Nov. 20–25, 2022
My dreams from Sunday, 2022–11–20: Construction. Hail to the Chief.
First dream. I go through a strange house’s hallway door into an attached garage that someone has half-converted to a bedroom. There’s a kitchen-counter-like cabinet under a sliding window, that goes a little farther along the wall on both ends than the window does. I think the /new/ people want a small recording booth built between the cabinet and the left-hand wall. I’m already thinking about how to make it fit when someone, either on the phone or behind me, asks the person with me (?) if we can do it. I say, “I just need a tape measure.” I’m going to cut the entire cabinet short by about a foot on this end, to make room.
Next dream. I’m a low-level functionary in a government building. Florida Governor DeSantis is getting an award, a medal, some kind of undeserved honorary title, and he’s here for the ceremony for that. The person confering the title is to my left; I don’t look, so I don’t know who that is. DeSantis looks at me and snaps, “Well, get the sound.” He means a recording of /Hail To The Chief/ to play during the ceremony. /Sigh./ I go out and down the hallway to a small bedside lamp table and look through scribbled-on paper CD envelopes here for the right one, so that ignorant racist demagogue can have his music for his award. I can’t figure out what any of these CDs are. Just pick one at random. It’ll probably be sufficiently insulting. (It’s like when you collect a bunch of music up at random — all styles and genres and eras — and set them playing in alphabetical order by artist name, it always comes out sounding like the order was cleverly chosen on purpose.) This CD — this one with random typographical characters on it — will play something that will send that guy into a fit of rage, and I’ll get fired, and that’ll be fine.
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My dreams from Tuesday, 2022–11–23: Music venues in the underworld.
First dream. I’m moving diagonally across a mostly empty huge soundstage space that represents the cosmos both politically and astronomically. I jump-fly to balance on a beachball-size paper lantern world of ant people and only crush it in a /little/ bit.
In the same place, but it’s now shrunk down to the size of a small school auditorium, I’m lying on a cot in a corner. Some people are in loose theater seats across from a folding table in the opposite corner. They’re testing or auditioning people, one at a time, and it’s my turn. I pull on a long, fluffy, gray knitted hat as I walk there. There are piles of paper and /drifts/ of paper on and around the table — this is all /my/ mess of work. I get the outline of my speech out of an insulated food bag. I’m ready…
Time has passed. The same room is even smaller. There’s a recessed, slightly raised stage area in the opposite long wall from me, with a vaguely Xmas-theme collection of furniture and junk. A big blonde girl sits on a throne, stage right. She’s like a freelance police-consutant anthropologist. She’s been seeking the secret of this place, and to this end she’s posing as the queen of the stage scene. The king character, stage-left, is, barely conscious, out of it, weak, like Theodin under Saruman’s spell.
A tiny door in the side wall of a fireplace to my left swings closed from behind. I look to the girl. She saw that; it’s what she’s here to find out. She says quietly, triumphantly, “Gotcha.”
How will we send an agent down there; the door and passage is so small… It’ll have to be a dwarf…
I push the brick door open again. My point of view goes in and down between a tiny spiral staircase and one of the corners of this square stairwell shaft.
The normal-size door at the bottom opens on an underground world. It’s dim everywhere. It’s like the outskirts of Sacramento or Fresno or some other flat valley city. I’m stuck down here now with others who found the way here; we’re scattered over the underground world.
Bruce of /Kids In The Hall/ but at about fifteen years old and sloppily made up to look like an old man has an understory of black hair with a cap of all white hair on the sides and top that thins in front to a combover that he’s ashamed of and fidgets with. He assembles music equipment on the apron of an abandoned gas station, the only structure in sight at a crossroads. He sets a bulbous little music keyboard on its stand, off-center, doesn’t notice or care, as it’s stable. He turns on the various machines, pulls the microphone around on its stand, and sings a medley of /almost/ familiar songs, from mild rock to comical Jim Carrey-like lounge lizard Liberace/Bobby Darrin-like material, to lullabies — it’s just two or three bars of each kind, all pushed together.
The girl from before, from the throne, is down here now, older and more soldier-like, pushing another normal-size person — her police partner, broken — backward in a garden cart through the dimness. He communicates that she should leave him and finish the mission they’re here to do. She’s determined, pushing, trudging. She says, “I just want my detective back.”
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And some short vignettes from Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Nov. 23–25: Bee hand. Jealous creepy man. Old friends. Tig Notaro’s Tesla. Climbing tube. 409.
>The end of a man’s arm has, instead of a hand, a big puffy hat that looks like the back end of a giant bee, and I matter-of-factly tell him so. He already knows, but thanks.
>A strange girl and I, planning to be married, have been sleeping on the ground outside the back corner of my (dead) Uncle Pat’s and Aunt Honey’s house, but here it’s my college friend Dan’s father’s house, and he’s the girl’s jealous creepy father. I don’t want to be lying here with her when he comes out this way to go to work, but she thinks it’ll be okay, and she wants to stick around, have the confrontation and get this all over with. I’m like, /Why?/ but we’re going to get married, so her opinion is valuable. Though I am the one he will shoot.
>A person like local Mendocino actress Jill Taylor (but not; it’s somebody else) is with me and a lot of other people who I can’t see, moving through rooms in an empty version of my grandparents’ early-1960s restaurant. The dream back-story is, we had sex three or four times in the old days, in the 1970s. I’m not sure why we’re together here. I think we just ran into each other by accident, and now what? Are we getting back together? Probably not.
>Tig Notaro has her expensive new electric car open its door for me; the passenger seat slides out and back on rails. I’ve been waiting in this cul de sac with no houses around it, in a mess of piles of books and an old office chair all on the pavement. I sit in the car-chair, its armrests swivel down. As it slides back into the car I see that the door will have a problem closing because of the mess; I kick a pile of books aside just in time. I say, “Don’t you want your books?” No, she doesn’t. Rich people don’t care about that. They just abandon anything they’re not concerned with anymore. They don’t need it They don’t need the money from selling it; they can always get more books and a chair. (I work for Tig Notaro, here. I’m a /do-this-do-that/ person.)
>A thin, insect-like man is climbing up or down inside a vertical tube of woven bluish luminescent plastic.
>I’m in a car driven by a cross between Mitch Clogg and my college friend Dan. He carefully turns off the road over its sharp shoulder, steers downhill to the right, like the way Road 409 goes off the highway in real life. I’ll get out here and travel through the forest to where my car is (?), get it, and meet him on the other side, avoiding the gang of religious government thugs who are after us.
The song playing in my head for this car adventure and as I woke up was an eerie, echoey version of /Praise God From Whom All Blessing Flow/.
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