April 30 through May 5, 2023

My dream from Sunday, 2023–04–30:

I and my generic tall Nordic doctor/diplomat/spy partner are waiting in the Rite-Aid pharmacy on Main Street in Fort Bragg (CA) till it’s time to start the mission. On a goods display table out front he finds a big flat old thick-paper comic-book-bound map of an unfamiliar Eastern European country. The place names on the map are simple English translations of the original ancient names: Good Place, Water Over Cliff, Rocks and Grass, etc.

The country on the map is across the street to the north and it’s all somehow on one city block. I’m in the map country now, climbing a hill of rocks and grass. I don’t belong here; I compose excuses in case I get arrested. The higher I get, the steeper downhill becomes. When I have to get down, can I fly down?

Decades pass. The diplomatic agency of this country is a little church priest’s house. I’m in the front yard of the house, now one of many on a suburban street. Something someone says sounds like, “Tickle your ass with a feather,” part of an old joke — it sounds like, “Particularly nasty weather.” I repeat, “Particularly nasty weather,” and the priest/diplomat looks at the sky, looks at me; he doesn’t get it. Never mind.

Now I’m lying on my back in bed on the lawn, typing on a virtual keyboard in bunched-up sheets on my chest to look up feathers on the web to buy for Juanita, for a costume she wants to make. This results in a publicity poster for a 1950s Ohio church group club meeting and bazaar — maybe because they’ll have feathers there.

Around the corner, dogs approach a cat in the middle of the street and make friends. More dogs arrive, all different kinds. The first dogs and the cat continue the way the cat was going but the new dogs become a pack with a collective goal and step around people in the street to race down the white-wood-fenced alley behind the next street of houses.

Cardboard appliance boxes are flattened for disposal but scattered on a house’s side lawn. There’s my laptop computer under the edge of one. I say to myself, /Remember to get that before you leave./ I go around shoving the cardboard with my shoes to pile it together in one place, and also kick cut yard waste into the pile.

Back at the priest’s house, an old babushka-nun is putting dinner on the table. I ask the priest if he knows what a crystal is. (Retroactively he’s been curious about how I plan to restore the landscape — now no longer a suburb but a desert — to green grass and round rocks the way it was in history, and I simplify the explanation to something like the Tok-Ra crystals that make instant tunnels in /Stargate/. My technology will convert the land, all the way to the horizon, to match the descriptive name for this part of the country on the map: Rocks and Grass.

Another person at the table is nervous. He’s lost his papers. I see them next to a typewriter and point there; this reminds me of my computer under the cardboard. /Excuse me. I have to go get something. I’ll be right back. Sorry./ I hope it’s still there!

Another day, while the crystal tech gizmo is finishing up converting the land back to rocks and grass (from dingy suburb), I push a stick around (more Clark’s Law tech) to pulverize the priest house’s entire back yard to fertile dark earth. I edge near to the fence and around bricks without harming them. The house is so old. I consider magically lifting it up out of the ground and fixing the foundation. Go in and tell them first? Get their permission? No, just do it.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–05–01:

First dream. I’m at an outdoor concert event, in the enclosed area that’s the line for toilets. The line I’m in gets shorter and longer at random. Someone calls me by name to shift to another line where I’m closer to the front and the line works more normally. How this toilet works is, you sit down in a small convertible-car body, lower the cover to leave only your head sticking up, and in this position pull your pants down by feel and just piss in there.

Ben Blaufeld, a Jack-Black-like boy from the Mendocino Community School in the early 1980s, is in front of me in line. He gets into the car, pulls the top down, sits there for awhile looking around presumably pissing, pushes the top up, gets out, says, “All yours,” and goes away. My turn. I get in, tuck my head down so it’s inside when I pull the cover down, but with it down all the way people can still see in. Oh, well, I have to do this. I piss and piss; it just keeps going for minutes, soaking the carpet and the seat and ruining car tools and parts in here. What a mess. Finally finished, I get out. The next person in line gets in like nothing’s wrong. /I guess this is just the way they do it here./ I go around backstage to the electronics and wires and cables to figure out what my job is today.

Next dream. My college friend Dan’s family lives (in the dream) in an Addams’ Family-like house but even older and more cluttered. Dan is depressed about something. I’m staying over while I work at a concert? theater play? convention?

I hope everyone else of the family stays away till I’m gone, especially the father. I try to occupy Dan, take his mind off what he’s depressed about, by exploring unknown rooms and cleaning up a little…

Next dream. Here’s another giant old house but more sunk down into the earth in grass and forest, missing some walls, even missing the roof of the whole back part. This feels like the house in Mendocino Theater Company’s production of /One Shoe Off/. The place is crawling with unsupervised delinquent kids, mostly Lost Boys but some Lost Girls. I fix the water system, test it by shooting the hose into a closet-size fireplace, but there’s still fire in there in embers. I build it back up in a corner with twigs and bigger wood from a crib of random rough found-firewood.

Time passes. Months. Years. I impress a new group of kids here by jump/flying across a bowling-alley-size room, bounce off the wall, fly back, knock all the furniture over as I crash to a stop. Ta-daaah! (Unlike usual dreams of flight to show off, here this results in acclaim and authority.)

To further establish my benevolent rule, I become a riverboat gambler/scamp fallen on hard times but who can still pull off a financial coup. My scheme is to phone for pizzas, go down to town and cheat someone out of their land or rob a railroad company bank or something, all in time to pick up and pay for the pizzas and bring them back to the house for everyone in just half an hour or forty-five minutes.

Even later this old house is the setting for the documentary-like story of a Withnail-like character stringing the girl who loves him along with plausible-lie scenes of all the discrete steps of a young writer becoming successful. There’s nothing in between the steps, and each one is punctuated by a declaration. The first is, “I got an agent!” Then, “I mailed my manuscript!” Then, “My agent called! My manuscript has been accepted for publication!” Etc. The girl is not fooled. She just loves him. /That’s the biggest trick of all./

I woke up with the Men At Work song /Helpless Automaton/ playing in my head.

— — -

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–04–05:

First dream. Society in this worldwide Nevada-City/Fisherman’s-Wharf town is shot though with different gangs and factions of low-key homeless spies. I go to the back room of a restaurant to get a haircut, but the woman who works here is not of my spy gang; she’s in another one. Suddenly I’m sitting in the barber chair and she’s handling my weird dreadlocked hair. She /wants/ to cut it, but what she really wants is to stick a pin with a white plastic ball on the end into my head to surveil me and surveil the people I spy on. Now she /is/ in my spy gang so I have some say in this. No, no recording pin. I’ll do it the old-fashioned way and write things down.

Farther north up the street is a Googy-architecture gas station that’s been turned into a curio shop. I take a picture of a commemorative plaque, using two torn pieces of cereal-box cardboard sliding against each other. (My phone is reduced to this by age and use.) Maybe I can buy a fresh phone or a camera in the other gas station cattycorner across the street.

Next dream. I’m in a big strange house belonging, in the dream, to my real-life landlord. In the basement I discover that another handyman (Macintosh expert Chuck Wilcher) has fixed pipes and properly grounded the tub pipes while I was away. /I guess I’m not indispensable./ My landlord leads me around under this /other version/ of the same person’s house. I’m following but not paying attention, so when he turns to go upstairs I continue in a straight line; my feet slide on the floor while I step the way I want to go, so I only gradually slow to a stop and head back for the stairs up out of the concrete basement. (It feels like going up into the rich family’s house in the future, in a dream from months ago.)

Next dream. I drive the nicer of the two Ramblers I used to have, between cabins in like Navarro Ridge in the 1970s. The people I came here to see aren’t here. Other Easy-Rider-like drug-money hippies look out at me from another house. They won’t shoot me; they can see I’m leaving. The driveway is so little used it has grown over with grass. I can only see where it is, to follow it, by dents and channels in the height of the grass.

Next dream. There’s a story/interview/lecture event in a place like the Whitesboro Grange Hall. People come in and sit in folding chairs to wait for it to start. I’ll record the speaker woman on video with my phone. She goes to the lectern and starts to talk, but she can’t be heard because of the (retroactive) well-attended barbershop quartet show blaring in the next room. I tell the woman to stop. /Just wait a minute. That’s their last song./ She’s like, /Oh, okay, then./ Everybody waits.

After the shows I’m helping clean up and put things away. I find a squishy big kapok-padded envelope with pages from the past. Here’s a letter /to me/ in round teenage-girl handwriting, where the girl says something nice about my eyes — how wonderful my eyes are. I don’t think so; is this really to me? There are more documents now, and there’s a splorp of thick ketchup. I separate and set aside the things to clean them and keep the ketchup off papers and things that haven’t yet been ruined, but no matter how careful I am, the ketchup multiplies and gets on everything, including a page with Juanita’s precious feathers from some project, dated in the wonderful-eyes-girl’s handwriting, /October 7, 1992/.

Next dream. In a bar on like Navarro Ridge in the 1970s, the bar owner pays me fifty dollars he owes me for something I did for him a long time ago. He pays the next guy hundred of dollars. A man like Derek Hoyle reminds him of his debt to Lawrence Livermore (manager of Green Day and publisher of The Lookout). The bar owner says, “How much?” Derek says, “Seventeen thousand.” The man writes a check for $17,000! Derek turns to me and says, “See how nice?” What I see is that I was an idiot for going first and settling for fifty.

I woke up with the song Mary Ann with the Shaky Hands, by The Who, playing in my head.

—

When I woke up from that dream, the first thing I read when I turned on my computer to get my email was the Mendocino County Today column in TheAVA.com (The Anderson Valley Advertiser), and halfway down the column was this paragraph by Larry (Lawrence) Livermore:

>I was pretty sure Green Day/Sweet Children were gonna do great the very first time I saw them, but the day I knew they were destined for superstardom came a few months later at one of their early Gilman shows. They brought a bag of dry ice and opened it up when Mike clambered on top of a milk crate to play, of course, “Dry Ice.” One of their buddies turned a flashlight into a spotlight, shining it through the fog to illuminate Mike’s calmly ecstatic features. I guess he was still only 16 at the time, but he stood tall, confident, and proud even without the milk crate, and the band, while mocking generic arena rock, seemed to be simultaneously saying, “Oh yeah, we could pull off a stadium show with three bucks worth of props.” At the time, probably no more than a couple hundred people had even heard of them, but it was obvious nothing short of a meteor landing on their practice pad was going to stop these guys from being one of the biggest bands in the world. Happy birthday, Mike, thanks for all the memories and inspiration, past, present, and future.

— — -