Five days of dreams, ending Friday, 2022–08–19

My dreams from Thursday, 2022–08–11: Politics. The green bathroom. Trees.

First dream. I’m at a strange political rally in scrub oaks and hills like the land around the campground village at Lake Pillsbury where I went a few times with my friend Dan’s family in the late 1970s. But I’m here by myself; I’m not one of these people. I fly up into the air above the crowd and zoom away. When I get to taller trees I fly down among them to avoid being tracked from a distance and shot at.

Next dream. Houses are spaced very far apart on a long straight rural driveway. Everyone’s in a church meeting where it’s traditional to sit there all day. I get up, go outside, start walking; maybe this will encourage these people to wonder why they’re wasting their time and just get up and leave. (I hope, but I don’t expect it.)

I’m walking down the driveway, my arms crossed over my chest. I step a little lighter and higher with each step until I’m just /flicking/ at the grown with a toe and floating forward ten or so feet to the next step.

Next dream. The backstage rooms of Saturday Night Live are a normal old small L.A. house like my grandparents had. A young modern Frank Sinatra character knows I wrote an article about the nepotism here. I go into the bathroom by stepping over the edge of a big square bathtub, which has a normal tub in it, and a toilet and sink and mirror. I stand by the toilet to piss but nothing comes out. (Maybe because there’s no door to close.)

Now I’m lying on my side on the floor of another, much bigger house. Juanita is here, sitting in a recliner chair. I scootch over across the floor and put my hand under a black and white cat lying on /its/ side, then I put my other hand on top of the cat. It folds over somehow so I put /another/ hand on it. It folds again, and I put /another/ hand there. I say, “Cat sandwich,” to get Juanita to look.

And now I’m in a car in the same big room. Juanita’s lying on her back, draped over the bench-seat back so her face is below mine, between me and the steering wheel. We sit here kissing for awhile. Someone else is in the room, observing this. Not the cat, a person.

Next dream. I’m driving a truck through a flat valley of rows of thick green trees. The road has shrubs growing in it. I crash through them without slowing down. Gradually everything grows much bigger, until the shrubs are clumps of scrub oaks and the truck is huge, as big as a two-story apartment block. I worry about tearing the bottom of the truck out, so I start to steer around the trees, even though they’re no higher than my fenders.

By the forest of big scrub oaks in a line at the end of the road, the truck is normal size again. I’d like to be able to keep driving, so I go around boulders, but the truck vanishes and I’m on foot, leading two scared businessmen, one of them a young James Doohan (Scotty of the original Star Trek). The road becomes a trail. The trail becomes a hallway. The hallway becomes a /missing young woman’s/ apartment. Scotty is scared out of his wits to be in somebody’s house without permission; I tell the other guy to keep an eye on him.

Now we’re in a house or office rooms, one after another, a familiar dream-trap, except I’m confident because we’re going the same direction the whole time. /Just trust it./

At last we come to a room with a wall of windows — they don’t lead to the outside, though, but look out on a lower floor with curtained windows in its opposite wall that might lead outside. I climb through a window and drop down to the floor of this basketball-court-size room. Some other office people are going up and down stairs, on one end of the room. I motion to Scotty and the other guy to go over /that/ way to find the door to the stairs, and I head for the final wall. We’re fine, we’ll get out.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2022–08–16: Dining in the shadow of the Wraith. Record player. An arts and industry (and film) festival in Ohio. Corrupt connivery.

First dream. There’s a restaurant on black metal balconies hanging on the side of a Wall-of-China-like brick building in Spain. There’s one table on each little balcony, with a metal stairway going down from the balustrade to it from one side. Stargate Atlantis Wraith darts buzz overhead to where they’re busy harassing something on the horizon.

Next to the table I focus on, on the floor of its balcony, are ball-shaped but odd fruit and glasses full of different kinds of juice, in rows. It’s cool here; this is the shade side of the wall.

In case you have to use the toilet or escape the Wraith, you’re meant to climb down through a window in the wall. Inside are kitchens, the bathroom, various utilities. I get a quick drone’s-eye view of the interior.

Outside again. Another balcony, besides the one it’s my job to watch, has two tall expensive-looking blue bottles of something on the floor, where the fruit and juice were on the other one.

Next dream. Juanita and I are in bed in an apartment high up in a cluster of buildings-piled-on-buildings like the London of the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel. It’s dim in here. I get up, press the auto button on a record player. I must have pressed it twice, because it plays a little of Doris Day singing then stops. I look close, press it again. The tone arm lifts and puts itself away, but only /almost/ all the way. I push the arm down to click it onto its little plinth.

I know it’s only 2:30 or 3am. My show goes till 5. I must have put something on and then I fell asleep. I don’t care if my radio show stops early. In the dream I don’t feel like doing the radio show anymore; the feeling is, what’s the point? I just go back to bed, doze and (within the dream) dream of a spider and a sparrow who live in a robot mailbox’s empty metal head.

Next dream. I’m in an art festival in a grass field in Ohio, that’s also somehow indoors, that feels like a slightly out-of-control carnival my cousin took me to when I was last in Ohio, in summer of 1973. I’m here to give a speech about something and get an award. I’ve wandered up an aisle between show booths to get calm and try to figure out what I’m supposed to say, but this means I’ve gone away from Juanita, looked away from her, and /that/ means I’ll never see her again by deliberately looking; there’s no point in even turning around to look. She’ll appear later.

Out of the main area, under a fully-outdoors sky, blue ripply 3D water is projected onto the road. A sign warns not to step in the water, so I step in the water — ah, I see, it’s really water. Clever. I find a curb to get on, to only be shoe-side deep and not ankle-deep.

Back in the main area I wander around. Here’s Juanita, good. (Hold hands this time and don’t look fully away.) Now it’s like the Sonoma County Fair but the exhibits are heavier, more industrial. Here’s a fridge-size furnace of projected coal fire in firebricks that’s like the water exhibit outside: it’s projected fire, but it also has real fire in it. Juanita’s gone again, dammit. She’d like this part of the show because it’s hot. She likes being a lot hotter than I like being.

And here’s Juanita. (Really, hold hands and don’t let go.) They put on a famous old movie about my friend Joseph Huckaby and a strange child living in a cabin in Colorado. I say, “I’ve seen this movie at least three times and probably six.”

They put on an animated film of Woody Allen in bed with his girlfriend Allison Porchnik (from /Annie Hall/). Allison is agitatated. I can’t tell if she’s happy or upset about the results of surgery; she’s twisting around like a stuck chicken, going, “My breasts are huge! My breasts are huge!” And now I get that it’s because she used the product some company in the fair is selling. She’s thrilled that it worked. But her breasts are only huge in two dimensions — they’re flattened out into dinner-plate-size disks.

Now the film is not animated but has real actors, and I’m moving around in the action. Woody Allen (at maybe 25) and Allison have a telepathic long-distance discussion because now he’s away from where he was with her in her bed: he’s upstairs in a room above the house’s garage, up the hill behind the house.

I lie on my back on gravel desert landscaping. The sky is a plaster-ceiling-pattern pareidolia image of Woody Allen’s anguished face with a long sideways-hatchet chin.

Martin Landau and a woman like the aristocratic English lady Maurice courted in /Northern Exposure/ chase frantically into the property, which is now a sharply defined rectangle on the hill, stepped, with the house at the low third, then a step with the gravel in the middle, then the step with the garage/apartment and a small but deep-looking swimming pool painted blue.

I become Woody Allen. Martin Landau and the lady show me the product that will make us all a million dollars — or rather they show me a diagram of it: it’s two concentric circles drawn in blue pencil on a teak-wood cigar box. I say both in the dream and out loud in real life: “What’s it do?” And I’m half-awake now.

Juanita, next to me in bed in real life, reading something on her phone, said, “A pitchbird.”

I said, “How is it a pitchbird?” She showed me her phone, which I couldn’t really see well and she said, “I said, the Perseids.” I said, “No — I thought… Oh, it’s a pitchpipe that sounds like a bird whistle.” (That was the invention in the dream. The circles were a disk-shaped pitchpipe like the one on my headboard in Albion. I explained this to Juanita to show why I’d thought she said, “Pitchbird.” She said, “Sure.”

Asleep again. Next dream. There’s a corrupt forest town of skyscraper buildings. A man who might not be /quite/ as corrupt as the usual leaders here gets in charge of the main business of the town: some kind of electronic-device factory. Everyone else schemes like a bunch of selfish science-fiction film-noir autonomous chess pieces to ruin him by sabotaging the factory — but how?

A blonde Siamese-cat-like woman hears old men talking about an old way they know to get into the factory: through the wide, unlocked glass front door. She sidles over to a man in a movie theater and tells him about it, inciting him to get there first and take her with him on his rise back to fame and fortune.

Somewhere in here I’m in a strange house with a bunch of strangers. I’ve been sleeping on the carpet of an empty all-white bedroom. I have to get ready to go out. There are clothes on the floor of the white closet: my good black jeans and my work jeans, both dirty. Put on the work jeans.

All the bad people in town (meaning everybody in the upper class) go to the cat-like woman’s clothing store to get dressed and equipped to sabotage the factory. The good-looking crook boss (the one she incited) looks out of the big dressing room they’re all in; he sees that the vast main room of the store is empty and the walls of regular dressing closet doors are all open; there’s nobody and nothing there except for the owner (cat-person), who apparently neglected her legit business to this point because she’s counting on her crook boyfriend winning his way back to being in charge again, though over a further ruined town and a broken factory.

The crook guy privately takes it all in — the plot, the sordidness, the other Masque-of-the-Red-Death-party-like participants, and he makes a sad/amused face, realizing that /maybe this whole thing isn’t such a good idea./

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2022–08–17: Road skiing. Alien tech.

First dream. A teenage girl like my stepsister Jamie in the late 1960s is skiing at night on a glass-smooth iced-over mountain road through deep snow and trees. As she goes along, I think of things that might happen: A young drug-addled but wilderness-knowledgeable couple might appear and take her aside to their cabin where there’s fire and food. (That’s the best thing. Let’s have that heppen.) Meanwhile I try out skiing on the road, alone, and it works pretty well. The road isn’t tilted but you just keep going along, like on a battery-powered skateboard.

In hot summer in this same mountains but with fewer trees, two strange boy jock college friends, one Asian, one a Midwestern character, ski on the now-bare-and-dry concrete road. The Asian guy turns to ski up a wood-chips-and-gravel path in a roadcut wall and follows the path down to continue on the road. I see a closeup of where he’s not actually on skis but on a long snowboard. The metal edges of the board should be torn up and ruined by all this, but it’s shiny and new, end to end, both sides, no damage.

Next dream. This is Sierra Junior College but summertime-deserted and on another planet. I, a generic friend man and a little girl get warning that the bad guy is coming from space (The insect Xindi villain of Star Trek: Enterprise). The man is somewhere else; the little girl and I hurry down a hallway, get outside, jog down a dirt/dust driveway through dry-grass hills. The man and a little boy — both are kids now, so two little boys — are in a terrain-hugging tech station, learning about things in there, sneaking around…

I’m the little boy now, back outside, before the nemy (human) enemy people left the station to go into space in the first place. From up the hill, I see through the door, through a corridor of rooms, to where a tech man is working at a console below a thick green-glass window that’s tilted-away, into a test chamber. I find a long rifle-weapon to try out, raise it, sight through its black-and-white video camera monitor. I don’t want to shoot the man; those people are only enemies because they don’t know any better. I fire (silently) at the thick glass). Nothing? No — there’s a mark there. The man didn’t even notice the shot. I fire two more times. This must be earlier than everything. This is the beginning of the story.

Later again, the humans in the tech center are gone. The children and Laurence Fishburne (the other man with us) and I go inside. Three perfect little holes are burned through the green glass.

We find a moving-truck-size spaceship on its side in a swimming pool in the next room. Laurence Fishburne and the two kids and I might be able to fix this ship up and get out of here.

Next dream (this continues from the previous one): I’m with the boy and girl and a white version of Laurence Fishburne, standing in line with trays in a school (or airport) cafeteria. We’ve been talking about our dreams. I get the idea to say to the air, “How many holes in the glass?” One beat goes by and the man and the two children and I all say at once: “Three.” I say, “Oh, my God! It was real!” General merriment.

Things jump back to when the little girl and I have just left the college. The insect Xindi enemy man finds us this time and appears on the dirt road behind us on the way to the tech place. He sends a toy drone zipping past over our heads. We won’t be able to lose him. We stop, wait, and when he gets here I say to him, “Whatta /you/ want.”

He’s not bad at all. He wants to help us. He’s stranded on this planet now just like we are.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2022–08–18: Doomsday weapon.

There’s a mountain community that’s also a corporation. Some of us are in a room in a cave, standing around, taking a break from the hectic development of our latest project. I joke to a woman, “It’s not as though anything could go wrong. We’ve blown up mountains with lasers before.” (But that was giant lasers; the new way lets us do with smaller ones.)

A smart but twitchy young man scientist has gone mad, threatening everyone else with his own version of our laser project; his process can use just any tabletop laser and a bathroom tile of bluish ceramic/obsidian. I get to where he’s going before him, get his tile away from him and throw it down the mountainside to smash, which somehow removes his laser from the action too. The two workers here (just some man, and a woman like the waitress on the Supertramp /Breakfast In America/ record cover) are relieved that the bad scientist has been thwarted, but we all know he can just go to a scientific supply house and get another school laser, or even a cat-toy laser, and the mountains are full of glass rocks to tune it to.

But he’s nuts, we’ve established that; he isn’t going to do the sensible thing. He’s going to /another/ workplace to steal /their/ parts, /their/ power-obsidian slabs. He’ll kill the woman there. I get in his way on a slot-like trail of sharp but slippery rocks. He moves to attack me. I throw rocks until he falls and slides out of control back down the slot, faster and faster… Okay, that’s gotta kill him. I don’t even have to go look and make sure. Problem solved.

Elsewhere in the mountains the villain putz from the first Jurassic Park dinosaur movie goes, without a plan except to kill, into a forest ranger kiosk where two rangers sit at a desk watching a baseball game on a tube teevee the size of a toaster. The murderer/putz has a lump of hard black rubber in a coffee cup. He pretends to sip at it and comments on the game in non sequiturs. He’s standing in the door. One of the rangers says, “Come on, Roy, you’re freezin’ us.” So — he’s not a murderer or villain; he’s just the local mentally slow person.

I go into a diner at the foot of the mountain range. The whole place — the mountains, the corporation, the community — it’s all economically dead. The old woman and her pretty red-haired daughter (Yeoman Colt from The Cage pilot episode of Star Trek) are sitting at a table; this is their place. No customers. They know I’ve saved everybody here, and probably the world, from the lunatic laser boy, before. But it’s hard times. Even if someone came into their diner and wanted to eat, they don’t have anything to cook for them.

I sit down with them. The old woman gives me their last two powdered-sugar lemon cookies. I have an idea: I’ll get everyone to go to the theater or the Grange hall and bring whatever food they have. Get the two cops in our single cop car to go sweep up our two or three homeless people. Have a big Thanksgiving dinner and bring up the level of morale around here.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2022–08–19: Nordic political objects. Bell pepper and melon. B-movie geology.

First dream. I’m moving uphill inside a huge indoor church/political-institution place that represents an Arctic country. Three vie for power: one black twenty-something man; one who’s a cross between Chef Boyardee and Benjamin Franklin; and one enough like me that I can play him in the story we’re all in — meaning he’s not here but /I/ am… except I’m the only one here; the other candidates and all the citizens are represented by objects scattered around on the rug and on a desk. A globe of Earth. A clock with a thick case in the shape of bird wings coming out of the face and swept backward like on a hood ornament. Etc. Everything becomes vague.

Next dream. There’s a psychiatrist session in a bedroom that has a teacher’s desk instead of a bed in it. A special girl and boy are being interviewed by the Bob Dobbs-like doctor (I’m the boy). Doctor Dobbs, pacing the room, acts like he doesn’t really believe I can fly, which I know is an act on his part because that’s why he’s here; he’s from a government agency to evaluate the threat I might pose, and also to gather data to help other government scientists figure out exactly /how/ I can fly. I don’t know what the girl’s power is. Also now there’s an Auntie Em-style legal adviser character watching out for us so we don’t get taken advantage of.

The psychiatrist guy is infuriating. I’ve had it with him. I’ll just /show/ him about flying. I pick him up, carry him out, and as I go through to the front of the house I turn him into a red bell pepper. Somehow I also get a bowling-ball-heavy honeydew melon.

Outside is like the front yard of my grandparents’ house in Burbank when I was little, but in the dream the houses are far apart, the yards are big, combined into a kind of park, and behind the houses on this side of the street is a rock and ice wall of mountains.

Some high-school boys and girls are walking by on a concrete path. I go around the other side of a concrete historical monument shaped like a fridge, but they saw me before I hid — oh, well, so what? I leave the melon, put the bell pepper in my low-left jacket pocket, and rocket-fly up backward by clenching my fists and arms. I clear the mountains, get up into a sky of bright clouds, continue away.

Time to turn around, go back? Or just go to another place to live? Go back, if I even can. I’ll most likely return to another timeline/world and it’ll all be different anyway. I can restore the psychiatrist from the bell pepper so there’ll be at least one person who knows me, but the melon, who might have been the Auntie Em person or the little girl, was left in the other world, so she’ll be stuck in melon form. I can’t do anything about that, so, oh, well. Tch.

Next dream. A deserted big-city department store floor-space is being used for a dance studio. A famous woman ballet company leader and a man composer/choreographer watch and direct ten or so tall balletic dancing women in their practice. I’m skating smoothly around on my shoes, gliding in long curves, filming the practice with an eight-millimeter movie camera. The choreographer is pissed off because I didn’t get permission from him to do this. I’ll give him the film to do with as he pleases — just let me finish off the roll so it’s not wasted. Later he’ll be glad to have the record of this. They always are.

Things shift. I and someone? from before? are in the desert mountains near L.A. in a science-fiction B-movie cave mouth. Rocks’ sizes, shapes and positions are being recorded by an analog scanner/laser-printer-plotter instrument. (The rocks are like haphazardly chopped big mushrooms made out of rock.) Pages come out of the printer showing columns of data. I turn the printer upside-down and paper comes out of a slot on the bottom that’s had a cracked edge repaired with duct tape and folded cardboard. I can’t see the numbers right, but I grasp that the plot dimensions don’t match up with the data numbers. (Peer at it. /Will/ it to resolve.) The number of one rock and one place is something like 1.59 and on the drawn plot it’s 1.6 or 1.7… Close enough. The Tim-like scientist back at the lab will be pleased.

Superimposed on this action, the Tim-like scientist’s assistant (another I) and the woman he rescued (?) are mentally gaziggled by the radiation from whatever he rescued her from. The woman becomes a 1950s little girl, doesn’t know where she is, panics, runs deeper into the cave. The man notices she’s gone, goes in after her. And /that’s/ okay, because we know where they are now; we can just go get them and bring them back and get them water and medical treatment. It’s only a cave; it’s not where the radiation came from.

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