Dreams Mon-Wed, July 25–27, 2022

My dreams from Monday, 2022–07–25: Hannis’ apartment. Popcorn.

First dream. I’m out camping in dry summer California hills for a recording project. I need something from down that way a mile or so away. I run barefoot on a gravel and dirt track-road, realize that I’ll run my feet bloody before too long, give up and go back, thinking that I’ll just use what’s available (a cassette deck will be enough; there’ll be something to use at the, uh, place).

Now my job is to preserve a recording of a foreign opera singer that I made forty years ago at an event on a lawn in Little River (CA), that I did with a Technics 10-inch reel-to-reel decks from either the Community School or KMFB. The tape has been in Hannis Krebs apartment all this time and now he’s dead. (I visualize a typical book-cluttered apartment). But I recorded that show twice — the second time on the little lawn and walkway in front of the Dutch bakery, and this tape is from that much poorer second show, not from the good one. Also the tape is mangled; it’s wound unevenly, with crinkled edges, and the tape leaves the reel and goes in again at other layers farther out. It’s been ruined by someone mistreating it.

I say that I’ll go find a deck to play this, and get a computer from, you know, anywhere, there are computers everywhere, and put CoolEdit in it and do the best I can, but I can’t make the original tape nice again, nor can I make it be the tape of the better show. Actor David Woolis, in charge of the project, explains, exasperated, that this is all to give a gift of a recording to the members of some international environmental organization whose other countries’ opera singers all gave us a fancy commercial-quality recording of when /our/ singer was in /their/ country (in like 1983). I’m like, /David, I’ll do the best I can with what I have./ Oh, also, he says, it’s supposed to be ready in half an hour for the Zoom ceremony. No way; it will take me an hour to even locate someone with a deck that will play this. And then it’s gonna snap a dozen times and I’ll have to splice it and fix the splices in the sound. And I’m not even being paid, and everyone else involved has a nice house and nice cars and they fly all over the world to do festivals and things anytime they want to. And they’re probably being paid by some foundation or government grant. I’m feeling a resentful about this in a very familiar-to-real-life way.

I woke up just as I was about to tell David this brilliant idea to save everyone and get me off the hook: “Put it in a pretty box as-is, and give them that.” (They’d be overwhelmed with the honor.)

Next dream. I’m out on a wet asphalt road in Albion (CA) but more of a sparse pine place like Colorado. Here’s a plastic bucket of dry unpopped popcorn, a red plastic spaghetti sieve, and a broom. Somehow the recording in the previous dream has devolved (or evolved) from tape tech to having been done on and in the medium of corn.

Now the corn is scattered on the road. I sweep it into little piles and pick the piles up by the edges of my hands and then with my fingers and get it all back in the bucket. I pick out bits of dirt and leaves. /How can the result of this ever play the data in the right order?/ Things become vague.

Two bad tough teenage girls in the employ of criminals are in the cab of a pickup truck on the hill where I was camping in the first dream. I’m in the back of the truck, being guarded to keep me from running off to get something they’re supposed to find out the whereabouts of (from me) and report on or steal. I magically get away while they’re involved in talking with each other. My point of view is still next to the truck, though, seeing them notice I’m gone and freak out about it. They get out, order each other to stay here and watch the truck while they run off in opposite directions to look for me. So now I have a truck.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2022–07–26: Advent. Pickleball. Danny Trejo, alien guru at law.

First dream. I walk downhill from a community place like the dance hall at the Mendocino Woodlands campground to a small house like the old pink house where Juanita and I lived in Caspar but even older. In the dream I’ve been living here and working, but it turns out that other people live in the house and I’ve perfectly accidentally just been here when they’re away. The (strange) real estate woman is in her room, moving around, making sounds, opening and closing drawers. The (strange) man is out, but I see where he’s been sleeping. I think I’ll offer them two dollars for having left the wall heater and the plug-in floor heater on while I was away, to heat the (uninsulated) house up to be comfortable for work. Two dollars should be enough. It was only an hour.

Later I’m alone in the house, taking care of a baby that has its cloth diaper taped on around its waist with masking tape. I’m doing this for my cousin. I’m nice to the baby, talking to it, holding it. It’s just freshly born, it’s tiny, but it smiles intelligently, in a knowing way.

Now I’m lying on my side on the bed. The baby is lying on its side facing me. I wiggle my fingers, make faces, tickle its belly, and he — I’ve decided it’s a boy — laughs, speaks in baby tones but in a useful sequence. I say, “You can say a complete sentence.” He says clearly and confidently, “I can now.”

What will I feed him? What happens when I have to change his diaper? I guess I can do that.

He’s suddenly grown up to about twenty years old and he’s standing in the door to the next room, stepping from foot to foot, getting the feel of being upright. In seconds, he can walk. The diaper and tape has torn and come loose. He’s messy but he can walk; he can go in the bathroom and clean himself up. So I don’t have to do that. Good.

Others are here because of this weird development of a baby growing up in a minute. A square-headed Hispanic reporter will be showing up to interview me (which was arranged before; I don’t know why). I’m reminded of this when he knocks, and he and his two assistants, one of them actress Meg Ryan, walk into the house. I push them all back out, saying, “Quarantine. There’s sickness here.” I go back in the other room where everyone is. The reporter barges right back in by himself with a ray-gun-shaped sound recorder with a spiral antenna in the end for a barrel. The people here are a conference of government agents and scientists and my dream-only cousin’s family. I lightly beat the reporter up and stand on his neck — not strangle him, just make him stay there. I take my foot off. He starts to get up. I say, “Stay down,” kick him pretty hard, and he rolls his eyes like a teenager and acquiesces to the situation. /He’s in the room with what he wants to report on, after all. This is a normal reporting situation for him./

Now all of us are evacuating from giant vaulted Iceland caves. Former baby, now Jesus/hippie/super-brain guy, is with me. We pass by the opening to a cave where an airplane has crashed. I /think/ to Jesus, /Can you help them?/ He says, “They’re too far gone.” (I’m the reporter here; I’ve just established that Jesus/hippie/super-brain guy can read minds.) In the next cave-room a small, tubby jet plane is stuck in volcanic mud and beginning to burn because the incompetent fleeing pilot is frantic to take off and running the motors full blast. The plane gets up off the mud, pointed at an opening to the outside, but the plane is on fire. Jesus-hippie does something so the plane sits back down on a solid rock place and char-skeletonizes, bypassing the burning phase. The man inside it runs out and goes to join his government friends. /So Jesus-hippie is telekinetic too./

We continue to move to get out of these mud-erupting caves with the military people and their soldiers. Jesus-hippie and I veer away to the left, up another path, and climb out of a ravine. We push through a corridor/tunnel of layered cabin doors. I remember (?) that at some point earlier Jesus-hippie had said, “All doors open away from me.”

Outside in the air again and safely away from the government people we come to a remote hideout cabin where a pretty Amish girl is making the place ready to hide out in, setting out folded sheets, pumping water, etc. A man is standing vertically down in a hole through the floor, in the basement. Another man is doing something with a four-foot-long syringe-like hose attachment full of yellow paste, whose clear hose goes down into the burned pants of the man in the hole. The man is burned all over, especially on his face. His eyelids are charred but intact and they work; they don’t crumble when he blinks. He isn’t in pain. The yellow paste is healing him. (The film music playing here is from a song that I remember Barbara Streisand sang, something about, “One love that is shared by two, I have found with you.” Just the strings, though, no voice.) Also I’m the man in the hole, and the hose is now going down not into my pants but into my chest, straight down in from behind my left collarbone.

Next dream. I’m working to clean off the flat roof of a tall hippie-built forest house, like a three-story truncated A-frame made of mismatched mill scrap wood. One floor down, there’s a cluttered side deck. I curiously rather than lazily/maliciously push a bowling ball over the edge to thump down onto the deck. Then another. The balls stop rolling before they get to the stairs. I push a third bowling ball over, and this last one, this /blue/ one, makes it to the stairs, rolls down, crosses the stairs back this way, and rolls off to land in a horse-wagon that has several three-foot-long pickled fish jars on their sides in a bed of straw. The ball perfectly missed all the glass. No damage. Someone pokes his head out a window of the next house and shouts, “What was that?” I say, “Nothing. Cleaning up, and I dropped something.” Oh, okay, then.

Next dream. Jesus-hippie (from the first dream) and I have a way better hideout now, with phones and internet service; a regular apartment in an old building in a city, maybe Fort Bragg (CA), maybe on the East Coast, though. Jesus-hippie has become a lawyer and settled into a routine, thinking about things, periodically taking a case and helping people by using his powers. Amy Pond of /Doctor Who/ was helping us in the back-story of this part, so there’s an obligation to help her with the occasion luxury request. She calls, demands I get Jesus-hippie (she doesn’t call him that) to tell her a thing she can do to lose 45 pounds. I put down the (wired) phone handset, move away, wait a little bit, come back and say, “He says if I tell you, you /have to use it/, but it takes all 45 pounds off instantly. How much do you weigh?” She says, “125 puh — Oh. Never mind.” “Okay. Thanks for calling.”

I go to Jesus-hippie, Now he looks like actor Danny Trejo, with the leathery, pitted skin. /He/ was the one getting the burn treatment, not me, before. It was deliberate, to mess him up, for a disguise. I know he knows what I’m thinking, which is, /Do you approve of how I handled that call./ He smiles and nods, and focuses on infinity again. He’s working on a hard problem.

—

My dream from Wednesday, 2022–07–27: /PONK!/

I’m in a 1970s-like forest commune environment, for these people’s special day or week, or maybe they’re like this all the time. It’s night; kids are running around wild, in light from bare bulbs on strings of wire going between the trees. They’ve put up a freestanding hundred-foot-high vertical metal ladder somehow both inside a barn and outside in the redwoods, and ten-year-old boys and girls are lining up to climb it and jump off (!) into a fifteen-foot-wide above-ground swimming pool that’s only five feet deep. I’m afraid for them but they must know how to do it safely or they wouldn’t be allowed, right? Except I’m the only grownup in sight. I should stop them, but I want to see what happens. I’m outside the barn.

The first boy to the top has an argument with the next two kids who get up there. He got there first, he goes first. So go, then. I will! When? Watch me! (I’m too far away to hear this, but it’s obvious what they’re doing.)

The boy jumps off, falls the whole way down on his side, without thrashing, and lands in that position along one of the side pipes holding up the plastic of the pool, just /stops/ there /PONK/. He can’t possibly still be alive. Is he? The other kids go over and discuss what to do. Lift him down onto the ground? I want to yell not to move him, but he’s just balanced on the pipe; he’ll fall off anyway. No, they’re holding him on it; they know not to move him. His spine is already straight, that’s good.

I’m gonna see if I can find where the grownups are. Maybe that doctor woman who had like five red-haired kids in the Whale School is here. /What is her name?/

I woke up wondering that. She was Juanita’s and my doctor for a little while. You’d think I’d remember her name. I remember all her kids’ (first) names. I remember the names of all the kids there. They were all children of hippies, so they had names like Windspirit and Raincrow, and Ithaca-Finds-The-Feather, and Sky, and so on. But the doctor’s kids all had normal names. What the heck was her name? Ah! Barth. Hanya Barth.

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