Dreams from late August, early September, 2022

My dreams from Tuesday, 2022–08–30: Parking lot. Shifty-eyed buttinsky. Understudy. RCHSE, the Royal Canadian Helicopter Service, Electric.

First dream. I’ve been sleeping in my car parked in front of a heavy-beam wooden cabin up on stilts, with wide stairs. Across a lake-like parking lot a lot of tiny people are having some kind of celebration at a lodge or Canadian or Alpine hotel. I get out of the car naked and go up the stairs to the cabin. It’s night-time.

Later, or earlier, the stairs are a stairlike ramp up to a bridge over a wide flat river that’s choked with vegetation. People here ride motorized skateboards everywhere. I have one. The ramp is not too steep to power up, but the strips of wood across it stop your wheels. I carry the skateboard up, put it down on the flat part at the top and continue on.

Next dream. The cast and crew of a play we’re going to put on are all waiting in rows of folding chairs in a big gym. A strange pushy black-haired movie-start-like guy comes in, worms his way between chairs and people to lie down both on chairs and on the floor and periodically poke his head up to join in happily, smarmily, in conversations and ask questions. There’s nothing really wrong with this; just that there’s something weird about his eyes. I don’t trust him.

Next dream. Cotton Auditorium is turned the other way, so the stage is at the south end. A musical play has just started. The band is downstage-left. I’m at the very back wall of the stage. The main character comes into the stage-left wing from an outside door, singing. He passes behind the band, moves left and right. I move left and right to match. I might be the protege/understudy; I’m memorizing the moves. I can’t really hear what he’s singing; it’s all echo and reverb.

He goes diagonally back and across, so that when he gets to where I am we’re far upstage-right, almost out of sight of the audience. As we go behind a wing-curtain (and around some exercise equipment) he ad-libs something to me and I ad-lib something perfect back to him. That’s a crucial skill. I’m learning a lot.

Now it’s afternoon the next day. I go to an old original Macintosh computer on a folding table in the covered walkway on the school side of the auditorium. As though the CRT is a touchscreen, I press a file folder icon. The man whose computer this is, is peeved at me. He explains that we want to go /up/ levels, not down. In the back-story of the dream I used to borrow this computer to do my work. It occurs to me to apologize for never thanking him for that — for taking the use of his computer for granted, but I don’t, because he’s already mad and it wouldn’t help. This is all part of a private-detective story.

Next dream. The beach at Van Damme State Park is as crowded and busy as a Where’s Waldo centerfold image. In the dream, this is somehow both at the ocean and in Canadian mountains.

A black shard appears in the sky, gets closer. It’s a really big helicopter, like a Lego tugboat/sailboat but with helicopter blades and room for lots of people to walk around on top (under the rotor). A man yells down something about a lampost? electricity? I point at a lamp-post and yell something back up — it’s so loud I can’t even hear myself yell.

They land on the beach. (The crowd has conveniently vanished.) The helicopter’s woman leader strides to this mountain resort’s clubhouse. I tell one of her officers, “I don’t know if it’s enough electricity for you but we have computers, so it’s AC.” (If they want to charge their electric helicopter, that won’t work. If they just want to charge their laptops or phones, fine.)

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My dream from Wednesday, 2022–08–31: Wet dirt.

I’m in an old many-story house the size of an apartment block, moving around in it, exploring, with an eye to cleaning the place up. There are people in some of the rooms, but I don’t have to think about them. I find a bathtub on a wide slot in the floor. Down the slot is a lower floor with a big square drain grate in the corner. There are cough drop wrappers strewn around down there like leaves in the fall, but they aren’t big enough to clog a drain that big, so I don’t go down and get them out.

One dim room is sopping wet from flower pots overflowing with wet dirt. I pull up a corner of the rug. The floor is particleboard, decomposed and soft.

Against the wall of a room is a dangerous open chimney shaft obviously made for sweeping dirt into so it falls into the basement near an opening to the outside. /There should be a little fence around this./

A strange man is watching Juanita do something with children. I’m jealous enough to interrupt. I climb out of a place between floors and tell the man the end of a (dream-only) adage about why not to feed dirt to snakes: “The snakes’ll all end up two feet longer.” He’s confused. Good. Clear out, pal.

Now everyone’s in a hallway off to my left. I balance on a rail over a stairway, put my hand out to the far rail and hop down to the middle of the flight of stairs.

Robin Williams, old and calm and quiet, sits in a chair at a long dinner table. His grandchildren are all running around happily, in and out of doorways and under the table. He recites something long from memory for me. He slows down, starts to get stuck for a line, but recovers and plows on. He has a wide straw hat that has a flowerpot in it. The littlest girl get up on the table and pours dirt and water into his hat for a joke and he accepts it, like, /Eh, whatta ya gonna do?/ Everyone’s so happy. Juanita’s in the kitchen, the next room around the corner, cooking, it sounds like, and talking with a Russian woman.

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My dreams from Thursday, 2022–09–01: Flood tactic. Moving day.

First dream. I’m walking on a grass sports field by a row of trees, and there’s a row of trees on the other side of the field. This is on a tropical island. The strange man with me has an antique revolver rifle. (This image probably came from the first few pages of /The Hawkline Monster/ by Richard Brautigan, about two cowboy hit-men. At first, they’re in Hawaii.) Some other people are here having a family picnic. Shapeless bloblike jets fly over, low.

Now I’m on another, smaller island where there’s danger of water going over it and killing everyone. In the dream I remember that the last time this happened some people survived by lying down to not be washed away. Others know this too. Everyone lies down on the grass. I lie with my feet against a tree to be better anchored.

The water comes and washes over the land in one-foot-high waves. I hold my breath when the water comes, and breathe between waves. (It doesn’t occur to me to just sit up.)

A girl is sitting up next to me. She starts laughing about all this. I say, “Wait till /you/ lose someone you’ve been with for 40 years.” (I mean Juanita. In the dream Juanita has been drowned.) But was the girl laughing? or crying?

Next dream. My mother is living in the dream-only house of her friends the Weldens. I’m moving her things from a living room to a bedroom. She wants the teevee cable to reach her new room. I think about it: is this the second floor? because if it is I can’t just get underneath, pull the cable that way and pop it up. I don’t think the Weldens would appreciate it if I string visible cables everywhere.

I don’t actually recognize any of the people living here. They’re all school age and cliquish. I haven’t had caffeine today; I’ll get a headache if I wait too long. Time keeps passing, and I keep forgetting to go make tea or coffee. Where /is/ the kitchen? Here’s a bathroom, that’s almost a kitchen, ahem, I’m becoming hysterical... I go everywhere and can’t find any walls with a window. This is a familiar endless-house trap and I’m trapped here. I’m already getting a headache. /Tea! Find the kitchen, there’ll be tea there, make the tea!/ I’m like Inspector Clouseau.

I woke up with Sophie Madeleine’s song /I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm/ playing in my head.

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My dream from Friday, 2022–09–02: Underground.

I’m in a line of cars trying to get out the south driveway from the CVS drug store parking lot in Fort Bragg (CA). Everybody’s turning left. I want to go to the right. The cars in front of me sense this and crowd leftward to give me a way. /People are so nice. Thank you./

I’m in a boxy 1960s car, half-aware that I’m dreaming, and thinking about how good it was in the old days, when you could look in the classified ads in the newspaper, get a crappy old car for a couple days’ pay, fix it up in an afternoon with normal tools, coathanger wire and duct tape, maybe put a $60 set of recapped tires on it, drive it for six months and then give it to the wreckers and get another one, and you didn’t have to have insurance, and the gas was practically free.

Things change so a girl who works for something like General Dynamics in the teevee show /Eureka/ finds a snake of car-size metal boxes from the Other World along the center of the street to the highway from CVS. In an earlier episode (?) they had to use a crane to move the last box into line and make the machine operate, but this time she can move it by pushing it like pushing a shopping cart (I step in and move it, line it up). Its a teleportation device for things you put inside it. The girl frets about getting the company out here to take it away and hide it before anyone comes along.

And things change back: I’m driving one of the old Ramblers I used to have, on a two-lane in the Central Valley. And someone else is driving now. I watch the young father in the story (?) driving to meet his family, who are already at the new place they’re moving to in Fresno? Bakersfield? Turlock? He has to leave the road to hide from car lights coming up a side road. His car tips sideways in the sand. He gets out, goes to investigate a /hole in the hard sand/ at the bottom of the ditch. I’m like, /Don’t get too close…/ but he gets too close and falls right in, of course.

I get a wad of heavy but rotting rope out of the car, drop an end in the hole and wiggle it to make it get around obstructions and go farther down…

Superimposed on all this is the adventure of people from the girl’s technology company, from before, searching a bank of little CRT monitors for a glimpse of their little Jack Russell terrier-dog who went down the ditch-hole into an underground alien office building of tunnels. They finally see where the dog is trapped in an office room just as it’s getting /out/ by going over a low wall. It starts back toward the way up to the surface. It got what it came for, though it’s carrying nothing. /Good dog./

Later, I’m alone at night pulling the man, or the dog, or /something/ up out of the hole, with the rope. It turns out to be one of the aliens, a deep-blue snakelike man curled in a fetal position, clamped sideways on the knot at the end of the rope. More blue aliens are behind him down there, following, now that they know how to get out into our world. /Maybe they’re not bad. Maybe they’ll be okay. I don’t want to drop the alien guy and kill him. I’m going to trust them. But if they come at me I’ll defend myself. I’m ready./

Much later, down in the underground alien office-building/apartment complex, I’m with Teal (from /Hyperdrive/) in her apartment, that she appropriated from the alien whose apartment it really is, after the humans kicked all the alens out. She’s nervous about my knowing she’s been living here for years; she’s really permanently settled in. I pick up a photo in a frame from a book shelf. It’s Teal as a little girl with her mother and father and their cute little Jack Russell terrier. She takes it out of my hand and puts it back on the shelf. I say, “Okay. I’m sorry.” Other things fall off the shelf and clatter down behind it. There’s a similar feeling of that to the man falling down the hole, before. And I’m still thinking about the girl by CVS, standing there waiting for the trucks to come get the alien teleportation thing out of town. Surely someone will have driven past there by now and seen it and called the police, and there’ll be bystander phone video. It’ll be impossible to keep it secret. What a mess! Oh, well…

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My dreams from Monday, 2022–09–05: Trilobite girl. Radio stations of the cross. Construction.

First dream. There’s a calm holiday, housewarming, or after-theater-show gathering at night in a living space made from an abandoned supermarket.

Photographer Garth Hagerman is persuaded to play a song. He stands to play a four-foot-long stretched-out ukulele vertically, planted bell-up between his feet; he plucks a tune, fretting the frets he can reach without bending over. He’s pretty good at it.

But now it was a 14–16-year-old girl playing the music. A mean comment cuts through the polite applause. The girl is an orphan, traumatized before she got here, and the nastiness collapses her. After the party, in another grocery aisle of the apartment, the girl is a flat, trilobite-like bug the size of a computer mouse. As a few concerned adults are still trying to figure out how to help, she crawls slowly to a refrigerator case and hides under a pillow there. Aww, she’s so pathetic. I’ll adopt her. I tell the others that I’ll take care of her and they seem glad about it because it means they don’t have to.

The girl is back to being a human — she’s a generic Midwestern blonde girl. She and I are on a mountain desert highway (she’s driving). She pulls over onto a wide place so we can trade places; she can sleep and I’ll drive. I can’t see the dashboard, or really anything but the mountains around, and the steepness of where we’re parked, and — I don’t know why I say it this way, but I’m trying to tell her how to take the car out of gear (while what I really mean is to shut off the car, leave it /in/ gear and pull the parking brake… Now I can see: it’s a Prius. /Push the Park button/, but we’re both already out of the car. It’s not rolling away, so she must have figured it out.

Next dream. Things are vague. I come to myself doing my radio show in an upstairs apartment in a modern new apartment building on a hill — the apartment follows the tilt of the hill; the rooms are stepped. The bed is on the next step up, about three feet higher. Juanita and somebody else are there.

I have no stories to read, and here’s a scattered mess of CDs I must have been playing up to now. They have labels but I can’t read them without my glasses. The one that’s playing sounds like a drawling country-western version of Laurie Anderson. This is good. Hmm, what else is here…

Now I’m walking downhill away from the apartment in a big, wide-open 1930s Ohio version of Mendocino. I get to an outdoor radio studio table on a streetcorner. Music is playing. I figure out how to switch the microphone on (it’s a white flower vase upside-down with white zipcord going into it, a table lamp without a light in it). I wait for a quiet place in the music, identify KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA), and switch the mic off.

Okay, that’s done. Go farther down the hill; there’ll be another table. This is like the stations of the cross in the rosary bead ritual, but for radio.

Next dream. I’m driving a car uphill, away from the sea, in Mendocino, almost even with the post office. There’s construction equipment scattered around, blocking the left side of the road. The truck at the front of this line of cars has stopped for someone crossing and is taking too long to start again. I know I shouldn’t do it but I pull out, zip around everyone and get in front.

At Lansing street, everything is changed, maybe for a movie shoot, maybe to just renovate the town, or this is twenty years in the future, or something. There’s a high rectangular white plywood facade on the fire department. Mendosa’s grocery is where Mitch’s barbershop used to be; it also has a three-story-high white facade but this is bulged out to cover the middle of Lansing street.It’s shaped like the round base and proscenium of the puppet theater I made for the Whale School. I’m on foot now; cars can’t get through here; it’s too narrow. And the whole place is decorated even more like Main Street in Disneyland than before.

I woke up with Dusty Springfield singing /The Look of Love/ in my head.

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