Dreams Oct. 16 & 19, 2022

My dream from Sunday, 2022–10–16: The office.

Juanita and I are on a mountain road. I’m about ten feet in the air above the road. There are few people anymore so we don’t have to worry about another car coming along. Our truck is parked on one lane, and Juanita’s sleeping in the other lane.

The aliens are coming from the ground, uphill. “Come on. We gotta move.” I swoop to pick Juanita up and fly downhill over brush and dry grass. Here’s a house we can hide in.

Now I’m floating in the air over a big white European camper van by the cemetery at the south way into Mendocino. The center three-foot-wide section of the roof is made of sliding panels. I push the front one backward to shut it all the way, but the back panel is missing. There’s a lot of detail in the metal of the rails the panels slide on; it’s like Damascus metal.

The back panel appears, but it doesn’t fit right. I push it as far as it will go. Good enough.

Now I’m in back of a long station-wagon Prius car parked by the Presbyterian church in Mendocino. I’ve been sleeping here. The engine is running, burning expensive gas. I’m talking on the phone with somebody, getting the news about how I’m supposed to go back to school — to grammar school? High school? It’s 8:30am already and those places are four hours away by car. And what class do I even go to? Just go into the office and explain about time travel? Or go to college… I don’t want to.

Now the car is my old Chevy Nova. I’m driving. I’m not going back to school but to Fort Bragg (CA).

And now I’m on foot, with Juanita and a strange young-social-worker-like black woman. My microphone cable organizer rack can be used to hold Juanita up on the back; I get on it like riding a bicycle and try levitating it a little bit. That works. Motion the black woman to sit on the front, to balance it… I fly us all north, just inches above the shoulder of the highway, hopping every once in awhile on my chicken-foot-or-pliers-like bare feet to keep going. We get into a sand-on-sandstone floor tunnel where there are preserved footprints of a dinosaur that must have hopped similarly here millions of years ago. Juanita says, “Now I know how the footprints got there.”

The tunnel becomes a big Ikea-like corridor of empty 1950s offices. I’m somewhat mentally crippled after a lifetime of superhero-ing service. I have a grant of money, or rather an account, from a government program to do some kind of office task. The black woman has gone away, but I call her on the intercom and hire her — so she and Juanita and I set up in an office…

Superimposed on this office-readying montage, I’m still out on Highway 1, though also indoors, riding the orange plastic cable organizer by myself, carrying office supplies balanced on the front: a rubber stamp, to stamp vague shapes in cream-white stamp ink on white balloons (I have two sample blown-up stamped balloons).

The actor who played Dr. Posner in Mendocino Theater Company’s production of /Wit/ comes to our office, bringing a stack of homemade form templates and a fanfolded-paper blank sign-in sheet with room for thousands of people to come in and sign their names.

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My dreams from Wednesday, 2022–10-19: Buster Keaton facade-drop trick. After the deluge.

First dream. Juanita and I are in a house from a dream two weeks ago that I never wrote down (about a smug skinny New-York-accented L.A. real-estate woman using me for a slave to clean up after her while she chats with her friends on the phone about money and travel). But here it’s a cold northern state with snow outside.

Juanita’s simultaneously with me in a full-size bus and in bed (this is all on the second floor of the house). We’re about to leave for warmer climes. I have to get the bus out of the house, so I’m going gingerly forward and backward, trying to turn around. I get careless and the front bumper goes over the bed and /just/ touches the front wall of the house, causing it to detach and flop down onto the yard, with the bed and Juanita tangled in the wreckage and the snow. She’s okay, not crushed. I’m thinking, /Can I fix this? Do I have to fix this before we leave?/ Then: /Naw, just flee. Let the next people deal with it./

Next dream. I’m on a ridge south of like the Navarro River or Big River. Something has happened to release a huge amount of water, so the river fills the valley almost to the brim. The water is smooth and calm, moving gently to the sea.

In the back-story of the dream my dream-only Russian or Mongolian brother is somewhere behind me, to the east. I get the idea of crossing the water to go to a city (?) I half-remember will be where Little River should be. (So this might be the Albion River.)

I kayak across, but once I’m in the water it’s going really fast — thirty or forty miles an hour. How will I get out without breaking up on something at the shore? I crash through a standing wave at an obstruction. I’m afraid I’ll be swept out to sea…

Time has passed. The crisis is over. I’m in a big San Francisco-like city at the mouth of the now normal river. Buldings are tipped over and there’s a lot of wreckage but people are working, picking up, doing regular jobs, in the concrete parking lot at ground level under a block of intact buildings. And the electricity is on and steady. How?

I see a pretty, white, thirty-something woman with curly black hair, who’s having trouble starting her car, and I go there, practicing in my head what to say so she’ll pop the hood and I can use magic to just instantly make it work right.

(I woke up with the Elvis Costello song /Watching the Detectives/ playing in my head.)

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