Dec. 31 through April 12, 2024

My dreams from Sunday, 2021–12–31: Handyman.

First dream. There’s a line of giant old dilapidated but still wonderful three-story Victorian once-white houses on the street in Mendocino where Cafe Beaujolais should be, and the house where Mitch and Elly used to live. These houses are far apart on land that slopes steeply down toward the bay. It’s cluttered and excavated and grown over with vegetation, and the paths go up and down over declivities and piles of junk. The far-downhill place is mostly roofed over with high, corrugated-metal-roof carports full of all these old people’s storage items and art projects: pottery, mechanical art, potted plant pots and gardening supplies, tools…

I’m young. Peter Lit, one of the old people, but young here, wants to pay me to illegally move a bunch of gardening materials and plastic and clay plant pots to the yard of the next house to the east, where Mitch and Mary Tyler Moore live. He tells me which way to go when carrying things so no-one sees and calls the police, but it’s like the way weed used to be; it’s against the law but it isn’t a big deal.

This whole time and place is pleasant, no worries. A Studio Ghibli pretty blue sky, cool air, unhurried…

Now I’m driving the Chevy Nova I had in the middle-1970s, on a two-lane highway at night through hills. I realize I forgot to move Peter’s things. I wait till the road gets wide, in a small town of a single strip of shops, to turn around without using the brakes, slowing by skidding sideways, like turning wearing skis.

Next dream. I get up out of bed in like the bedroom I had when I was in high school. A pretty, 40-something woman, who I work for (in the dream), is out front doing yard things, dragging a hose around. I’m naked. I sit down on the bed, bend over and put my face in my hands. When I look up, the woman is peeking in the window. She startles and runs away.

I go into a bathroom that’s where the hallway should be. There’s a doorway on the other side with no door in it, and there’s a homemade-looking cloth shower curtain arranged on dowels around the toilet corner. There’s a big lenticular brownish water drop on the toilet seat from a coin-size hole in the ceiling sheetrock. Is there a bad pipe up in there? I make a mental note to add that to the list of things I have to fix around here.

Next dream. I’m in a bedroom in one of the Victorian houses from the first dream. It’s the last day I’m allowed to stay here, so I quickly clean things up, clear everything off the bed, shake it all out, and put it all back on straight, then go around the room picking blankets and sheets and towels and everything from bundles and piles of bunched-up laundry, piling it all on flat and evenly on the bed. Nothing looks or smells disgusting, so this is fine.

Outside it’s daytime again after I was out driving last night. It’s almost noon by my watch. I was supposed to go to school today. Oh, well.

I haven’t been keeping track of my time working for Peter, or for the people next door. I don’t remember how many hours I’ve done. I’ll have to just make something up. I move some yard garbage and this reveals a fresh whole lot of tall grass and weeds that still need cutting and pulling out.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Operator/ by Jim Croce.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2024–01–01: Right angles.

First dream. Something about a big cubic room and I’m shouting, swearing precisely like a magic spell or a mathematical rap song into it, through the open door, at something invisible inside.

I woke up repeating the sequence of swears, to remember it, to write it down, but I didn’t write it, so it’s gone. I remember that it had /motherfucker/ in it a few times.

Next dream. I’m in the living room of a strange suburban ranch-style house with some others. I’m sitting next to the flat stone of the decorative fireplace. Tim brings me my next work to do in dribs and drabs. It will eventually be a new kind of antenna made of lots of little active elements. Here’s a stack of one-inch-by-three-inch circuit cards. Here’s tiny bundle of the leftover ends of used quarter-watt resistors. Here are four plastic-wood three-foot rulers with notches in the ends, to fit them together in a square, probably, like craft sticks, or like Lincoln logs.

Now this is a government installation where we have an invisible alien person trapped in a cubic room twelve feet on a side. The doorway is open. I’m communicating with the alien about building a special /big/ antenna to sabotage their invasion, but at the same time I’m building it, and I understand the problem of working against my own people. Thick cables go into the room slightly diagonally. It’s not important that it be perfect. My bosses are impatient. I’m trying to build it right, and fast, but at the same time I’m being a deliberately sloppy so it’ll need to be done again. It’s a balancing act.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was Bleeding All Over The Place, by Randy Newman.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2024–01–02: High heel fight. Below stairs. Cabletrain.

First dream. I and a generic partner in the vague lead-up adventure swim/walk to a small island in a desert lake in dim light. Someone else is landing at the island from the left in a rowboat. The important girl hiding here and her devoted bodyguard man have already swum a hundred yards farther away out into the lake to get away from either the boat man or us. They have nothing to fear from us, but maybe the boat man is a threat… No, he’s not. Nobody trusts us. We should just leave. They’re okay. The real bad guys might be following us and we /will/ be the problem.

I go to swim/walk back the way we came, but my partner, a Doctor Pangloss/Mexican bandit/Jovent(from John Barnes, A Million Open Doors)-wild-Musketeer character is riding a motorcycle away from the island on the ridge of a peninsula to it, into dirt-bike mountains. /He’s/ the bad guy. I chase after him on a motorcycle as the world gets darker and darker, so I’m really following the cone-glow of his headlight, around the curve of the ridge, to the right.

Now I’m in a modern apartment in caves on the side of a cliff far up a long deep valley from the motorcycle chase. It’s very dark now. Pursuers’ motorcycle lights are coming diagonally up the cliff, this way. I might as well leave the light on here; surely they’ve seen it.

And now pursuers are in the apartment. There’s the feeling of the apartment scene in the movie /Limitless/ where arrogant aggressors are confident and so don’t start anything yet but will. I’m wearing black high-heel shoes. I innocuously dance-experiment with stretching and taekwondo-kicking, to make sure that when I have to fight I don’t hurt my back. An in-room besieger woman talking with her accomplice glances at me. I sheepishly gesture that I’m carefully avoiding scuffing the wall with the black shoes. I’m ready, though. Whichever one attacks first will get a heel spike through the chest or neck.

Next dream. I work in a school for rich people’s children. It’s either the massive birthday party for one of them or a whole-school graduation or holiday event coming up. I’ve set up an electrical demonstration like one I did at a Whale School event in the 1980s, but with fewer and nicer exhibits. I leave the little boy who lives here in this country-club-size modern sprawling house’s garage/classroom playing with a laser that hax X/Y sprung mirrors on coils to direct it to draw persistence-of-vision outlines. As I leave, he goes to put his finger on one of the mirrors, and I tell him touching that will ruin it, but go ahead if you want to ruin it. He withdraws his hand. The event will start tomorrow.

Things jump back to everyone bustling about preparing. The theater play will happen in the garage. I’m figuring out how to suspend thin canvas along the awning on the sun side and around to the house under the eaves so the theater can be dark, or at least dim. The thin blonde woman whose house his is dismisses my concern. She says it’ll be taken care of.

Another day, I’m out in the golf-course-like, park-like manicured grounds of the house and other houses like it. I’m sewing a seam by hand along the long edge of a vast unrolled canvas sheet draped over a decorative wooden fence. The very end of the seam matches the end of my thread. Now, how will I hold it up? /I forgot to sew the rope into the seam./ I’m thinking about going to the dollar store to get a brick of clothespins and using those. There’s a ghostly conversation with the blonde rich woman, who again dismisses my problem. To her, everything just happens in time because somebody just takes care of those things.

In the house, a black-haired teenage girl is uncomfortably, miserable, jumpily, stutteringly high on something speedy. What am supposed to do? I want to take her to a hospital, but that would probably get me fired. I hate this. Everything about rich people is wrong.

There’s a heat-lamp table for catered food getting ready for the event (?) tonight. Some pots of food and a one-foot-by-three-foot steam-table tray piled with a mountain of quarter-inch slices of roast beef are under the lights. Everything’s below room temperature. The pots are /cold/. This can’t all heat up in this arrangement. I think of getting the woman’s attention to deal with this, but she’ll just tell me that it’ll be taken care of, so, fine, let her find out that it won’t. Or maybe someone will come and fix it. It’s not my problem. It’s not like they’re paying me anything. I might as well just eat some of this meat before it goes bad. And/or go to the dollar store and have the clothespins ready when the canvas curtain doesn’t solve itself either.

I fly up and the whole place goes from spring to winter. Snow everywhere. This is after the age of rich people, or maybe just outside the bounds of their estate, because there are small roofs everywhere with a foot or two of snow on them. I have an eight-foot-by-four-foot piece of sheet steel held out before me, and I fly down at a roof, experimentally, to swoop at and along it and /scoop the snow forward and off of it./

I come to where a little family lives in a station-wagon-size dugout trench with a flat Ornyte fiberglass roof (visible corrugated edge) held up on two-by-fours two feet above ground level. The man is coming out of some trees to the left, hurrying back, probably because I might be an oppressive threat. I shout to him a shorthand message of nonsense, asking if he wants me to scrape the snow off. He doesn’t trust me. I do it anyway.

There’s no resistance to my flying along with this sheet metal, neither by the wind nor tons of snow. It doesn’t occur to me in the dream that there’s anything wrong with this. I’m just zooming around, trying to be helpful.

The song playing in my head as I woke up was African Skies, by Paul Simon, the version with the choir of African men singing along, not one of the ones with women.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2024–01–03: Duck-cats. Night jumping. Experimental transport.

First dream. I’m on my back on couch with my knees up. Somebody’s slouching on the couch, at my feet. Two duck-like cats are walking heavily around on me, one stepping on my belly and crotch and one on my belly and chest.

Next dream. The night is blue-black but the world seems moonlit. I’m walking north on Highway 1 across the side street at the old Hopper Dairy building, but in the dream there are no buildings. In a crosswalk across the highway, two homeless men are talking. One has a Tote Goat minibike and the other has a lumpy blue paint-slathered motorized bicycle that he’s finishing constructing. The Tote Goat guy sees me, pushes off, and pulls the starter rope to putt away east.

I cross the highway, compliment the bicycle machanic on his work, noting the vertical shock absorber straight up the middle, that rides a hinge between the front and back wheels, springing them both. “That’s some good work. Did you make it?” He says warily, “Yes. I did.”

I’m carrying something bulky under my left arm, and fidgeting with my right at a flat pencil case or cigaret case full of little metal and rubber things. (This might be my phone.)

As I turn back south, somebody I didn’t see coming is suddenly right in front of me, and I jump as high as a telephone pole to go over him and avoid him. A little farther south the thing in my left arm is the motor from the crosswalk man’s motorized bicycle, that I guess I coveted and so stole. Somehow pull-starting it even without wheels will let me ride it like a mini bike — or will it? Also, seeing how I just jump/flew, I think I can make better progress than walking. Though if I’m going to be jumping and flying I should do it mostly horizontally, down the middle of the road so I don’t hit any wires or tree branches.

First, though, I walk past homeless people sitting around on the ground by the side of the road, under shrubs and trees. I’m wary, in case they attack me; I’m ready to jump the whole time.

Things become vague. I have jumbled adventure-in-a-blender of a club of Italian fishermen using the Christmas-traditional-time-hole-traveling as an excuse to get away from their fishing-officework-colleagues’ bad will and trouble, so it’s a good thing they have the time holes, though they’re fibbing a bit.

Next dream. My cousin Mimi and her family have been visiting California and they’re ready to go back to Ohio. In the dream, every place I’ve ever lived or been all over the state is somehow crammed in around Lake Tahoe, but a version of it from a dream years ago, where the hill it’s on is a vast stepped earth pyramid landscaped with grass, with metal Parthenon-shaped exhibit buildings. The visitors have been here for a week, but I’m just seeing them now. I ask Mimi if she went to the Griffith Park Observatory. No. Oh, that’s too bad. Maybe next time. Look it up. It’s good for the kids. Also the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And the Human Mole Caverns. And Blakeley’s public swimming pool.

Next dream. This is a weird suburb-house rich bohemian revenant party, like a 2040 science fiction version of a 1920s Gatsby night, in a house that has stairs around, up to, then around and down away from every door, so every time you enter a room it’s like stepping down into a basement where the ceilings are at least twelve feet up.

The current game is a big cardboard tube and foam core model airplane project, taped together with masking tape. It’s eight feet long with one-foot rounded wings exactly in the middle. The partygoers declare it ready, throw it across this room from the landing at a doorway. It doesn’t even pretend to fly. They add on more, similar wings in rows, so the wings go from near the nose to near the tail; they take it outside and throw it away into the night. My point of view somehow sees it going in a straight line for awhile; it curves leftward and vanishes. They all troop back in ready for the next game; they’ve already forgotten all about the airplane. I go out to the porch, lean around the corner of the house. There’s the airplane in pieces on the grass. The yard is cluttered with other broken, abandoned craft projects and trash and rags.

Back in the house, it’s become a ground floor loft-like space. A thin, long, high wall of concrete-gray bricks is wired together to keep it up during construction. It starts to twist a little and lean toward the 1930s-school-building-like front window-wall. George Bishop, who used to operate sound for Mendocino Theater Company plays, helps me struggle with the wall. We get it braced with loose water pipes but it still wants to tip. George both goes away to San Francisco to get something to fix this right /and/ stays here, which is in San Francisco now, holding the wall up while I go outside. “I’ll be back with help.”

In the street, people are being swept along like a puddle of water being swept by strokes of a broom; they’re futilely running from an armed robber gang. Later, the city has been entirely taken over. The gang guards are lazy, not vigilant but only waiting for their shift to be over. Here’s a guard who looks /right at/ conspirator rebels sneaking into the building he’s guarding, sniffs, messes with his gun, settles back into just standing there.

In the department store building the rebels were sneaking into I’m already in a display bed next to fifty-year-old fat William Shatner, who’s lying on his back on my arm. I’m a reporter interviewing him. I ask him if he watches PBS shows, meaning, does he go to the yearly dress-up plays PBS puts on here? He says he used to like to but he has no time for that anymore. His explanation of why is a visualized and then solid but articulated metal drawbridge/wall at the foot of the bed, that collapses outward, folding upward in the middle, but puts out pipes to prop itself up before hitting the floor, in the same way the brick wall before was propped up. Black women backup singers approve of this. William Shatner subtly bows by smiling and blinking. /There’s my story, right there./
Next dream. In a rural warehouse with a concrete floor, a dangerous pendulum of balled-up metal junk hangs swinging on a cable from a crane attached to the metal truss rafters. Two men, master and apprentice, are trying to think of a way to get the pendulum under control. I offer. They don’t want any help, but clearly they can’t do it. I use telekinesis to nudge at the pendulum, cable and crane irregularly, to break its swinging rhythm. This just makes it swing faster, in tighter and tighter chaotic wobbles that shake the building. Finally I offer it a three-foot-long banana-shaped magnified chunk of redwood bark on another machine, spindly hydraulic iron spatula like a yellow-painted iron sheet-cake pan on a backhoe arm. The pendulum is like, /Hmm,/ like it’s interested in eating that. Its motion slows.

Lots of time has passed. There’s an old transportation project that the government has revived, where a framework of crisscrossed X-girders supports a cable into the side of one end of the now much bigger warehouse and out the other side. It’s night. I climb up close, watch an experiment where a metal hotdog-shaped train pod rockets along under the cable, out into the night, comes back in and goes out the other way. In the clerical offices upstairs behind the structure and the cable, a young woman in charge, a cross between Julie from /The Mod Squad/, my stepsister Jamie, and Mendocino actress Cindy Triplett, hands me her phone and officially but sarcastically dares me to try to snap a picture of the train when it goes past again. She’s sure that I’ll be too slow to do this. Nobody’s been able to do it yet.

I listen for the train, hear the /whoosh/ of it coming, wait, wait, snap a picture as it flashes by. Maybe it worked, and maybe it didn’t. I don’t know how to look at pictures on this phone.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was King Of The Hill, by Roger McGuinn.

—

My dream from Friday, 2024–01–05:

There’s a high, flat metal roof over whole acres of a parks-and-roads project. I and one other person are working in the pits under and around dug-in trampoline installations, where the trampoline cloth is thick solid chains woven, made of strips of black plastic cable-guide tractor tracks, like in a CNC milling machine, but much bigger, inches thick.

We’re here over a vacation time when all the other workers are away, because a boulder has fallen through the roof and somehow damaged all the trampolines. I climb up a hill of gravel and print wet bootprints on this segmented trampoline cloth, that’s bunched up and partly covered with gravel. This isn’t right. There’s no boulder here. The roof /is/ punched through, but not consistent with something falling through it. And the chains of plastic of at least this one trampoline are separated and dangling like an unraveled edge of carpet. The other worker lied; he must have negligently piled massive amounts of this gravel /on the trampolines/. I dig and kick around in the gravel in a concrete-lined trampoline pit. It’s just gravel. There’s no big rock here.

It won’t help anything if I rat on him. We both have to work here anyway, and fix all this. Get whatever machine he used to put the gravel here in the first place, and move it all back out to wherever it belongs. Where is the machine? What is it?

The other worker is gone. This is just my job now: The ground and land have changed to be inside a bedroom in like a YMCA shelter, and the job changed: I’m spreading out blue plastic tarps with elastic around the edges, like fitted sheets, on the beds here, or like shower hats for bed-size rectangular cake pans. As I go around, doing the corners, the tarp I’m putting on expands to cover more and more beds, until all the beds are gone and this is a single bedroom converted from an abandoned office space, and the bed is a foam mattress on the floor with a blue tarp over it.

An unintelligible voice says something that sounds like the last part of a segment of a show, which gets my attention, then it’s dead air. There’s the familiar mild, constructive panic of realizing that my show is supposed to start now. I don’t have anything ready to read, nor music ready to play for a break or to fill in, nor is there even a microphone at this rusty, cold, antique Altec tube-type mixer — but there are other things around. I should be able to find enough equipment to make a temporary broadcast booth here.

Random radio and test equipment is in bookshelves. In the far corner of the room, here’s a stage microphone on a long cord with an adapter to go from the 3-pin cable to a quarter-inch phone jack. I gather everything together, steadily plug things into each other, and into power, turn on the mixing board. The vacuum tubes light up. Look at my watch: only a minute of silence has passed since the previous person, wherever he is, signed off at 8:20. That’s not so bad. Sign on and start, and fake it…

The song playing in my head when I woke up was Timmy Timmons singing /Ev’rybody Wants To Live Together, Why Can’t We Live Together./

— -

My dreams from Sunday, 2024–01–07:

First dream. A clean modern sprawling college is empty between semesters. A clean, light day. I’ll be teaching here when school starts again, and the woman administrator/teacher who hired me is having a date with me. We’re walking to the gym to play tennis or rollerskate or something. On the slightly S-shaped concrete walkway through the grass of a big park-like quad, I suddenly blurt, “Is there a toilet somewhere close?” She points back the way we came, and we walk to a gray building with irregular rectangles of glass.

I’m in the bathroom while she’s still way out in the park. I want to complete what I came here for and be washing my hands before she gets here, but it takes forever to struggle out of my pants.

I woke up, thought about getting up to use the toilet, but, Nah, and went back to sleep.

Next dream. A long, narrow, enclosed bus stop structure blocking the sidewalk of a four-lane street has a door on each end. There’s glass on the street side, but it’s dark out. I’m worried that I’m being followed. I go into the building, go to the far end. Now this door is on a closet; no exit this way. I have a weapon, or a magic power like a weapon, but I don’t know what it is. Somebody invisible in the dark comes slowly in the far door and is instantly halfway across, a fuzzy silhouette of a tall man in a fedora hat. I’m just going to shoot him and /then/ worry about what trouble I might be in.

Next dream. I’m in an outdoors corridor/path under vine trellises. I think my job is to clean up these dry and wet leaves in piles drifted everywhere up against the trellis fence. A boss-man gives instructions but I can’t understand what he’s saying. Some others are behind me. I don’t know who they are. They’re probably also working here.

I pick up an armload of leaves and plot to take them to burn in a burn-barrel-like machine that has a crank on it and a chimney. Is there fire danger. I’ll do it anyway. (This is like the gun in the previous dream: I’ll do what I need to do and worry about consequences later. I take the leaves out the front of the trellis corridor to an empty four-lane city street, go around the trellis-fence… The leaves vanish, the burn machine is gone, but here’s an abandoned car showroom or garage where I suddenly remember I left my car years ago and forgot about it. Here it is, halfway back, full of old junk. I might as well get things out of it that I want. I climb around in it as though it has no roof. Here’s a jacket that I remember liking, but when I pull it out into the light it’s not the right one. /Is this someone else’s car, where they’re almost but not quite l ike me?/

I find a project microphone, the kind of thing I used to make, with a hardwired cord, that might still be good. I make a collection on the floor of the shop of things I want to take away from here in some flat cut-open cardboard boxes. Soon there’s more than I can carry away. I’ll just take the microphone. But now it’s not here. It’s not back in the car. Where did I put it?

Now I’m in Cotton Auditorium setting up to video-record a show with like a hundred children in it. I have the equipment I had in the 1990s, meaning a good tripod but a crappy camera, a VHS-HiFi video deck on a chair between a line of theater seats and the wall, and the microphone preamplifier/equalizer/compressor/limiter I made back in the Community School lab in 1983 or ’84. The woman organizing and directing the kids tells me that there’s a grown up woman who’ll be singing, who they couldn’t trade with on the schedule, so she’ll do her show and then the kids will go on.

While I’m messing with the camera, somebody sitting behind me is talking maybe on the phone, maybe to someone standing behind them, behind the rail that runs across the halfway-up point for the transverse aisle. He’s complaining about being insulted by things /I/ had done to him over the years, such as, I was working a show like this one and I pushed past him, and he said, Hey! and he didn’t like the way I just went along with my business and didn’t pay proper respect. The woman on stage is singing already. I turn around and look at the man. He says, Sorry, but he’s soon talking again.

The woman finishes singing. The kids will be on next. /I realize I have no microphone! I never set one up. There isn’t one in the camera. The one from the car…? Nope, couldn’t find it, didn’t bring it.

I don’t have a car, so I can’t drive away for a mic. How can I solve this? It’s a theater; they probably have microphones here somewhere. I run around trying to find one. Here’s a man who was talking to some tech kids before. One of them will know where a microphone is. I run after him to ask him where they went, as everybody is milling around between the shows. I go up to the back of the theater, out into the lobby, around to the left. This is like a Canadian or Midwestern school with thousands of people in it. The events have packed the place with parents; the whole town is here for it, I hate not to be able to record the show. Down a side corridor dim, high-ceiling industrial offices are full of all kinds of staff for a whole city of schools, all having business meetings and in-service meetings and trainings. As I continue this way it’s less and less school-like and more industrial, with big heavy machines bolted to the concrete floor. One man is turning on and off and on and off something that looks like it might be a water pump, but also it’s electronic; the engine-valve-cover-like top part is a housing for bundles of wires. /Wires! I’m here for a microphone!/ I run around the back to the other side of the theater. The side doors are open. The children are already beginning a huge song and dance number that makes me think their play is /Bugsy Malone/.

Time passes. I come into the theater from the street, through the lobby, push past people to get down to a carpeted downhill place behind the seats that’s like a hillside at an outdoor performance in the park, and I find a place to plop down on the floor with my knees up and my fingers laced behind my head. I’ve given up; I’m just going to watch the show, which is now in its second or third half-hour

And after all that, /now/ I think: Why didn’t I just duct-tape my phone to the tripod and push it up to the stage. It has a huge nearly empty chip that the video recorder app is already configured to record directly to. I could have got it all. /God damn it. Damn it./

Next dream. I’m in Fort Bragg (CA). There’s the unattractive alley-like side of a big building on corner of Franklin where in real life there’s little parking lot and the place where I used to pay for car insurance. The walkway to the back corner door goes next to a cut-out part of the earth, so going in the door means you have to jump a little over a pit. Street work has revealed that the building’s underground part extends under the street, and who knows /how/ far it goes down and to the northeast.

Inside, ground floor, is like rooms in the back of a restaurant. I have put an open cat-litter-box tub of dry rice, a rolled-up cloth sleeping bag and other belongings in an oversized curbside green-brown plastic trash can. Others here are having a business meeting or watching a movie; it seems to be up to them. I unpack the wheeled trash bin to pack it better, and find trash juice and water in the bottom. The rice is ruined. Spill it out. Explain.

Beth of Mendocino Theater Company is talking with Paul Bennett (RIP), who always made me think of Peter Lorre. He runs to check a sealed shut and boarded-over door near me, because Beth go a notice on her phone of a door-open security problem. It can’t be that door. It’s probably from the door I used, over the hell-pit.

I leave by the same door I came in, imagining deeper and farther occult church spaces underground. Now Franklin Street is lined with families and hippies and tourists sitting in the street quietly waiting for a parade. I jump up the two-foot curb. Walk up the sidewalk to Redwood or Laurel. The curb here is four feet above the street. I ask a man standing, leaning against it, what the parade is for? What’s the occasion? A purse-lipped woman with wide-set weird eyes walks over and /shoves/ him. He shoves her back. She says to me, “Marr-co!” and says something to the man that I think might be, “Did you see what he just did to me?” (As though I cut in front of her in a line. Great, now I have to worry about /another/ person around here who knows me, when I don’t know them, and they hate me because they’re crazy.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2024–01–08:

First dream. There’s a whole lead-up to this that I didn’t get to keep, but I’m driving at night. I come to a concrete bridge. Two participants in an international youth walk event are on the bridge, I see, because of their safety lights.

Because of the before-part, I bring security police to the dorm room of some of the participants. The French kids publish a protest poem about how /they should have expected this/, whoever they mean, and whatever they mean. The radio article about it uses a word from it several times: seeglim.

Next dream. During the weeks of a theater project in a mix of Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg (CA) and in a soundstage at Warner Studios in L.A., where they were in the early 1960s, I’m living in an apartment in an apartment block where the main room (the big house) of the Whale School should be. ?Garrison Keillor has been staying in my apartment, as well as my mother at age 50. She makes food for him. Garrison Keillor and I are sitting at a dining table, talking. I want to record this for my radio show, but I don’t have my modern recording tools, there are no cell phones, and all the reel-to-reel tapes on the shelf are things I don’t want to record over, things from the 1980s at the Community School and the Whale School. Here’s the missing tape of the Chuck Frank, Private Op shows. Oh, well.

Now my mother and I are sitting at a table in another room. Garrison Keillor comes in from somewhere else, looks in the refrigerator, takes out bowls of different things: cut melons, etc. I say, “Take how much you want of whatever you want.” I turn to my mother and say, “That’s right, isn’t it?” Of course.

Next dream. I’m narrating and imagining writing the narration for a documentary about the crimes of famous British actors in their youth. I walk around in remade crime scenes, here the garage of the house where I lived in most of high school. A young British actor was engaged in selling drugs. He went into this garage (but in England). Two other criminals who were set to buy drugs from him tried to rob him. He killed them and hid their bodies and all of the theater equipment here in back rooms of other places, like thrift stores.

This store is arranged to be a map of places in England. I’m walking around it now, naming different British place names the different areas represent, confidently just saying name of random places that occur to me. I come to a classical guitar whose neck is stitched through the sides with waxed twine to mark the guitar frets. I pick it up and noodle on, in classical fashion, the things I know how to play. Garrison Keiller comes to look down over my shoulder. I would be embarrassed to play guitar on his show, so I deliberately make mistakes so he won’t invite me to. He knows that’s what I’m doing.

My mother and I go into a restaurant that’s like a cross between the commissary of a big old movie lot and the Seagull breakfast restaurant. We walk past a long table where people are eating. I covet different sections of their San Francisco Sunday Chronicle newspaper of like 30 or 40 years ago. It’s so attractive: all the thick, dedicated sections, and pages and pages of color comics printed full-size, not shot down tiny. I reach to take some of the papers but stop myself. They’re not finished with them yet.

My point of view moves around the movie studio’s horse ranch in Heidi like Alps. One horse has been injured in a movie shoot and its leg is in a cast that’s like a twelve-foot-long dark wood flute case/coffin that trails out beside and behind the horse on a wheel, suggesting both a motorcyle side-car and the trailer crane-ladder of a fire truck. I’m on like a tracked carnival ride. The ride turns right. We come to another horse with an even more elaborate cast on a broken leg impossibly straight out the back of it, that’s more like an A.I. monstrosity of the whole back end of a freight truck.

Now my mother and I are on the bench seat of a truck cab. The driver is a young blonde short-haired surfer dude but also like my schoolfriend Randy. He’s sensible most of the time but always up to do something dangerous and fun. The truck is carrying fuel and materials for a movie shoot. The other two truck drivers here take their trucks on a road off to the left. Randy waves at them, pretends to follow them, but abruptly turns right, up the side of this this not snowy frozen-dirt and rock mountain, to go up over the right side of the top of it and get where we’re going faster than the other guys do.

I don’t see how we can get up something this steep in this ordinary truck, but we make it. Near the top the driver turns not right, around and over but left and into a luge-like run that’s still a dirt and gravel (and ice) road. The driver is going way too fast, but somehow not sliding. The road goes into a tunnel of rock and ice that follows the curve of the mountain, where the left wall is removed for window spaces and ice pillars. My mother is fascinated by the wall of rock and ice to our right. I say, “Look this way. You’re missing it.” The vista to the left, through the cut-out places, is a Matterhorn-like peak and a whole range of other majestic mountains like the Sierras in a Maxfield-Parrish-blue sky.

The driver has lost control of the truck. We crash against and through walls of ice and come to a stop in a tunnel to the left of the original tunnel. Somebody says something about the integrity of the structure. Inside-corners of the ice break loose the way corners of bridge supports cracks in an earthquake. The floor breaks loose. We’re falling, sliding downward like a freight elevator. The driver becomes white like ice, scrapes out of the truck merges with the wall we’re sliding past to be a bas relief person. We’ve fallen below the ice line. We’re going past floors of a building. We’re standing up in the truck now. I grab my mother’s arm, say /We have to jump./ We jump and reach the floor of a studio building where they’re shooting the movie of a play that I remember Mendocino Theater Company did (in the dream). But that was years ago. This must be another world — another similar world that’s running at a different speed. We have to get out of here before we’re discovered. We have painters clothes on and we’re all white, made up to be people who were rescued in a snow accident. We run through this long apartment of sets for different parts of the story, away from where the people are working.

Dead end, but here’s a floor-to-ceiling cupboard door. I pull a latch in the back of the cupboard, which makes the whole thing a door that swings outward. We go through it, I latch it shut behind us.

So: we’re on the alley between soundstages in like Warner Studios in L.A. in another world, covered in powdered white paint. We don’t have any money; even if we did, it would work here. If we go to the police and say we were robbed, that won’t help because we don’t have a bank account here… or do we? Maybe there are analogs of us here and we can find them and turn this to all of our advantage… Comic frantic music is playing that I only realize at this point must have been going the whole time. It can stop now. We’re not speeding or falling or fleeing anymore.

Next dream. This is a movie about an old police inspector who, when he was young, was studying to be a religious archeologist. Here he is at sixteen or seventeen, painfully shy, staying in rural France at school-size house for a dig nearby. The girl who lives here is thin, sarcastic, pretty, with a wide face, a boyish haircut of stiff, straight hair parted on the side, and a girlfriend who goes everywhere with her, reports on her, and must be tricked an evaded so the main girl can have a life and have fun. All the other archeologists are away somewhere else.

I’m the archeologist boy now. I get up out of bed, upstairs. The girl and her friend are just leaving the house. The girl looks back and their eyes lock. She smiles. That’s it, that’s how it’s going to go now; they’re going to be together. There’s no hurry. It’s set and decided.

Later, he’s (I am) on the edge of a deep dig in hard red earth, looking down at his big discovery, which is not the hole in the ground but the /understanding of what this means/. The girl is somewhere nearby, spiritually, encouraging him to jump down there, “next to the wire.” That’s an ancient vertical ten-foot stick of rusty rebar.

I jump down about thirty feet without harm, but my clothes are disintegrating. The girl is up on the edge, looking down, happy that I’m successful in my first, you know, /archeology/. Then the story goes back, or forward, to where the boy and the girl are in bed. He’s pressing himself against her back. I mean, I am.

I start to wake up, and wonder if this is the position Juanita and I are in real life, in the real bed, on this last night before I have to go back to Albion, but I’m back in the dream again. It feels like the early times of being in love, when you’re young and everything’s fresh and exciting, and the world is all out in front of you, offering you opportunities and new sensations. But not too young, before you knew what /not/ to follow through on: all the things that seemed like a great idea at the time but that you regret all the rest of your life and wince every time you think about them.

—

My dream from Tuesday, 2024–01–09:

A gentle river connects lakes in a well-kept park of green grass and child’s-drawing tree-shaped trees. People float by and swim by with the current.

Now I’m swimming up a narrow place between two little lakes. A woman swims after me, maybe with bad intent, maybe just playing. There’s no current. I demonstrate the fastest way to swim, to get away: on my back, long full strokes of arms and feet together so my back becomes a hydrofoil half the time. The women looks annoyed and turns aside.

The band that was playing earlier is crossing the water here, using their instruments for floats. They’re surboard/kayak-like big hollow waterproof versions of normal instruments: a bass fiddle, another different bass fiddle… Hmm, they’re all bass fiddles. Okay.

I’m in a bedroom/party-room made of the two-car garage of a big strange house near the park. My cousins Mimi and Lorraine are here at the age they were in the 1960s. They’re friends with the band. People enter and leave.

Lorraine, unfamiliarly freckle-faced, explained something to me, but I didn’t write a note when I woke up, so that’s gone.

— — -

My dreams from Tuesday, 2024–01–16:

First dream. The set for a play fills a gigantic big-box-store-size space. It’s a Dark City-like 1940s town. The play is an event of a complicated society’s government that has factions that compete for control. There’s the Ren-Faire type people and the Mayor Shinn school-board-type people. I’m neither kind of person, but I favor the free, creative type, so I’m on their side in their coming prank.

We confer by hanging upsided down from a cable to the lighthouse tower in the center — I’m lowest, and Major Kira’s former rebel friends are just above me. The one-armed man has me by the ankle.

It’s getting time to start the play. The stuck-up daughter of the person in charge comes across a bridge to the tower. She leaves her Toblerone-shaped green vinyl banker’s money purse on the rail and goes back across the bridge for something. /We have to work fast, now: find the fake money that will humiliated them./ We all run around the little glass office/light room, shuffle around in tabletop props. Where is it? Not finding it. She’s coming back; time’s up. I hurry to the money purse and put the ruling faction’s fake money back where it was, just in time. We can still do all the rest of the prank. It won’t be as good but it’ll be okay.

I woke up with sound from the dream ringing in my head and my heart pounding. It was a kind of frantic carnival-calliope version of Randy Newman’s song /Ghosts/.

Next dream. I’m flying around over an idyllic version of the kind of place where Dusty’s foreign car garage used to be. It’s near the sea just south of Fort Bragg (CA). Far below, people walk on a dirt road uphill from and parallel to the water. I call down to two women about this being the right time for the ride, meaning perfect weather for flying. They scoff at this.

I turn right, north, and now I’m flying by hanging from a wing-parachute, by hundreds of black strings that come down to control broomstick sections, one in each hand. The wing is as far away as a kite. Of course I get tangled in power lines, but manipulate the strings to get loose and get the chute ad strings and everything on the ground.

Time has passed. I’m in the garage space of one of the houses here, organizing all my flying gear to pack it up and take it away. It’s multiplied to be lots of things: a bag of clothes, the wadded up chute, all the string, a big square backpack made of wicker, the size of my refrigerator…

A boy like Geo, at the age he was at the Community School in the early 1980s, and his friends, boys and girls, all come into the house space from the other way. It’s a thrift store now, with statues and clocks and heavy books and Swedish furniture, and a catering kitchen setup, where I’m cooking for a big upcoming event, talking about cooking, and saying clever things that just come to me.

Here I started to wake up a little and thought of writing the latest clever thing down because it seemed too well-thought-through and I wanted to be sure it was really clever and not just clever in the dream.

All the way in the dream again I’m outside, behind the house/thrift-store. A real-estate woman and man come out from the back of the next house, and they’re angry that I’m here. They’re conspiratorial. I’m not supposed to be here because /they’re/ not supposed to be here. They’re listing both these houses for sale, and there’s something about the deal that can be ruined if whatever secret they have gets out.

Next dream. Across the highway, to the east, from the thrift store house, there’s an elaborate musical event with all the Mendocino high-society people here. I’ve set up a recording control booth in a closet in the house /here/ because there’s also a theater in the house, and people are singing and playing instruments on stage. For some reason I’m suddenly outside, up the hill, on the grass. The people have all moved outside to attend singers out here. The singers are starting. I run down there, fumbling with my phone. I can’t find the sound recording app so I start the video recorder. Oh, they’re not starting; they were just warming up. They’ll be starting soon so I leave the recorder running. Everyone’s standing around talking… The recorder stops. It’s run out of memory. I start trying to delete big things to make room, but I’m somehow just opening more and more screen-filling programs as the phone becomes a tablet, then a 1990s-style laptop. I close program after program. The thin, rich-looking but pleasant old woman to my right keeps interrupting to offer advice that’s no good. I tell her to /please let me be/ and she say /okay/, accepts this, turns away but stays near in case I change my mind.

I woke up with the idea to ask the MCN Announce listserv to send me stories on the theme of /the time you realized he or she didn’t love you anymore./

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2024–01–17:

First dream. I’m driving my first car, the green 1971 Chevy Nova, on a road south to the Comptche-Ukiah road, where in real life is the Stanford Inn. A dense line of cars is going east on the Comptche road from the highway. I impatiently butt in to get in the flow, though I have no peripheral vision.

Next dream. An Other World adventure of great seeming duration leads to my being in a bedroom in a strange house, where someone with his back to me is studying at a desk. I explain to a woman here about parallel worlds and how they work.

We’re in my Nova now. I’m driving on a mountain dirt road, my point of view both in the car and far up in the air behind it. We come to a wide, rough place where other drivers are participating in a skill event for crowds of people. I pass the others to go right off the edge of a steep place and fall harmlessly about a hundred feet to the next climb up to maybe the finish line, where a real road cuts across the facing hill. Other cars make the fall after us and also climb this way. It’s steep and bumpy. I don’t see how any of us can get up that, but we all try.

Next dream. I’m in a house like my mother’s, a manufactured home but a nice one. This place is cluttered, and apparently colonized by maybe a dozen young people who need a place to live while in school or working in whatever town this is in. I’m calm but hurrying to set up my radio studio things. It’s 9:25am by my watch, and in the dream my show goes on at 10am.

Things change so I’m in a big strange light-blue bedroom in another house. People are standing around, like at a sedate party. I’m lying on a mattress on the floor, poking at some connected tablets, trying to keep the radio station from having dead air, by starting different recorded things playing at random. Where’s all my prep for my show?

(This is a familiar dream situation, where I’m on the air on a strange radio station, with nothing prepared, just faking it. Which I never do in real life — I always bring the whole week’s worth of prepped material.)

— -

My dreams from Friday, 2024–01–19:

First dream. I’m homeless, traveling on foot on Highway 1 on the coast but at the same time in a strange inland European place. Now some others are with me, including someone like Miriama from the old Community School and some boys like the characters in /Withnail and I/. We get lost in intersections of freeways that are also rural, with lots of greenery, that, as we continue, becomes a town of wooden, some-brightly painted, buildings of all different heights, connected to each other with walkways and by being pushed close, so there’s no horizon and now way to tell direction. Miriama has found a classical-age 4 string mandolin/guitar-thing. After awhile I notice she doesn’t have it anymore. I wanted it, if she didn’t. I say, /Did you just leave it behind?/ She says, defiantly, /Yes./

Next dream. After a complicated vague story, an evil quiet mafia guy, like the actor in the John Wick movies who also played Woden in Nail Gaiman’s /American Gods/, has caught up with woman a woman I was helping to flee him. We’re cornered in the back big banquet room of a restaurant in the frozen Midwest. Woen’s head is above a sheet held up across the room. I was helping her, but I see now that, by incompetence, I’ve betrayed her and basically inadvertently set this up. We’re standing, waiting. The sheet is lowered, revealy several more bad mafia bosses, all short but compatcly dangerous. Woden says, “Come forward.” We step a few steps, staying even, watching for a chance to fight or run or do /something/. But even more mob enforcers apear under side-covered tables. There’s no way out of this. I have to pretend to have given the woman up here on purpose, so I can live to try to save her later, if they don’t just kill her now. I look like a coward to her, but that’s what I have to do.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was the theme song to the teevee show /Eureka/.

— — -

My dreams from Sunday, 2024–01–21:

I’m with some others, moving around with an unclear purpose in a Disneyland-like clean, well-kept, prosperous version of a busy tourist wekend in like the 1980s. The actor who moved away a few years ago and gave me his old amplifier is carrying me on his shoulders as he walks. I’m my real age and real size, not a small child, but he’s tireless. As we go, I’m looking through wallet cards from my back pocket.

We’re going uphill now, up Main Street. I get down onto the sidwalk, and Mike (I think his name was Mike) speeds up so I have to hurry to follow him. Ford Street, going north, is here a busy city street of shops, like the Chinese Restaurant Street in San Francisco. I follow Mike’s legs and feet as he turns left, which somehow results in going right, down a Peruvian mountain village alley-street like the scene at the end of the Black Mirror episode about the robot-bees terrorist. He knocks on a door, and it’s not Mike; it’s a little boy; I followed the wrong legs and feet.

I’m wandering around by myself now in this weird Old West/South American tourist/shopping mall/Japantown place, trapped indoors. I find a door out past a hippie man who’s lying on his belly, scrubbing a ten-foot-square beige shag rug with a sponge. As I’m leaving he calls out to me something cryptic that I interpret as a job offer taking over the work from him. I keep going and pretend I didn’t hear, because /of course not/.

Somewhere around here in the story I go through a narrow swearing-Cowboy/Miner-theme restaurant to the bathroom at then end to use the toilet, but the bathroom door has a brass metal screen in the top half of it, so I sit across the toilet, kind of lounging on it, my favorite old lost trenchcoat dangling on the floor, to wait a moment, to test the situation, to see if I’ll have time to /use/ the toilet before someone comes to the screen window and can look in. Immediately a demented-seeming 1800s-prostitute-costumeed woman comes to the window and argues incomprehensibly through it with someone who’s suddenly already in the bathroom with me. I’m like, Nope. I leave the two women now angry at /me/ for something.

In a two-or-three-story-high-ceiling part of this now city-size shopping mall a sarcastic man at the back of a small audience of waiting-room chairs asks where I live, or where I come from, in a tone that indicates he already knows, and he’s on to me about some crime his agency is investigating me for; he’s trying to rattle me. I’m actually very near where I live in the dream, so can’t go there now. Some children of all different sizes file past in Heidi costumes, the smallest child last. I have to wait for them to go by in front of me between the wall and the chairs, but this makes a good time to disengage from having to talk to the sarcastic man, so I fly up into the air and fly around gracefully and fast just under the high, flat ceiling.

In my flight path I edge gradually toward a sliding glass window over a shelf near the ceiling down a corridor. A woman is already getting out there. She must also be able to fly. I go out after her and onto a white plaster-rock roof. She’s not here. I can only see things that are close to me, a few feet away. I hope she’s just a little farther along on the roof and she hasn’t flown away yet, because I want to talk to her and share information about the government agency people who are after us because of race hatred — hatred of the people who can fly.

Next dream. Vaguely continuing from the previous dream, I go down a corridor like the one transverse across the gym of my high school, and go out glass doors to a calm, wet, gray day. A middle-1960s Chevrolet that is built to be as big around as a normal car but it only like two inches high comes floating/rolling across the parking lot to stop and be admired by people walking by on this special commemorative holiday, maybe a war memorial day. The flat car is a demo of new technology. Its hood is a video screen showing a cartoonlike, video-game-like football game from the air, where a low-rez giant cartoon cat moves around the field, and there’s a text crawl that I can’t quite read because of glitchiness. I wonder, /Did they even have LEDs in the 1960s?/

Farther down the street in the rain workers are spreading out a heavy rubberized canvas tarp map of Europe that I walk on and then help spread out with a mop, giving the others the good idea to use mops for this. Cars come to the intersection and stop. Soon they’ll get impatient and drive across the tarp, but it’s okay for now and we’re pressing all the air pockets out everywhere, like using the flat of your fingernail to smooth out blocks of text and artwork when laying out a newspaper.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /I’m A Little Busybody/ sung by Cats and Jammers.

— -

My dreams from Wednesday, 2024–01–24:

First dream. I’m in bed with Julie, my girlfriend right after high school in the middle-late 1970s, but it’s now, though she and I are both young. I feel love for her like I feel for Juanita, and I’m thinking about how to describe this later when I talk about it on the radio.

Next dream. This is an after-school teevee story of two boys, friends, with third, younger boy, who go to an empty-of-games arcade (or an early 1900s general store. They unwisely take drugs. Time passes. They all come out of the back room, confused about where they are and why they’re here. The shop proprietor who I thought would be the bad guy is not. He’s concerned for them. He didn’t provide them with the drugs. Wait, where’s the third kid? Did he die?

Later, the two boys are in their early twenties, making a movie in a desert that has some marsh-land plants. The blonde boy is a cross between my schoolfriend Randy and actor Owen Wilson; he’s hunched down in the front bench seat of a big boxy mid-1960s convertible car with the top down. The car spontaneously jerks out of /park/ and starts rolling downhill through the sand, picking up speed. My point of view moves around behind and above the car; I’m curious about how how the boy is steering it while he pretends to be still drugged, or rather /sleepy/ after being drugged all day yesterday (meaning years ago). From this angle the car is strangely narrow, so his elbows touch both doors. He’s steering with his knees and his chin. But the car’s really barreling downhill now, and now I’m in the back seat of it, so when it crashes over the berm at the bottom of the movie-track I go flying over and out (I’m both myself and the boy, here) strike a hill of sand and marsh plants and roll to a stop, unharmed. Whew.

My friend Mark lives here in this other-world Lost-In-Space-like desert. His two dream-only dogs come running from where his shack must be. One is a big black German shepherd and the other is an old gray German shepherd/blue heeler mix. They hop around, and bump into me, happy to see me. They remember me from before, when I used to take care of them (in the vague back-story of the dream).

Returned from the desert to another world, possibly ours, I’m confused about the shower in this motel, that includes a bed-size carpeted depression in the floor. I should use the shower, because when will I get another chance? But the person I’m here with, outside, is impatient for us to leave, so I just get all wet in my clothes and fedora hat (somehow without feeling wet). I wonder if this is still part of the story/movie we’re making.

Also I’m worried about having left Mark’s dogs, which we borrowed for a scene, in yet /another/ world. So the motel place is in neither that world nor Mark’s; I half-remember his instructions for getting back there… But the dogs were in Mark’s current world already when we got there, right? So that should be okay.

— -

My dreams from Thursday, 2024–01–25:

First dream. The world is water and channeled water everywhere. An operative or agent or officer of a political group searching for the main character of the story who’s a spy? a rebel hero? a hapless dupe? is like the angry bad-team-leader boy in /Ender’s Game/. A Roger Moore James Bond-like man has a device that makes him appear to be a blonde movie-star woman in a bathing suit. He turns this on to climb (I climb) and jump from the top of an impossibly tall vertical dam both as the woman and as Roger Moore with someone he’s rescuing who is using the device to appear to be the woman. Maybe it’s the deposed president of this water place. As they (as we) fall, our fall is arrested to give time to hang in the air and discuss options.

This becomes a wait in a white apartment of a part of the dam that appears out here. I show investors in a Eureka-like tech company town the disguise device in action. This isn’t giving up a secret. This is nothing, compared to what they’re getting for their money, really. /Do you want to try it?/ I hand it to a man, who wants to but is hesitant.

First dream. In the dream I’ve been staying in a long low nice strange suburban house. I’ve been here for awhile, but somehow I don’t know where a bathroom is. I wander around and find a toilet, use it, marvel at the like gallon of soft-serve-ice-cream-like shit that comes out of me (how can there have been room for that?), and cast around for a plunger tool to use to make it flush.

The rooms and windows change so, in this bathroom, I’m in plain sight of Mexican workers building or adding onto the house next door. Oh, well.

Time passes. I’m showered and dressed normally, in a room of the house that’s mostly bare but has two white-formica level drafting tables. This house is being worked on, or will be soon. Two tough and smart-looking Hispanic boys come in. They have a media project that I identify with as something like things I did in my twenties and thirties. I’d like to help them. I offer to let them use my radio show. The boss one offers paper for contact info. Two small but thick pads of paper on a table. It all looked blank at first, but every page I pull off has writing and numbers all over it. I stop on one whose writing is sparse because of a bad pen and talk about my radio show while I try and fail to be able to write anything, because of continually changing my choice of what info to give. /Come on, Marco/. I force it to be my website name, leave off the http://, and actually start to get it down: M… E… M… /memo/, etc.

The song playing in my head when I woke up at last, after waking and dozing and waking and dozing some more because of noise from the industrial yard next door — they’re hitting metal or punching-bag-sounding things rhythmically, slowly, with a hammer, throwing metal things into a rattling bin or into a truck, idling their pickup trucks and periodically grunting them to move them a few feet this way or that way, or running mowers and leave blowers and a chipper, though today was somewhat subdued, as though they were trying politely to keep it down, was the vocal version of Grazing In the Grass.

— — -

My dreams from Sunday, 2024–01–28: Demon knife. Tropy edition of the Chronicle. Facile lying criminal waiter.

First dream. I’m sitting on the floor, hiding with a strange 1960s-office-type man behind one of the homemade plywood desks I made for my recording studio in the 1980s, but in a strange big bedroom cluttered like a storage locker. The man is traumatized by the story I’ve just entered, that he’s been in for awhile, where objects have significance, like objects in Tarkovsky’s /Stalker/, or in the teevee series /The Lost Room/. He won’t say much, but I gather that the current problem is a malevolent, intelligent, contagious knife in a pile of junk near the door. I say, “I’ll get the knife.”

He goggles at this idea of getting it, when we have to /hide from it for our lives/.

I get up and approach it, thinking about precautions I should take. Pick it up with rubber-handled pliers so not to be taken over by its influence? Would that be enough protection? Or — pick it up in a thick blanket and shut it in a box?

Next dream. A nice newsstand woman has her shop in Roseville Square the way the shops there were in the 1970s, but they’re all deserted, with the parking lot full of abandoned cars. She saved a San Francisco Chronicle for me, bound in masonite, like an archive copy, but part of my in-the-dream job of some kind of newspaper work, or maybe for a trophy for re-establishing print publication. I didn’t expect her to save me one, but I have to take it. Out in the parking lot there’ll be other copies. I’ll get a regular one, pay for it out there, and bring the special one back, even though I already paid a quarter for it here.

Time has passed. I’ve been out somewhere all night on an adventure. I go into a deserted shopping mall, to a small glass shop with one woman in it selling vaguely breakfast things, mostly packaged, and that has a soda dispenser. I walk through to the single barstool with my masonite-bound newspaper, and order, “Something from there (wave to display of vague things) and Pepsi.” I see a Dr Pepper can and add, “If there’s no Pepsi, then Dr Pepper.”

I know my watch is three hours fast because of the time difference (?), so it’s really 8:30 and I’m supposed to be at school at nine for a important graduation day series of events. It’ll probably more than half-an-hour to get to school, so I go back out the way I came, grab up the Dr Pepper, give the woman the quarter from my pocket and say, “This is all. Sorry.” (Meaning both cancel the rest of the order and I hope a quarter is enough. I’m imagining the can, empty, later, on the bench-seat of my first car, the 1971 Chevy Nova.

Next dream. I’m in a restaurant kind of like my grandparents’ place when I was little. The main waiter guy, like supercilious obnoxious Larry of /Eureka/, concludes my unofficial investigation of crime here with a complicated obvious lie that ties up all the loose ends, thinking he’s helping. I have to go expose this, he senses this, grabs my arm above the elbow and gets ready to start hissing new lies that might work better.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was Dire Straits’ /Romeo and Juliet/.

— -

My dreams from Monday, 2024–01–29: Renovations. Graceful though painful flight. Bed bird.

First dream. I’ve parked my first car (’71 Chevy Nova) nose-in to the refrigerator porch of Tim’s cabin. I pick a quart carton of milk from a grocery store display inside the car. The carton is soft, on its side and torn open, but somehow the milk stays in it. Also I have a handful of dark-chocolate-covered raisins that are weirdly uneven, from ones the size of a beebee to ones the size of a grape.

I back down the driveway to the factory building, where the ground is all chewed up and moved into random mounds, both on and off the driveway. A tough cowgirl-like forty-something woman walks by, right-to-left. Others are around, working for Tim — some kind of vague whole-property construction project.

I walk around the factory, through the little tunnel under the shed area, to where Tim is waiting to show me what he wants me to do. He demonstrates shattering a concrete block with a hammer to get single-shingle-size concrete flakes to line big intersecting above-ground water channels made of taped-together lines of cardboard boxes with their ends and tops torn off.

Next dream. I’m in a strange version of Mendocino, dressed like a homeless person and barefoot. I walk by fancy minimalist restaurants with aluminum and glass walls where Cafe Beaujolais used to be, and end up inside one. Rich people are sitting at widely-place tables, not recognizing my presence.

Outside again, a big Viking/surfer kitchen worker is explaining to the air around him something about sports teams, that I answer even though he can’t be talking to me; I don’t belong here. But, yeah, he turns and talks to me like a person, and I think that’s nice.

I fly up I into the air and float past where the rich people eating can see. I make a point of twisting and turning gracefully as I fly, though this involves clenching my feet till they cramp. I /just barely/ fake not being uncomfortable as I use one foot to stretch the toes back on the other foot.

Farther west, other restaurant workers are outside, on their break. The earth is chewed up and bombed up like a World War One battlefield. One worker calls the others’ attention to the way a film of slime slides of its own accord over a hump of dirt on a porpoise-shaped hill, so the hump is like the bubble canopy of a flying car. I point this out. Someone behind me as I fly by agrees.

Next dream. I’m in bed in a future, nicer, less cluttered version of my house in the woods. Juanita’s pet bird Melody (RIP in real life) is much bigger than I remember and she seems to have gray hair among the regular red, blue and black feathers. She walks and hops around on the blankets. I scratch behind her head and she likes this, though she’s restless. I get up, throw the blankets back, avoiding where she is, but she vanishes, so I’m careful to move the blankets again in case she’s trapped… No, she’s moved behind me. Juanita shows up from a side door where in real life there is no door. Melody flaps around, excited, and hurries off to follow her into the back.

Again I woke up with the Dire Straits song Romeo and Juliet playing in my head.

My dream from a nap Monday night:

I’m with a fellow conspirator, a chipper, dangerous-but-friendly elfin Morey Amsterdam/Robert Preston character who has the aspect of someone in the science-fiction story I was reading before I fell asleep. We’re fleeing through a low-budget-movie-set-like hotel convention-center hallway. Morey Amsterdam is carrying a life-size floppy cloth Nelson Mandela/Raggedy Andy doll. I kick the door shut on our pursuers and kick it again to break it /jammed in/ it so it can’t open. Morey Amsterdam shuts the door on the other side messes technically with the controls to start us down to the lobby.

We come out the front of the building. It’s night, the building is an old Grange hall, or maybe a small roller skating place, on a shallow long dirt hillside parking lot. We run down to the road. The other two (Morey Amsterdam and a live female version of the Nelson Mandela doll) are way ahead of me — I’m shoeless; in socks — so when I get stuck going around the edge of the lawn, down by the fence gate, to not get my socks wet and not get all-over wet in the reciprocating sprinkler, they’re already across the highway and up the long hill of the parking lot of a dark ranch house, having a duel of wits and West-Side-Story street-fighting kicks and flourishes with the people defending the right side of the house’s L-shape that’s obscured from this angle, and by the varying darkness as clouds race past the moon.

— -

My dreams from Thursday, 2024–02–01:

First dream. In the dream my dead schoolfriend Randy isn’t dead, just away, doing something for money. I’ve taken some of dream-Randy’s old computer junk away from his mother’s house, made at leas one working early-1980s IBM computer out of it. I explain this to Randy’s mother.

On my way out through the long barn-like house, here’s a cross between Randy and Jerry, sitting on a folding chair, bent over, facign away from me, tired or sad, his hands at the sides of his head, so maybe /headache/, too. I ask if he heard what I said, meaning, to his mother. He bends farther over to put his forehead on his knees. I say, “Do you want water? Can I get you a drink of water?”

Next dream. After a complicated plot at Mendo Micro that I didn’t get to keep, I’m at the northwest corner of the compound, near the pumphouse. I find that I can jump up about about six feet into the air and curl up in a meditation-sit/ball-shape. Some indolent-but-tough-looking heavy football-player-like teenage boys are standing by a telephone pole up the road. I’ll go there and find out if it’s the flying is only my imagination or if /they/ can see me doing it. Maybe I’m demented. I think about Bill Hicks saying, “If you ever think you can fly, try it from the ground first,” so just jumping up in the air and staying there for a few seconds seems relatively safe, but — will I always remember, when I get back to the /other place/, where I probably can’t fly, to only ever try it from the ground first? I should write it on my arm.

Next dream. I’m in the sea in front of the long, high, flat apartment-building-like face of the structure holding up the control-bridge area of an anime version of a giant ocean liner, like one I remember, in the dream, dreaming about before, or maybe seeing in a Studio Ghibli movie. If I’m in the water here, then there must be no front to the ship. But there is, because the the ship is on its side now, and slowly turning even farther over, because there’s the pennant mast dipping into the water. Juanita’s in the water with me now. As I quickly weigh which direction to swim, so that when the ship is all the way upside-down we’ll have gone to the side that means a shorter swim underwater, I’m generating and rejecting things to say so Juanita will comply and live, instead of being childishly defiant and hesitating. Will I leave her behind if she won’t go my way? Probably. Maybe I should just grab the back of her shirt and drag her through the water after me.

My point of view move upward and diagonally back to the right. There’s nothing over where we are in the water. The ship can continue to turn over and even sink, and we’ll be okay. The wharf is right here.

— -

My dream from Friday, 2024–05–02:

People are on the side of a steep hill, all working, some digging and picking out metal from the earth, some moving equipment, hauling up things on ropes. Everyone’s in a hurry, because we’re hiding from some kind of evil agency and need to get finished here, salvage what we can, disguise what we can’t move, get back to the spaceship and leave.

Zoey for /Firefly/ is with some others clinging to a car-hood-like stretch of metal sticking out from the suddenly much steeper hill. They lying on it and digging it out at the same time. My point of view rises up the cliff, looking back and down. Standing at the top of the cliff is a 1950s rocket-shaped rocket, one landing fin exactly on the rock at the edge. This seems unsafe, but I guess they know what they’re doing; there are probably gyros and automatic gravity propulsion systems ready in case the cliff crumbles — the ship will stay where it is for awhile so everyone can get in at the last minute.

Inside, the situation is, there’s been a series of sabotage attempts, but no-one’s been caught. I’m a person in the show now — I’m a young version of Mr. Scott from Star Trek, waking from being knocked out, lying on my side on a mesh-metal shelf in an industrial-kitchen-like engineering and medical laboratory. By straining to my right and forcing an eye open I see that a sleazy teenage version of Mister Chekov, in dark aviator sunglasses, is lying on top of me, grinning about his victory at fooling all of us, and he’s about to leave and get away with deal he made with /whoever/ to sell us out. Scotty is drugged and can’t move. There are people in the next room. Are they good guys? or are they with Chekov?

I take over for Scotty, call out Chekov’s name in case this is my last moment of consciousness, so they’ll at least know he’s the villain. Chekov doesn’t seem worried that others will hear. I say, “Chekov! …Chekov!”

Now I’m on my feet, holding a sometimes full-size, sometimes half-size Chekov by the knees or by the ankles, and bashing him against the wall and metal shelves and metal boxes sticking out from the other wall, just swinging and bashing and trying to kill him. His head is caved in but he’s not bloody anywhere. Is this a person or a manikin? I’m still yelling /Chekov! Chekov!/ Nobody comes in from the other room. Now I just have to make sure I’ve killed him because I’ve damaged his brain so much that if he isn’t dead everyone will wish he was because of how he can’t be a person anymore, because of the brain damage. (This is a pretty familiar situation in dreams for me, especially from long ago. Smashing and smashing at a person or an animal to /finish killing it to put it out of its misery/.)

I woke up with the original Diana Ross and the Supremes song /Ain’t No Mountain High Enough/ playing in my head.

— — -

My dreams from Sunday, 2024–02–04:

Dream. After a vague, complicated episode of being in a spy agency, searching for a criminal (or contraband intelligent object), I become suspicious of a blonde hippie girl in a sun dress. She makes a resentful guilty /caught/ face and flees upstairs and then uphill, into a small-stadium-like indoor/outdoor parking garage. My partner, a stocky black man, heads her off. She’s defiant, won’t come quietly, and has the power to change into something or somebody else, so arresting her requires cleverness: the other agent steps off the edge of the floor into an abyss. The criminal reacts, as the agent knew she would, by becoming a suitcase, which I throw down after him; he can fly, so he’ll catch her and that’s done. But there’s nobody down there, nor flying. What happened?

This rooftop/concrete hillside/parking level I’m on becomes a regular building’s flat roof. The criminal woman, having changed into a Latina businesswoman, steps out of the air on the other side. Her smug look turns to resignation. Arrested, she becomes a two-foot-long deeply channeled dark brown two-by-four with a small animal embedded in one end of the channel for a face.

Inside the dim building all the agents in on this operation stand around. The man who caught the woman, now someone else, a rookie, makes a rookie mistake, puts the two-by-four on the concrete floor. The small animal dis-attaches from the wood, scurries under a workbench and shoots away along a long wall.

Everyone coordinates to chase it. It’s cornered near a door. The rookie tech guy thinks this is all a bit of fun; he /opens the door/. I yank it shut, in time to stop the rat-thing from getting out. The others can catch it. I berate the rookie. /This is serious./

Later in another part of the shop we’re all waiting for the meeting over the operation to start. There are particleboard shop tables with random piles of electronic junk. I find a big microphone with elaborate nested plastic parts, all loosely set as if someone’s had it apart already. I open it up and see what’s wrong: the diaphragm and microphone engine is a two-inch paper speaker that’s pulled apart and torn, so the coil is ruined. I put the microphone back together but the last few parts don’t fit right. Take it all apart, try again. There are more parts than ever and nothing fits right, now. Oh, well.

Next dream. I’ve been working at Mendo Micro more the way the land was thirty years ago, before all the thick tall berry shrubs and rhododendrons dried out and became a fire hazard and had to be cleared, so more like a jungle. Near one of the labs, here are Liz and Frank.

It’s night. I go to a dream-only classroom where the solar panels should be. I think I’m supposed to be showing a movie tonight. People are coming in, finding seats. There’s no projector, but like a 40-inch teevee propped again the wall at one end of this L-shaped space. They’re just going to show a DVD; they don’t need me. It occurs to me that Liz and Frank are here for the movie and they won’t be able to find this place. I go back out, saying over my shoulder, “Give me a minute before you start. I’m going to get Liz and Frank.”

They aren’t where they were, but they and a woman they were talking to find me on the driveway. I lead them to the classroom. They’ve moved the teevee to a better wall and already started the movie. I move around in the dimness and find a place to sit.

The man next to me asks if I don’t want to sit with my friends. Liz and Frank never came in behind me, so no, thanks for asking. But I think he means, move away from /him/. I get up and find a seat near the door on /this/ side. A woman and her little girl come in, stand nervously over me. I say, “Do you want this chair?” Another woman stops the movie, turns on the lights, angrily goes to the mother and daughter to tell them to stop talking or get out! I stand up, say, “I’ll leave. I’m sorry.” I’m so embarrassed.

Next dream. In the dream I live in a clean but old hilly suburb. It’s a holiday time. I’m cooking for lots of people and I need a product that simulates cups of bread toast crumbs. I go to a small grocery store where, also in the dream, I’ve just started working, haven’t even had my first day yet. It’s made in a regular ranch-style house painted yellow, with the open garage/carport area for outdoor groceries. Closed on Sunday.

But the door is open. I go in. It occurs to me that I can get a loaf of bread, toast it all and crumble it up, and that’ll be the same thing, but nobody’s here. Take the bread and pay for it when I come to work tomorrow? No. A regular house refrigerator next to the register counter is hanging open. The door opposite the one I came in is ajar. The latch is broken.

There’s a payphone to call the police, but I don’t have change. I can use my cellphone, but I think I should call the store owners first, so I don’t get in trouble for making a fuss over nothing if this happens all the time. Okay, who are they and what’s their number? No idea. I have to call the police. /Good thing I didn’t take the bread./

— -

My dream from Tuesday, 2024–02–06:

I’m with somebody else at a rural house in like Sebastopol that’s overgrown all around with green plants. It’s the day we have to leave, I should be just getting ready to leave, but there are dozens of shoes in the wet tall green grass around a wet, rotting wood deck and a blackberry bush, and maybe I could use some of them. They’re all either way too big or slightly too small and none of them match. As I go around the deck they’re less and less normal shoes and more and more croc-like novelty shoes, until the last ones are plastic-rubber flat limp replicas of romaine lettuce that go on like swim flippers and even if they fit I wouldn’t wear them.

Inside again, I think to take a shower while I’m where there is one. I look around and find it in another building. There’s heat coming up from a heater grate. The heater is set to 70 degrees. I know that the rich kids whose parents own this place were here and maybe stayed here last night, but I don’t remember if I was in this building before and left the heater turned up. I turn it down to 60. If they wanted it up and they’re coming back that’s not too low, but if they’re gone for weeks starting now and I was the one who turned it up in the first place, and if I leave it at 60, when it’s much colder outside — it might end up costing them a hundred dollars. Maybe they wouldn’t even care because they’re rich, but suppose I need to come back here some day…

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Girls Just Wanna Have Fun/ by Cindy Lauper.

— — -

My dreams from Tuesday, 2024–02–27:

A Carlos Santana-like boy has built a Wright Flyer-size paper and wood kite airplane.

I need to replace the inner-tube of the single sideways tire of a weird gardening-tool/appliance, as I work, the tire becomes more and more mushroom-shaped. Other parts come out that I don’t understand. Should I continue? It’s already ruined; it doesn’t matter what I do now. The tube is cushioned from the inside of the tire with a bath-towel-size satiny sheet that has beige/yellow Frills around the edge of it. I’ll figure out how to put it all back together when I come back from the hardware store with the new inner-tube.

I’m in the kite-airplane with the boy, escaping pursuit. It’s a glider; there’s no power. We’re headed for the sea at the edge of the desert. The boy is worried we’ll go out into the ocean. I’m steering. I manage to land us on a gravel road where a woman and her little boy are walking. I have to yell at them to get out of the way.

I’m riding in a narrow, tandem-bicycle-like garden-cart thing. I’m in back singing quietly to myself: /California Here I Come/ in a Joni Mitchell key. A cross between Juanita and a teevee-style social worker is in front, steering. We go slowly past a park on the right side of the road that has a square end, and then we go by another very similar place but that’s got what I in the dream think of as Cenozoic tuft plants and trees, and it turns out that all this time I’ve been sitting in a government waiting room like at the Social Security office in Santa Rosa explaining to the people around me, especially to the woman to my right, about how we could use a place like that to make a time travel movie and not have to put sets together because the parks are the same shape, set in the same kind of hill, but the plants already look like they’re from very different eras. Everyone’s open to the idea. I might be able to persuade these people to just come away with me now and make the movie.

The dream jumps to where the airplane is in a Pueblo Indian place where Gypsy Indian people are having a quiet holiday time that’s like a post-apocalyptic Ren Faire. They helped us hide the plane from the federal soldiers, but they found it anyway and they’re going to confiscate it. There’s a frontier business court proceeding in a big empty metal barn with a sand floor and long cafeteria folding tables set around a U-shape. The Zorro-movie Mexican official expects me to sign ownership of the airplane over to the government, but I refuse because it’s not my plane to sign for. I don’t own it. There are tricks within tricks here. I don’t know what will happen, but the official seems stymied; he’ll have to wait for more people to come from the capitol. /Maybe we can get away with the plane./ (This might be how young Carlos Santana and I got away in it in the first place, see above.)

There a long time here of my imagining different ways of getting the plane into the air. A catapult might work…

Back in the world of the Social Security office, a cross between Juanita and Julie, my girlfriend just after high school, works in a stationery store in the shopping mall across street. It’s very slow, so she’s working on her school homework project next to me at the counter. There are other people around, but it might be her break time and that’s why she’s paying attention to work. The formica of the counter and the low shelf above it, next to the cash register, is dirty. I look around for a paper towel to wet and clean things. I move a little clock and office supplies aside to clear the space off. I can use drinking water and my handkerchief. In the dream the Kevin MacLeod song Scheming Weasel is playing

—

My dream from Wednesday, 2024–02–28:

I’m in a kind of office complex that’s also the second-floor deck of a quiet apartment block in like Cloverdale in the spring. I go to where two-tone room dividers — amber plastic wavy glass and wood with metal mechanical-ivy patterns on it — come up to my chin, so I can see over them because I’m tall. Some people are standing around in this indoor-outdoor foyer area. Someone comes here with a scruffy little dog.

Teryl Rothery, the actress who played Dr. Frasier on Stargate SG1 is Amanda Tapping, another actress in Stargate, meaning her /name/ is Amanda Tapping, and in the dream she’s responsible for starting the whole Stargate adventure in the first place, there’s only one Stargate series, not three, and it has the importance, cachet, historical significance and effect on history of Star Trek. Lucille Ball at about fifty years old and pleasantly dumpy lives here and shows up for this meeting. Somebody says something meaning to hurt my feelings for revering these women. I say something random and garbled though clever about the little dog. Lucille Ball says, joking, something like, /Yeah, I suppose you could call a dog a kind of cow./ I tell her about how important she is to people, and how she certainly should be able to get along with Amanda Tapping because they’re both responsible for something great in the world, meaning that Lucille Ball was instrumental in there being Star Trek — she offered them DesiLu Studios when no other studio would bite.

Outside of the foyer area, farther down the rail of the deck and open to the sky, Lucille Ball’s husband looks like an elderly Gary Seven or James Coburn. I think he’s worried that he’s the lesser person in the relationship, and I say something about that, that for a miracle doesn’t misfire. (This is the place in the dream where I realize nobody’s saying real words, but just sort of winging it with sounds.)

Later still I’m sewing the collar of my sweater. I notice that I’m using light colored thread and the sweater is dark, but it’s okay because the stitches are going in a perfect straight line down the hem so it looks on purpose.

And I’m not sure where it goes, but somewhere in all of that I had an /Oh, well/ moment of pulling open my passenger-side car door and seeing that my radio-station computer suitcase was gone. Somebody stole it. /Oh, well./ It’s almost twenty years old, it’s not worth anything to anybody but me, I need it every week, and, tch, jeez..

The song playing in my head partly in the dream and partly as I woke up was a mix of Joni Mitchell singing /You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio/ and a soft a cappella version of /True Colors/, not the two songs at the same time, but going back and forth between the lyrics and the tunes. It works out surprisingly well.

— — -

My dream from Wednesday, 2024–03–27:

I’m working, or pretending to work, in a strange future version of the old Community School. Steve Siler is in charge of the place. He’s young, at the age he was in the 1980s. The school has high school and younger kids in it, and also kids they’re experimenting with letting out of prison. One boy, like the horrible angry small hostile one in Ender’s Game, is becoming a threat by gathering others around him to be dangerous, causing fights. Steve and his group of older, guardian kids expect me to use my superpower in a fight with that boy and scare him/hurt him so badly he’ll somehow become quiet and good. I don’t want the school to go that way. I refuse by saying that I have to go visit my mother who’s not well. I fold my arms over my chest, turn around lean backward and fly on my back up out of the garage door, into the darkening sky, over low hills, northwest, I think, like from Cloverdale up Highway 128.

Later I’m an old Willie Nelson-like character, back in town. I go into a big grocery/stationery store to meet somebody (my mother? a social worker?). The counter man says they’re down /that/ aisle. I walk all around the store looking for them, singing a song that just came to me, that I’m writing as I sing it: “Men are moving south, la da da, mm-hm-mm-mm-me hmmm hm-hm-hm. Men are moving south on that highway in the skay.”

I woke up and recorded the tune on guitar so I wouldn’t forget it.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2024–03–28:

There’s a big opera theater whose inside vertical space is shaped like a V with a Denny’s-like restaurant of booth-tables in the thirty-by-sixty-foot flat space at the bottom. Dean Martin, and some other singer from his era are at a table near the middle, waiting for the rest of their group to show up for a meeting. I’m here. Elderly Dick van Dyke comes in, smiling, singing a pop song from the 1960s in a very smooth professional relaxed rather Dean-Martin-like voice. I say, “I didn’t know he had such a good voice.” I knew he sang, but it was for fun, in Mary Poppins. The others agree. Nice singing voice.

My mother comes in with the secret of having first put /her/ mother in one of the invisible-from-here seats high overhead. I organize in my mind how to reveal that I know the secret, to pretend to have psychic powers.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2024–03–29:

First dream. I’m a kind of honorary health-food witch-doctor for a traveling-on-foot carnival in a dystopian but not hellscape future. I give a plastic bag of sandy brown sugar to a woman as medicine for her little boy and tell her that he’ll be fine by tomorrow. She’s very grateful.

I lead, or rather accompany from the side, a procession of good-natured Gypsy/Mexican/Okie/Minnesota people through a clean park-like forest to and through a circus tent. (They go through, I go around.) On the other side is a giant shopping mall parking lot. Here’s an open-sided tent for hundreds of people to sit and eat. I’m the cook for breakfast for them. The kitchen is a big booth in the center of this end of the tent. On my way there I’m imagining a charcoal-fired flatgrill and materials that will be already set up and ready to make bacon, sausage, eggs, hundreds of pancakes, everything, somehow fast enough for all the people showing up. I’m not sure I can keep up, but I have confidence to try. It’ll be fun.

Next dream. I’m in a traveling circus musical band. Our apartment is an abandoned storefront in an indoor mall near Fisherman’s Wharf in a weird, quiet San Francisco. The others are setting up a wedding ceremony (or medical treatment?) for a new performer. Candle stands that have incence burning in them and water sprinklers around the top a placed around the marriage bed. An overzealous girl turns her sprinkler on — too much! — and can’t turn it off. My girlfriend in the dream, a small Asian girl with a wide, triangular face, and I run to cover the sprinkler with a plastic bucket and turn it off. I put the bucket on; she turns the water off. (I’m young here, in my teens.)

Now the girl and I are in another bed (a mattress on the floor). We’re about to have sex. I remember doing this with here the day before, and maybe also the day before that, but it occurs to me to ask, “What are we using for birth control?” I think, maybe she’s on the pill. She says, “I thought we’d take care of that later.” Oh. Nope. I’ll go buy condoms. She’s like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yes, really. I’ll be right back.”

Next dream. I’m on foot on a very wide, S-curved street that goes between a pretty town and a military airbase. There are trees with fresh spring leaves all around. I’m a reporter; I’ve traveled back in time to this scene of an air accident where a dozen young trainees in like a Lego/film-spaceship-model tilt-rotor Osprey with a dense big tree standing up on the back end of it crashes, and I’m hoping to stop it from having happened. They go slowly, loudly, around a circle at about 100 feet up. They’re in distress; the rotors are not working right. Why doesn’t the pilot just set down on the trees? It would be better than crashing into the ground. But they’re all in the glass-paneled-gazebo-like cockpit, standing in the windows, shouting, pointing at places they think the pilot should go. The pilot is busy, of course, and not paying attention to them. An airman from the tree section of the plane doesn’t even know they’re in trouble. He climbs part-way down to the cockpit because of the shouting, sees only that it doesn’t concern /him/ and disappears back up into the foliage.

Next dream. A clean, quiet, big, indoor shopping mall’s empty stores are used for fandom funeral events for beloved performers. This is the last gasp of usefulness for places like this. I’ve been helping a middle-aged woman with her grief, and I’m coming back with some take-out food for her. I stop in another similar store. Everyone’s gone from the event here, too. The woman running this one hears or sees me and says from out of a back room, “Is there anything you need?” I say, “No, don’t mind me.” (I just want to put all this food down on a table for a minute and stack it up better and get a better grip.

— — -

My dreams from Sunday, 2024–03–31:

First dream. I’m riding a thin, light motorcycle on a wide dirt and gravel road in the hills around Lake Tahoe with a Japanese girl behind me on the seat. She’s the daughter of a rich guy who I’m working for in the dream. A fat, pumped-up-looking version of a 1960s Karmann-Ghia goes past the other way and that gets me thinking about all the cars I ever had, and wondering where they all are, because in the dream I didn’t use them up and sell them or take them to the wrecking yard, just left them places and, for all I know, they’re still there, waiting for me to go back and get them. So often in dreams I come across an old car that just left parked somewhere for decades.

The motorcycle is making a thin, reedy exhaust note. The girl says, “I think something’s wrong.” I keep going until the motor stops. In the dream there are no phones. We’ll get a ride from the next people who come along. I can leave the motorcycle here, like I left all the cars.

Later I’m in my dream-only Tahoe-hills rented room, in a big king-size bed. Someone near the bed says something about shit. Oh, yes, there is fresh dog shit on the sheet. I move and get some on my arm where there’s more behind me. I have tissue paper to pick it up, but now it’s not dog shit anymore, but big fresh-meat meatballs, and when I move the sheets there are more underneath. At the foot of the bed, on a table between the bed and the wall, there’s a foam to-go plate of meatballs with plastic on it, with the plastic torn. That’s how the meatballs got in the bed and on the floor on the other side. In the dream I’ve been away for more than a month. It’s a miracle that this meat is still fresh after all that time being out. I gather the meatballs up in the package, stretch the plastic to shut it again. There must be a refrigerator somewhere nearby to put it in.

Even later I’m at work for the Japanese girl’s father. Lake Tahoe is near the Pacific. I’m with others on another dirt road, recovering bodies from a car accident. That’s my job. We’re pretty much done with this particular job, but I find a body from another, older, unknown accident. It’s the grown son of a woman who I somehow get to come here instantly to claim it. But every time I look it’s farther down and more hidden in the slot between the road and a rock wall. The woman doesn’t want to interfere in our getting the other bodies back to the morgue. She can get her son’s body by herself. Are you sure? Yeah, go ahead, I got this.

She climbs down the slot, disappears into a side way at the bottom.

Next dream. The song /If You Wanta Be Happy For The Rest Of Your Life, Never Make a Pretty Woman Your Wife. ’Cause from my personal point of view, get an ugly girl to marry you/ is playing in the air from somewhere. I’m young. I’m with a young and white but Black-shaped version of Sherie, on wooden elevated sidewalks between vertiginous wooden apartment buildings fitting into the spaces between each other like half-block-separated Tetris block shapes. Sherie’s talking upward and around the corner to her friend who lives there. We get around the corner and her friend is on the phone and never heard her. We’ll wait. We go down a space of wooden sports bleachers. Sherie lies on her back on the floor of the bottom row. I lie on top of her. We’re kissing. I’m not very into it, but I feel like I’m supposed to, so, okay. In the dream, this is when I was boyfriend-girlfriend with Julie, so I’m thinking about this being a problem for that.

The song was still playing in my head when I woke up.

Asleep again, next dream. I have a key to a Biff-like person’s antique mid-1950s car. I go to the garage where it is. Other old cars, perfectly preserved, are jammed in here. Biff’s car is stuffed full of his things: clothes, boxes, white tennis shoes. I’ve opened the two doors on the driver’s side and the hood, I don’t know why. I shut everything, carefully locking the doors.

A lawnmower-salesman-like man and his son, the actor who played Tom Paris on Voyager, but at the age he was in Star Trek: The Next Generation when he was Wesley’s schoolmate at Starfleet Academy, come downstairs into the garage from the house. They assume I’m here to buy one of these cars and they, father-son-practiced and smooth, start their pitch for that.

Next dream. A giant ski-lodge-like redwood and glass house is where the Tradewinds motel restaurant should be in another world version of Fort Bragg (CA). A rich family lives here. The mother has gone upstairs to arrange with authorities to project a special message on the sky to the south, to cheer up one of the girls, who is depressed.

Another girl, bookish, sarcastic, skinny, skeptical but good-hearted looks at me like, /That won’t help, but, ehh, what could it hurt?/ We’re like, /Come on,/ to the others, including the depressed girl, /Come on, let’s see./

There are already things being projected. An ad for something in fuzzy blue-green letters. The shape of some dogs playing. This is an annual thing the community does. We watch out the window for the right one to come. We’ll know it when we see it.

The sun comes up /in the west/ over the sea, between the sea and the rain clouds, and everything’s lit up too bright from that for the projections to work anymore. Oh, well, there’s always next year.

I’ve been up all night, but we’re all going to do something important together today, so I go to the big kitchen room and start trying to figure out how to make breakfast for everybody. I think about taking a shower. The family’s golden retriever dog is pregnant, hiding, slinking around in furniture caves behind the pots and pans cabinets

Here’s a fancy weird toaster, flapped open, clearly designed to make a whole family’s worth of toast at once. I put in just enough bread for myself, to learn how to use it and nor ruin all the bread. I figure out how to close the sides up and get the top on.

Later, the person standing in for me in the story has panicked because the toaster won’t open and burnt-toast smoke is coming out. Why didn’t he just unplug it?

One of the rich kids shows him how to use another toaster. They have more toasters, of course. The mother dog and another big dog slink out of the caves and squirm around behind other furniture to get out the south door with their puppies. A small child (the depressed one?) is worried that they’re taking them out to a field to kill them. One of the bigger kids explains, “They’re just going out to /say goodbye/ to them”. Now /I/ think they’re going to kill them.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Boulevard of Broken Dreams (I Walk Alone)/ by Green Day.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2024–04–01:

First dream. I’m driving in snowy mountains. The person who’s driving while I watch from above and to one side turns around, in a Y-turn, using the snow shoulder of the road, in a bad place where cars can come around a blind curve past a a rock wall, but nobody comes along, so okay.

A musical play is happening both in an old barn and projected on the side of the barn for people who couldn’t afford to pay to get in. The last song is like something Danny Kaye might sing — very fast and alliterative, and the last line is, “Laminar alumina and liminal on wire!” Repeat, repeat, and big finish with the whole cast like a bouquet of jazz hands.

Next dream. I’m riding with others in a big mid-1960s car down Auburn-Folsom Road, with my (dead) stepfather Roland driving his car, following us. We’re on our way to some kind of college even or fair to solve a bureaucratic problem or promote our company’s product. Somehow we’ve lost Roland. I don’t have my phone with the number of the girl we’re supposed to meet. Nobody else has any useful information. How will we find her there? Just stop.

Now we’re all playing a scattered soccer game on a miles-long playing field along the road while we wait and watch for Roland to eventually come along.

Next dream. It’s nice, pretty spring weather at a school that’s made of a cluster of old but well-kept-up houses on a headland north of Cleone. School is over for the year, and the people running the place are strategizing about solving bookkeeping and legal-requirement problems, and money problems. I make a phone call to an adviser, who recommends that we talk to a man in China who can solve everything. I wait on the line for the adviser to connect me, but realize that he just hung up.

Now all the school people are gone, but some visitors are here — the family-at-a-distance of some of the kids. I think I can convince them to invest. They take me for a ride in their car so i can show them around the area, give them a sense of what it’s like here.

We stop against the tire-stop at a beach that normally goes hundreds of feet down /there/, but now the water is all the way up to this little park building and the parking lot. I tell about how far down the beach used to go. Oh, look, the water hasn’t stopped rising. I say to the woman driving, “You’d better back up some. It’s coming up higher.” She backs us up. The water begins to lap over into the parking lot.

I’m lying on my side in an abandoned car half full of water, thinking about the word /etiolation/. It seems to have something to do with a children’s book illustration of robot/animal doctors cutting away the flaps of flesh left and right of a long deep wound down my knee to my shin, as though there are no bones in there.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Ventura Highway/ by America.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2024–04–04:

First dream. Main Street in Mendocino is indoors and outdoors at the same time. I find folders of papers and books and things from my old newspaper office, in cardboard tray on shelves in, and on top of, store booths that are like car seats. I find an old whole cooked chicken, spoiled and horrible. Here’s another one, this one with red flecks of contagion all over it, hot from live decay. I carry the bad meat to a restaurant kitchen that’s completely outdoors, at the corner of Main and Lansing. The old woman cook here points to the trash can under a sink. It has no plastic liner. She says, “Go ahead,” meaning, throw the chicken right in there. (This is my first hint this isn’t the right world. No plastic bag in the trash can.)

I move around town, down, back up, and down Ukiah Street again, seeing ghostly, around me, magazines that might be from the 1960s but with unfamiliar names, or rather names that are just shapes but don’t say anything. I’m thinking about starting my newspaper again, and coming up with names to call it.

The whole place settles into a magazine-article-like middle-class hippie 1960s scene in a clean, perfect, peaceful way with a Maxfield Parrish blue sky. It’s quiet. Some Beatles-like boys and an assortment of tourists are attracted to my tour spiel. I say, “There’s this thing we do. Go under here…” I lead them under the milk-blue deck of like a church and then to a meeting space on the packed-dirt floor under the building. Everyon sits around in a circle, anticipating an enlightening hippie experience. I show them my phone, press the button to light it up. I say, “Where I come from, everyone has one of these. You can call anyone on Earth. It’s a movie camera, and a tape recorder…” I expect time-travel authorities to come and stop me, and take me back where I belong, but nothing happens.

Now we’re under Crown Hall almost at the low end of the street. I show a man how to resize the image on the screen and push it around with his fingers. I tell about how cell phones work in my world: There’s a repeater and and antenna antenna nearby everywhere less than a mile away. The phone only has to communicate with that. When you move nearer to another repeater it automatically hands off the signal to that one…”

The people look bored. This doesn’t mean anything to them. I say, “Is as anyone here an electrical engineer?” Yes, but he’s gone now.

He comes back. No ones impressed with the phone. I’m obviously loony and the phone is a magic trick. I’m like, /Wait a minute, do they even have radio here?/ I say, “What year is it.” Someone says, 1740-something. I say, “Seventeen-hundred forty years since what?” Now they /really/ think I’m a loony.or joking. How could anyone not know that?

This is a totally different timeline. No-ones coming for me. I’m stuck here. That’s okay.

Next dream. I’m crashing a big outdoor catered celebration, or maybe it’s a holiday where poor people are allowed into this country club or estate or whatever it is. There are tables of food set out, so much that nobody’s even watching as I make a giant sandwich out of long strips of perfect thick crispy-edged pepper steak on a whole tube of hard-crust soft-inside sourdough bread cut lengthwise. A dog comes nosing over the edge of the meat table. I say, “No, no, don’t do that,” and wave it back, but I cut a piece of meat and give it to the dog a little bit away from the table.

Other crashers (I think) come around when I’m at another table. One says something about how, with all this food, why would I want what I got — just meat and bread? I say, “Because it’s good. Here, try it.” No, they don’t want any. I guess that here poor people can have meat and bread any time they want. They’re here for the rich-people food, processed things you can’t just bake or go out and shoot

My dreams from Friday, 2024–04–05:

Shower outside on asphalt corner of house/yard. Spray can of owl shampoo. Dream friend: they’re gonna kill you ya know. I: who. He: they already tore up the place. Radio station imagine Wreck all the gang boys with magic, by shooting them all in the s as me knee. No residue. But maybe the cops are on on it and we’re not even test for that. Maybe my friend is here to kill me Woke up feeling paranoid and worried about money and health and soc sec

Asleep again. Next dream. I’m in the concrete basement area of a big government research building. I go to a room that, in the back-story of the dream, was used for a swimming pool — — a deep, high, long concrete space half filled with water up to the corridor leading in. I take off my clothes and get in with someone else who comes here after me. By a concrete column near the far wall my feet start to get tangled in what feels like vines. Is it bundles of network cables? Is it alive? I swim backward, away, panicked for some reason, calling out /Hey! Hey!/

(Juanita was working at the computer, on her college homework. She woke me up, saying, “Are you stuck?”)

My dream from a nap just before the show:

A Latina girl is sitting on the asphalt of a strange city street, facing away from me, leaning back, her legs out before her, kind of swimming in the air a little, as a /shape/ of smoke or flexible aerogel comes down and forward at her. I rush forward meaning to dive through it and break its momentum.

Things jump back to just before I moved. I don’t think it means any harm. I think it’s trying to help her.

While I was dithering about what to do, I woke up with Inka-Dinka-Dee playing in my head. Just the music part, not Jimmy Durante singing.

— — -

My dreams from Tuesday, 2024–04–09:

After a vague adventure of managing relations with a listserv troll, I’m in a Midwest college library. In the dream I work here. We’re playing a local tradition game of charades mixed with hide and seek. I leave a spring loaded symbolic book confetti bomb in the stacks with a clever jeering poem.

I sneak across the wide open middle front part to an aisle on the far side of the store where a Rosie-the-Riveter-style janitor woman sits, on her union break, in front of the secret way into the next building, that’s also a science-fiction-teevee-show-style portal to another time and place. She says, “I suppose you need…” I give the passphrase. She undoes the top button of her brown cotton apron skirt, lifts away the plywood blocking the portal in the wall. I say, /I’ll be right back/, and climb through into a convention-hotel whole floor of apartments being renovated. I go through a bathroom, into another bathroom. I piss red koolaid into a clean new commercial restroom toilet, clean up construction waste, paper towels, old newspapers…

I have a telepathic conversation with the union janitor who replaced the first one. I’ve been gone for hours. Visiting dignitaries/investors will have long since arrived. The trick poem-bomb will have humiliated my game opponent. I hurry back to the portal, daydreaming of writing /Wrath Of Khan/ here, where they don’t have that yet, thinking of Khan cursing Kirk as Kirk later shouts Khan! — making sure those things are the main point, as they were in my original world, because it works best.

I woke up with the Fleetwood Mac song /Silver Spring/ playing in my head.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2024–04–10:

First dream. I’m on the phone with my mother. Small animals skitter around outside the house. I shout out the window, “Quit making noise our there!” It’s not small animals; it’s people I can’t quite see moving around pickup trucks parked across the front. They drive away both leftward out the driveway and rightward where in real life there’s nowhere to go, but here, apparently, there is. I wait patiently to get off the phone, because I want to go out there and see what’s changed about the road, and try to figure out what world I’m in, because this must not be the right one. This room is empty, uncluttered, for one thing. That’s not right.

Next dream. Meatballs and steaks and hamburger and all the different kinds of meat are in the corner of the Oliver’s Market where there should be produce. Juanita and I have paid for all our things and gone out the back of the store, through the loading area, but Juanita has to check something on a label she saw, so I have to follow her all the way back inside with the shopping cart. She comes back this way with a package of hamburger. I wave her away, fearing that someone from the store will think we’re mixing unpaid-for things in with the paid-for things. /It’s just hamburger. We can’t afford it and she doesn’t eat meat, so just forget it. Who cares what the label says? But it’s another thing she wants to explain to me, so I have to. But, please, can we just go?/

Yes. We go out the front. I’m composing and recomposing a single line of an article I’m writing in my head about a Mexican mariachi band famous for playing Frank Sinatra songs at a junior-college swimming pool with palm trees behind the sunrise mall, which in th dream is an old folks’ home, and that’s where we are now, or rather not in the scene, but floating over it.

I woke up with the song /Silver Spring/ playing in my head again, like yesterday.

Asleep again, next dream:

A post-apocalyptic community, like /In Watermelon Sugar/ by Richard Brautigan, is having a meeting in a cheap restaurant’s back-room banquet hall, but this is the community meeting place in the forest. The meeting is about the different kinds of guns everyone has; also it’s a gun show of new guns somebody got from somewhere else. I’m not interested. I’m lying on my side on a folding cafeteria table by a back corner. My Ohio cousins are all here sitting up on the next table. They’re the ages they were in the early 1970s, the last time I saw them. (I’ve seen pictures of them since then. And I saw Mimi a couple of years ago, but they’re not the same as these ones. They say things to me that I take for a test of my sense of humor, and I say three or four clever things — clever enough that I determine to remember them, but I don’t. They were the sort of things teevee comics have someone write for them to say, and they just came out of my mouth without effort. Too bad. They’re gone.

I’m back in the palm-tree junior-college old folks’ place, sitting on a toilet outdoors at the back wall of maybe a cafeteria, partly obscured by a woven bamboo room divider. There’s no toilet paper. Farther down the wall is another toilet, that has a roll of paper towels balanced on the toilet paper dispenser, with some loose paper towels on top of that. Juanit’s over there, in the sun. I start to ask her to bring me the paper towels, but I think over how to say it so she won’t either stand there and talk about how paper towels aren’t toilet paper, nor stand then and put the loose paper neatly back on the roll, but just bring it to me so I can clean up and pull my pants up before people start coming out here.

Again with the Silver Spring, by Fleetwood Mac.

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2024–04–11:

First dream. I’m using a machine to cut heavy already-bound pages of a two-foot-by-two-foot, eight-inch-thick book, right through its thick doubled corrugated cardboard binding. A strange woman watches as I lean on the lever and it cuts more and more out of square as it goes deeper. I’m crying crocodile tears for the benefit of the trainee? prison warden? woman about how cruel this is, as though the parts of the job can physically suffer from humiliation and pain. A weird percussive music is playing — maybe it’s the motor of the hydraulic compressor. There’s the ghostly overlay of gray metal asparagus/mushroom shapes bending up and backward over the spine, to tear off to mark things so I only cut a third of the way through at a time and, in between, I can straighten the job to bring it back square.

Next dream. This is in a bleak dry Arizona/Alaska desert. A dead-schoolfriend-Randy-like /Box-Of-Moonlight/-like boy and his wild trailer-trash but good-hearted girlfriend have come out the other side of the back-story treasure/danger story. They trick me into going with them over a giant flat barge to see their new sailboat that they built. Somehow they stay behind me, get in their sailboat, which we must have either walked over or right next to; they cut loose the boat and barge to start us, and their friends invisibly far away on the barge, off on an acid adventure.

I run back but the barge is moving quickly away from shore. I make a running horizontal dive. Someone shouts in astonishment at a person diving into Alaska-cold water. I hesitate in air, loosen my martial arts robe/shirt and pants to not be tangled and hampered by then in the water — oh, what the hell, take all the clothes completely off while I’m at it. Hit the water; it’s not a shock, but I swim bending awkwardly high up out of it, make it to shore, climb out naked.

Some small Native Alaskan kids are playing on playground equipment. Farther along, to the right, on a low plateau, high-school kids in marching band uniforms stand wearing their instruments, waiting for orders.

Ahead, other Native Alaskan or maybe Maori kids stand abreast in a line at the base of another plateau. I hurry through and past them, up the hill. Their Native Indian/New Jersey Italian P.E. teacher says something I can’t understand. As the environment becomes more and more a county fair exhibit museum, I recall the backstory of a naked crazy man here, how the story started. I’m the naked crazy man. I watch from outside myself as the man begins the whole story all over again…

Next dream. I’m sitting on the arm of a couch in the converted garage-room in a strange house. A friendly dog comes in the garage door and I pet it and scratch its neck and back.

Outside a crow-like black cat is curled up atop a fence post, and and eagle-swan thing lies draped down over the big mailbox behind it. I go there and take lots of pictures. (Juanita will like this.)

Later, on an excursion/evacuation on a flat barrel-pontoon boat I see only fifty-two playing-card-marked filler spaces in the camera’s gallery. I look the camera over and discover that the memory chip is not pushed all the way in. /Shit!/ Sorry, I’m sorry. (The singer in the band on the raft had just begun to sing.) A Juanita-like woman crouches down over me and hugs me. I explain quietly about the chip. /Get off, please, I want to pay attention to this./ I know the new pictures can’t be on the chip, but maybe all my old pictures are still on it and not corrupted. (This relates to my having quickly deleted some folders in real life, to make room, and discovered that there was plenty of room, but the phone keeps complaining it’s out of space.)

Next dream. I’m in a radio station in a storefront near a street corner in a busy big city. I get ready to stop the test stream from a new computer on a wall shelf-table and start the regular one, other end of the shelf, and turn it up smoothly. I practice the motions a couple of times. Bob Woelfel of old KMFB is here, farther back in the shop, working on something.

When I go to stop the test computer, I click on the outside, street corner-window computer’s mouse instead and that starts that one streaming. Try to stop the program but can’t figure out out.

It’ll be okay. If one computer is still streaming and connected, another can’t butt in and take over. I just need to get all the computers set in the state they belong in… Things become vague.

I’m in a hallway like the one across the indoor way into the gym in my high school, but here it’s a classroom alley, after hours, in a college like place place. I start a computer playing cartoons for a childlike janitor who is captivated by the novelty.

—

My dream from Friday, 2024–04–12:

I’m on a narrow straight country road that’s also like the lane between the backs of soundstages or county fair buildings, but there are no buildings, just some sparse streets. I’m looking at a web page in the air that has several layers; each one is a new art technique that’s supposed to simulate motion in pen-and-ink drawings by rotating colors between the lines. I keep pressing or tapping or clicking on what seem to be controls or a play button, but the colors never appear. The top one is tesselated birds coming out of a cartoon-frame box, pointed to the left and up past a small barn.

That’s it. That’s all I got to keep.