2023–08–05 through 09–29

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–08–15: Our Town. Synthesizer museum.

A family of scientists and apocalypse survivors is traveling in a camping vehicle across the desert. Before the smash there was broadcast power, and it’s still on, but erratic and breaking down. They’ve found a way to momentarily shut it off on purpose by remote, and they’re using that to locate the source so they can fix it right.

Elsewhere a little boy and girl are living in a miniature-golf-like small house fake neighborhood inside an empty warehouse. There’s a sinister lord machine system represented by a mutable moving shape in the air — sometimes a part-question-mark, sometimes a teevee-screen shape, sometimes a simplified little animal. The lord-thing and other vague machine parts (the lord thing’s minions) all have shut off for a moment. The lord-thing is alerted by this to bring the children along to find and crush the human resistance to its power. It makes sandwiches for the children and gives them all sorts of things to carry. The little boy gets a big bag of like a hundred pounds of food and water and machines. I take over for him, become him, and pick up the bag.

We’re on a dirt road next to a fence, like the fence around the perimeter of the sound-stage in the 1940s movie version of /Our Town/. The shape-thing is plotting murder and communicating silently with other machines everywhere. I hope the scientist family gets to the power first and shuts them all off in time, but it’ll be close.

Next dream. In a nice climate in like the Sacramento Valley, I walk to a giant metal warehouse that has wide walkways in it between rows of synthesizers and musical keyboards. I’m attracted to a big-desk-size keyboard with smooth white flat old-electronic-organ-stop-like toggle keys in sections across the top control surface, beyond the piano keyboard, all labeled with different combinations of three letters. A calm rich man comes to show me how to turn the machine on and shakes out latex gloves for me to wear to handle it.

Two happy, friendly big black dogs, one more border collie-like, one more Lab-like come around and run back and forth under the tables. I play with them, ignoring the man’s rapid instructions about the machine. He has to go away for awhile; he says, “Any questions?” Sure, I have some questions: 1. Where’s the restroom in case I need it later? 2. Can I walk away from the machine with it on and come back to it, and it’ll still work, and no-one else will have taken over? 3. Where is it okay for me to sleep? I know that the man will provide food later. I’m not worried about that. Also I plot to magically just understand how to use the keyboard and produce some amazing musical composition with and impress the man with it when he comes back later.

I woke up with a jumble of chip-tunes Emerson Lake and Palmer and Electric Light Orchestra music playing in my head, especially the plinky piano part at the end of /The Sheriff/ by Emerson Lake and Palmer.

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–08–16: Loft vultures. Bohemian art-life odyssey.

I’m young, in a strange college class. I say, “Oh, no!” and the other kids are annoyed that I don’t explain what upset me, so a girl says, “Who hates this guy?” (meaning, who else besides she hates me). What happened was, I just remembered that after a vague earlier part of the dream of going through LP records and boxes of tapes and all, Juanita and I didn’t move them from the giant top floor of the loft place we moved out of, that other people were already moving around in, to move in? or to just find something they wanted. So all of those things are lost now. I don’t mind about the records, but the tapes were my old music projects. /Fuck./

Somewhere near the college I’m in an old, bleak, dim metal warehouse that feels like the back rooms of an army surplus store in the 1970s. I find a cage-closet of I and other people I know made long ago. I say to a tech guy behind me, “Do you want this?” (It’s a small radio-project enclosure with a pile of things on it: old metal-magnet crackly-paper speakers, small parts. He surprises me by taking them. I’m like, whatever — what was /I/ going to do with them?

In another, newer, more modern college, a woman like Mary Aigner, who used to be the program director of KZYX, is talking with a man next to glass doors. It’s late at night; there’s nobody else around. I go out into moss-grass. A door to the next wing of the building has no knob or lever outside but a crash bar inside; it’s open. I shut it — it springs open an inch. I kick and smash at it, but it won’t latch. I go back and tell the woman, “That door needs to be locked from the inside.” She doesn’t care. I tell her again. She looks at me, annoyed. I tell her again.

Next dream. In an old brick-and-rusty-iron building in the factory part of a deserted, defunct big city I’m browsing through tabled rows of antique metal and wood art things. Here’s a long box whose function is for all the cut-out key-shapes and other thick and thin metal strips in a row across the front to fall off, revealing /inside/ metal hardware that represent famous people and movies stars of the early 1900s up to John Wayne. It’s clever. Would Juanita like this for her birthday? (And where would we put it?) Juanita comes near. I say, “Do you like this?” She’s like, meh.

Juanita vanishes. I’m in another part of these old buildings. It’s night now and weird squatters are having a 1960s drug party. How do I get out of here? A gay fake-vampire guy wants me to follow him through a narrow room to get out. I’m not going in there with him — but what if that really is the way out? Well, I have acquired an antique metal toy sword that would actually be useful as a little sword. I brandish it for effect and follow the guy. Also I have stolen a valuable painted tapestry thing. As I go I clumsily roll it up with one hand and try to stuff it up inside my shirt to get away with it. Vampire guy vanishes. I get out into the place where the art box was, and here’s the way out. Thanks.

Outside it’s daytime now. The whole city is ancient brick buildings and ashes and rusty metal. People are picking through a dumpster area in a dry dirt yard. /Here are Juanita’s and my LP records/, but picked over; all the good ones are gone. That’s okay, we never played them anymore anyway. But the tapes of my music projects. Even if they’re here, I’ll never find them.

Now I’m in a big old Victorian house that hasn’t been lived in (nor cleaned) in probably fifty years. I vacuum around one room with a hose vacuum. The metal hose end ruins and intricate old sideways-catenary-thread-bead curtain, but I get the horrible dust out of it. I’m thinking, /Can Juanita and I live here?/ The paint is probably all lead paint; the crumbling wallboard is probably all asbestos. There’s wide ditch of dirt, dust and wall crumbs along the wall edges of this filthy ancient carpet… Maybe if we only live here for a little while it won’t hurt us.

In another room, that feels like the very front part of my grandparents’ Italian restaurant when I was little, I show a strange woman the vacuum cleaner’s collector box, inside another box. It’s a terrarium diorama of mountains of dust and paint chips and purple beads.

Later I’m driving in like San Francisco in the 1950s. I have a car like the 1963 three-on-the-tree Rambler that I liked so much, that I had in real life in 1981. It’s running great. Every part of it is loose and rattles, but it feels /reliable/, and I understand it; I know how every part of it works.

The steering wheel is creased over so it’s too close to my chest. I bend it back straight. There, good.

I drive past a modified old Fort Mustang that an artist has attached plastic plate body parts to, to pad it out into a different shape. That’s interesting.

I’m just enjoying driving around, up and down hills. If I see a pawn shop I’ll stop and buy an electric guitar amp, or a banjo, or a .22 rifle, or whatever attracts me. An oboe, maybe; I’ve always wanted to try to play an oboe.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Smile/. “Smile though your heart is aching. Smile though your will is breaking. Though there be clouds in the sky, we’ll get by…”

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–08–21: Lightness of being. Ripped off.

First dream. It’s evening. I’m in a grass yard of different little experimental-seeming houses on the edge of a plateau. Some college kids have just moved into a two-story box-house with a flat roof that’s meant to get up on and sit there. I climb up and declare it a good idea

I climb down the outside, swing around the corner timber and jump lightly down the last ten feet. Well, bye. I go down around the hill, to the right, to start walking back to where I’m supposed to be, but the valley is so pretty and green and wild and big that I step off the hillside into the air with my arms out like airplane wings, glide out and down, curve right. Here’s a high bridge to go under. Here’s the other river from the next valley over. I just barely make it to the right side of that river, land and lie down in the sand.

Children get out of school or camp or church from a rustic camp building. Some of them play jumping games near me. I’m dozing, but when I open my eyes I smile politely so the kids’ supervisors won’t think I’m a creep.

I should get up and continue on my way. Older trouble kids are all tearing off uphill out of the parking lot in their rough home-made-looking cars. I wait for a time between batches of cars, and run up the dirt road. The hill gets steeper and steeper until I’m precariously perched on the high part of a cliffside cabin, holding onto the base of a little tree at the point of the ridge. Trying to climb up pulls the tree loose from crumbly soil and it falls aside. There are other trees — maybe they’re better fastened. No. One by one they all fall, and I’m not on top, and the cabin is starting to come loose… I need to get up there, to go along the ridge and continue north, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I had to glide back down to the school or church or camp and try again tomorrow.

Next dream. I and someone else, a generic friend, have been at a science event in a simplified Roman-architecture version of Washington D.C. in East Coast mountains. It’s night, late, our car is the only one left out on the curving road past a vista point.

The car is a 1960s station wagon. The driver’s side back seat window is has been sprung out a little at the top by a thief. All our camping supplies and clothes and our sleeping bags are gone. The soft, roll-up, whole-top roof panel has been ripped loose and stolen, so there’s no roof at all. At least they didn’t take the wheels and tires; we can get around even in the cold if the engine starts and the heater works. Did they siphon out the gas? No. The car starts, the gas needle is halfway up.

A black cop car comes up the curve. I shut off the car and wave them here to tell them about the vandalism and theft, not that they can help at all.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–08–22: Time ritual. Recycling.

First dream. Close to where Rossi’s Building Materials is, in a dream-only office building, there’s an elevator-size room that has a ceremonial time-travel portal. Once a year you go in there and look through a hole in one upper corner to get a glimpse into the future. But this time there’s a malevolent feeling coming from the time hole. I can’t see him, but a man is looking down, thinking to come /here/ somehow and cause trouble, maybe wreck history, maybe murder and eat people. I bluff, growling upward crazily: “I’m coming to kill yooooooooooo!”

Here, in bed in the real world Juanita kicked backward at my leg with her heel to wake me up. I said, “Sorry. Sorry.” Later I asked her what I was doing that made her wake me up. She said I was shaking and obviously in distress. I said, “What did it sound like I was saying?” She said, “I think you were whining and whimpering for help.”

Next dream. In a cross between the neighborhood where we lived when I was in fifth grade in Carmichael, and where we lived when I was in seventh grade, at almost where I crashed the neighbor kid’s go-kart into a Corvair and ripped my leg open on the broken-off steering wheel, I’m someone else, not myself, but a boy gathering up recycling to sell it. I’m in the Pace’s yard that’s strewn with round clear-plastic eight-ounce containers. I only have so many trash bags, so I get really good fast at scooping the containers up so they nest in long cylinders to take up less space. Someone in a truck to my right says something to the boy, who I’m outside of now, and he hurries even faster, proud of how efficient he is.

I woke up realizing that the orchestral music playing from the truck radio in the dream was the tune to /Send In the Clowns/.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–08–24: Bereaved Scottish monster. Lock mess.

Mendocino is bleak and empty and, instead of coming to cliffs at the ocean, slopes a long straight way out and down to the water. I go down to a house there for some reason, though wind is making the water come in higher and higher. I turn back up and run.

At a safe level, by another house’s fence, I’ve taken a Master combination lock entirely apart like a Chinese puzzle, to fix it. A man-size non-human creature is worried about his mate. I somehow know that she was down in the house that’s now underwater. I tell the creature that his mate is dead, drowned. I don’t know that, but I don’t want the creature to run down there and drown, too.

The lock mechanism becomes weird. There’s a layer of cardboard fish paper that’s supposed to go in — on /this/ side of that ring of metal, or /that/ side? And it’s cut on one end to have rectangular sections stick out and fold sideways. Which way?

The creature is going to run down there and drown. No. I say, “Stay here. I’ll go.”

Next dream. I’m in bed in what was the dining room in the house where we lived on Clay Street in Fresno after my mother married Roland. In the dream, my mother is cooking giant diseased-looking bloody raviolis to store in foot-tall pickle jars. She’s her real age, in her nineties, but she’s pregnant. She goes into another kitchen, past where the real house ended, and she calls back from there that I should /get up/ or she will [gibberish words for /terminate the pregnancy/ in favor of whatever she’s cooking now].

I turn on my side and shuffle through a pile of unfamiliar newspapers, looking for a comics section, or maybe a section that has writers like the ones I liked in the San Francisco Chronicle back when it was twenty cents daily and almost an inch thick.

Roland comes through the room, dressing, getting ready to go to work. I go into the other kitchen. My mother is gone. The microwave oven is somehow cooking a platter of halved potatoes that’s outside, in front of it. I go near to turn it off and this is faintly but ominously prickly-painful in my finger joints and the flesh of my arms. Back away. Think it over. Run to it and yank out the plug. At this point in the dream I remember the real-life mysterious burn on my arm from a few weeks ago and I wonder: /Is this how I burned myself?/ (It wasn’t. I figured that out later when I did it again by sloppily spilling spaghetti through the colander and splashing.)

The house is even longer now and has become an old-people’s facility. I’m old, and my strange dream-only elderly wife or girlfriend and I are a team playing a card game against another couple, sitting on wooden crates at a table made of a big utility-company wooden spool for cable. I get up to go get something and carelessly show my cards. That’s okay; I can still win. I’ll be right back.

Throughout all that, or maybe only injected here with the memory of it being throughout all that, I’m worrying over the lock assembly from the previous dream. I still can’t decide what order to put the layers of parts in. No matter what order I use, it all fits. Just press the case closed and try it? What’s this, now — instructions of a folded bit of white paper for how to set the combination to be whatever you want it to be. Did they all always let you do this? I think of the locks I had in high school for the various lockers in the hallway and in the gym. I remember their combinations all had a lot of sixes in them. One was 16–6–36. I remember being embarrassed by not being able to stop myself from going to the office to ask if I could have a locker next to a girl I thought was pretty. I don’t remember her name now. But then, the woman at the counter drew the questions and the process out to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore, snapped, said, “Never mind!” and fled.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–08–25: Tartan. Learning to throw.

Juanita and I are in a multiplex movie-theater-like environment, but we’re going to a play. I’m barefoot in my pajamas, tagging along behind Juanita. We don’t have tickets. This feels like when I was little and my mother would take me places — concerts, whatever — with the attitude that were just as good as anybody else and we could go wherever we wanted, I was always embarrassed about it, but there was never any trouble. Nobody ever kicked us out; we just went in and sat down and that was that.

The theater is full. We slide down one side between the seats and wall to sit with others on the floor in front of the first row. There’s no room for me, so I wedge in on my side under the front seats on the end. My head is very close to the head of a person now lying across the front seats, because he’s sick, with a tartan blanket on him. I don’t have a covid mask.

I get up and scoot back up between the seats and the wall and go to the restroom. It’s crowded, and the urinals are strange, at different heights and in different shapes, with hoods over them. I can’t find one to piss into where the hood isn’t so low that I can’t piss up under it. I eventually give up and piss in a metal oil-change tray on the floor, which floats up and moves because now the floor is like a flat, shallow concrete creek flushing with piss and water from everybody else. It washes over my bare feet. It isn’t cold or warm or weird or anything; this is just the way they do it here in Ireland in a theater restroom.

Later at night I’ve gone out into a bleak foggy deserted place that’s like the feeling I get from Van Morrison’s song /Bulbs/. I go back to the theater. I’ve been out for hours. Juanita is angry because she was worried about me. She’s like, /Normal people don’t just vanish and then not call or say anything./ I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stand being there anymore and I had to leave, and I didn’t want your phone to ring in the show, so… (It was /Music Man/, I realize now.)

Next dream. I’m in a place in the same dream-Ireland but that’s indoors and like a cold-climate bowling alley or some kind of town or school recreation facility. It’s a very wide space with nothing holding up the ceiling in the middle. Two pairs of boys are throwing big heavy pool-table balls back and forth like baseballs. They have baseball gloves. There’s a boy with a glove and some balls ready to throw balls back and forth with /me/. I don’t have a glove. I catch the balls like reverse throwing, absorbing the speed of the ball by jerking my hand backward. That works fine but the balls are too heavy for /me/ to throw. I heft one the size of a softball, drop it, say I don’t think I can throw that one. I try some of the others, pick the lightest and throw it but it falls short. My arm is so weak. I say, “You’ll think this is weird, an American who can’t throw a ball…”

The other person becomes a red-haired girl with a strange head that slopes backward like a Mayan deity, but pretty. She’s at the concession stand where you rent equipment and buy hotdogs and soda. She’s swishing something around in her mouth, trying to get something out that’s stuck inside. I say, “Would you show me how to throw properly.” She looks sideways at me, swishing and choking. I say, “Would you mind showing me how to do this?” I smile and shake the ball. This interaction feels gentle and clever like the way a boy and girl meet in a movie and you know they’re supposed to be together. She smiles around the problem in her mouth. She’ll be happy to show me how to throw a heavy pool ball, but cleaning her mouth out is taking so long. It’s spoiling the moment.

—

My dream from Sunday, 2023–08–27: Two Cadillacs.

In a post-apocalypse world I and someone else have come to a cattle-pen-like bus stop. The other person has a big military rifle; I have a small, light child’s .22 rifle. We know there’s an organized colony/gang somewhere around here. The leader of the gang shows up to capture us. He’s a tough-looking black man. Somehow the gun my friend has means nothing. The man focuses on me and my pitifully underpowered gun. He picks up a rock and a five-pound exercise dumbbell and says, “Which do you think will do more damage?” Meaning, if I shoot him and he hits me with the dumbbell, say, who will win? I think, I’d have to shoot him in the eye or the neck to win… I don’t want to do that. I say, “Okay, fine. We’ll go with you.”

Everything’s relaxed and easy at the gang’s compound, which is a regular tract-house neighborhood in like Sacramento. We’ve been here for awhile and settled in. Then the death of someone important results in a legal event that bequeaths two 1964 Cadillacs in a garage to me and the gang chief from before. They’re both convertibles. One car is gold-ish brown with with a medium-brown interior; the other is light blue everywhere. The gang chief likes the gold one and I like the blue one. That’s perfect. Everybody’s happy. Done.

I become fascinated by the slightly darker blue plastic rope-bead set in a groove around the rim of the passenger compartment of my car. It has something to do with the sound and feel of the motor of that kind of car as it accelerates from a stop.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–09–04: Say it out loud. Atmosphere gradient. The wonderful island of Oz. Disrespect.

First dream. Juanita and I are in a bedroom in a strange apartment. She’s just come out of the bathroom, having taken a shower. She’s clean and shining and her hair is bigger and poofier than it’s ever been. We get on the bed and clearly sex is imminent here, but — she doesn’t seem to want to. I say, “Why.” She tries to /look/ the answer to me. I say, “Come on. Say it out loud.”

Next dream. I’m in a tall building, but there’s something about the atmosphere gradient that puts the high floors /outside the air/. I’m here to figure out a way to pressurize the building so there’s enough air in the rooms at the top but the column of air won’t press down and make it overpressurized at the bottom. You’d have to be able to open the doors to the street to go in and out and not let all the air out. Airlocks made of revolving doors? Corridors curved into giant Tesla valves?

Now it’s the Empire State building. Juanita’s with me. Apparently the air problem has been solved. I think we should go up to the top and look down from there the way, in real life, you used to be able to before everybody got afraid that people would jump off and they don’t let you do that anymore. This is before that.

(When I was there in 1972 a filmmaker had a big movie camera set up. His helper set a bright scarf loose in the wind and they followed it with the camera all the way to the river. I threw a penny down. People were taking pictures with their children standing on the rail.)

Next dream. An old ship’s captain and his hippie friend are in a freighter on their way to a legendary place. They’re the only ones onboard. It’s night-time. They aim through an island that they know can’t see until you reach it, to get to the proper island behind it, which — the only way you can get there is by crashing your big boat into the first island. This happens, the first island vanishes, the freighter sinks, and in its place a thumb shape comes up out of the water. My view goes closer. The thumb is a tiny fishing boat that they had on the freighter. The island they’re still headed for has Oz-like round-top towers. I’m happy for them, that they’re finally going to get there after dreaming of it and preparing for years and acquiring and sacrificing the freighter and all. I hope it lives up to their expectations.

Next dream. I’m a manager of a department in a store that’s like a mall department store but it’s where Mendosa’s Grocery is in Mendocino. Everyone else who works here is young. They’re all snarky young people, enjoying being with their friends, not professional at all. I’m talking to a girl about something she was supposed to do. She walks away from me like I’m not even here. I walk after her, unable to stop myself from saying, “You don’t walk away from somebody when they’re talking to you about work.” She’s reached her boyfriend working at one of the checkout counters. They’re both already laughing about how silly old people are.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–09–06: Problematic scorpion. Guests.

First dream. In the dream I’ve been sleeping in a bed of tangled sheets on the floor of an old strange plaster house. My employer Tim has just come into the room. There’s a scorpion the size of my hand on the rug. I look around and find a two-quart sour cream bucket to catch the scorpion in. I chase it around. Its speed varies a lot. It moves as if drugged, then it will suddenly skitter wildly this way and that, and jump into the air… It gets under things — a dresser, a bookcase, and I feel like it got away into the wall, but then it comes out again and I chase it some more. Tim just stands there, watching.

Finally I trap it with the bucket upside-down on it, but it’s bigger, so the edge of the bucket is denting it in two places. I push down to kill it. It takes a long time. I put more and more weight on it but the edge of the bucket won’t cut through it. /I hate this. Why does this always happen./

Next dream. I’m in a strange rich family’s big ranch-style house. Everyone’s gone but the matriarch. Juanita and I have been staying here in the bedroom of one of the absent rich kids. Juanita’s out somewhere.

I feel like we need to clean things up and get out of here. I stuff two big trash bags with clothes, straighten up the bed… I use a tiny screwdriver to try to get an outlet wall plate off to fix something behind and next to it in the wall. As I work, the wall plate becomes complicated with colored wires coming out of holes in it and going across to go back into the wall through holes next to the plate. /Forget it. Give up./

I want to take a shower so the next place we go I won’t look like a homeless person, but mainly I just want to get away. I think to call Juanita on the phone, but where’s my phone? Where’s another phone to call my phone and find it? I can’t remember my phone number anyway. I wander around this giant house, resenting people who never have to worry about where they can stay tonight.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was, /Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.

—

My dream from Friday, 2023–09–08: Festival prep mascot.

I wake up from sleep in the dream in a strange version of my house that’s in a wet, green place, not a summer-dry California place, and there’s more to the house, to the north, that I sense but don’t look that way, so I don’t yet know what’s there. Outside the front door I hallucinate/remember my childhood dog, which in the dream was my mother’s dog, this is /her/ house I’m house-sitting for, and that dog and another dog are gone because I forgot to feed them for weeks and they ran off and I guess were eaten by coyotes, or something.

Now, back inside, the place is a vast concrete-floor metal warehouse. My house setup — the bed, a kitchen area, etc., is all pressed into this southeast corner. Roadies and technicians are setting up a control center for lights and sound for a rock concert that will be later — maybe tomorrow. This is still my house, but all the economic activity of the festival means I might be pushed out and kept out afterward if I make a fuss about anything. It’s only tacit that I’m allowed to live here. There’s no paperwork to it. I don’t want to get in a situation where I have to insist that this was my house way before /they/ showed up, because they’ll just say, “So?”

Now I’m walking back to my house-place in the warehouse from having gone out the back to watch them unload trucks and pre-assemble stage risers and trusses. There are even more people around everywhere, all working, all pros. I’m barefoot, wearing only elastic boxer shorts, and there’s a t-shirt hanging from where my left arm goes through one sleeve.

I’m like the crazy old mascot of this place now.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–09–26: Jerry coincidence. A car and a truck. Expenses and romance. Schlepping at the airport.

First dream. In the messy, metal-dusty back room of a shop on Redwood Street in Fort Bragg (CA), but in an old East Coast city, I find Polaroid pictures of my friend Jerry, where he’s all raggedy with a scraggly gray beard, looking homeless and desperate. On my way out through the front I ask the man who runs the shop if he knows Jerry Fraley. He does, but he’s suspicious and mad at me for something, maybe because: how could /I/ know Jerry; that would be too much of a coincidence. I say, “I have to go now, but I want to talk about Jerry Fraley when I get back.” What I want to talk about is, I loaned Jerry a camera case full of six or eight hard drives once years ago and I think I didn’t get all of them back. There’s a whole bunch of files that I can’t find. Maybe I just deleted them by accident at some point. I don’t know.

Next dream. In a poor desert community I go to a rusty metal garage in the kind of junkyard that every garage has around it here, and I buy a car that looks like a 1950s round-cornered European Ford. Somehow thrown into the deal is a very big very rusty but originally powder blue 1980s GMC pickup truck whose left side of its hood was torn away and covered over haphazardly with scraps of sheet metal screwed on, so — how would you open the hood now, if you wanted to? Take these screws out…

It’s later. I have somehow got both vehicles across the desert into another rusty metal garage, where I live, and I’m talking the deal over with my generic friend in the dream. We’re taking more of the sheet metal off the truck. Here are bullet holes that look painted on but are real holes, and the whole passenger side has missing metal on a weird six-inch-wide shelf that goes along under the window. We chuckle over this funny shelf. Somebody worked pretty hard to make this; is it supposed to be a planterbox? The round little Ford has become a Mercedes-Benz, with a vertical, exposed radiator. The surface has traces of its original dark blue but is now nearly entirely smooth rust. We inspect inside and underneath. Mechanically it’s in pretty good shape. /I’m going to be able to use this. It wasn’t a mistake to buy it./

Next dream. I’m in the pink house where Juanita and I lived in the late 1980s in Caspar, but it’s the present day or maybe even the future, and this is another world where the house still exists. A carpenter has ripped out the lining of a broad doorway between the living room and the bedroom so a piece of furniture that Juanita got can fit in here and the chimney like part of it can stick all the way up through the ceiling to the ridge of the roof. I think I’ll solve this heat leak by stuffing wads of paper and cardboard up into the slot. I give the guy a check for more than $600, wondering why I didn’t just do this work myself. Am I crippled? I can’t remember what happened up to this point. I’m worried that this isn’t my house, and whoever owns it now will come back… (This is a very familiar feeling, especially in dreams of that house.)

A mechanic in a shop where Joe’s Garage used to be has just fixed the brakes of my Ford-Mercedes-thing from the previous dream. He trusts me to go home to get my checkbook, to give him a check. I live in some vague place in the village of Mendocino.

I drive the /truck/ out of the pink house, though, because the front now is a wooden garage door that rolls away to the right. I have trouble getting past another truck and U-Haul trailer that is parked backed into the yard. Men and kids are standing around, doing nothing, in the street. They help me get out of here by manipulating the garage door and moving sheets of plywood that are leaned against the greenhouse window and sticking out in the way, so I don’t have to go over to the Caspar Inn and find the truck-and-U-Haul guy to move that. Some of these street people have signs like protest signs but they keep them turned so I can’t read them.

As I drive up to the highway my view is also from both inside and behind the truck. The rear suspension is strange: the rear wheels are on separate extendable pivot parts to keep the truck level even when I drive over a place where the road goes down as much as three feet on one side or the other, which it does — the road is bomb-cratered. (There’s an interlude here of a conversation with a girl who asks questions about this truck and the road.)

Just across the highway is another garage, this one made all of wood, and with a dirt floor, where retroactively I’ve parked the truck in a perfect slot with a normal house garage door on the side, partly down. I need to leave the truck here while I do something elsewhere and also trust whoever works here to just let it alone and assume that I’ll be back, even though I don’t know who it is and haven’t made arrangements. The place looks abandoned anyway.

Now I’m in Mendocino at night near the Corners of the Mouth health food store. I’m in my early twenties. A girl like a cross between Carie Miklose and a wrestler/fighter woman from the cover of a fighting magazine is walking toward the post office, ten feet in front of me. We both just came from the same event. We’re talking as we walk, about our dream-only lapsed relationship. I think, and she says aloud, that we probably shouldn’t get back together. I say, “That’s probably wise.” But she changes her mind, stops, comes back to where I’ve stopped, and we’re suddenly kissing. This doesn’t feel right to me, but it /should/, so I say, “Don’t kiss me the way you think I want to. Kiss me the way /you/ want to.” Our faces are inches apart. She’s sweating a little; this is very sexy. We’re both looking around for somewhere we can go to have sex right now that isn’t in the street. (As I write this down, later, awake, it occurs to me that in the dream Juanita didn’t come to mind. Juanita didn’t exist to me there, which is unusual.)

I’m back in the shop where the guy fixed my brakes, but now it’s not in Caspar; it’s farther north, and there’s no Fort Bragg (CA). I think this is some place in like Wyoming. /I forgot to get my checkbook./ I shorten my explanation to just that I met a girl. The mechanic and his friends perfectly understand this. I drive away /again/, but I’m instantly back with checks. “How much do I owe you? Please tell me exactly.”

Somewhere in here somebody at a shop like this, but not this one, found a piece of paper that’s a note from someone else to me, that I wrote notes all over about material for my radio show, and the note-person didn’t know what all this was about, and I explained and accepted it back. That is the paper, but now yellow and lined like ledger paper, that the mechanic is working over with a pen to decide how much I owe him. /It comes to $895 — no, $570-something… While he dithers about it, /I/ settle on 600 and think, /With the 600 from the plasterer guy, that’s $1,200. Do I have that much money in the bank?/ Now I’m nervously/confidently trying to word in my head how to ask this mechanic, who has already finished the work, if I can give him a check for only $500 and drive away and figure out where to get the rest of the money, as if I owe him the entire total of the two jobs. Another thing I try out, to myself, is, I dunno, maybe write out the check for $1,200 and ask him to wait a week to cash it while I sell something? What do I have that I can sell? Where do I even live? No, this isn’t working. I’m going to have to give him the car (it’s the car again and not the truck; there is no truck) and just walk away and start all over. I’ve started over plenty of times in my life. I can do it again.

Next dream. I’m in a strange mostly-deserted airport, waiting for my grandfather. He shows up at the age he was when I was five, but I’m my real age. He has a heavy shoulder bag and two suitcases on wheels, one big, one medium-size. There’s a scale here, in the middle of the concourse, like a computerized forklift with a gray metal plate across the forks. I help my grandfather get his bags up onto it to weigh them, but he gets on too, and he hangs far out over the edge from a cord attached above the scale floor, so it can’t be accurate. He won’t listen to me.

Now we have to go a long way through the building. He hangs the shoulder bag on my real-life painful shoulder and walks away with the big rolling suitcase. Okay, whatever; I pull the smaller suitcase and follow, limping.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–09–27: Lab action fiasco. Socks. Door repair escalation. Sleep paralysis. Diagram OCD. Lunch in K-Mart. Real estate dogs.

First dream. I’m someplace I’m uneasy to be, trying to put a tiny toy Tesla turbine back together the way it was before I messed with it. I adjust the spacing of the disks so they’re even, close the case and squeeze it closed, try it. It doesn’t blow as hard as before. Open it, push the disks all tight against the left side again. Shut it, try it. Okay, good enough. This pump has something to do with a mouse experiment in a government lab.

The motor for the pump is different now; it’s separate, in a bigger case. Juanita’s standing next to me, waiting, as I fit the pinion gear from the shaft of the motor into a slot at the end of the turbine. Some more clear plastic tubes appear, but they have nothing to do with the pump. A press-switch is here that wasn’t before, inside. I press it, close the cases, turn it on. Nothing. Take it open again, press the inside switch and close it all up again, try it. Okay, it’s working. Put all the little screws back where they go.

Juanita’s standing here waiting. She’s sleepy, and I have to push her roughly in the direction of the corner door. We’ve been here too long; we have to get out. I jump up and reach like dunking a basketball to hit a big paddle switch in the corner of the wall above hospital crash doors.

Another girl, something like Chloe Sevigny in /Portlandia/, has retroactively been here all along on this non-crime. (She works in this lab and she’ll get in trouble for helping us.) She cries out, “The pressure is falling!” She means the coolant pressure in a wall of stainless steel refrigerators. I had hit the wrong switch. I get a chair for a step, jump up higher, put the switch back the way it was. Jump up again and hit the next one. The pressure’s coming back. We’re done. We can get out the /other corner/ door, go through the lab yard, around the chain-link fence, and get away before the cops get here in response to a silent alarm that surely was tripped when I /shut off and turned back on the power for some unknown amount of the whole building./ But there will also be video, I guess. They’ll all have a big laugh watching us fumble around like amateurs.

The music playing in my head when I got up to pee was Tears For Fears, /Everybody Wants To Rule The World/.

Asleep again. Next dream. I’m putting on black socks and white socks before going out into an exhibition hall — or an expedition preparation hall — in an icy Northern country. The socks are a confusing puzzle. I end up with one white sock and then two black socks on the left and and three white socks on the right, remove some socks, try to get it so the socks on the outside are either both black or both white. This is hard to do. I keep ending up with white outside on one side and black outside on the other. An ambassador or helper person is waiting for me right here. He’ll be going out on the demo or expedition too. An important young woman is waiting just outside this room.

A lot of time has passed. We might have already done the demo or made the scientific discovery out in the ice. Yes, it’s after the event, whatever it was, but I have to get ready for the next one. This sock puzzle is ridiculous; I’ve been going at it all wrong. I’m just going to take all the socks off, put /two/ socks on each foot, save the last pair in my pocket and put my shoes on. That solves everything. Who cares what color the socks are inside my shoes? As long as they’re all the same thickness.

Next dream. I’m at work, at Tim’s, at night. The buildings are all in different places than they should be, and the vegetation and trees are all wet and thick the way everything used to be thirty years ago. In the dream I’ve been away for a week or two and just got back here. While Tim talks with Alice in her dream-only beatnik/hippie-built cabin where the east driveway should be, I’m improving an old plywood door for her. I go to the factory shop for a better, bigger eye screw and hook.

Now I’m in Tim’s cabin. The door I’m fixing has old sweatshirts pinned all around its edges to make a soft insulating gasket to shut on. Tim comes back from Alice’s. We talk about getting my timesheet in because it’s still under the wire, because I came back early. I’m having trouble solving some other kind of problem with the door, now that I’m working a hallway room that doesn’t exist in this house in real life. This room is a kitchen.

The door keeps changing. Now a thick rubber rope with a hard bend in the end goes through a hole in the door. The straight, loose end must be the inside part so Alice can pull it closed. But there are markings on white sticky tape that Tim put on to show what’s the inside. They’re ambiguous letters and arrows. I can’t just ask Tim; he’s gone away again.

He’s back, and the door has changed /again/. Now there’s a red metal spindly bracket at the top that sticks out at least a foot on what I’m now sure is the inside.I say, “What is this supposed to do?” Tim says that’s to hang a kerosene lamp on. I take it off, saying, “No, that’s just stupid.” Tim agrees, pleased at the extra safety, and wanders away.

More kinds of cloth are involved in the door gasket and now also cover the whole door. I take it all off and make a big laundry pile on the counter. The cloth on top is a fuzzy blue plastic-fiber blanket. It’s on fire! “Hey,” I call to Tim. I pull the blanket off the counter, onto the floor. It becomes a stiff brown shoe-brush doormat as big as a blanket, with little fires on top and inside the folds. I put all the fires out by folding it up as tightly as possible and standing on it to squeeze all the air out. This is no good; it’ll just all catch on fire again. I start to take it outside, pause. No, it’s all real-life tinder-dry outside now. I put it in the kitchen sink at soak it. I don’t care if it makes a mess.

Next dream. I’ve been sleeping in my car, parked the wrong way in a turnout on a winding part of Highway 1 with the nose of the car sticking out almost into the oncoming lane. There’s a roadside toilet building behind me. More and more cars start to come from both directions on the highway and turn into the turnout, which becomes a bigger and bigger parking lot. I can see, but I’m kind of paralyzed, struggling from sleep to get my clothes on so that I can get the car started and back out of the way before somebody crashes into me. It keeps feeling like I’m making progress but I’m not. Things become chaotic and I bail out of the whole situation.

Next dream. Tim has been giving me instructions for something to do at work. He finishes but I still don’t know what to do. I go to where I sleep in the dream, which is the edge of a dirt plateau above a forest — a place from a dream some months ago. I have a blanket. Alice comes and lies down to go to sleep about 10 feet away. I tell her the story of being stuck in the car and not being able to move. I ask her for a pencil so I can show her, then — never mind, there are pencils and pens in the dirt. Alice gives me a white bedsheet to write on. I try to draw a diagram of the way the road and the parking lot were. I end up writing nonsense all over both sides of the sheet and never get it right enough to be able to use it to explain.

Next dream. I’m sitting at a table in a place for customers to eat or rest, that’s also the employee break area, at the front of a store like Walmart or K-Mart. I have one hard-boiled egg. I peel it and take a flavorless bite. The yolk is purplish-brown. A boy who came by before and told me to move comes here again, anxious because I took him to mean that I would have to move /after I finished resting and eating/. A bunch of people are coming through the store with a giant shelf arrangement that’s one big piece of furniture. /Okay, okay! I’m moving./ I go to the cigaret locker counter to get salt. I see tearaway sheets of tiny tubes of pepper. I ask the counter boy here for pepper. He tears off a sheet of lots of them. I say I only need one. He snidely pinches off two and slides them to me.

Next dream. I’m in like a guest house in a fancy neighborhood of expensive houses with lots of old trees and thick, established landscaping around dark wood modern structures with lots of glass. Two little dogs that belong to somebody else are here. One is a scruffy little terrier-like dog. One is brownish, short-haired and tubby. In the dream I’ve been taking care of the dogs so long that they think they’re my dogs. They’re very well behaved, respond to complex commands. They love me and run to jump and snuggle against me when I sit on the couch.

In the dream I work for a real-estate company. I go into the house next door to the one that this is the guest house of. My mother is young, still working for Forrest E. Olson, and listing this house for sale. I walk in. “Mom. You here?” A young rich-looking white girl goes across a kitchen area from the bathroom with a towel around her from having taken a shower. She sees me, deliberately takes the towel off and puts it back on, continues across and through the door. I say, “I’m very sorry. I’m looking for my mother. I didn’t know this house was occupied.” On my way out, now there’s another rich bored-looking girl. Now I’m not sure I’m even in the right neighborhood, much less the right house. I should get the dogs and get away from here. I go out the back door, through the attached garage, out the side door of the garage. I say to the unseen dogs, “Hey, where are you guys?” Here come the dogs. Good. Let’s go. I anticipate that my car, whatever kind of car it turns out to be, will be around the house this /other/ way.

Work in the industrial yard next door woke me up, as usual. The song playing in my head was /How Deep Is Your Love/ by the BeeGees.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–09–28: The Prisoner.

World War Two spies and partisans and snitches are all sneaking around in the world as though it’s all a big boyhood schoolyard. Right now it’s night; I’m hiding with others in a clump of dead cars, watching the Mendocino Art Center lot from the west for enemies. In the dream the lot is a forest. I order some of the others to go in there, and I take some with me to the right, through a town of low tropical-desert terracotta buildings where the bay should be.

I skim-experience a chapter of confused adventure and come to myself on a beach of packed damp sand, next to a shelter shaped like an upturned boat. I assume I’ve been kidnapped and dumped here. /At least they didn’t kill me./ It’s a box canyon of crumbly rock and shrubs around the beach, with a vague way out to the sea, which I don’t look at, so maybe this is just a crater and not a cove. I go to climb the side and shortcut this by levitating to where it’s not so vertical. Here are two naked middle-aged white women walking on a trail, making it seem less like Hawaii and more like Arizona or New Mexico or Comptche. I explain that I was kidnapped. They /indicate/ that this is a retreat/camp place, not spiritual; it’s just for lying around in the sun. They have a phone somewhere. They haven’t used it in months, but they have one. Also there are no authorities available to call. I say, “Who do you pay to live here?” It’s been awhile since they thought about that.

In their apartment, the phone they dig out is in several big parts. One part is a car battery in a plastic tub with a 1960s dial phone on it. The other part is a metallic-painted cardboard box with two rows of pushbuttons on top spread out like a dog’s teats with numbers next to them, and the box has a cradle for the handset of the phone. I put the handset on the cradle, pick it back up, put it to my ear. Loud, razzy, distorted dial tone. The buttons do nothing. I click the cradle switch a bunch of times and then I hear the ringing sound faintly through the electrical noise.

A man is incomprehensible but he sounds annoyed at being interrupted. The noise clears up a bit. He scolds me: “It’s important to treat others with respect here,” he says. I say, “Can you connect me or direct me to someone who can help me? I’ve been kidnapped. I don’t know where I am. That’s the only reason I’m calling, and that’s probably why I sound upset. I’m sorry.” But I talked too long; the noise has gone up again. Several people, men and women, switch me back and forth between them, taking turns saying things I can only just barely understand. And — I think they’re not even talking to me anymore. They’re just other people having their conversations, like when the phone system in real life was screwed up a couple of years ago, and my modem wouldn’t connect to get email, and when I picked up the landline phone there were all these people talking and nobody could hear me. One conversation sounded like a Zoom business meeting, or maybe part of a movie.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /How Can I Be Sure/ by the Young Rascals. Later I looked it up to get it and discovered that the singer is a man. I had always thought that was a woman singing that song.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–09–29: Ouija airport and homeless spoiled pizza. A model for justice.

First dream. I’ve been studying a paper photograph/diagram of an old war-zone secret landing field where people left messages to planes in the air. Maybe we can use it for that again. It’s like a Ouija board in that some of the markings say things like /It is the case/ over /It is not the case/, to be circled or scratched out to transmit the answers to common questions. Long words in all capital letters, scratched into the dirt and snow, are infinitely interpretable to say different real words or nonsense words. Someone else comes to look at this with me. I say some of the words I see, and say new words that it could equally well be saying. The other person doesn’t like this game as much as I do.

A strange woman and man and I have been camping like homeless people on a king-size mattress in a junkyard/garbage field. I bring supplies after being away for days: big soft insulated cold-or-hot satchels. “Are you guys still hungry?” They’re like, Not really, but whatta ya got?

I don’t know. I open the biggest satchel: Here are eight or ten big thick uncooked pizzas with just the crust and dried tomato sauce ready to put cheese on. The two on the very bottom have pepperoni on them already. /This should have been refrigerated a long time ago or even frozen. It’ll all be ruined./ I wonder how long it’s been out of the fridge, and I’m transported back to where, in a previous dream (?) I was moving out of a strange house, despairing of the messy pile of belongings in the back seat and floor of my car and the huge amount of things still in the house.

The song playing in my head when I got up to pee was Edie Brickell, /What I Am Is What I Am/.

Asleep again. Next dream. I go out of a room, across an unroofed corridor to where the (missing) two little boys I’ve been babysitting for their real-estate-agent mother live. A white dog has a macaroon-like plastic jewel on its collar. It occurs to me that this is the key to the apartment. I lift it off the dog, press it to the doorknob. It works.

Inside the apartment, before I can find something to do to look like I belong here, a maid who looks like Robin Williams in /Mrs. Doubtfire/, but Polish or Russian, comes out of the back, startled to see me. I say, “Do you want me to cook you something for dinner?” She isn’t buying this bluff. I go right back out.

My point of view moves up the stairs of Mendocino High School to a pathway through a garden park, where an eight-foot-tall fashion-model-statuesque but insecure woman is on her way to confront the park/school administration for being a pack of political criminals. Her face becomes greasy and spotty. I tell her how much I admire her courage, and that we’ve been watching her progress and cheering for her. (There is no /we/. I haven’t been watching, and she knows that, but she likes this anyway. Her skin clears up.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the park, now in the L.A. hills, retired president G.W. Bush is confused. He fumbles with an outdoor mail drop-box as though it’s a Chinese puzzle. It won’t open. He kicks it and slaps it. I reach there, pull it open, point at his mail.

I become him, driving a big purple-brown boat of an early-1970s Buick on curving driveways through the park, which has become the park uphill from the docks in San Francisco, by the Safeway. It’s hard to keep the car on the path pavement. Steering from lock to lock makes a zipper sound. At the far downhill place, between brick gate-walls, I have to /stand on/ the brake pedal to stop, and even so it’s creeping forward a bit in rhythm to the engine chugging.

There’s ridiculous music playing, like /A Long Way To Tipperary/ crossed with /Potrzebie/ by the Fershlugginer Five.

— — — -