Dreams from Monday and Tuesday, May 24 and 25, 2021.

My dreams from Monday, 2021–05–24:

Little thief. Precarious bar. Flight trap to wolf time.

First dream. A dream-famous (infamous) thief little white girl is hiding in plain sight, though out of focus, on the concrete walkway between a rich person’s giant new house and the side chainlink fence. Two painters/workmen/cop guys come to the garage corner of the house. They’re about to go around the corner and see the girl (they’re here to catch her). I motion to the girl to go back past the house, down to the lake and away, and I step out around the corner at just the perfect moment to misdirect the men. I’m loud and fakely happy to see them. I point behind them, toward the road, and just start talking, making shit up, perfectly obstructing them, the way just wiggling your fingers at a piano in a dream can make perfect music.

Next dream. I’m like twelve years old, barefoot, dressed in pyjamas, in a weird expensive resort restaurant/hotel complex. I’m here with my (dream-only) family, but they’ve all gone on ahead somewhere. A hotel man is sitting behind his heavy desk keeping his eye on me while I stand here motionless except fiddling with my wristwatch, which is also a clever cigaret lighter, and mumbling to myself.

I snap out of waiting and walk farther into the place. A shadowy shape is crouched in a dark niche. Is that Juanita? I say, “Hey.” The shape unfolds into the light and is in fact Juanita. We go through endless dim curving corridors. I think the others might have gone up onto the roof, so I find a stairway in a closet; it leads us up and down along the side of a high indoor wall, but generally upward; it’s narrow, there’s no rail; it’s like a Dr. Seuss stairway. It goes to not the roof but a bar. Odd, having an alcohol bar accessible only by dangerous stairway like that, and only like six inches of floor behind the barstools, but I guess if people were falling all the time they’d have had to do something about it by now.

Next dream. A road goes from a crossroads uphill into and through a bleak strip-town of apartment buildings. I get up to the end of the road, at the local school’s playing field. Now Juanita’s with me. We should fly up and go higher into the mountains… Juanita and I clasp forearms — my left and her right. I say, “Lean forward,” but she knows how to do this; we’ve done this a thousand times: we take a few steps downhill on the grass and I give her some flying power so her feet come up off the ground, my feet come up but, as I think about the people in the sports bleachers seeing us fly, instead of thinking about where we’re going, we twist away to the right instead of the left, go up over the game and, as if on a track in the air, head back down the road, flying (or rather floating) about six feet above it.

Near the bottom of the hill we land in the columned entryway of an apartment building, go in, and climb steps into a strange elderly woman’s apartment. She gestures to the window. We lie on our sides in the air to go headfirst through it and get back out, but we’re still in the building, just higher up, and it’s a hospital now, with hallway-wide bridges that go across an otherwise empty place in the middle. Here’s another woman’s apartment. I give her the bottle of champaigne a nurse-guy gave us (when?). No, we can’t hang around; we have to go. I apologize to the woman for leaving scraps of pallet wood and metal straps behind on her rug. Over the kitchen sink is the only window in this apartment. It’s blocked with more pallet wood. I pull the top two little planks out. We’ll have to take the screen out, too… but… out the window is just to another air shaft that has a higher floor covering the top. /It was stupid to go inside someplace; you can never get out again./ (I’m not blaming Juanita. I was the one who did it.)

Now it’s years later. Juanita is gone. I get up from being in bed with a strange forty-something woman whose forehead is wider at the top than at the eyes, who I guess I have a relationship with, but I say nothing about not knowing her. I get dressed, tell her to call me later, go out and — I’m again at the top of the road in the same town, but there’s no baseball field now, just more wide gray streets going across the hill, and blocky gray buildings, like the Old Country in Shaun Tan’s picturebook /The Arrival/. It’s early morning. I’ll walk down the hill to work (?). An empty tram-bus-thing comes along, stops for me. I know it’ll go back and forth and zigzag down the side streets till it gets to the bottom and I don’t want to do that. I tell the driver thanks for stopping but I’m just gonna walk straight down and get there first. He warns me that it’s Wolf Time (especially this day, and this time of day, there’ll be magical dangerous wolves out). I don’t care. If a wolf comes, I’ll fly up into the air, and then I’ll be in the air and I can turn back uphill and go where I was supposed to go in the first place, before I wasted my life by showing off flying.

— — -

My dream from a nap Monday night:

Proof of aliens.

Some clever but gullible redneck boys have a UFO club where they meet at night on the runner-grass parking lot of a barn. I’m a guest. We’re all lying around between the cars. One of them tells a story about space aliens invading. Car lights (or spaceship lights) come up on the other side of a hill. There’s something about how the boy’s story would be proved if there’s water running under the ground. 1940s-style mixed fedora hat men and farm and gas station men replace the boys, and one man (farm type) runs across Lansing Street in Mendocino to a berm up to the sidewalk to open a manhole and look down. Of course there’ll be water — it’s a water pipe — and how does /that/ prove anything, but I want to see too. I have a flashlight in my phone to see down there, but I don’t have shoes on, just socks, so I follow more slowly to not get hurt. Also the manhole will have a manhole cover. We’ll need a tool to get it open, a jackhandle or something. And, scene.

Now I’m lying on my back in the street at like the corner of Lansing and Ukiah Streets (Mendocino). There’s a car door open above my head and chest, and I’m talking on the phone with Alex Bosworth, being friendly-sarcastic about how last week on my radio show I apologized for pissing him off so he never calls anymore, but in the middle of it I notice a flower vase is balanced (and taped) standing precariously on the knife edge of the top of the open door and tilting over as the door somehow begins to tip over. I say into the phone, though Alex will have no idea what I’m talking about: “That is some pretty strong /tape/ they used on that.”

(As the door tilted farther and the vase broke loose, Juanita woke me up by making a shadow on my face, coming from the kitchen to show me something to see on her phone, and she didn’t have her glasses on so she didn’t know I was asleep until she got near. I woke up startled, with a shriek, as much from having said the dream thing out loud in the real world and for some reason being embarrassed by it as from Juanita suddenly being there, standing over me, excited about something, just as the vase was about to fall.)

— — -

My dreams from Tuesday, 2021–05–25:

Caravan. Impractical MG. Chicken magic confidence.

First dream. It’s night. I’m in a radio station in a window-walls tram-car parked on a cliff. A media caravan (of cars and trucks) is going slowly by below with spotlights on itself. A cross between Bruce Anderson (of the Anderson Valley Advertiser) and Peter Lit (of the old Caspar Inn), in the open car in the middle, calls upward and all around with a bullhorn to publicize an upcoming theater show of the woman on a big poster I have right here spread out on the mixing board. She’s an 1800s philosopher/performance-artist; there’s elaborate circus-font text all over the poster with the star in a gymnastics suit of the 1890s standing on a trapeze swing in the center. Bruce/Peter calls out something nice about me and my commitment to radio and publishing — he says it to make a joke and to say hi, because he looked up and saw me. I wave and smile. Later I’m in the next trailer/tram on the cliff, a hundred feet away. This is where I live, in the dream. There’s a big loud dimly-lit party going on in the radio station tram-car and on the plateau behind it over there. Lots of people, but I can’t really see any of them. They know not to come here and bug me. My lights are low too. I’m at the sink, cutting up food to cook.

Next dream. A girl in her twenties has an old friend who’s a cook in a kind of rugged post-apocalyptic frontier travel hostel of dirt-floor cabins. The cook is a medium-size British-accent blonde-haired man who seems mild and like he’d be a pushover but he has resources. The girl needs a car to continue her flight from something bad.

I’ve been staying at this hostel. I go with the girl to a big garage where the car is, that the cook has pulled some strings to just get for her for free. It’s not very practical: it’s an antique MG. I help her get it ready to go by looking it over. The headlights are softball-size metal shades sticking up from the bumper with a hole in front and a bigger hole in back, and each ball has like a makeup mirror on an adjustible stalk to send the back-light forward. I tighten all the wingnuts on the stalk of the right-hand headlight, but it’s still loose and will swing in the wind. What a stupid design. Turn the light ball around so the big hole just points forward? But maybe that will break it off.

The driver’s seat is on the left, like an American car. The dashboard instruments are hard to figure out, but one must be a speedometer, and there’s a narrow rectangular notch with the edge of a wheel of text behind it to give advice, through the notch, for different road conditions, though however I spin the wheel (with a knurled knob) the advice is always something like that this model of car is not useful in rain or cold. (It’s a convertible with a soft top made of a cloth sleeping bag.) Also I’m barefoot and there are too many pedals and I can’t see there and my feet can’t figure them out. (If that’s the clutch, this is the brake and this is the gas, is this one a kickstart? And what are these sharp ones? I give up.)

Another string the girl’s friend has pulled is to get the engine and drivetrain diagnosed in a clean shop as big as an airplane hangar, that looks /expensive/. Somehow they already have the car. The call on the phone to tell when to come for a conference about what needs to be done. I don’t think the cook will be paying for any actual work on the car, especially at a place like that, and /I/ certainly can’t. What will happen? I’m calm about this: I’ll do what I can, and when it comes to something I can’t do, that’s not my fault or my problem anymore, like not understanding the pedals. (I feel like this more and more of the time in real life.)

Next dream. I inhabit the lowlife-character but useful old boyfriend of the girl in the previous dream, who has come to help her. He left his (I left my ) old white Dodge van behind in a field next to a gas station hundreds of miles away and somehow got to this now-more-normal non-post-apocalyptic-frontier place that’s like Auburn, California in the 1980s. While the girl — no longer blonde but now a vacuous pretty 1800s showgirl-like version of Juanita in her twenties — waits for something (?) elsewhere in town, I’m in a class for party magicians in the glass office of a gas station. The teacher assigns us all a trick to learn.

Time passes. I’m in class in the same gas station, maybe a week or a month later. The party-magic teacher goes around the room asking how old we all are. It takes me a moment of stuttering to remember I’m 62. The first-called student’s demo trick is cards. My trick is something to do with a rotisserie chicken — make a puppet of it, something like that.

The Juanita-like but young and quiet showgirl and I are camping in her old MG-car, which somehow is wide enough inside, and unobstructed enough, for us to lie almost full-length across the seats. It’s been windy and raining, but it’s not wet or cold in the car. A little wind comes in from the cracks around the top. Juanita’s in her black bikini underwear and I’m in boxer shorts and a flappy magician’s shirt and coat. She turns around the other way and face-down and starts licking my leg. I lick at her leg and inner thigh. We curl together and start getting involved in the sex of this…

A woman outside screams. The car is not in the forest at the edge of town anymore; it’s downtown in a parking garage made out of a gas station’s drive-straight-through car repair (oil-change) area. It’s not night; it’s like nine or ten in the morning, and a 1940's-dressed middle-aged couple came out of the shopping center so the woman saw us having sex — to her — in a public place and she freaked out, outraged. (All of that grasped in an instant, with her furious horrible scream.)

As the showgirl-Juanita and I have trouble reorienting ourselves and sitting up in the now much more realistically cramped car, a garage attendant is heard boredly telling the old couple complaining to him that if they’re that upset then call the police. We still haven’t been able to get dressed properly when a black woman cop with soft-looking curly hair appears at my window (I’m in the passenger seat). I roll down the window and stick my arm out to shake hands. The cop woman gingerly takes my thumb between two of her fingers and wiggles it. She seems okay about the sex in the car thing — she is called for this sort of thing all the time, and it’s not like anybody’s being harmed — but it’s her job to run us through the legal system, so… I say, “We were never naked. It was just our position. We just woke up.” (All close to true.)

There is a chance the cop will overlook it this time. I must say nothing, wait and softly, sheepishly smile. This is a moment of quiet hope, from the confidence of having learned the chicken magic trick back in the gas station.

(The garbage truck’s rumble and backup beeping woke me up.)