fortunately comes down to my thighs. Still, I’ll have to walk close past classroom windows. I’d be more persuasive if I fly to wherever I live and get my pants. So — what year is this, where am I, and where do I live now?

Three security policemen stand patiently guarding the building, about thirty feet apart. I go to the one on the right and say, “You seem very familiar… You’re Grant Rudolf!” He says, “Yeah!” and he’s smiling, all happy to see me. I say, “But you were older than you are now and that was the 1980s. /How?/” He shrugs. He’s smaller now, redheaded, balding in the front, close-set eyes, not at all like Grant Rudolf.

The song playing in my head as I woke up was /You got me singing the blues./ I heard it a night or two ago in an episode of /Northern Exposure/.

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–06–09:

I go into a school-like place’s entryway. A sarcastic-looking man comes in, sits on a couch by the window. I say to him, “I’m confused about where I am.” Rather than tell me where this is, he laughs to himself in contempt of me. As I go back out the door I say to him, “Thanks, bitch.”

Here’s a parking lot like the one at the hospital; past it and across a park of grass are some buildings like the British Parliament place. Big older high-school boys mill around at the part of the lot near the driveway out. Some of them are in long leather or wool robes. /This is not the right world./

I have a regular skateboard with a small gas-powered lawnmower engine balanced on the back end of it. The boys all start walking at me menacingly. I pull the motor’s starter rope and /zoom/ away out the driveway.

In another place in this /wrong world/ I’m inside a shopping mall-like entryway of three sets of wide doors with heat locks (more doors further on), that give the impression of once being car washes that you’d drive through. The person with me (?) and I are waiting for the others (?) so that we can get out — first, get out of this shopping mall and then get out of this wrong world to the right one.

The people here are polite and don’t pay any attention to us even though our clothes don’t conform to the apparent local rules. People here use their /pants/ to show what profession they’re in. For example, one person has pants that are denim on one leg and leather on the other leg, and that means he’s an auto mechanic. Reverse the legs, he’d be a blacksmith. Something like that. It’s a semaphore system.

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