April 17 through 27, 2023

My dreams from Monday, 2023–07–17:

First dream. It’s night. I’m alone in a house like where I lived in seventh grade but it’s in a cold bleak forest. I’m supposed to be feeding and caring for two premature babies, flesh-colored sluglike things the size of your thumb, but I’ve been neglecting them. I don’t remember when the last time was that I tended them. (They’re on paper towels in a rectangular Tupperware container behind the fridge in the garage, the warmest place here.)

The babies/slugs have been replaced by bunch of tiny puppies and a mother dog. And also I left the outside door open last night, so the mother dog could find them, because — retroactive change again — I knew about the puppies for days and days and I’ve been neglecting them, and they vanished into the environment out of porous places in the walls. The people I’ve been house sitting for will be upset, but I can’t go back in time and fix this.

Next dream. A U.S. civil war/British World War One sergeant-major character is trailing Australian/American Indians through wilderness. He catches up to a big one, who turns to face him. They look at each other from about a hundred feet apart, up a little creek valley. I take over the part of the sergeant-major, hold out my heavy wooden spear sideways, put it on the ground. The man nods, turns and goes away.

The story picks up later when I (as the sergeant-major) go farther along after the man, to a two-or-three-story bare-wood common house of the people. I go in, climb stairs, go along a hallway/balcony above an indoor court. Their warrior/leader (the man from before) sees me, gets up from the long table they’re all sitting around. I’m here to stop the war. I offer myself as a sacrifice for him to decline to kill and that will be the first step. I lie down on my back. He raises his long wooden spear, touches my chest with it, and doesn’t kill me. So far, so good. I’m supposed to go away now and never come back, but I wait. He mimes disemboweling me, stands straight and waits, looks frustrated that I’m too stupid to leave… He shrugs /whatever/ and goes back to his friends. /Now/ I go down the stairs and leave.

Later, at night, this is all in forested fairy-tale European California. There’s a castle in mountains. The old king of this place, in a recessed stone balcony, has just finished quietly yelling at his helper for not having done an important secret state job right. (The Aboriginal affair?) The helper leaves. The king goes down and out of the castle to do it himself and repair the problem. Two other helpers, having heard everything by hiding in the next balcony over, go down and out after the king, to spy on where he goes in his trackless steam train engine. Somehow they get to the meadow first (the original valley where I put my spear down, but here expanded to a river floodplain of grass and shrubs). They walk over rocks and a logjam at the river channel on faun legs (really on their real legs and feet that are in cloth the color of the background but with faun legs and feet painted on this side of them for the camera).

I think maybe I’m the king here and I got here first. The king has a vehicle, they don’t.

Next dream. This is like the situation in /Firefly/ at the end of The Train Job episode but also like /Touch of Evil/, so the sheriff out in the rocky (and snowy) sand dunes of Point Arena (CA) kills the story’s criminal while Wash (on an open-top snow-jeep) waits nervously back at main street and drives along the dune-park edge in the snow and wind, a woman officer running beside and behind him. I say to someone watching this show with me, “They’re in short sleeves and they’re fine, while it’s freezing cold.” Maybe the tense exertion is keeping them warm. Maybe they’re just that tough.

Next dream. In my house I dig around in a cardboard box on the pile of clothes by the refrigerator to make sure I have a mic cable for the part in the film shoot tomorrow where the sergeant-major will give the cable to the Australian Aboriginal space alien character as a gesture of good faith. Ah — here it is. It untangles so easily I think I should have bought more like this when I had some money. /Maybe I did./ I go out to the car barefoot on wet ground to look there. It’s dim, before dawn. Oh, crap, the passenger door is open and the dome light is dark. Battery dead? I crank the engine; it reluctantly starts. I’ll just sit here with the motor running for awhile to charge the battery a little.

I woke up with Johnny Cash singing in my head, a song about Milliken’s oil-drop experiment that first measured the mass of an electron. It goes /some-thing something something, as long as it can (meaning the oil drop stays in place as long as it can)… That’s professor Milliken, the oil drop man./

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–04–18:

First dream. I’ve stated making my newspaper again, in an office of old scrap wood in a city seemingly all made of old crates and wooden pallets. I’ve finishing laying out the bulk of the paper on flats and somehow already have a sample issue before even going to the printer to have the flats shot.

Now I’m with lots of people from the Mendocino area in the 1980s, including Harry Rothman of Hit and Run Theater (looks like Melvin Douglas) and grown-up (year-2000-or-so) versions of Albion Whale School kids. We’re in like an indoor dim cattle-yard chute, shuffling along to get out. There’s bland-ish but dark news filtering around about criminals having just been arrested in Albion. I ask if the main criminal boy had anything to do with my employer’s place, meaning, did he hide something there that might get Tim in trouble. Everyone says, /Don’t./ Don’t what? /Don’t./ Don’t ask that? /Don’t!/ Okay, whatever. (This is a familiar feeling. There were a lot of secrets in Albion in the ’80s and ‘90s among both hippies and speed rednecks. One time I was talking with Joey Michaels about someone up the road he’d had a scary run-in with, and I said, “We should put him on the air [on my show on KMFB then] and talk about it.” Joey said, “You ARE crazy!”)

It occurs to me, and I say to the people around me, that I didn’t think of it until now but I could just go around to all my advertisers from the old paper and get twenty or forty or sixty dollars from each of them to pay to print the new one — but I already laid it out, it’s already done. I’d have to ad an insert or wrapper of four pages of nothing but display ads. /I hate that. I’d rather be broke./

Outside in the cattle-yard/parking lot I climb up on the combined products of a clan of people here who make three-foot-long floppy dolls out of leather scraps. I choose one to give to Juanita, a dark brown but somehow blonde waif/elf (it looks like actress Gina O’Feral) and toss it down to a man I’ve been talking with. “Hold onto that for me, would ya?”

The pile of leather things is now inside a church; it’s much higher and blockier and has a regular old garbage dump’s worth of other things in it: stacks of newspapers, an old washing machine, etc. I follow 1950s wiseguy gangsters to get down; they know how: you find a fissure in the garbage down one side and vault down back and forth between ledges of different kinds of trash. Fun to jump down this way.

Outside, this is a sleazy area of San Francisco where intersections of more than two streets each come together and go under metal train track trestles. Gangster/government men like actor Chaz Palmintieri are coming this way slowly, talking on walkie talkies, taking their guns out and moving to box me in, or is that my imagination? …No, yeah, they’re here to catch me.

I float up a little bit into the air and start flying away but I can’t go any faster than they walk, and when they start trotting I can’t go any faster than they trot. I stay low and get between cars on the street and people crossing, to deter the gangsters from shooting at me.

I get off the road and into a rural area like east of Cloverdale (CA), with /old/ two and three-story houses scattered in springtime tall grass and trees, all linked by driveways and fences so it’s hard for the gangster cops to chase me, but still I can’t go up high in the air because then they’ll see me from everywhere and can just shoot and shoot until they hit me.

I can go a little faster now, but no matter how far I go there are gangster cops who have managed to get around things and get near me, though I have an advantage in that I can always see them coming, even around corners, and they can’t see me until they’re within fifteen feet. I’m only a foot off the ground now. In the yard of a church a gunfight begins where I get guns away from them to shoot back at them with, and everybody’s shooting. Nobody hits me, and most of the time when I shoot right at them it doesn’t bother them at all, but I manage to kill about a lot of them and get farther away in another direction.

I’m out of flying power. On foot, I get to a tall-grass field, the big horse-pasture front yard of another old church, or maybe a Moose Lodge. Two tall big-belly Moose Lodge bad ol’ boys at talking among themselves as they walk to intercept the way I can’t help but go. They have guns and take them out. I can fly a little again. And so can they. I fight and shoot them, finally kill the biggest one in the air and leave him folded, pinned/stuffed in a cleft in the side of a building made of pallets and telephone poles.

On a road overgrown with shrubs, along the base of a hill, young hippie revolutionary people are here to help me, and when the government gangsters come close from the next road to my right, everyone’s shooting. My gun is empty, I throw it down. I save one of the men who’s been shot, limp/run along with him, our heads down below the hedge and fence line, to where the road ends at a higher-fenced sharp drop-off. I pick the man up by one arm, lift him over the fence and use all my recharged flying power to fall slowly to the bottom of an empty reservoir that’s all grown over in tall grass. The man is dead. Shit. /Shit./

But I feel like I’m far enough away from pursuit now that maybe I can relax a little. No. In a procession of workers walking alongside an ice house, I’m recognized by Diane Buxton (real life waitress at Brannon’s in the early 1980s) who in the dream is the girlfriend of one of the gangsters. She pretends to be friendly but she’s angry because, in all the shooting, which was months ago now, her boyfriend Chaz Palmintieri was killed and she was shot in the leg and that’s all /my/ fault. (She doesn’t say any of this. I just know it.) Things become vague.

I’ve got up into the air again, higher up than ever, far enough away that I have no idea where I am except probably still in California. /Now/ can I relax a little?

No. They’ve sent someone after me who can fly /this/ high. He’s flying feet-first, wearing zories, and it’s like before where I could see around corners and far away but they couldn’t see me; I’m right next to this guy and he can’t see me but just intuits that I must be going this way. I say, “Sorry,” and cause him to crash into the side of a seven-story-tall old unpainted plywood hippie-shack highrise house. I go in through an open door on a rail-less balcony, and here’s a old gentle hippie guy with short hair and thick glasses, who seems to think he has got out of all the hippie/government/gangster business and he’s home free in his little crate-wood apartment in the sky, but I’m going in a straight line; I have to have to crash out through his many-pane sunset window, whereupon he’ll know that the troubles aren’t over and he’s still in it. Again I must apologize and leave destruction in my wake: /Sorry, man./

I woke up with the song /Take Me To Church/ blasting in my head. I think it was going for the whole dream, from the part where I saw Chaz Palmintieri coming with his gang.

Next dream. I’m someplace on a vast flat in the Bay Area. Maybe this is the airport, abandoned, but it feels like where the Marina area of San Francisco should be. I’m here to meet Juanita and her friends at a fair that I have zero interest in, but I promised to go, so.

Also I have something to do with a show in a bar like the Caspar Inn of the 1980s. In the trunk of my car, visible through the hatchback glass, is a cardboard box and two old analog synthesizers: my 1970s Micromoog and a flattish somewhat newer but still one-voice synthesizer (Korg?); that one’s not mine. It must belong to the band setting up to play in the bar. I carry it, stand just inside the door. Everyone stops talking. I can’t see any of them, or anything. I explain to the air that I have to let my eyes adjust to the dark.

I go the long way through the bar to a dream-only doorway into the stage place, where band people and technicians are either sleeping in sleeping bags or bustling around, busy. “Is Johnny Bush here? I think this is his.” Somebody bored says, “He’s here. Stay there, I’ll get him.”

Now I’m outside again, driving up a residential hill, looking for a place to park, to walk back down to the fair. A very steep driveway goes up to the left. I take it and park next to someone else parking here for the fair. (It must be okay.) Except, a garage appears in front of the cars, and a house to the right. These people must be tired of fair people and event people blocking their driveway. Hmm.

A man gets out of the other car, tells his little boy to wait here, and he hurries away down the driveway. I look in my trunk; both synthesizers are still there, plus the box, plus clothes and a lot of other junk. I rearrange the clothes to cover things. The little boy has got out of his car and is in the open garage stomping sideways at the bumper, where its hooked on the edge of the garage doorway. I shout /NO!/, but he gets it loose and the car begins to roll backward down the drive.

It switches to be rolling down forward. I jump in, brake, push down the parking brake, and puzzle out the weird way to put the transmission in Park (the order is wrong). Park, there, good, wow.

An old hippie woman and her old hippie former-lawyer-like husband come out of the house. I tell them /I’m not parking here. Don’t worry. I understand./ I explain about the man abandoning his son.

Something happens where I’m inside their house, it’s become like Dr. Mikuriya’s old house in the Berkely hills, built down the side of the hill, so it’s one story high at the road but three or four stories high when you go all the way downstairs, and I help the woman carry boxes of books down to the parking place and driveway at the /bottom/ of the house. The man and woman are going to adopt the little boy and take care of him. They can have his car, which they need. The woman gleefully tells me that the cops have already been up and down the road putting tickets on cars parked for the fair, so I can put my car on the street and not have to worry about that. They only go through once.

I go up the inside stairway, which is now as steep as a ladder. The space of the stairwell around the back-and-forth-ladder wooden stairs becomes narrower and narrower until I have to struggle to get out at the very top into a hippie attic-like space of dry old redwood and glass souvenirs and books and dishes. As I go down another short normal stairway to the front door of the house, to get out to the street, it occurs to me to call Juanita on the phone and tell her why it’s taking me so long, but my phone opens up to Juanita already having called me and opening the phone answers. She’s in a loud environment; I can’t understand anything she’s saying. I say, “Stop! I’ll be at the entrance desk in twenty minutes. Is my name on the — “ She’s still talking. I say, “Twenty minutes! That’s how long it will take me to get there!” I’m at the street, walking down the hill to the flat, where the fair is not in tents and booths but inside a huge concrete block building that retroactively has always been here. She’s still talking, the sound is cutting in and out. I hang up and laugh the word /FUCK!/

My dream from a nap Tuesday night:

I’m floating upright in calm water between some small ocean-fishing boats and grass-edged shore with palm trees. Juanita appears in the water with me and gives me a bottle with complicated light orange fibrous liquid (?) in it. She made it and she’s proud of it. She swims away toward shore.

There’s been something in the news about people being hurt? drowned? or merely terrorized by /wire/ in the water. I’m reminded of this by feeling fishing line tangled around my legs and mainly around my right foot and big toe (which in real life has been hurting from what I think might be incipient arthritis). There’s a current, or the fishing line now practically everywhere in the water is gently but irresistibly pulling me along the line of boats, toward the channel between the last boat and shore, to the sea. I’m afraid the line will pull me against the back of a boat and into a turning propeller. (Maybe it’s pulling because it’s already twisting around a spinning propeller.) I woke up going, /AAAGH! AAAAUGH!/

(Juanita was standing over me. She said she woke me up because I was calling /Help! Help!/ I said, “I feel like I woke myself up by going /AAAGH! AAAAUGH!/ She said, “I woke you up by doing this.” She wiggled my knee. Huh. I didn’t feel that.)

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–04–19:

First dream. In the dream, Juanita and I have been living in a strange old long flat suburban house for many years. We had to sell it. We’ve done most of the moving out but some of our oldest things are still here. In the garage-bedroom (carpet on the concrete) here are crates of LP records on their sides, with most of the records scattered everywhere, probably by the new people moving in.

Here are shoeboxes of old things: bank books from 40 or 50 years ago when they put it in an IBM Selectric typewriter and typed on them. Here are two multitools: a red Victorinox one without pliers, and a gray metal and gray plastic bigger one with pliers and a wirecutter and a long heavy saw blade that pulls out of one handle to turn around and attach by the tang. /It’s twice as long as the handle it comes out of! How?/ I put it back in and take it out again. This can’t be right…

Here’s a box of self-published books by people who sent them to my show on KMFB. Mostly self-help business and psychology bullshit.

I take my clothes off and shower in a corner of the garage where the water can run out under the garage door. Is there soap? No. Hurry up, in case someone comes in here from the house.

Back in the house an old tough cowboy woman of the family already living here is settled in a wooden chair, watching teevee. (Her bed is in the garage.) The family has been politely waiting for weeks to move all their stuff in once Juanita and I are gone. They go into a big dining room to have dinner. I’m not invited. Juanita’s not here now. She’ll want me to save the records, but all I care about is the neat multitools. I’d be happy just to get those and whatever Juanita wants and leave and never come back, and let the new people throw out what they don’t want.

Next dream. I’m driving on a narrow highway between cliffs, toward the sea. When cars come the other way you have to crowd the right side of the road to miss crashing, so I’m going thirty miles an hour instead of highway speed. Cars rush up behind me and pass on the right, on the paved verge. Are you allowed to drive on that? Why not just stay out there?

Now I’m driving a boxy 1960s car from a position following along in the air a hundred feet behind it. There’s a time lag between when I turn and when the car turns. This is too scary. Just get off the road entirely.

I’m in a gas station convenience-store/cafe at night. Gas is six dollars a gallon, which to the person I am in the dream is crazy. Everything for sale here is way overpriced: a five-dollar spark plug socket tool is $75. Quart cans of motor oil are $35. I and other salesmen hang around here, discussing the prices, drinking bland 1960s-style coffee out of paper cups. (Coffee is free.)

Out back of the gas station on a mild-to-chilly fall afternoon in Wyoming, I feel like who I was in the early 1980s. Also here is a savvy, quiet, self-assured salesman and a young man like Clue, who used to live down the street from us in Caspar (CA). Clue’s red fire-company-surplus pickup truck is locked in a fenced carport, impounded. He complains that to get it back and legal to drive he’ll have to pay more in fines than the value of the truck. /A familiar story./

The salesman says, “I could acquire all this in half an hour.” (He means the gas station, the impound yard, the entire side of the hill up there…) He starts telling about his history in sales, leading to but never quite getting to telling the secret of just being rich. I gesture for him to cut ahead to that. He goes to get a drink from the water fountain on the wall. What /I/ think is the man’s money success secret is: he’s in a gray-brown suit. He talks standing still, feet wide apart, looks straight ahead. Clue and I are in t-shirts and jeans — kid clothes — and Clue is hyperactively twitching, stepping back and forth and hopping a little the whole time. Am I doing that? Yes. Tch. That’s why the man is rich and can buy gas stations and we’re not and can’t. That may not be the whole trick, but it would go a long way.

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–04–20:

First dream. An agent of our time-travel or inter-timeline-travel agency didn’t come back from a mission and was probably killed, so I and one other go to see what happened. We’re standing in the rock-arch doorway of a cave where the switch between times and places happens. All around outside are people from this place — Portuguese Inca people, I think, and they might rush and kill us, but Queen Isabella-Inca (a cross between Eve Arden and 1930s Princess Ardala) turns out to be sympathetic. Also, this is not the same place as our dead guy went, so it /isn’t/ time travel but inter-timeline travel. Good to know.

Queen Isabella takes me out on the ocean to go to someplace she wants to show me. We’re on a powered flexible raft like a flat plastic blanket. The motor control is a blobby plastic box with buttons and knobs on it. We end up not in the place she wanted to go but just a mile or so up the beach from where we started. It’s getting dark; time to go back. But the waves have got big and scary and a storm is coming in. Maybe we should just walk back — but she insists. I say, “I don’t think this is safe, but you’re the expert.”

Once we’re out on the water the waves go especially crazy. The wave we’re on is about to break and we fly outward/seaward over the edge of it and fall a long way, so the water gets over on top of the blanket/raft on her side and disorients her so she wants to have sex with me. Are you kidding? No, she’s getting all languidly sexy and her arms and legs extend in length to drape over me and into the water on all sides of the raft. I say gently but firmly, “Stay alive now, sex later,” and I follow her arm down into the water with my hand to where she’s still clutching the motor control. Whew.

Okay, how do I work this? There’s a knob recessed flat with the top of it, with a dent in the knob so you can turn it. That does nothing. I push one button after another until one of them starts the motor and gets the raft going, slowly. The waves have calmed down. I steer us around rocks and get onto a beach. It’s full night now. We walk up the beach to a college library. Isabella says, and I quote, “I think I can get help from our nigger base.” I say, “What?”

A man who I think is leaving stops to hold the door open for us and follows us in. The woman is a teacher here; the man is her colleague. He has one-word-title play script books spread all over. He’s been xeroxing them and binding them with a book stapler.

Next dream. An old actor-Owen-Wilson character is a rancher. He’s concerned about a mess of all kinds of different sizes of white plastic pipes, flexible joints, big valves, etc., all in a dry dirt space under the floor of a warehouse out in the wilderness. Something’s wrong with it.

Later, when the concert up on top and out in the surrounding fields is already happening, important parts of the pipes are leaking, not like they’ve failed but like they’ve been sabotaged. Treasure-Of-The-Sierra-Madre-like men are standing around, scowling, indolent. The main plumber who’s been working for Owen Wilson since they were teenagers walks away saying Union slogans.

Owen Wilson’s brother Russel Crowe claims he’ll fix it up, but Owen Wilson is skeptical and wants to hire someone else. Russell Crowe says, “Will you hire some kid? Or somebody you /trust/.” Owen Wilson trusts me way more than he trusts Russell Crowe, so.

It’s later. The concert is still going on up there. I’ve got the water turned off and have plenty of pipe glue and fittings and parts, including parts for pipe a foot in diameter that takes a regular full-size handsaw to cut. I’m fixing everything.

Next dream. I’ve been working in a strange old Italian restaurant. There’s a forty-by-sixty-foot front room with a twelve-foot ceiling. I’m in a back corner of this room, behind a room divider, both pretending to do paperwork and just resting. The little girl from Tarsem Singh’s /The Fall/, but without the arm-and-shoulder medical cast, has just been hired; she starts tomorrow. A woman like Juanita’s friend Lisa gives her an apron. She thinks she should put it in the kitchen rather than bring it home with her. I say, “We just throw it over.” She tries to throw the apron over the long transom window but can’t get it high enough. I say, “Try again.” She puts all her effort into it and it goes high but wide, makes it over at the edge, and there’s a wet /plop/ sound. I joke, “That went into the soup.” She’s horrified. I say, “I’ll take care of it. It’s okay. See you tomorrow.”

Time passes so I’ve just finished eating breakfast or lunch at a table in the kitchen, which is no longer the kitchen. Two other people are at the table. I put my check on the money-counting table and the money woman (Lisa) isn’t satisfied. Oh, it’s the wrong paper, not my check. Nothing in my pocket or back on the other table is the check. The waitress, Sandy Glickfeld, must have gone home for the day. She’s not out in the room in front. I can’t remember what I ate, to just say that and pay for it. I think I might be a demented man and they make allowances for me here.

More time passes. I go into the room behind the kitchen/not-kitchen for something in a low shelf of a rack of cubbies. I’m wearing only tight white underwear. Whatever I’m looking for is not here. The new-hired little girl comes in, gets her apron, goes back out. The place suddenly sounds busy out there. Now I’m looking for my pants. I suppose I can make a dress out of two long aprons, one in front and one in back. /Why am I even here? Why does this always happen?/

The quiet early part of Jethro Tull /Aqualung/ was playing in my head when I woke up.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–04–21:

First dream I’m scheduled for a colon exam in a deserted-of-merchandise mall-type department store. I’m directed to climb up onto a Cooper Mini-car-size linoleum-covered wooden frame, so people — maybe medical students, maybe amusement-park tourists — can stand around watching as a Montessori-teacher-like middle-aged woman sticks her index finger up my butt, somehow through my pants, then follow it with a flexible camera tube thing. I expect to be able to see what the camera sees, on a screen across the aisle in front of me, but once it’s inside, it’s dark. Of course.

Everyone wanders off, including the Montessori woman. Can I get down now? I guess so; if they had found a problem in there, they would have said something.

Next dream. Some of the Hit and Run Theater people are sitting around in a strange house. They’re at the age they all were in the 1980s. Someone says something about the recordings of their shows sounding so bad. Doug Nunn says to me, “Tell him about the the software thing.” Harry Rothman is at the dinner table; I explain about new A.I. software that I tried out on their website that takes a crappy, noisy recording of people talking and makes it sound like they recorded it in a quiet studio with good close microphones.

(The song /Unchained Melody/ was playing in my head when I woke up. Then the pet bird sensed I was awake and began to scream for attention, so I had to go pull the blanket down around her cage. Juanita doesn’t like it when I reward the bird for making that noise by saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry I didn’t feed you before,” and feeding her. I’m supposed to wait at least ten minutes after the last screech. I don’t mind that noise anymore, but Juanita does, so.)

—

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–04–23:

First dream. I’m homeless, but I’m younger than in real life, and have a gig giving boxing lessons to kids whose parents just drop them off by a rough vacant lot where the heating and sheet metal shop should be in Fort Bragg (CA), south across the street from Rhodes Auto Parts. One boy’s father is standing here watching. He butts in to show his little boy how to punch, swinging his arm around in a wide curve. I say to him, “I’m sure it works for you, but that’s not right. Look how much better it is this way.” I show the boy again and he does it right.

I’m camping in the empty end of a giant car repair garage where the line of shops on North Franklin Street should be. I get up, put my clothes on, stuff everything in my sleeping bag, roll it up and tie it. I go to where a couple of mechanics are conferring with customers. It’s clear they have no time to help me with my truck now.

Things change so the garage is where Rhodes NAPA Auto Parts should be, and it’s a wooden building, not a metal one. I’m coming across a Southern-state forested area to it. It’s 4:30 by my watch. I ask a man standing under a tree if they have time to fix a tire today. He says no. I say, “Can I use bead seal?” He says sarcastically, “Have fun.”

Inside the shop my truck is Clue’s red fire department pickup truck from the dream last week. I lay the tread of a tire out on the shop floor like a giant long red-carpet rug. It’s muddy everywhere. I kick and brush at it, inspecting it. I say, “I lost where the puncture is.” The sarcastic guy snickers at how incompetent I am. All I can do is keep at it, try to find the problem and then fix it. It doesn’t occur to me in the dream to think ahead to /how will I make a tire out of this again, even once I’ve patched the hole?/

Next dream. I’m walking down Main Street in a future version of Mendocino. I go into a toy store where I expected to get something that Juanita wanted, that I think I’ll remember what it is when I see it, but the place is mostly empty. The Nordic proprietor man is going out of business, packing the last few things up with his helper, Mary Jewett, at the age she was in 1980. I say, “I didn’t know. It’s sad.” He says, “We had a good long run. It’s time. It’s all right.”

I walk back up the street to a dirt lot where the eucalyptus tree park should and the cemetery east of there should be. In the dream this a place people dump their cars and leave them. Old cars I used to have might be here. Hmm… Well, here’s my 1972 Toyota Corolla, no rustier than it was. The key’s under the seat. It starts right up! Perfect! It’s not my favorite car, but I didn’t have any car a minute ago and now I do. This is a huge step up. I’m not gonna jinx it by looking around some more for another car I used to have. This is fine. I pull out onto the road and turn toward the highway. The car has the faint ghost of a smell of upholstery mold and old motor oil.

Next dream. I wake up from sleep, in the dream, in a weird version of my house, but the bed is walled off from the rest of the house to be in a little bedroom. Out the window, in a bright, sunny day, a twelve-foot-square paper sign is hung up horizontally on ropes, just at the right height so I see it on edge and can’t read it. Is that for helicopters to read?

I don’t have any clothes on. I look around the doorjamb. The place is bustling with college political activist maybe-lesbian hippie girls. There’s a kitchen sink and counter on the south wall of the one long room that’s the rest of the house. There’s bathroom right here in a tiny hallway. There’s a couch, and a chair. A teevee is on, yammering news. Everything is clean and new and all my stuff is gone. It occurs to me that the sign might be the girls’ way of saying /fuck you/ to The Man.

Now I’ve got my clothes on and I’m writing about all this on a strange tablet on the bed, using a PC keyboard plugged into the USB port. I see that I’ve written a block of about a thousand words. I scroll up. The top of the file is the activist/work resumes of all the girls living here now, with their pictures and mottos and aspirations and so on. A happy Shirley-Temple-at-20-like girl comes in to see what I’m writing, /snatches the tablet up/ and laughs musically at finding her own picture right in the middle of it.

I go out into the main room to talk to the boss girl (it’s obvious who’s the boss). I say, “How many of you are living here?” She nods to the bookcase that’s replaced the sink and counter, that’s full of little diorama/shrine displays of each girl’s expression of life. I say, “So — eight?” She nods, yup. I say, “Just out of curiosity, what happens when you all wanta take a shower?” (I asked this because the water heater is only ten gallons and it takes an hour to get hot.) She’s finished dealing with me; I’m not interesting anymore; I don’t know anything to be exploited for.

/I/ wanta take a shower. But someone’s in there already. Steam billows out around the open door. This is all impossible, in both senses of the word. Where do they all sleep? This is /my/ house. I didn’t agree that they could move in here. Where’s my computer? Where are all my things? I can’t write with all this going on; I can’t get ready for my radio show. This is a sitcom-plot nightmare. Still, I’m calm enough to not freak out and order them all to get the fuck out of my house, because maybe I’m demented and they’re supposed to be here and I’m not, and I’m here because they let me be.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–04–24:

First dream. I find myself working at Tim’s but I don’t know what year it is or what I’m supposed to be working on today. I’m in the shop, but there’s plumbing arranged like in the garden-well pumphouse before the separate meters went in, so that narrows the time down a little. I call Tim on the phone to try to ask him without letting him know I’m from another time. Before I can say anything Tim says oddly angrily, “I’m paying you fifty dollars an hour.” Ah, he means that much only for the Bloodroot wheelchair ramp project. I didn’t know I was getting that much. I worry that on my timesheet I didn’t separate out the Bloodroot’s-house times from the other work. I’ll have to look the timesheet over and fake it, like faking chemistry lab notes in college — the same feeling.

Next dream. A golden-tan desert of buttes and bluffs and Maxfield-Parrish-blue sky. A quirky, elderly beatnik artist has made an artistic tribute to me and an old man and his wife. I’ve come to the old couple’s house to congratulate them. I say to the man, “He got very close around the eyes.” The man is embarrassed and amused. I climb up on the fence to point out the art, which is another house in the distance, like the house in the American Gothic painting but made of stone and clay to be a house-size human face with a big (clay-colored) toothy smile and slightly hooded eyes. There’s nothing of me or the man in that face, but I say, “You see, about the eyes?”

Later, same desert landscape. I’ve been working in a recording studio on a documentary radio project about a particular famous song of a band, like The Band but not, that used an echo method that nobody else had ever done, that involved both tape echo and a big metal bucket of water with pipes that went in and out of the sides… I go to a house like the house of the old man and his wife in the previous dream. Here the house belongs to a young couple — maybe the same people when they were in their thirties. Their back yard is filled with a garden and a green wet lawn. Their ten-year-old boy is playing with a collie dog. He goes to a spigot by the house to fill up a plastic bucket with water.

I tell the couple that I’m exhausted. It’s because of the national-park-money project of the rock sculptor, also of the previous dream, and land reclamation work after the disaster (?), and also I’ve been staying up all night on the sound for the documentary… I say, “Here, I’ll show you.” The boy is across the yard now. I call to him: “Bring me that bucket.” I’m going to go to the spigot and use the bucket to play back the part of the recording that has what the documentary narrator calls /The Machine/ in it. I’m going to recreate the special sound by playing a cassette tape into the bucket and swirl water around.

(I woke up worrying again about where are all those recordings of plays I made for the theater company might have got to. Crates of them. What if whoever’s been keeping them died of old age and workers are taking those tapes to the dump right now. /I can’t follow up on even the most important things to me anymore./)

Asleep again. Next dream. This dream jumps around between different movies, low-budget high school rainy-day gym movies, about ecology, but with elements of high creativity, like from the early 1970s:

One film: Two people fly north in a cardboard box, aiming for the North Pole. They go out past golden-tan stone and clay battlement ruins, and away over the sea. Then I’m telling the story of that film, and the people come back and fly overhead the other way.

Another film: I see different angles of a big rich-people’s arts-foundation building on the Mendocino Coast, with lots of trees around, especially inland, uphill. Because of resentment I won’t be able to be polite to these people and that’ll ruin my chances of ever getting any of their money, not that it’s likely at all. So I only go part-way into the foyer, turn, go back out, and float-run down concrete steps, to swing around the edge of a decorative wall near the parking lot.

Another film: In a place like the Roseville (CA) cattle auction yards in the early 1970s I go into a whole-city-block-size building made of heavy timbers that hold up and hold together slabs of sloppy, rocky, fresh concrete in a multi-ridge roof. It doesn’t look safe. I examine a garage-door frame where the concrete on the lintel and the wall above has bulged out away from the building. I /guess/ it’s okay. I mean, if none of this has fallen yet, it will will only get stronger and harder. But nobody’s spraying water on it. Don’t you have to keep spraying water on concrete to keep it from cracking until it’s finished curing?

And another: Young people like live-action Scooby-Doo kids on a case have sneaked into a glass greenhouse/laboratory. Only one of them can see the big dangerous quiet Wilson-Fisk-like security boss standing /right there/ watching them. I become that boy and say urgently/covertly to the others, “We hafta get outta here. Come on.” But we haven’t found what we’re here for. “We have to go! I’ll explain later!”

Finally I’m in an alley between rows of unpainted, disheveled backs of storefronts. It’s all rusty and rotted and horrible, and all non-building space is Cobb-cartoon-like mounds and hills of mixed 1960s landfill garbage. I use my phone to shoot video looking out the end of the alley, where there’s a green hillside of trees. It’s the same out the other end.

I carry a rusty dead washing-machine-like appliance to just drop it against the corner of a rusty metal building. Other people are here now, working or rather walking through the place going to or coming from working or pretending to work. Nobody cares that I’m dumping trash here. This is an old-fashioned dump, no sorting or recycling, right in the middle of town in an otherwise idyllic mountain valley.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Leave Me Alone/ by Helen Reddy. Just the chorus.

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–04–27:

First dream. I’m working in an old concrete open building that’s made mostly of a leftover decommissioned 60-year-old freeway overpass in like Ohio. This is part of the studio backlot of a Goodwill store. My project is to rebuild a motor from an old truck (or maybe it’s from a fishing boat; it’s big). Everything here is red rusty old iron. Long bolts hold the cylinder block to the crankcase through holes that come out both the top and bottom, and I’m putting these bolts in and finding nuts for them and tightening them down.

Somehow after seeming weeks of work I get a 1940s Dodge-like car going using the engine. The car is rusty all over. I follow another car just like it up a hill I remember in Auburn, California but here it’s in Youngstown, Ohio, near the Mahoning River. I’m ready to turn aside before the steepest part. The car has very little power. If the guy in front of me has a problem, then I’ll turn. Let him get farther ahead so I have some warning and can turn down a street instead of both of us being stuck.

Next dream. I push and temporarily fasten up long thick heavy metal electrical conduit pipes under the flat roof across a meeting hall or church space, from over the balcony in the back to a high shelf on the way out the front.

Now I’m with Juanita where she lives (in the dream) in remote hills, by an abandoned wrecked dam. It’s night. The weather is wet. I just got here last night to spend a week with her. The phone rings. It’s Tim. Something’s wrong with the electrical system in his pumphouse; all the water tanks are down to nothing. I suppose I can go back there and fix it. (Juanita mutters to me not to do it because I just got here.) I think of how if I go back I’ll also be able to fix the electricity and plumbing at the commune where Judy Brown lives…

I woke up thinking about how Judy Brown is long dead. And she never lived in a commune. The Dire Straits song /Roller Girl/ was playing in my head, the part where Mark Knopfler sings, “Roller girl, don’t worry, deejay play the movies all night long, all night long.”

(There were dream notes from Wednesday, too, but I did them on the phone into an email and neither saved it nor sent it, so when I pressed the wrong button later it went away and wasn’t in the drafts folder, or anything, and so it’s gone. If I had those notes I could reconstruct it, but I don’t have them, so.)

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