Dreams end of July, start of August, 2022

My dreams from Sunday, 2022–07–31: Music camp. Sandra Bullock slept here. Body-swap hustle.

First dream. I’m at a very well-attended music camp in a flat bowl in green hills. Thousands of Ren Faire-type people are here. I’ve come here with Juanita. I didn’t bring my guitar.

The sleeping arrangements are motel rooms where people set their sleeping bags and homeless-camp arrangement out on the floors of the otherwise empty rooms. You pick a corner or a place by the wall or the middle of the room, and that’s your place.

People are waiting to use the bathroom. Outside, people mill around, arrive, depart. There’s a bus station. I don’t know where Juanita went, and I know from like a million dreams before that there’s no point in looking for her once I’ve lost sight of her; she’ll have to find me. The performance stage is simultaneously Woodstock-festival huge and a mile away, and right here in a chainlink fence baseball backstop just across the infield from a flood berm.

Next dream. Post-apocalypse, people are all living in abandoned 1960s school buildings that are real estate now. Here’s Juanita’s and my foam mat. Vinyl fish-tank tubing goes from low room divider bookshelves to a water fixture just above the corner of our mat. A lumber-store guy has declared victory fixing things for now and he left the water pipe parts leaking and squirting, wasting water (and getting our bed wet). I go everywhere in the school, look in all drawers, even in a big first-aid suitcase, for something I can use for teflon tape or pipe grease to fit the pipes properly and tighten them down.

The new owners of the whole place aren’t here yet and the old owners (Walt and [Name] from a Lake Pillsbury campground in 1979) are long gone, having been paid. Finally I remember reading that Sandra Bullock compulsively uses teflon tape on everything: jewelry, bottles, screw-together pens… I just have to find something Sandra Bullock used when she was here before (?) and get the teflon tape out of that.

Next dream. I’m driving in a place like where you come down out of the hills going west to Clear Lake (CA). This is the same post-apocalyptic world as the previous dream. I think I’ll be able to get home to the coast this way, but I come around a curve and the road is blocked by a turnstile-pipe gate. Flooded ahead? I go under the pipe and continue anyway.

The lake has flooded mud water over the road and it’s slowly climbing the hills, which are dissolving. I turn around and I’m making plans to go hundreds of miles wide around all this, but I think to take pictures of the mud event for MendoFever or the Anderson Valley Advertiser, turn around again…

Now it’s night. The lake is a flat dry plain. There are people living here. Metal structures. I drive through a well-lit metal-products warehouse.

Now I’m on foot. The plain is a government military airport. Trucks move around, entering and leaving. I go inside a high-school-like/DMV-like meeting hall, and I see the weaselly man who’s using /my body/ that I thought I’d never get back. He sees me and hurries out the other way. I go out the way I came, go around the building, get ahead of him in the darkness between buildings, and I knock him down (gently because that’s my body) and catch him.

Inside again, people are resting a set time before they do the operation (?) on them. The weaselly guy (Asian now, for a minute, then my body again) says he’ll go take a shower before he turns the body in. I say, “Yes, please.” He goes into the shower room. I go out, go around the building where I went before. He’s already out here again, this time talking on a phone, making a frantic deal with someone. I loom up in the darkness and stop him again. He just seamlessly keeps trying to weasel out of everything some more; he’s like, “Just let me get my money from this and take care of [an obligation]”… /and/ he makes a break for it. I pick him up and strike his head on the ground. (That’s my head, dammit.)

I drag him back inside. I’m not surprised they have a waiting period before they can put you back in your right body; that seems reasonable, but I’m thinking: I’ll have to pay these two crappy local policemen to actually /watch him for hours/ and keep him from running off because I have to sleep. I have no money. I’ll promise them anything and deal with it later. (I’m being just like the weaselly man.)

I woke up with Sarah McLachlan /You Do What You Have To Do/ playing in my head, but the voice singing the title line was going all over the place like a violinist showing off. Like, imagine a Kate Bush version of that song.

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My dream from Monday, 2022–08–01: The turtle and the seal.

I’m with a crew making a video about a skiing race, and we’re shooting from miles away, across a valley, with telescope lenses. I go to the competition place, and I’m skate-skiing on my shoes down a hard ice hill. The edges of my shoes bite into the ice the way skis do and I can control my orientation and direction a little, but can’t slow down. Later (or earlier) I’m skate-skiing on my shoes down a narrow snow trail along the top of a ridge. I know film people are watching from the next ridge.

The Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman Sherlock-and-Watson are acting in an adventure where they’re riding on an excursion chairlift up and down over low hills in different kinds of weather and over different kinds of land. The main clue to solve the case is a video loop of a giant turtle head and a normal-size seal head biting and batting at each other like hand puppets.

I explain to someone about how every part of the show is cleverly making fun of so many things and also itself. (I didn’t get to keep any of the explanation, just that the show was /so clever/.)

And now Juanita and I are in a house that’s familiar from a dream years ago but from nothing else, folding clothes and sheets and putting things in boxes. We’re getting ready to move a long way to another place to live. As I fold things and get more boxes, I’m happily, loudly singing /Get Over It/ by Don Henley. All the lyrics. Juanita’s not tense at all about having to move. It’s really okay.

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