Dreams from May 2–5, 2022

My dreams from Monday, 2022–05–02: Hippie-built Frank Lloyd Wright house. Curse. Cadillac tide.

First dream. I’m steadily working — cleaning, plumbing and wiring — in a new four-story house made of upright telephone poles with floors bolted to them, somewhere like Lake Tahoe but with no lake. There are both closed and open sides of different floors of the house. I don’t have to figure anything out; everything to do is obvious and I have all the right parts and tools. My arms are short and have rugs of hair on the back of them. It’s foggy but bright out. There’s no sound.

Next dream. Jimi Hendrix is clumsy and all thumbs. His stage handlers/managers are purse-lipped but hopeful that this will resolve itself without their having to kill him and replace him with another Jimi Hendrix. I mess with the guitar and learn that the problem isn’t Hendrix, it’s the guitar; it’s cursed; it’s just impossible to play right. How many times have they killed and replaced him already, not knowing that?

Next dream. My job in the dream is to deliver rich people from the airport to a motel where the Budget Rent-A-Car place is in Santa Rosa. I’m driving a four-door 1964 Cadillac, and the rich woman in the back seat is something like an older actress Uma Thurman. I stop at the curb; she gets out. I go to get her bag out of the trunk, but there’s a sudden wash of water over the road from the west, like a rush tide, and the car is swept away to a whirlpool on the side-street, somehow without causing a problem for me or Uma Thurman. I run after the spinning car (through the water but without splashing or being impeded), and try to get into it to get some control. Uma Thurman’s standing on the curb back there, more worried about getting her bag than about whether I’ll be drowned or crushed, but polite. She knows this isn’t my fault.

(The song playing in my head as I woke up was The Housemartins, /Caravan Of Love./

My dream from Wednesday, 2022–05–04: Steak fight.

A political dissident woman is captured and kept in a giant boxy empty concrete-block gym by a woman and man scientist pair and their opaque government agency. I take over for the woman, become her, to give her a break from this. She (I) goes (go) to the lighted red button on the end wall and just push it, causing a /crowd gasp/ from other captives who are invisible. You’re not supposed to press that. I press it again, really mash it down.

The scientist woman is the actress who played an alien woman in a bird-feather wig in a /Stargate Atlantis/ episode. She’s smug in her power and enjoys breaking people to her will. Her project is to find the perfect little boy subject, to do something to him genetically and electrically to give him a superpower? or to fight aliens? or make her lots of money? She thinks she’s the good guy.

Before today’s uncertainty/psych-torture session on me, she lets me go to the bathroom. I use the sink to wash my (regular me, not the woman’s I’m filling in for) face and crotch and under the arms while the scientist woman is outside the door smugly talking and talking, requiring response, making sure I’m not somehow escaping from this little room with no windows nor even an air vent.

Now I’ve been here for years, unable to escape but more and more trusted, ready to make my move. I see the scientist woman, now like actress Lindsay Crouse in the 1990s, ballroom dancing naked with the boy she chose for the experiment, up to her belly (up to the boy’s chest) in the facility’s Russian spa indoor swimming pool. Later, when dignitaries and government officials come to the motel room (?) to meet with her, I talk glibly and comically about her creepy obsession with little boys, and the dancing naked and all. They don’t know what to think; she’s surely told them I’m crazy. But I’m confident they’ll believe me, so there’s danger for her and she might slip, say something rash and reveal her evil. She doesn’t, but they leave, humming with discussion.

Alone with me in the motel room the scientist woman becomes traitor Ward from a middle episode of /Marvel’s Agents of Shield/ and threatens to break my hand. He bends it backward mainly by the middle fingers. I get my hand free and we fight weirdly slowly all around the room, jumping over the bed and behind the couch. I keep just barely managing to avoid being struck, but slamming him on the ground or wall or kicking him in the chest or face doesn’t hurt him, just embarrasses and infuriates him. Eventually he’ll connect and probably kill me.

The little boy subject of the experiment, under the bed all this time (!), helps me by throwing me a pastel-blue plastic tub of cold wet thick big bloody steaks, which I fling at the man I’m fighting with so they stick all over him like bloody typewriter-pad-felt magnets.

/Now/ the visiting dignitaries and reporters come to the door with the woman scientist, and they see the man hurriedly pulling steaks off his body and throwing them down. Things revise so /now/ is when I tell them about the woman (somehow, at the same time, the man) dancing naked in the pool with the boy (who I know not to point out is under the bed, because they might have tricked me about that — I mean, he might not really be there and my credibility and gains from the reporters seeing the meat-embarrassed man would go away).

Point one for me. I’m out in the world but still under the thumb of the vindictive scientist pair (woman and man). It’s years later. The man’s buzz-cut hair is turning gray on the sides. In my memory he gloats that he has full access to any computer I use.

I go to my new (dream-only) apartment up a long flight of concrete steps in an old big-city neighborhood. The apartment is across the street from a busy 1950s-style diner. I go farther up stairs inside the building and instantly have been followed up the steps by a gaggle of busy, frantic twenty-something women dragging their little boys and girls along, shoving money at me to pay me to take care of their kids all day while they go to work. I explain that I’m being stalked by a crazy government guy who used my name and information in whatever ad yez all must have seen, sorry. I shut the door on them, and look around this strange apartment to see what resources I have now to defend against the horrible scientist pair who’ve been screwing things up for me for decades now. There’s a computer with a big CRT monitor. I wonder what I can do with that, depending on what era this is.

— -

My dream from Thursday, 2022–05–05: Scrap metal pirates.

I’m in a dark maze of corrugated metal corridors in a warehouse office-like place in stereotypical /Clutch Cargo/ or /McHale’s Navy/ tropics. A crisis is happening. A woman promises that she can help if the man would just let her. The man dismisses this and runs off down the corridor with a rifle.

I run the other way to get guns for the rest of us. All that’s available, though, is a little boy’s Christmas-present .22 bolt-action rifle. I ask the boy, “Are there shells for this?” He breaks the barrel and reveals the butt of a shell in a separate tube, I guess in a line of shells in that tube, but this seems like just a beebee gun. I say, “Does this fire these shells? or beebees?” He says, “Beebees.” I say, “When you shoot, does it sound like a firecracker? or does it go /tchk/?” He says, “Tchk.” Okay, it’s a beebee gun, and so the man is on his own against the pirates.

Boomy popcorn sounds of real gunshots come from around the bend, up the river. The man must have got on the pirates’ boat with them.

Now I’m out in the river, having jumped from barge to barge. A fast big motor-powered barge races between obstacles, with booms and cables and magnets of scrap metal swinging crazily from it, then it drifts, turns slowly around to come back. I shout to a man-size Alf-like alien person, and a man on another barge, that Mister (Name), the father of the boy I’m playing at this point in the story, has captured the metal thieves on his own, and he’s on that boat, and so /don’t shoot at it/.

(The door shutting, of Juanita going away to work, woke me up, then immediately her phone bleebled. I jumped out of bed, found the phone, /unlocked the door so I wouldn’t lock myself out in my pyjamas/, and ran out, down the steps, toward where she usually parks on the street side of the building. She came tearing around the building in her car, having realized she’d left her phone behind, saw me and stopped. I gave her the phone and went back inside. It felt like an extension of the frantic activity in the dream, which I realize now, much later, writing this down, might have been informed by Juanita moving around frantically getting ready for work and running out late.)