2023–07–03 through 07–11

My dreams from Monday, 2023–07–03. Faking it. Biblical gardens. Wobble.

First dream. I feel my way through a series of dark rooms on the outside window-wall of a long building in a dim forest wilderness. I come to my early-morning appointment to teach/deliver a vaguely familiar Dickens(?) Christmas poem/story to a class of kids of all ages in a cluttered beer-bar-like place. I begin by intoning like an old fraud actor: “It was so long ago I forget /exactly/ how it goes, but… ah…” A big clever teenage girl senses my distress at not remembering even how it starts; she covers for me by saying the first line, and she gestures for the next kid to say the next line, and so on. This works great. As each line comes, I remember it and say it along with them, each time surprised I actually know it, but continuing to fake it. (Now, later, writing this down, it’s all gone. I don’t think it was The Night Before Christmas or the Scrooge story or anything like that. It could even have been part of the Jean Shepherd beebee gun story.)

In a room farther along in the same building, but less wood and more bare concrete, I’m teaching science to two or three kids. I’ve already done one class here, where I dropped baking soda and vegetable oil in the four-inch-deep still water of the whole floor. It reacted somehow and spread outward to demonstrate the Big Bang origin of the universe. While I’m trying to imagine how to get the oil out of the water so the effect will work when I do it again for this class, one of the kids, a boy, has got regular dirt from outside and he drops the dirt in. It works as well as the baking soda and oil did, but it’s not as beautiful now that the day is so evenly light out. I’d like to cover the the windows, but with what?

Next dream. The rooms from before are immensely bigger, outdoors, and walled with stone ruins and pillars of ancient aqueducts. I fly up and backward, upright, by the power of clenching my fists at my sides, and land many rooms away in another part of history, where monk-scholars who look like serious scholarly Three Stooges have dry-gardened a tourist-attraction maze on Biblical themes. When Medieval horse soldier/aliens slowly, harmlessly but ominously invade I fly farther into the past and find a place to hide in a natural hut made of shrubs woven together. Two dog-like bad-taxidermy lions, one as big as a pony, one the size of a sheep, creak-walk into the hut and face off, involved in their cat-rivalry, not stalking me, but disconcerting. I test using a small amount of flying power to just nudge the big lion a little farther away from me, and that works, but even on the lowest setting it’s rough on the lion. I don’t want to hurt the animals. I should leave and fly somewhere else. I’ve already lost my familiar world and time; it doesn’t matter where I go now. And I have a defensive power. I’ll be fine. I’ll deal with whatever comes when I get there. Find a place to live and settle in and then figure out what to do. Make friends. Make a living as a wizard without being burned as a witch.

Next dream. I’ve just bought an old car to go driving in green European mountains. The car is like one Juanita used to have — a faded-green 1967 Datsun four-door. (I don’t know if the link will last, but it looked like this: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/793407659335461140/ ) The road turns downhill. A big wobble develops in the ride that slows the car like rhythmically tapping the brakes. In a turnout by the rock guardrail I examine the wheels. I can freely hand-wiggle the top of the front-right wheel left and right by inches. The bolts are all tight; the wheel’s fastened on right. The problem is that the frame of the car is rusted through where the suspension attaches. I remember there’s a law in California that if you’ve only had a car for a day or two and discover a big problem like this, the sales lot has to refund your money, but this is Europe. And how will I get the car back to the lot? Where even is it?

I woke up with the Hollies’ song /All I Need Is The Air That I Breathe/ playing in my head.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–07–04:

First dream. A big complicated 3D maze-like house under construction has burned down. Afterward, a skinny, competent detective like Joe Miller of /The Expanse/ is piecing together that the heart-of-gold wild criminal guy /didn’t/ burn to death with his dogs and ducks here, but set the fire himself and cleverly escaped. I participate in the detective’s rewind-and-run-through point of view; we turn the /other/ way from the way it was assumed the criminal went, we stumble and crash straight down through a ladder of flaming slats into the basement, run through a maze of rooms, and there’s the obvious basement window out. That’s how he did it. But the ducks, and the dogs — I can’t believe he sacrificed them for this, to fake his own death. I’ll bet he took them with him. Outside are connected gray concrete empty water reservoirs set in the ground. I balance along the edges of this to climb the hill. I won’t arrest the criminal; I’ll just catch him and let him go.

Next dream. I’m packing to go to a summer camp. I never want to go to anything like this, but it’s required. There’s no limit on luggage, so I add my thick red bathrobe, for walking around in the woods at night.

Now I’m unpacking on a park bench at the edge of a cliff. Far below, under eucalyptus trees, some kids have had a car accident. I fly down there. I’ll take the coma girl to the hospital. They’re all, /What hospital?/ I say, “Near where Douglas [Boulevard] goes over the freeway.” The girl’s mother is here; she insists on going along, and someone else wants to go. I say, “I can’t carry all of you. I’ll see you there. Get out of the way.” I pick the girl up in my arms. Everybody grabs onto my pants-belt and my arms. I put the girl down and gesture to them, /What’s the matter with you. Let me save her./ They won’t let go. Ah — this was a trap. (Sigh.)

Next dream. At a bench-table in the side yard of a strange, nice suburban house, I show my (dead) salesman-dressed-and-shaved stepfather Roland how speech-to-text works, reading a newspaper article into my phone to demonstrate. He leads me to a computer in the grass that’s like a 1970s plastic shelf-stereo. It’s the 1970s now. They gave this to him at his new job and he’s supposed to learn how to use it. He hands me a pencil-written page for me to make a document file of it. (He doesn’t want to learn. He wants me to do the assignment for him.) He did enough things for me over the years that he probably didn’t want to do. I say sure, okay, and put the paper in my pocket. I’ll do it tomorrow.

Next day, inside, the house is a business suite of Mad Men or radio station offices and office politics. A mean heavy bald boss loudly complains to a dwarf worker that Roland was supposed to make the file /yesterday/. They discuss this. They don’t care who hears. They don’t care if Roland hears. He’s an insect to them. They’re going to fire him anyway.

In a room like the children’s Lego toy room of Juanita’s friends, where we went to a New Year’s Eve party some years ago, I show a child-version of a mean dwarf (from an earlier dream? from a movie?) how I can use telekinesis to float a child-size chair in the air and spin it end over end. A boy and a girl, regular children, replace the child-dwarf. The boy demands that the person here who replaced /me/ use magic to take the metal end off the handle of a toy sword and heat-smear the remaining blue-green plastic into a knob on the end, instead. The person standing in for me accomplishes this. The boy smiles /gotcha!/, throws a fit, yells, “I didn’t actually say /do/ it, stupid!”

I’m outside again. The house and yard are on the ocean now. There are beautiful redwood trees to the south. Doug Nunn of Hit and Run Theater comes here and asks me about what I learned in the office. He’s interested in my take on what sort of people live and work here /in this timeline/. Retroactively I met some of the others of the business and talked with them in a conference and in the lunchroom. I say, “I like the girl. Guileless.” He’d like some more about this. I know he knows what guileless means. I explain guilelessness with a straight face, like making a joke of explaining a joke, to make it clear the girl is not stupid. She’s just not mean and competing for every inch and advantage like everyone else in the world. It’s significant that she thrives there. That means the place can’t be all bad. This is the sort of information Doug was looking for.

To the south an openwork shiny metal truss-bridge pier sticks out to sea. It’s an event rental venue that’s having a car show now. Attendees flow past beautiful space-age 1960s cars. I can almost smell them, the people like wet flour, the cars like new plastic and WD-40.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–07–05:

First dream. I’m finished recording a concert in a place like Cotton Auditorium but it’s turned the other way and refurbished like a new college auditorium. I’m packing up my equipment: long microphone cables, the compressor/limiter I built in 1985, the double-speed cassette deck I had then, but no microphones — they had their own, hanging from the light bar. It’s 10:30pm. There’s another concert next door (?) at 11pm. Plenty of time to set up for that, except every time I look at my watch now it says a different time; something’s wrong with it again. That’s okay. I know how long a half-hour is, and how long it takes to set up.

Next dream. I’m in a cluttered old attic with a strange girl who just moved in here to live. My job is to make it habitable for her. I take the cover off a hatch down into the house. It’s made of old, decomposed particleboard reinforced with three pieces of plywood. Moving it hinges it on the lines where plywood comes together. This won’t last and it’s not safe. I’m thinking about finding a single piece of good thick plywood to replace this, and I’ll put metal handles on both ends of both sides of it.

The girl asks me how I hurt my fingers. (There are bandaids and splints on my left hand.) I say, “You mean lately or my whole life?” While she thinks about whether or not that’s a joke, I think about /all the times in my life I’ve hurt my fingers,/ as well as trying to imagine how to cover or warning-sign the dangerous hole while I’m out making a new hatch. I breathe shallowly because attic spaces and dry old wood, especially dry old redwood and old particleboard, always makes me cough. I should have worn my covid mask here.

Next dream. I’m in a room shaped like the attic in the previous dream but down in a house, with a window to a strange backyard. I’m in bed with an old-desert-prospector-like man. In the dream, we’re in a sex relationship, which doesn’t feel weird because of being homosexual but rather because I don’t feel anything at all for this person, so how is it possible that I’m here?

He gets on top of me and wants to have sex. I scootch backward and sit up. He says, “What. It’s Sunday. There’s no work tomorrow.” I say, “I just don’t feel like it.” I don’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings, but I’m looking around for my clothes, to get dressed and get out of here and never come back. (Unless we’re the last two people on Earth and that’s why we’re together. I can’t remember if that’s true, though. I can’t really remember ever having sex with him before, nor who he is. Even if we’re the last people on Earth, I need to get away, in case I’ve been brainwashed or drugged into being here.

—

My dreams from a nap Wednesday night:

First dream. I’m in a spectator-sport cross-country event, teamed with my high-school friend Randy. We have downhill skis on, and backpacks, but it’s summer-dry California hills. Many spectators are watching — their view is close but they’re invisible.

We come to a flat rock downhill off the edge of a precipice. Below, a ruined both-paved-and-gravel road goes farther downhill to the left. Randy rushes forward, dangles off the edge of the rock with his arm clasped with mine. He swings and kicks out to drop but it’s too far and I don’t let go, so he swings back and his arm bends backward. I let go. He falls. He’s okay. I have to go down there now. It’s even farther down than before. If I drop already going to the left, the slope will take up some of the drop, but it’s still too far. I’ll just fly down…

Juanita’s voice said something confusing and woke me up. In the real world, she was in the kitchen. She says she didn’t say anything.

Next dream. The actor who played a big, bald, rage-filled father in an episode of /Lie To Me/ is in a story where he’s out for vengeance against someone in an Old West frontier town whose street is nonetheless paved. It’s been raining. He merges with a big girl so the combination-person of them comes along the deep edge of the submerged road, walking chest-deep in black water. By the time they get out of the water the girl has absorbed him to the point where she’s all that’s left, and she’s not out of control the way he was. Still, she has to kill someone behind me and to my left. She lifts a futuristic ray weapon from the strap at her side, adjusts and cocks it. The weapon: it’s like a person who designed normal 1960s motorcycles was assigned to make a cartoon futuristic rifle-shaped plasma-fire shotgun. It’s shiny and has a pressure tank and black metal frame pipes.

I woke up with Enya /Ebudae/ playing in my head.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–07–11:

First dream. I’m with someone else at an abandoned line of homeless-person-type travel trailers in a remote desert or seaside plain of low sand dunes. The trailers are mostly wood, dried out, sunbleached, and there’s a raised deck, like a land pier, going past them. It’s bleak here, with a silent breeze that stops and starts.

There’s the sense that this will become an archeology/historical site. Kids come here in a car to look around. I hope they don’t vandalize anything. A tourist family comes here — mom and dad and some kids. People wander around. They’re all respectful of the age and significance of the place.

For some reason I’m lying prone under the deck now, floating a little above the ground, gently scrabbling forward through a kind of greenish-gray snow of four-inch-long brittle fibers from sun-decomposed lawn-chair plastic webbing.

Next dream. It’s night. I go into the printer room at work from the northwest. In the dream, the whole compound is busy with people going from place to place with purpose. My employer Tim uses me to help him try to network early-1980s-era IBM computers with unfamiliar tech boxes. He watches one computer on a test bench while I push switches on a panel across the room and declare which one I’m pushing now. This resolves nothing, but I excitedly call him over to show that I’ve discovered which button to push twice to make the panel’s far-left yellow light toggle on or off. Tim waves /meh/, and leaves to attend to something else. Should I keep messing with things? I’m useless at this. I should sign out of it and instead do something I’m useful at.

I go to get a tall ladder from close to the center of a dim empty warehouse. Waitress Diane (from when I worked at Brannon’s in the early 1980s) has been working on something up above the ladder. Before I get there she climbs down and goes away past me. Our arms brush, and both stop and look, think about this. This isn’t Diane but someone similar. We’re both young. Are we supposed to kiss? I don’t know.

Next dream. In a fancy but hippie-built rough-bare-wood restaurant convention center complex in dry California hills, I go up stairs in an outside alcove to get to the back door in. Where the stairs angle around a clump of tall dry weeds, here’s a string of horse-hair plant fiber on fire, stuck by one end to the stair/fence rail. I pull it loose, ball it up in my hands to put it out. A girl in a waitress suit comes out. I tell her to get someone to hose all this down and clear these dry weeds out. She goes back inside. I find a hose and a spigot, screw the hose on, turn the water on. A maintenance man appears, takes the hose out of my hand and uses it for what I was just going to.

I have to piss! Inside the building I find a bathroom. A boy pushes in past me. I swear at him and call him a bitch, but give him the room and wait outside the door. The waitress chides me for swearing, calls me by name. Oh. They know me here but I don’t know them. I must be old and demented.

The boy comes out. I go in. It’s not a bathroom anymore but more of a horse stable. The toilet is a rectangular hole in the floor against the exposed foundation of the next, higher, attached building. I push planks and detritus out of the way with my shoe, saying, “Why cover it with cowboy hats and shingles?” A woman at a table nearby with others repeats it, brays a laugh, and makes that phrase the mascot of their literary discussion.

Next dream. I’m having my usual daydream experience of a story — thinking about it and extrapolating it in my head. There’s no book or movie, but something like those things has started this. It’s about people who call others antisemitic for even mentioning the plight of Palestinians, who are as Semitic as anybody there. The visual metaphor I construct is: a sympathetic but ethics-challenged higher power drags a line of black rope — or a miles-long stuffed black sock — sideways over a map of a band-of-white-sand country. There are crowds of tiny dots, each one representing a person. What will the rope do, make everyone nice? No, my view zooms in to see the rope has the effect of stretching and molding the dots of people into grotesque black blobby stick figures fleeing as if from plague or fire and dropping dead.

(I woke up buzzing with anxiety about Juanita still being sick and depressed, and worried about everything in our lives there is to worry about right now. The buzzing in my skin was somehow connected with the gas-powered weedwhackers or leaf blowers or whatever they were using in the industrial yard next door.)

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