Dreams from Sunday 2022–06–19

My dream from a nap Saturday night 2022–06–18: Interworld ship.

Juanita and I are inside a long, narrow wooden sailing ship. The back-story is something like: on an adventure we stumbled onto this miracle ship that travels between parallel worlds. I’m exploring, going forward from room to room (no doors, just wide doorways). I get the sense that we’re solidifying/manifesting in a real place — or rather, the ship is merging with and becoming a regular house — but we’re still moving. I yell back to Juanita, “We need to stop /now!/” She’s up and moving quickly from sleeping, for her, but she’s still not fully present. She says, “Okay,” but is she throwing the anchor out the back? No. She’s /looking/ for it. I yell again and again, running back through the ship/house to her, “We need to stop now! Stop now!”

She finds the anchor and throws it out the back. I see from several angles as it drags a jagged furrow through the lawn between this house and the one behind, diagonally across and through a concrete walkway, and… we’re stopped. I run forward again and this time go out a screen door into the space between this house and the next one in /front/. The bow of the ship, that’s vanished now that the ship is just a house, has left a ditch in the grass and crumpled the corner of the next house’s porch.

Things change for us the way they changed for the ship. Now we’ve been staying in this house, in this place, with a tough family for too long, overstayed our welcome, after the [this-world-modified] back adventure, where we helped them through some trouble but, you know, what have we done for them lately? We have to get our things and get out.

I go looking for a toilet to piss in, find one in a messy bedroom, on a shag rug, piss into it. It goes back and forth between being a toilet and being a flattened-oval pinkish plastic wastebasket, and a lot of piss splashes onto the rug around it in a crown shape, immediately becoming a ring of yellow-brown blotches on the rug, dried and rotten, like splotches of plastic bloody honey. I get down on the floor, find the flush step-button, push it with my thumb. Now I have to clean the rug. What do you use for this?

Uh-oh, someone from the family is coming home: a big redheaded twenty-something man. He comes in the outside door of this bedroom, sees me, starts to cloud up about how I’m still here. I stand and say insistently and seriously, “Get your flashlight and come with me. This is more important.” (I’m going to show him the divots in the yards, fore and aft, and reveal the real nature of the house/ship, so he can help me repair the damage and keep the secret while we figure out how to exploit it.) I bark the order: “Really, get your flashlight.” He goes instantly from ready to kill me to digging around in scattered girls’ clothes (it’s his sister’s bedroom) for a flashlight. These people aren’t stupid; they can change emotional gears and be useful. That’s why we helped them before.

(Juanita made a sharp sleep-snort and moved suddenly, bumping my arm, waking me up. I was left with the sense of the ship in the dream feeling like a time-traveling sailing ship in /The Machine’s Child/ by Cage Baker.)

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My dreams from Sunday, 2022–06–19: Adventures of Conan.

First dream. I’m by a river that’s like just below where the North Fork and Middle Fork of the American River come together near Auburn (CA), but here it’s in a flat place on top of the land and not down in a deep valley. Families are floating this way on flimsy plastic/rubber rafts and inner tubes connected by a loose ropes so they don’t get too far separated. From where I am I can see a sharp downhill part ahead, and my point of view rises to see dangerous rocky rapids beyond. I run upriver on the shore rocks, yelling to the people to get out of the water. They don’t see or hear me; they go right past, and my point of view rises up again — they’re safe and okay, screaming happily, passing through the danger, no problem. Now I want to go there and do that but I have no raft. (Once in real life I went down a place like that with no float, just swimming. I was very luck not to break something or hit my head and drown.)

Suddenly it’s night. I go away from the river a little bit, past a canal, to where my horse is. I ride in the dark to a cluster of houses in hills, planning to ask if there’s someone around here I can pay to keep my horse for a month or two while I go to work.

Now I’m at the house highest up. The man here will feed the horse and let her out to run around. Other horses are here for her to play with. This is perfect. I hand him a fat roll of money from my jacket pocket. He doesn’t care when I come back.

Now I’m like Conan between adventures. I’m at another river, way steeper than the one before but with calm pools in the rocks. Trees spread overhead. Other people are swimming and sitting around; they’re waiting for their transportation.

I expect my fellow Ren-Faire-style mercenaries to arrive eventually. I walk into the cold water but I’m not cold. The others get here. We climb farther down the river to where it’s dim and spooky and swim some more… Here’s a funnel-shaped crack in a big rock down under the water with coins in it, quarters. I reach in and get some. Now there are more, and a big half-dollar. Clearly this is a trap. I have more coins than I need; I put some back for the creature down there to use to trap the next person, and I say /thank you/. My friends think this is hilarious. Anyway, time to go to work.

Out on a Mongolian desert at night Conan’s father, an architect from a normal 1950s city, comes to visit and wants to see how Conan is progressing. He hands Conan a pad and pencil and says, “Draw a building.” I take over for Conan, draw a big American West country store in this place, using perspective lines for the side, the edge, the peaked roof. I’m happy with it but I think that in a cold climate like this you’d have a special front door to open big to let vehicles in but have a small door /on/ the big door for just people and maybe a horse, say… Or put a cold-lock area on that sticks out? …I get a little bogged down here and start to fret. Conan’s father reaches for the drawing and I pass control back to Conan, so they can have the moment of both of them with a hand on the drawing at the same time. The father says, /That’s good enough, son./ Conan is a fighter and a strategist; drawing is extra. Education always pays off, and there’s nothing really wrong with the drawing. It’s good.

Next dream. Continues from the previous dream, I travel through desert mountains in the snow on a horse. A streamliner diesel train comes with supplies for our war. I get off the horse, hand the reins to a lieutenant from the train, take a rope from the front of the engine, and climb up rocks through deep insubstantial snow, pulling the whole train to get it up here. At the top, the bulk of our army soldiers comes from the other way. They’re surprised and happy; they had thought Conan was dead. They take the rope to help. with the rope. The train, now just the engine of it but full-size, spins its wheels on the rocks, everyone pulls from in front and pushes up from behind, and it’s on top. Hooray!

Next dream. It’s night. I’m with others hiding in a secret empty safe-house base (like the one in Marvel’s /Agents of Shield/) inside the top of a hill. An alien or supernatural 1950s-gangster/monster man finds this place just when I and my dream-only family go outside to get away in a big square-cornered 1970s car. The monster man has a gun. I send my wife and kids back inside the hill and get ready to fight the monster. He shoots past me, ruins the car’s front-right fender and tire, but… here’s /another car/. I don’t know how but I somehow subdue the man and send him temporarily away (he can’t be killed; he’s supernatural).

Now there are hills to the horizon and my point of view is on one of a loose corral of hills around a Texas town of mostly houses. The top is a flat square concrete platform and a car (or aircraft) garage that has an elevator in it. Three military cops are here. One reminisces to the others about his adolescent revelations on the subject of first sex. They’re having a light discussion. They’re friends. /They’re not being alert enough. Something will go wrong./

Now more guards are here, townspeople, not professional soldiers but better because of being alert to impending danger. The tough smart former sheriff of the town senses (hears/smells) the danger coming /now/. He talks about who lives /there/ and /there/ and /there/ (pointing down and across at different houses). I’m not sure what he’s telling the others to do. Is he just remembering the house-people’s names to show off? /Or is he winding them up to fight because something bad happened to those people./

And now even more people are here so it’s crowded when /Conan and his army overrun the place./ They do it peacefully. They don’t kill anyone; that’s not what they’re here for. They leave the women and children and old people but take the men to add to their army fighting the alien/supernatural menace. They all walk away down the hill between manzanitas and dry berry bushes.

I stay behind. Some of the women want to go fight too. Okay, good, go ahead. In fact…I go with them. The I-person from a moment ago becomes another of our fighters and stays behind /like he’s supposed to/ to help the remaining people by fixing their water systems and making sure their electricity stays on so they can live like people while they wait for the war to be over and for everyone to come back. There’s a soft-focus Xmas-card look to the landscape. Manzanita leaves shine in very little light.

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