Dreams July 20–22, 2022

My dreams from Wednesday, 2022–07–20: Old fart. Time travel trick. A truckload.

First dream. Haughty young people sit around a college library or meeting room table. I’m not being considered for a job here because what could /I/ know? I start to tell a snotty girl about some of the things I’ve done and accomplished — the newspaper, the radio and teevee projects. But I don’t even get a sentence out — she nor anyone is listening. I’m just another stupid old man to them. /I was never like that to old people. Was I?/

Next dream. (All of this dream is like watching a show; I’m not in it.) A man is blackmailed/threatened into carrying a magazine article or a piece of new technology to a criminal mastermind woman’s scientist-flunkies either in space near Earth or on another planet, to change something in the past.

The man and his friend (like Corwin of /The Chronicles of Amber/ and his human lawyer friend Bill) go along with the plan but, outside the loading door of the front warehouse of Rossi’s Hardware, Corwin tricks her thugs by vanishing early in his /own/ spaceship, not hers.

Later, the tall thin rich woman (mastermind) comes in and sits in a chair in a mostly empty cavelike-decorated big storefront on Laurel or Redwood Street in Fort Bragg. She shows the man’s friend (another woman) a cryptic full-page ad in a slick magazine (simulated low-line-count black and white teevee image of a product name that starts with C). The magazine is antique but clearly bears marks of Corwin’s influence, so he must have gone back in time after all. The criminal mastermind rich woman says, “What do you think he’s up to?” The desk woman says, “They didn’t get there. They didn’t do it.” The rich woman, now the cat captain from /Treasure Planet/ (but still human, with a human head and face), says, “Maybe they did…” (Meaning, maybe they went back in time and changed things so we got our present of space travel and so on. Maybe we should stop scheming and just enjoy what we have.)

Next dream. I’m sitting up on the high load on the back of a pickup truck I came to Mendocino in from Albion with all of my possessions in and on. The truck is parallel parked on Main Street a little downhill from the hotel. And I came here to thwart the plans of another version of the cat captain from the previous dream. I find that I have to drive back to Albion to get something I forgot (?), but I don’t want to have to take all this stuff off the truck to do it… I climb all around, making sure it’ll all stay on for the trip: loose cloth things and light rugs and boxes of bathroom-drawer things, and books and magazines… There’s a lot here I don’t recognize as mine, including like yard-sale items all over the engine hood, more things than were here just a minute ago, but I still think, /It got here all right. Maybe I should just trust it and only go twenty or thirty miles an hour and let people pass me if that pisses them off./

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My dreams from Thursday, 2022–07–21: Memorial crowd. Pump-flying. Trailer crash. A wire faux pas.

First dream. I’m in a future decrepit version of my house. The floor is falling through in places. The toilet is just a hole in a depression in the floor with a hose and a step-on valve next to it. I step on the valve, water swirls down the hole onto the ground. /Yup, it works./

I walk to my work place to get a wire-nut to twist both wires of the bare end of a four-inch bit of zip-cord together; it has a plug on the other end. This is a test-tool to short an outlet for some reason. Before I get there I already have the wire-nut. I put it on and put the wire thing in my pocket.

At work, the place is crawling with strange people all dressed like for church, in their best clothes, milling around. Is it a funeral memorial? Are they touring the place to bid on it? I’m in my ratty work clothes. I come out of the electrical parts room (without having gone in) and cross a dream-only fenced enclosure in the space north of the factory building. I’m going home now. My employer Tim sees me; he says something to me across the yard.

Next dream. There’s a wide wooden plank deck around a tourist restaurant on the top of a summer dry grass California hill. I go diagonally across the deck to the edge. People inside and outside freak out that I’m going to kill myself, and they call out /Don’t! Don’t!/, But I step off and fly out and down, strain like doing pushups, pumping at the air like pushing down on a hand air pump, to get altitude, and curve around to fly up past the restaurant, which is not on the top of a hill now but next to a path upward to the saddle of a ridge.

The only person left on the deck is a pretty blonde Jewish girl (wavy-but-straight hair that looks like a child’s drawing of a waterfall). She’s interested in flying. As I go past, I say to her, “If I can get over this hill I can fly for hours.” (Because it goes down for a hundred miles that way.)

Next dream. Other, steeper California hills. I’m with a girl, maybe the one from the previous dream. Across a paved road a small but tall travel trailer is balanced precariously on narrow vertical blocks. The people on the road here are already fleeing because rain is starting to plop down, and the back-story includes that there’s a poisonous or otherwise dangerous thing that will happen when it really starts to come down. I run for the trailer and call back to the girl to hurry, come with me!

We go into the trailer but are instantly up on top of it. The earth shakes. The trailer wobbles, tips, tilts down the other side of the hill. The girl and I jump off to the hillside, uphill, just before the trailer slides and rolls down to smash open far below. I’m not satisfied with how realistic that seemed. I’d like to do it again — do you mind going back and doing it again? (Things are confused here.)

Next dream. I come to my work place from the gravel parking lot. This is continuing from the first dream but there’s nobody here. In the dream the office area is part of Alice’s house, which is Ethel’s old house — they’re connected somehow. I’ve followed instructions to wire electricity out down the driveway along a fence, over a gate with a little decorative roof over it, and through the trees to the road for something — I don’t know what — but it’s white indoor zipcord (lamp cord) stapled across the bamboo-rug-like face of the fence. I go into the office. Alice looks at me oddly. I say, “Are you mad at me for something?” She says, “Some of the people here had gasoline in their cars.” So, yes, she’s mad at me. Probably because I used that kind of wire. Okay.

Tim comes around to talk to me in the garden under the old carport. He’s Tim, but here he has a kind of Zorba the Greek/Sam Eliot-like gravitas aspect, and he’s sleepy because it’s late in the afternoon and he gets up at four a.m., so it’s the end of the day for him. He says [a Chinese man’s name] will be here tomorrow and he’ll help me. I say, “It doesn’t matter /what/ kind of wire I replace that with; it’s not allowed there.” Tim says again, “He’ll help you.” Alice is here, and Tim is here, so who died?

I woke up with the Todd Rundgren song /Everybody Else Is Wrong/ from the album /Deface the Music/ playing in my head.

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My dreams from Friday, 2022–07–22: Graphic alien sex. Clone exploitation. (and) What did God say? What do you /do/?

First dream. A black athlete man fallen on hard times, who looks like Childish Gambino, has to work for a cheap teevee show where people have sex with recently arrived space alien people There are different kinds of aliens, so you never know what you’ll get. He’s polite, patiently waiting for his part in this. Sex with the latest alien is graphical-metaphor-ized into a horizontal metal cylinder with a thin diagonal slit in the side of it, blocked on the floor with wedges of bits two-by-four chunks. He has to put his mouth on that slit in the pipe. It’s implied that there’s pus or something horrible-tasting inside. He stoically does this, sits up, talks quietly with the producers between takes, but I know that in a minute, when it feels right to him and won’t make him look like a wuss, he’ll make an excuse to go to another room and then wash his mouth out in the sink. I think I’d also use oral peroxide; if they have that he’ll find it. He’ll think of that.

Next dream. The two human sisters who hosted the show in the previous dream are surprised years later by a phone call. Everyone thought the aliens went back to all the places they came from, and they did, but they apparently talked among themselves about Earth and now whole space-busloads of them are coming here to use Earth for a carnival planet, and one busload of a certain kind of aliens wants to pay to stay at the two sisters’ house. They’re old now, they need the money, so they’re like, /Okay, I guess. Fine./

Two aliens sit at one side of a table, that becomes just a bench, no table. One of them, in the back-story of this part, has had sex with a human on the previous day’s show. (They’re making the teevee show again.) The brown-red-haired alien woman nearest me (I’m in the room) clearly expects something. I say, “What do you want?” She looks at me creepily, lecherously. I say, “Why are you doing this.” (I know why: they think they can do whatever they want to here: Earth is their spring-break Mexico or Florida.) She says, “I have to,” meaning it’s like Pon Farr to them; if they don’t have sex they’ll die. /Sure, right./ I say, “What exactly does it involve?” (I know it involves pus and slime, but sex between humans is /kind of/ sweaty and slimy, and there’s a sort of pus involved, and we can’t catch a disease from aliens, so would it be so bad?)

She stands up in her long homeless-person coat and comes close to me. The problem is I just don’t like her — not her face or hair or voice. I don’t feel anything at all for her. I say, “I can’t do this. Also I’m married.”

Now I’m seeing this from outside the action. The alien woman is hugging and kissing the unwilling human sister. Alien lets go, cackles with glee and goes into the other room with something invisible in, or on, her hand. /She’s taken DNA to make a clone./

I’m in the room again. I run after her. Too late; the alien and someone else have already made a copy of the sister, but the copy looks just like the alien woman. You can tell them apart because the copy’s clothes are new (the alien is raggedy). The alien curls around her human copy, both of them standing up, and she bites and claws a chicken-breast-size chunk of meat out of the alien-looking human’s lower right side, through the clothes.

It’s later. I and others are under a concrete bridge in a dim city, near the ocean (San Francisco? England?) The alien and the human woman (copy? original sister?) are both naked, traumatized-looking, kneeling, facing each other, about six feet apart. We’re comforting them, waiting for the police. I think that the police will decide that the alien is the one without a bite taken out of her, but — these creatures can make a whole person in five seconds — don’t you think they can fix a bite-mark? Or bite themselves?

Everything is bleak. Everyone is sad. Worst Candid Camera date ever.

Next dream. I’m in a strange one-level suburban house that’s a /little/ like the house where I lived in fourth grade in Fresno, after my mother married Roland and we moved from Escondido. It’s night-time and dim. In the dream I’m who I am, at my real age. I’m half-sure that Juanita has gone away somewhere but I hope she’s still here. She’s not anywhere I look, so I’m /really hoping/ she’ll be in the last place someone could be, the kitchen. I say, “What did God say? What do you /do/?”, switch on the light and no-one’s here.

The neighbors in the industrial yard next door woke me up by banging something big and metal into their gong-dumpster.

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