Dreams May 15–17, 2022

My dream from Sunday, 2022–05–15: Network.

I’m in a community like in /Cabinet of Doctor Caligari/, a claustrobic warren of narrow twisting stairway alleys, but here the buildings are all made of clay and they’re much higher. The economic authority of old tall gray landlords and landladies and their henchpersons and conspirators has been oppressive for hundreds of years. A poor family’s little boy is sick and starving. I go into a wizard woman’s apartment while she’s out, and somehow steal some of her power to help the boy, but a wizard man comes to the door. He wants to come in and inspect. /He’ll see what I did or what I took./ He becomes the woman, all smug about her power and what she’ll do next. The room is very big now, cluttered like a factory. The right-hand wall is open except for metal lumber store-like standing shelves. There’s a valley out that way in rocky and grassy hills.

The wizard woman detects my theft and is about to strike. I use my new power to knock her down. She gets up. More people come here. The wizard woman gets ready to strike again, so now all these people will be hurt or killed, and I have to knock her down much harder (from across the room, with a bolt of invisible weight).

My defending myself against her has changed her brain so now she wants to do good, pay back the place for the evil she’s done, and that’s good, but maybe she’s stupid, too. Maybe I’ve damaged her so she’s sweet and nice but an idiot. /Dammit./

Farther along in the apartment, which is now like a dirt-road version of Comptche-Ukiah Road going toward the coast, I’m working, stringing blue network cable along the side of the road, laying it on tree branches to keep it off the ground. The road goes through a cabin that’s like a dirt-floor wooden version of the driveway/corridor through a Toyota dealership I went to for an oil change once (and didn’t like it; they cheated me). I move furniture and suitcases and boxes of books out of the way to get the cable through along one wall. I have to keep throwing things back where I got them from and outside to let cars through… Fuck this, I’ll do it later. I’ll do it at night when nobody’s driving.

The corridor becomes the cabin of (dead) painter John Darcy. He’s giving art lessons to hippie people’s kids. He’s just done a painting on the wall of Einstein’s face. I say, “You used the projector thing.” He asks me how it works. (He knows how to use it. He’s asking me to articulate how it actually works — how a mirror and lenses work.) I see that it’s the one I bought from the thrift store for Juanita. He says it was stolen from him a long time ago and that it’s really his. I’m okay with that. Juanita wasn’t using it. I wasn’t using it. He’s using it.

Back up the road toward to the door to this place, the door that lets out into the stairways and the clay Caligari town, I’m at a council of country elder artists in another cabin place with one big glassless window wall. I start to invent and explain my plan to get a network cable all the way from Comptche to Highway 1 (with lots of little solar powered switches along the way). I’ll demonstrate to them my mind power, on an object, a coin or a pencil or something, to get them to just go along with the network project. I know no-one can keep a secret, and my superpower will be exposed. I’ll just do it and see what happens. (Probably something bad will happen, but I want to show off.)

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My dreams from Monday, 2022–05–16: Falling. John Chamberlain’s boxes. The drunken sheriff. Loud. Robot chase.

First dream. I’m driving then walking north in a familiar dream-only high-school-land town, one street over from Main. Oops, I’ve gone past the place I was supposed to turn right.

Things change so now I’m hiking with a little dog up in mountains, above the treeline, where all the rocks look ready to slide. A man here says something that reminds me of Jack Chick religious cartoon tracts. He’s never seen one, so I tell him all about them.

There’s an earthquake. This whole side of the mountain is suddenly sliding in surface clumps that seem to be racing with each other. I try to stay upright. The man and the dog are gone. The sheet/clump of rocks I’m on goes over a bump and a cliff and I’m falling with my arms out, aiming at the river far down at the very bottom, way over there. As I get closer I see that I have a good chance of falling in a wide deep place, but no, I wished to glide, didn’t I, and I’m going past it. I curve around to the right and here’s a moss-and-ivy covered pond. /I remember planning in another dream years ago for this to land in water and live./ I flare back, slow to a survivable crash speed and drop into the water.

Now I’m in a tattered bathrobe and I’m barefoot. I walk back up the hills and the mountain to a community of scattered damaged houses on winding paved roads, where they’re already set up to serve people stricken by the disaster. I go to an outdoor kitchen that’s also like a big free fleamarket. People are getting clothes. Maybe there’ll be shoes for me. Nope; all the shoes are taken.

I tell a fellow ragged character about falling miles down off the mountain into the lake, and I show him how scratched up I am on my right side and my back, to establish my miraculous story, but even with his own and all these other people’s miraculous stories of survival he doesn’t believe me. Anyway, I’m alive; that’s enough.

They’re giving people jobs driving trucks — garbage trucks, lumber trucks — but I’m still trying to walk to where I was going in the first place (see above). Probably I should apply and settle here before all the truck-driving jobs are gone, but I just keep walking away.

The song playing in my head throughout the dream was /Inventory/ by Meryn Caddell. You can find it on YouTube.

Asleep again. Next dream. The previous dream continues here from both the end and the beginning of it, where I’m post-earthquake /and/ walking through the high-school-land town, but this is in mountains in, like, Wyoming. I come to a rustic Mendocino-as-ghost-town line of gray-dry redwood shops with a boardwalk along them. They’re having a memorial event for a famous beloved old Mendocino hippie. Late Night Liz is a guide to the event; she’s standing with some people at the door to a shop that they’ve made into a museum of Mendocino the way it was in the old days.

I’m a woman here, and I’m arriving with some man who, in the dream, is my [boyfriend? the policeman who captured me?]. Kevin MacDonald of /Kids In The Hall/ is with his girlfriend, a blonde woman, talking to Liz. Kevin sees me with the cop who captured me (?) and he starts to get jealous but controls it. Liz is drawling away about the event like an M.C. at a county fair. She has stopped any violence with her wise Texas accent. I go inside and everyone follows.

It’s all living dioramas behind glass. Here’s a busy train station maybe in Albion. There are crates with big brass handles and brass clasps. I say, “Those are John Chamberlain’s equipment boxes.” Kevin MacDonald is losing his battle with controlling his jealousy, which is weird because now I’m who I am in real life, Marco, a man, not the person he’s pissed off at. I go outside through the side door and walk diagonally across the parking lot. /Maybe I can fly./

Next dream. At night a western movie is being shot, starring Andy Griffith when he was young and, I’m surprised to learn, looked just like Ron Howard at maybe 20 or 25. The set is a whole actual Old West town. I walk past people working on different projects, getting set-piece areas ready.

Now I’m walking along a railroad track’s loading dock, which becomes a bumpy, hilly dirt road. A fat little sheriff comes the other way with a big but light-looking shotgun. I’m somehow privy to invisible townsfolks’ discussion about how /the sheriff is supposed to be an alcoholic./ He immediately begins stumbling drunkenly, cradling the shotgun, much heavier now, with both hands, pointing it around carelessly.

The brave lawyer lady of the story passes me by in a Model T with the legal evidence to win a client’s case against the town’s unscrupulous rich man, but the road is so bumpy the car is thrown up and flips over backward to land upright (!) but bounces sideways and bursts into flames! The lawyer lady has been thrown out onto her padded bustle and she’s okay, just smudged. I jump into the burning car and start tossing things out to her: all her legal folders in a big tied-up bundle, her open leather purse full of pens and pencils, and then groceries: bread, two jugs of milk, bags of fruit and vegetables. The fire is only in the front-right corner of the car now so this is okay.

I woke up with the song /Inventory/ playing in my head again, the part where Meryn Caddell sings, “I’m labeling the stuff I got, figuring what I lost.”

Asleep again. Next dream. I’m sitting by the side of a road in a big empty Central California expanse waiting with somebody else, who’s standing leaning on the trunk of a 1960s car. I have a little dog in my arms resting on its back on my left leg.

(The dog /or someone else in the dream/ whispered loudly to me some garbled nonsense and woke me up.)

Asleep again. Next dream. An indoor shopping mall is busy but calm, with people walking along the shops in two lines like a road, one side going one way and the other side going the other. My friend Mark is about 20 years old here; he’s walking with a type of girl that always made me think of a spaniel dog — something about the coloration and the spots and the jowls — who’s also 20 years old. My point of view moves along with them and flies around them, mainly concerned with the girl’s face from the side or front.

If Mark is 20, this must be the 1970s. So how did they shoot this? Not with a drone; they didn’t have them. Was the cameraperson on rollerskates?

Outside the mall, here’s the dirt parking lot between the buildings of a farm. A crew of twenty or thirty killer robots led by one from the film /Tomorrowland/ are here. They’re all disguised as young office people dressed for work. They can appear instantly anywhere they want to. I’m in the small group of humans constantly fleeing from robots and just barely getting away every time. Though I’m in the action I’m also a safe observer. I’m like, /How can they get away when they have to run but the robots can teleport? How can this go on episode after episode for years with the humans not just getting killed?/

Ah. It’s because the robots can’t teleport after they’ve found the humans. They can only teleport to find them, then they have to run after them. I get it.

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My dream from Tuesday, 2022–05–17: Radio in bed and a pitzel machine. Reflex.

(Again, this dream is permeated with /Inventory/ by Meryn Caddell.)

I’m in bed on my right side in a strange big white one-room apartment with a high ceiling, like a room in a school built in the 1930s. Juanita and her friend Jo are bustling about, across the room, cleaning or packing and/or getting ready for one of their Ren Faire or Dickens Faire projects. I’ve been dozing, and I see that I’m doing my radio show from bed, using a strange mixing board. It’s almost 5am; in the dream my show goes till 6am (?) and I don’t see any papers anywhere, so I must have run out of material to read, put on some music and fallen asleep. The music (/Inventory/) comes to an end (though it’s still playing, just in my head, not through the board. I press the obvious button on the mic channel and start talking, but there’s no meter movement, so I try another button, and that works. I say exactly this, “How ‘bout this one (button)— yes. KNYO-LP Fort Bragg. The dead air comes from I pressed the wrong button. It looks like I’m done with the material I brought to tonight’s show, and there’s some time left, so why don’t you call and we’ll talk about stuff. I’m just gonna turn the mic off and take a nap and there’ll be dead air until you call. Wake me up with the phone.” And then I say Juanita’s landline number, worry that giving out her number was a bad idea, but she and Jo think it’s funny. They’re in their twenties here and I’m my real age (63) so I’m a quirky grandfather figure to them, and that feels comfortable. Maybe they’re not getting ready for something; maybe they’re here from a government agency to pick up after me and clean up the house. In other news, I have a house. Huh.

Now Juanita is her right age and who /she/ is. We’re in an expensive all dark wood old club-like place in L.A. or San Francisco or Boston. Juanita’s at the bar, setting up some kind of business arrangement with the owner, actress Sally Phillips from /Smack the Pony/. I’m waiting patiently at a table, looking at a full-page menu item that’s a color photograph of a breast of chicken sculpted or molded of mashed potatoes and mushrooms. I’ll bet that costs forty dollars here, just a half a cup of mashed potatoes.

I get up and wander around. One of Sally Phillips’ Sally-Phillips-like assistants comes to me and asks me how the hot chocolate is. I was at the wrong table; they’ve been serving me over /there/. I go there. There’s a tall glass of hot chocolate and a plate of white toast. /Thanks./ (I hope I don’t have to pay for this; it’s probably $25.)

I sit at the new table and daydream (within the dream) about a scheme where I’d give Sally Phillips a pitzel cookie, lie to her that this is how good it is after it’s been in transit in the mail for three days, so just /imagine/ how good they are fresh! and try to interest her in investing in developing a machine that makes them, like the trick money-printing machine I read about last week.

(Much later, after my work day, I lay down on the floor to stretch my back because it was hurting, and I fell asleep for like ten minutes and dreamed of a conversation with someone who didn’t know that doctors used to tap your knee with a little rubber hammer to see the reflex kick. In the dream we’re all in a big car on bench seats that go all the way across but somehow there’s still room to go forward and backward through the car. I’m tapping and tapping at different angles and places on my knee with the handle of a shop mallet to show the person what I’m talking about. Tapping wiggles my leg but there’s no kick. Wiggling will have to be enough. I say, “See?” The person says, “Yeah.”)

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