2023–10–09 through 2023–10–19

My last dream from Monday, 2023–10–09: Rescuer.

I’m in a place that’s like Fort Bragg (CA) but farther north, and steeper, at the top of a street that goes up to a ridge that runs north-south. I step off the road into the air, fly toward the ocean and immediately get into clouds, so I have to go back /very slowly/ to where I can see the ground. I’m worried about maybe running into a power line.

There’s the ground, where I left it. I continue low over the ridge to a sea on the /east/ side of it, turn north and fly along rock cliffs with waterfalls spraying down as the waves spray up. Flying through this is wonderful. I’m not wet nor cold, so, great.

I’m sneaking around in a maze of concrete rooms in a YMCA-like water treatment plant. Here’s one big dry room that looks like it’s meant to be full of water, that feels like the chamber where a monster weapon project is in the first episode of The Expanse.

Now I’m in a 1920s-style high-ceiling school like the Fort Bragg Senior Center. Outside the north end of the building I help a strange woman up into the air to get away from her trouble. I’m holding her hand, lending her flying power. I bring her back to a similar but not-same world where her red-headed friend or colleague is waiting for the version of her who lives here. I hope they get along; each is not exactly the person the other thinks she is.

There’s something about a little black dog and a little white dog fastened to a soft backpack of everything I own in the world, that’s somehow attached to my back without straps. With this on, I fly holding hands with a little boy that I’m rescuing from an analog of the same bad man the woman needed to get away from. I’m ready to rescue anybody, as long as they don’t mind ending up in a world where things are different from what they’re used to, because I can go up into the air and move between worlds but never go back and find a previous one again.

—

My last dream from Tuesday, 2023–10–10: The secret of Charles Bukowski’s nose.

It’s night. I’m in a rustic camp meeting building in like the music camp out at the Woodlands park. People are giving a presentation of music events that will be coming, and/or historical events that they’re sharing their research about. What’s on now is a lecture about a famous musician from the 1960s or 1970s. The lecture is augmented by two people taking turns handwriting and sketching on an overhead projector. I become fascinated by the weird musical notation. A number, a letter, and a number, like 2n9, or a letter, a number and a letter, like p3k, shows spirals in my mind going opposite each other and this is something to do with the music, like a winding, sliding arpeggio on a fiddle. While I listen I scoot slightly to the right, eyes either clouded or closed, until I bump into a girl with long black hair. I apologize and move away, but when I’m crouching in the hearth of a stone fireplace, keeping my balance with one hand above my head, fingers hooked in the metal lip that goes around the fireplace proscenium, a man to the right of the girl, also in the fireplace, is disgusted with me — I’m the wrong race for him, or I’m creepy for some other reason, or he’s just jealous.

It’s later. Very few people remain, but a tough old Irishman, like a cross between Charles Bukowski and Jimmy Doyle, the terrorist IRA man in Season 2, Episode 12 of /Lie To Me/, takes over the lecture, wandering around the room, telling a story of what he has only just now figured out /really happened/ in that terrible time in the past, because somebody else noticed this: A picture on a slide on the overhead projector shows damage to the bridge of the historical musician’s (or scholar’s) nose is identical but reversed left-for-right to the nose of the man who’s talking now! Is it the same man but the picture is reversed? If it’s a different man, what’s the connection?

The man tells about how there was a party or a sleepover camp here when the open staircase to the loft had glass underneath it held up to the underside of the stairs by little strips of wood with screws in them. As he confesses that he took the screws out, I experience taking the screws out. Somehow the glass holds the steps up, and it’s implied that this sabotage is what will damage the person’s nose.

I find paperwork in a box, take it out, then set it all stacked on the corner of the open top of the box. It’s all in scribbled handwriting. This is part of the history project Juanita’s working on in real life.

My feeling is that I’m not one of these people, and not welcome here. I’m so low in their esteem that they don’t even bother to kick me out. It doesn’t matter where I am. I’m nothing to them. At least I have a place indoors to sleep.

—

My last dream from Wednesday, 2023–10–11: Flaking.

It’s night. I’m with Juanita in a strange college-town version of Mendocino, walking north on Ford Street. The field behind the post office is a park with a real lawn and paved paths. At Little Lake Street I suddenly remember in familiar calm panic that I was supposed to make sound effects and music for the play (?), but I also remember putting off and /putting off/ going to rehearsals to learn details of how to make each part of the job. Somewhere I have the list of things to make. That will have to be enough. The last rehearsal is tomorrow. I can do the whole job tonight. Okay.

But suddenly the above was /last/ night. I’m in the same place. Juanita becomes someone else. I tell her I have to go, and I run diagonally across the park to where the theater will be in the dream. On the way, people are coming out of shops and bars after revelry — /or/ it’s the end of rehearsal and they’re coming out into the street from that. Here’s a black woman who looks like Teri Epperson. I start to ask her about the play, but it’s not Teri. Sorry.

I go along a row of loading-dock-like shops, to a crowded cafe/library. Inside I look around for anybody I know who might have something to do with the play. I see one person I /almost/ know…

I go to a side door to where the theater must be in this new college. Somebody behind me shouts not to go in there, I’m already in. It’s dim. As I go forward there are rooms to the left and right with people talking in barks and stilted phrases, so this is a multiplex of live theaters.

This isn’t a rehearsal. This is opening night. Now I hear music and sound effects with the talking. So — good, they got somebody to do it because I flaked.

I’m exhausted. I lie down on a bed in a prop room. I don’t know how long I can nap here before people come, so I breathe deeply and force myself to relax.

People start coming into this room from their show, so I get up. Alon, from the old Community School, asks me if it’s possible to copy a tape. I say, Sure. He rushes off to get it. What kind of tape, though? We’ll see.

I stand around waiting while people move around me celebrating their opening night being over, ignoring me. I don’t belong here. This isn’t my world anymore. I used to make sound for all the shows. Now they don’t even call me. And I had a job and didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it because, I realize, I don’t want to anymore. All that furious and intense activity. What for?

—

My last dream from Thursday, 2023–10–12: Time hole.

A man and his girlfriend have been using the man’s hereditary power and a special place in the old house to set time problems right by traveling to the 1940s, living there for awhile, accomplishing missions for a group from the future, and going back. Finally they’ve finished and can go home to stay, but this time their changes have resulted in the man’s mother or grandmother being /alive/ in the 1970s, their home time. When they come out of the hallway where the time-hole is, she’s just said goodbye to her card-playing friends and she notices the time-travelers’ return. She peeks around the corner and — oh, no! — sees the time-hole, a gray-black five-foot disk on the end wall of the hallway, with the dark wood paneling of the wall rolled up and down to reveal it.

But the man and woman aren’t allowed to interfere with her, just make sure she’s okay, so they watch helplessly as she hurries down the hall to go through the hole. Then they run through after her.

I’m in the city and time where they ended up. I’ve been part of their adventure. I and another person involved have solved the problem /again/, including the problem of the old lady. We’ve split up and are trying to find where we left the car, somewhere in all of like San Francisco/Boston in the 1940s. I walk down one street that seems right, but it’s too far toward the bay. Also phones don’t work here, so now I’ve lost the other person too. Just keep going.

Meanwhile, I’m who I am, at my real age, sitting in a strange old-boarding-school-like library place with Juanita. She puts another paperback book in the reader device, an open-face box made of the same dark wood paneling as the walls. She’s been reading a new Harry Potter sitcom series. I ask her if they (meaning Harry and Hermione) get married in this one. She doesn’t like it that I don’t keep up on it and don’t know. I don’t keep up on it, because I’m tired of it. I say, “I want them to get married one of these times. I’d like that.”

Generic Irish flute and fiddle and guitar music was playing in my head when I woke up.

—

My last dream from Friday, 2023–10–13: Rehabilitation.

I’m in a strange house that I think I might have lived in before. The back yard is on a golf course. I collect things of mine to take away and try to get out of here before they come home and think I’m stealing from them.

Different odd sizes of tape cartridges in a wooden Indian-design box are also little notebooks full of my writing. And here’s a pink ceramic elephant pencil-holder that seems familiar but it’s not the same size as the one that was in my grandmother’s house. Also it’s not useful. If I’m going to inadvertently steal some things and have to bring them back, they should be something I need, something I made and so can’t stand to lose, and plausible.

Next dream. I’m somewhere else in this weird golf course community, in a clubhouse converted to a tourist hostel. I’m in the big single-toilet bathroom at the back of a restaurant dining room and the front of the nebulous place where our living quarters are. /Maybe this is a ship converted to post-financial-apocalypse city life./

I’m sitting on the toilet, pushing, trying to get something to come out. A wealthy gay-seeming sympathetic man comes into the bathroom. Now all the doors are open. He says something sarcastic but not mean about how long I’ve been monopolizing the only toilet for like 200 people, but nobody’s in a line to get in. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. An hour? Days?

I manage to force out a single turd, which, I see, joins several others in the dry bowl. I don’t want to be sitting down when I flush this; it might overflow. I wipe my butt thoroughly with both toilet paper and oddly soft paper towels. The toilet has no water; it won’t flush. I reflexively examine it to fix it, but there’s no water connection, unless it’s all inside the ceramic… I give up. Never mind.

I go out into the restaurant dining room, which becomes a room in a mentor-psychologist’s apartment. He’s like Mr. Lasley, the math teacher at my high school, but also he gives the feeling of being like a man with one arm who used to write to my paper and participate in Redwood Free Net, who wasn’t stupid but always misunderstood every detail of everything I ever wrote. I’m sitting on the floor, my back against the couch. He’s sitting on the couch, an arm around my shoulder. He gestures for me to look at his bookshelf. Lots of books. My eye is drawn to a big thick paperback book: A History of Science Fiction, Vol. 1. I say, “That would do you, if you were in jail for a week.” The man agrees. His wife calls from another room, wondering when he’ll be done (with his job counseling me), because he’s supposed to go somewhere with her.

The room suddenly flips the other way, becomes a waiting area in like a bowling alley or bus station, the couch becomes a connected row of fiberglass chairs, and the man is sitting next to me. He’s here to see me off on my next adventure, released from hospital or prison, back into the work world.

Time has passed. I’ve been at my new job for a few weeks. Whatever the job is, one of the perks is that you get to use the company golf-ball driving range in the underground concrete parking lot. The last time I ever hit a ball with a golf club I was twelve years old, I have no interest in golf, but this is the recreation here, so I’ll give it a try, to fit in. There’s the closet with the golf things in it. Here are two four-foot-long, one-foot-high parallel concrete curbs with a fake grass rug strip between them. This is a guide, so you’ll hit the ball straight at the far wall, because, see above, it’s a parking garage and there are more and more cars here every time I look around. But I’m supposed to do this. So I go to the closet to get a golf club and a bucket of golf balls.

— — -

Last dream from Tuesday, 2023–10–17: Jealous.

The road along behind the Art Center is much longer than in real life and it’s paved. It’s after a long adventure of school kids, like in a story, the end of the entire series of books. I and another boy rescue a pretty girl like Theresa Takahashi from my high school. I hold her up by the shoulders, from behind; I tell the other boy to pick up her legs, and we trot along the road to get to the west end of it and set her down.

Now she’s a cross between Theresa T. and actress Gina O’Farrell from the theater company. She tells sadly that she has a terrible disease and says the name of it, a long Polish-sounding word that starts with R. I say, /Is that the one where bumps grow on your arm and then spread over and get harder and harder until you look like Ben in Fantastic Four?/ I’m kidding because it can’t possibly be that, but she says it is. /Oh no./ I say, /They’ll cure it. They’re curing more things all the time./ She doesn’t think so. She’s not dejected; she’s resigned to it. It takes a long time to progress. Maybe they will cure it.

I go over to Main Street, to an art store with both art materials and gallery pieces. I’m with some of Juanita’s friends. In the dream Juanita lives and works in this Other World Mendocino-like town and none of us have seen her for a long time. She leads us through the store to where a smooth, slow, nearly motionless animal, a bulldog-size smooth green round-headed lizard thing, is resting across two rounded rocks (each the size of its big head) on two low plinths. I sit on an art shelf, admiring the animal (if it’s real, it’s great; if it’s a motorized puppet, it’s even better), waiting for Juanita to finish getting chirpily reacquainted with her friends so she and l can be together for a little while. But she starts taking out food from between the art things against one of the walls: big bunches of oversized grapes, and lettuce, and all sorts of vegetables. The lizard is really alive; it becomes a normal-speed animal, gets down off the rocks, goes over to the pile of food and starts eating. I ask if Juanita is supposed to do that, because this /isn’t/ where she works, but I guess they know her here and they don’t mind if she feeds the lizard. She knows what’s good for all kinds of different animals; when she was in high school she worked in a pet store, and she had a certificate in exotic animal handling.

Now we’ve all been driven in a car to someplace south, down the coast. We’re in another art gallery, that has a World War II Europe coast bunker-like concrete thing outside in bright nearly fluorescent green grass that’s the same color as the lizard was, with the sea and horizon behind it. Juanita’s talking with her friends like she’s going to be here with them /forever/ and never pay attention to me at all. I adolescently jealously hate this. I stand up from where everyone’s been sitting around on the floor and say, “Well, I don’t know how far it is but I better start walking if I’m gonna get home,” because I think this will make Juanita look up and say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” but she doesn’t register that I’ve been waiting this whole time for her. I guess I’m really not important to her anymore. I might as /well/ just go.

At some point in the above, I think in the first art store/gallery, a woman handed me a toy harmonica — that she’d just just had in her mouth — to continue the song she was playing. I wipe it on my pants, examine it, blow into it. It’s very cheaply made — flimsy white plastic, thin metal — but it sounds good and the notes are all in tune, real notes. I can’t play it great, but I’m not having any trouble playing it surprisingly well, by the Think System. Also, the part about the sick girl, Theresa, started out in a homeless-person cave of shrubs by the street that went past the junior high school my stepbrothers went to when we lived in Carmichael, in real life, near where an old woman shot a shotgun at us, or probably rather shot in the air, to stop Craig and me shooting at birds in her trees with our beebee guns.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–10–18: Animals. Unnecessary but inevitable conflict. Wet teevee. Asbestos.

First dream. Night or very dim day. A suburb neighborhood of nice old houses. The new man who just moved in next door is both sinisterly far-right politically and ignorant of the way we get along with forest animals here. It’s implied that he’ll get the government involved in wiping them out. Gradually more and bigger animals show up in response to that threat, and I settle on bringing a bear, a mountain lion and a full-size wolf with me to visit the man. The flimsy pen he constructed to rope little animals into is inadequate, he is more embarrassed than horrified to see, because he knew the animals would not hurt even him; he just doesn’t like the idea of them being around. He’s racist of animals. Maybe he’ll turn good now, or maybe he’ll call the government in anyway. We’ll have to keep an eye on him.

Next dream. The world has two kinds of people in it now, like in the X-Men story: there are the normal people and there are people who are enhanced in some way. There’s been strife, and there aren’t many people of either kind left. I’m a kind of ambassador for the normal people, going down the covered walkway inside a Spanish house compound in like California to meet strangers. Two men are at the far end, waiting. One is normal size, the other is seven feet tall. They’re both obviously immensely strong. I convince them that the normals are trying to get along with the new kind of people now, so the supers won’t hurt anybody who comes here after me, but I warn them that I might be wrong about that. /Don’t attack anybody but watch out for tricks./ They appreciate this.

I go out on the east side of the San Francisco Art Institute (the Spanish house) and fly up above the strange mountains and hills that are here in the dream. The normals I was working for probably saw that, so they know I’m not actually normal, and they probably are mad about it and will be coming after me. I fly past white ash road-like scars burned into the landscape, over ridges and valleys, to where there’s a clean river scene down below and people here and there lying around in the sun, like it’s a resort or summer camp. I turn right, go up the river, looking for a concentration of enough people to show off to by dropping straight down /fast/ and stopping just above the sand or water, but there are never more than two or three people in any place.

It gets dark. Now I’m in a meeting with normal-people military spy officials. I’m they’re captive or mascot super person. The guy who was up in the sky before rockets straight down feet first, to dematerialize, pass through the roof and ceiling and appear in this room, but something goes wrong so he’s stuck halfway through a surface out of sight above us, groaning in pain.

The military spy people can take this two ways: help him, or consider it an attack and go nuts. They choose /go nuts/, scramble, and distribute war materials to go out in the night and fight. Everyone gets a gray cloth bundle of equipment, including a medium-size automatic pistol with a black ring of electronics around the muzzle (probably a laser sight, a camera, a flashlight — a multitool gun), spare dry socks (everybody in a war needs that), gum, a candy bar, cigarets and matches, and a glass syringe of pain medicine for in case you lose an arm or you get your foot crushed or something.

I have such trouble putting on the socks that I’m the last one out the door. I have to look like I’m helping the normals but somehow keep them from hurting anyone or causing a fight. Halfway up this dark hill I duck back and look around the other side of a wooden fence. The two somewhat-super men from the Art Institute before are hiding in the trees by the river. That’s my power now, the power the normals are using me for: I can see where super people are. I turn and run uphill again after the normals. I won’t tell them about the supers. We’ll get farther and farther away from them. That’s good, for now.

Next dream. A famous writer lives in a big house built up a hillside so the concrete basement and two-car garage underneath are level with the driveway out to a city street. They got tired of having a teevee so they left it out on the porch one flight of back steps up. I want it, or at least I don’t want it ruined by rain, so I balance this giant flat teevee precariously against my side and back and get it downstairs and into the garage. It’s wet. Maybe it’ll be okay once it’s dried out.

Now I’m up in the house trying to get downstairs and out without anyone knowing I’m in here where I don’t belong. The last place to go past, on the way to the garage and out, is the basement office where the writer works. She’s a tough-looking 50-something wire-haired terrier of a woman, turned sideways to me, typing furiously, listening to an old phone propped between her shoulder and her ear. Her eye flicks to me and back. She doesn’t care that I’m here. She’s busy. I think I might be mentally ill and she puts up with me just showing up and wandering around in her house because she has too much on her mind to deal with it.

Next dream. In the dream I live in a long narrow old row-house built down along a hill in like Caspar (California), but it’s Ireland (or an East Coast U.S. Irish colony city). I come home from work (?) into the side of the house, halfway up the hill. Some shady, conspiratorial but nice Irish neighbors are inside having tense negotiations with a dangerous Irish gang criminal man. They conclude because I’m here. He leaves, up the stairs, out the front door. They’re sheepish about getting me involved in their crime, which has something to do with a letter from the city (?) about how all these houses are contaminated with asbestos. They’re like, /That’s okay, it’s probably all in the basement. Nobody really needs to ever go down there./ That’s what the deal was with the criminal: he’ll intimidate the city so they don’t condemn anything, so the landlords can keep getting their rent and city subsidies for low-income tenants. But now the criminal has seen me, I’ll be in danger. These people are nice; they care what happens to me. I don’t want them to worry. I say, “I’ll be fine, I have a gun. Not /here/, but I have one. I’ll go get it.” They look at each other. “Oh!” I say, and I apologize for my shoddy Irish accent, /in/ my shoddy Irish accent, for involuntarily talking like people I’m talking with. “It’s a common trope,” I say, “Pay me no mind.”

I go to my employer Tim’s place, to the shop, to look for things to make a gun or any kind of weapon out of. Here’s a round-neck strap-capo for a guitar, like the one by my computer keyboard in my real-life house. Is this that one, or is it another one that I can have? I like this kind of capo. It doesn’t matter where it came from; nobody needs it here. I put it in my pocket. Keep looking around. I need a weapon that will startle and intimidate an Irish criminal. There are plenty of tools and materials here. Get creative…

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–10–19: Management. Rancid protein powder. Corpse in the truck bed (and) Medical grinder.

First dream. I have to compete with a strange tough determined woman for a job in a grocery and restaurant supply warehouse out by the Buttes at the north end of the Sacramento Valley. One of the events is to process potatoes into these big stainless-steel trays and then process salmon on top of that. I tear off and eat some of the raw salmon. This is expected, that worker will do this.

I win and get the job. The woman is pissed off. She drags out acknowledging losing, blocks the line at the bookkeeper’s counter. She still has to finish her tasks to get paid for today. I’m up on a ladder, stacking trays. I offer to peel the red potatoes for her. She’s suspicious; she says, “Why would you do that?”

Later, maybe days later, I’m working. The manager guy at his desk yells at all of us but especially at one man he doesn’t like. I put my work down and just walk out, into /another/ warehouse room, then another — sooner or later there has to be an outside.

Somehow the manager, without walking, stays even with me. He’s too proud to say sorry, but I know he is. I stop, nod my head, start to go back to work. He breaks down crying and I hug him and say, It’s all right, it’s all right, everybody makes a mistake once in awhile.

Next dream. I’m on a long driving trip in a forest land of narrow highways. I pull over into a rest stop parking lot to try to get a signal on my phone for directions. On the lot are waiting-room-style rows of connected fiberglass chairs.

I’ve been here for awhile. There’s a black cotton hoodie jacket and a black flashlight/camera-thing with a black steampunk-like attachment on the end, this is all motorized for focus and zoom and maybe some other function. I stop myself from using the battery up going through its startup and shutdown procedure and figuring out the controls. Also here’s a rectangular plastic two-quart jug-like container of sticky beige powder. Is it protein powder? or a drug?

A European-seeming man and his wife come here as if looking for something they lost. I say, Wait, is this your jacket? He says yes. (Maybe it isn’t, but okay.) Is this your camera? Yes. (Now I know it isn’t; he’s just saying that because he wants it but, again, okay.) I indicate /This thing?/ (The drug or protein powder.) Now he’s angry because it is really his, and some of it’s spilled. Everything has powder on it inside and around my (dream-only) pickup truck. The container won’t shut right, and the plastic has deteriorated so it won’t hold its shape. The man, rather more Norwegian than French now, agrees to take what’s left and go away, but he’s threatening to get the police involved. He complains about how there’s powder all over, even in the camera I’m putting back together, that’s become a kit for a big black microscope/toy-constructor-set thing on a chair in the airport or hospital that this place has become (while still being a parking lot).

My vehicle is my regular car now, far enough away so the license plate is unreadable, so I can tell the man, Just a minute, I think I have something else of yours, I’ll be right back with it, and go to the car and zoom away. And he’ll let me, too, because he’s greedy for more stuff he can claim is his. His small round Italian/Arabish wife is bored; he’s always doing something like this, embarrassing her.

Next dream. I’m in Fort Bragg (CA) near Down Home Foods. The (back-story) dead body (who I didn’t kill but am responsible to dispose of) is in the back of my powder-blue 1950s stretch-pickup truck. A man comes over from the store, curious about the trouble I’m having fastening down the stretch-canvas truck-bed cover. Will he smell the body? This is hard to shut properly because more and more the truck is all made of plastic stretch canvas and it deforms as I tug or push at it, like clay on a potter’s wheel, like the decomposing container of sticky powder did in the previous dream.

I’ll fix it later. Juanita’s over here to the south at a woman doctor’s office on the sidewalk. The doctor is using a polishing disk on an angle-grinder to wear down the layers of skin on her left shoulder blade.

When this is over I ask the doctor, What painkiller spray and/or antibiotic can we put on the raw place that will be safe. (The doctor has ground it down to the layer of porous metal underneath, so no — nothing is safe, you just have to wait for the skin to grow over it again, if it ever does. I say, But something antiseptic? Something for how much it’ll hurt later when it starts drying out? And how can she sleep?

The doctor goes, Oh, all right! She stomps around the office (we’re indoors now) searching for something that will work, grumpy about how inconsiderate people are, always wasting her time wanting to not hurt and not get infected.

In Fort Bragg in /this/ world I work for the 1950s-style gangster mob that runs the whole place (hence the body in the truck). I drive to a restaurant on a wide pier, with a paved parking lot also out over the water on pilings, where in real life the old Ford dealership was. Right now my task is to make reservations for a party of unknown size. I sit in my idling truck, composing in my head how I’ll say to the waiter that we want a reservation for a table of four, but if more people show up later, we won’t mind moving to a bigger table.

Bright deep-blue sky. All the other cars in the lot are attractive and oddly shaped, all of them powder blue with darker blue edging around doors and hatches.

— —