October 20 to December 28, 2023

I let the dreams pile up for almost 10 weeks this time, without posting them to Medium. Just now I opened the radio show text files from those weeks, copied and pasted the dream journal sections of them here, and it’s so much at once that I don’t feel like reading through them and fixing the errors and straightening them up. The way they were when I read them on KNYO will have to be good enough.

My dreams from Friday, 2023–10–20:

First dream. People are spread out along a trail that’s mostly vertical, a steep cliff of rocks and cracks between rocks. I’m crouched where I need to climb down an especially hard place to go. I dislodge a rock the size of my head, which falls into the chute and rolls and clatters away as I shout down to the next open place, “Move to the right! Look out!” Anything I do besides hold absolutely still breaks more rocks loose, but I can’t stay here. I can’t really see anybody else, I just know that are people around somewhere down there and somewhere up behind me. “I’m coming down! More rocks will fall! Get out of the way!”

Next dream. I’m with a crew of hapless spy/saboteurs, but I’m not one of them. They’re adolescent wild boys who I feel obligated to keep an eye on. We’re on a high floor of an office building, an inner place of corridors with no windows, where it’s implied that somebody has set a clay Nerf-football-size chemical bomb into action by mixing the wrong cleaning chemicals onto it. I order everyone to get around the hallway corner, and I shove someone ahead of me into an elevator. People run in panic. “I’m closing the door.” Nobody cares; they’re running aimlessly, turning around, running the other way. Okay, then, I press the button to close the doors, but before they can close all the way somebody wants to come in, so I push the doors open. This happens again and again, of course, but the doors are actually closed when the bomb goes off out there with a hissing, rushing sound like spilling sand or pea gravel.

Next dream. I’m in a restroom in a theme park, trying to wash my hands, but every sink I go to has something different wrong with the soap dispenser or the water faucet. Here’s a faucet that works. I don’t care about being polite anymore; I rudely say /Excuse me/ and reach in front of someone to get soap out of the soap dispenser that they aren’t using anyway. The dispenser shifts behind a partition that’s six inches away from the wall so soap spills through my hands and gets all over the back of the sink and the floor below. /This is stupid engineering./

Out the door of the restroom the theme park is like the inside of a stationery store. I’m the adult of our party. My dead grandmother and a strange little boy are the two children I’m caring for. Another almost-adult person with me is pushing a shopping cart with the little boy in it. I walk backward behind them, pulling a tall art plinth on wheels with the little girl on top. She’s a cantaloupe-size white clown-face wooden ball on a swivel that somehow has the spring she’s mounted on coming out the top as well as the bottom. As we move I manually turn the ball left and right so she can scan her surroundings, because the mechanism that’s supposed to do that is broken. Another stop on the way to the real outside is the parking lot, which is roofed over by the parking lot above — it’s a giant parking garage. I wander around looking for my car and for my mother, who was supposed to take over caring for the kids but went away bored. Here she is coming back from a coffee shop elsewhere in the bazaar/mall the parking lot has become. She’s dressed in the long khaki-ish green North African full body dress-hat-thing that I saw a pregnant woman in the dollar store wearing the other day in real life, but her arms are bare and fat and jiggly. She walks past me, says, “Well, come on, let’s go.” She’s walking normally but she’s hard to catch up with. I keep looking around for my car. If I see it I’ll break away to it without a word and flee these unwanted responsibilities.

Next dream. In a college library that’s laid out like a Target store, there’s an office-like space between book stacks and a corner of a load wall in the middle of the building. I’m on an adventure contest search for an important object that might be a stolen new kind of weapon. I’ve come here to talk with somebody who might know where to go next and what exactly to look for — but I figure out the where-part myself — that way — and I’m about to leave when one of the other contestants shows up. He’s a small man, a mix of Poindexter (of Poindexter and Sherman) and musician Lawrence Bullock, but sinister and not to be trusted. I kick a desk ornament down a row of books to send evil Poindexter chasing after it, and I go through other stacks of books, which become tall narrow bleacher-seats outdoors on a grass field. I manage to be around the other end of a row just as the person chasing after me (pretending not to be) gets to a place where he would be able to see me. I see this from outside the action. It’s a comedy of never getting caught, like Coyote and Roadrunner.

Later I’m in a fancy big hotel/movie theater, driving an electric go-kart to find a way down and out of the building. I’ve gone up one floor too many, and the spiral chute/ramp down to the middle-front of the building doesn’t come up this hi. That’s good because the person chasing after me won’t think to come up here. Maybe I should go up higher in the building, even to the roof. There’s the sense that I found the prize I was after and somehow got it to the people who need it, and I’m just going through the motions of continuing to flee now to further confound the enemy.

—

My dream from Saturday, 2023–10–21:

First dream. I’m in a cold-country farmhouse of people who are all smug about being back-to-the-land. I go outside in my socks. It’s raining, but the yard-square flat flagstones of the parking lot/driveway to the garage back there are not wet enough to wet my feet. They should be wet, so they will be wet, so I go back in to find shoes.

One of the rooms has been converted to a walk-in fridge with refrigeration coils and a compressor. I don’t remember whether I did that. I go into the room to see how well it’s working; there’s frost on the walls.

The other side of the fridge-room wall, by the door, is normal house-warm. There must be insulation. I don’t remember anything about the job, and certainly not tearing walls open and stuffing them, so I probably /didn’t/ do the work.

Next dream. It’s night. I’m in a grocery store like the Safeway where it used to be, where the Rite Aid is now. This version of Fort Bragg (CA) is a college town. I’m visiting Juanita here. The store is closing and all the college kids are hurrying to get things before they can’t anymore. The store lights are out everywhere except where workers are. One aisle has a conference of workers and their manager at the far end having a talk, with one light focused just down on them.

At the front, at the checkout counters, each in its own pool of light, Juanita’s taking her time with things. I never liked that, the way when workers are trying to go home, she doesn’t notice that. Also, in the dream, I don’t think we’re married or together anymore and that’s a bleak feeling.

Next dream. This is another college town place, but post-apocalypse and with some kind of magic involved, like in a Sebastian Iturralde story. A puffy-flesh white-blonde, pretty but heavy girl is zonked out asleep in the back seat of a giant mid-60s Cadillac with the top down. The woman who’s my employer here tells me to take the girl away and put her in a special place they put people who don’t fit in, here. They drugged her; that’s why she’s sleeping right through our standing here talking. I stall a little, stretch out getting instructed, until the girl wakes up and lurch/contorts in different yoga poses, ending up in the front passenger seat. sitting up. I’m going to just drive her away and not keep her drugged, how about. The boss lady looks at me snidely like she knows I’m attracted to this girl and we’re probably going to get together.

I’m not who I am here. I’m barrel-shaped, short, and I have thick broom-bristle-like black hair, like a boy I saw in the dream earlier. /In this story I’m that boy./ So I take the girl where we’re supposed to go but there’s nobody here. It’s a parking lot next to the big flat long side wall of a big-box store. We get ouf of the car and start to have sex on the pavement, where I run my tongue up between her legs, and she and I, meaning she and the Fred-Flintstone-like boy, are becoming in love with each other, so this is sweet and nice, an example of something good coming from a bad situation.

Later, the farm with the refrigerated room and the Flagstone driveway and parking lot before the garage, from the previous dream, is now the bossy commune that drugs and exiles people. But now driveway side of the house is like the inside of the front way into a supermarket, with lots of glass. It’s dim outside, neither night nor day. Teenage Fred Flintstone is now more of a young wannabe mafia goombah. The red-haired freckled sunburned but soft-skin thin clever girl who did the magic process for him to love her (why? why does she want /him/?) is hurrying after him as he goes out looking for the chubby blonde girl. The red-haired girl is frantic, disappointed, pathetically telling him that he loves her. The magic didn’t and doesn’t work; he’s just walking away. I feel so sorry for the red-haired girl. That’s how love is when you’re young. You get it in your mind that things are going to be a certain way, and you find out it’s not that way and it’s so unfair…

The song playing in my head when I woke up John Martyn, One World. This version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkc1ldMtdOk

—

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–10–22: A magic heater and The God Light.

First dream. With a bleak but faintly hopeful feeling, I’m in a dirt floor soundstage-size plaster building on otherwise empty headlands where Mendocino should be. Here’s a messy queen-size bed that in the dream is my bed, where Juanita and I have been camping here. Somehow I get a heater that’s just an empty 18-inch-diameter cardboard and metal cylinder, that uses only 400 watts to blow a whole furnace’ jet of hot air as quietly as a table fan.

I’ll put the bed in the northwest corner, farthest from the doorless wide-open garage-door frames, and I’ll prop the heater-thing to constantly blow directly at the bed. That’s my plan.

Now I have another heater, not the magic one, but a regular little space heater that uses 750 or 1500 watts and will be useless in a place like this. Did I just imagine the other one? I suppose I can turn it on low (750 watts) and have it blow under the blankets.

Now there are plaster enclosures like hotel rooms in here, subdividing this corner of the space. Juanita’s here. She’s chosen the space we’ll have. I have to get her or the other person (?) to help me get the bed in here. Maybe I can do it myself. My back doesn’t hurt.

In another plaster soundstage to the east, a company is filming a movie called The God Light, about Fred Armisen and his fashion model-thin real estate agent wife. In the story, they’ve grown to hate each other, they’re getting divorced and at the same time succumbing to a druglike hoax scam (the God Light) that comes out of random objects, that you put your head near, and it somehow solves health and money and relationship problems.

It’s after-hours and film crew is away. Fred and a guy who works where Fred works (an office somewhere) think The God Light is a real thing. They try to shortcut or rather hotwire the God Light process by using a black plastic inkjet printer. I try to stop them but they pay no attention to me except to absentmindedly block my way from reaching past them. Fred puts a sheet of waste office paper into the printer that I’ve been fixing, that has a bunch of its inside parts out. It churns like a shredder and twists and jams the paper up inside. /Some/ God Light comes out, but not the blinding kind that came out onto Fred’s wife earlier when she was inducted into the cult. This is just a light bulb. Even Fred’s stupid sidekick/friend can see this is no good. They were trying to make it so the God Light would give Fred an advantage in his divorce proceedings, and now it’ll go worse for him. His wife will use this against him.

Next dream. It getting dark. It’s the beginning of winter in a failed-defunct-Renaissance-Faire world of sparse decaying cabin-store-booths and barn structures in a wet forest. I’m dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and I’m already cold. My job right now in this post-apocalyptic society is to do something with electricity in a cabin over /there/ somewhere and also bring water to flush the toilet, for whoever will live there.

Two impatient gay-seeming men wait in a barn while I arrange hundreds of feet of garden hose outside, uphill, in coils that alternate direction, so I can march and pull it with me and it won’t tangle and yank me to a stop. I pull the end into the barn through one open sliding door, get the hose under a ladder, and start pulling it out the other door into the woods. I’m always doing everything for everybody else, and where will /I/ get to sleep, and have water and a light, and there isn’t enough electricity to run a heater even if I had one, and how will I make a fire with everything everywhere already wet? I hate this.

—

My dreams from Monday, 2023–10–23:

First dream. It’s night and dark but I can see anyway. All is quiet. I’m caregiving for a crippled, demented old rich Mexican woman who is asleep in the other end of this long modern house that spreads along the edge of a cliff above the sea. The wall facing the sea is all glass, with couches and furniture and, farther along, kitchen counters against it.

In this world I’ve had a lifelong one-night-every-few-years relationship with a woman who’s a cross between my friend Sherie from high school and a sort of chunky but sweet Catherine Deneuve/Ellen Burstyn/Kathleen Turner-like actress or businesswoman who’s had her career character. She found me again and has come for another wry, poignant, welcome sex visit.

We’re talking, sitting on a couch with its back against the window. I look out and somehow straight down the cliff from a point of view outside the window. The water comes to rocks and a narrow strip of beach a hundred feet below.

Now we’re sitting on the rug between this couch and another couch pushed up close facing it. We’re kissing. Time passes. We’re fucking but it doesn’t feel like anything. Time passes. I wake from sleep, still in the dream, on my side on the rug, my arms around her, unable to move but not worried about it. She gets up. I can move. I guess our date is over; she’s putting on her clothes and buttoning things together. At this point I wonder if she’s a prostitute and I just imagined our long relationship because /I’m/ old and demented, and each time leading up to now it was a different prostitute, and maybe our relationship is like the one between Lars Fusco and Catherine Deneuve in his imagination, in the Fusco Brothers comic strip. But she’s so sweet and nice, and she seems to love me, and she’s sad to go but she has to. No, she is she, and if she isn’t, what difference would it make?

She has to go. We go down a stone-floor hallway toward the front door. An energetic white Chihuahua puppy appears and runs and hops around us, wanting attention. I pick it up and joke-ask Catherine if she wants it. No, thanks, she says. She has enough puppies in her life (implying that I’m one of her puppies.)

It’s getting light out. I’d better go make breakfast for the old Mexican woman and take it in to her and see if she’s still alive.

Next dream. I’ve been daydreaming instead of working (on what?) at a desk/table against a side window of a Denny’s-like restaurant in the flat Midwest. I’m startled by my boss, who has elements of my real-life employer Tim and of bad bosses from movies. He’s angry that I haven’t accomplished anything. Another person working with me hates me and has been trying to get me in trouble or fired. I dig around under a waitress-station counter to find the note with my list of tasks on it that I half-remember reading, memorizing (?), crumpling and throwing down there, to find /out/ what I’m supposed to be doing. The boss has left. The restaurant is a different level of busy every time I look around. I find an intact giant Sunday newspaper with the color comics section on the outside, the way they used to be. The boss is back, I have this fat newspaper and that makes me look bad, as though I went out to get it and will be reading it, on the clock. I hand it to him and say, “Do you want this? I just found this.” He doesn’t want it, but he takes it so I can’t have it.

It’s later. The other worker who hates me is hovering around behind me, to my right. I sense that he’s exultant about how his plan to get me fired is proceeding, but now I know what I’m supposed to do because I have the job instructions, and I’m just doing it: I’ve installed a stainless-steel double-sink in the table and I’m putting in the vertical pipe for a flexible overhead pull-down dishwasher hose. Not all the parts for this were present in the fixture box that came from the hardware store, so I’m improvising, using white PVC pipe. This will be okay, as long as all the dishwashers are told to not yank at it.

As I work, the parking lot outside empties and fills, empties and fills…

A random, tuneless carnival-music-flavor song was playing in my head, mixed with leaf-blower or hedge-trimmer power-tools-revving-up-and-down sounds from the industrial yard next door as I woke up, reminded yet again of the metal grinding sounds from one of the sheds there after someone stole my car’s catalytic convert at X-mas of 2020, the ghost of a bitter, paranoid feeling.

—

My dream from a nap Monday afternoon:

I’m skiing with someone else in fresh, light, deep snow down a smooth hundred-foot-wide chute, going faster and faster even though I’m turning sideways this way and that way to try to slow down. I reach a low place and continue up a similar chute on the next mountain, to where everything’s melting, and I come to a stop in bluish water with bluish ice chunks floating in it. I must have blacked out for a moment, because now I’m on the sill of a hatch into the side of a cement mixer truck’s drum made all out of ice, set into the snow and ice and water, with my legs in it, under the water. The crash has knocked my skis off but also knocked the ski boots off my feet. I fish around in the blue water with my legs and feet and get the boots back. I’m not cold. The ice water is neither cold nor wet..

Later in a generic 1970s high school cafeteria I show a new health problem to a cynical old man doctor: the middle finger of my right hand is stuck through a cardboard toilet paper tube, sideways, and it wants to bend /backward in the middle of the longest bone of it. The doctor doesn’t see anything wrong with this. I bend it forward and backward, and there’s a click to it, like the metal click of a frog clicker. It’s interesting. I can’t see into the tube from either end, and I still can’t get my finger out.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–10–24:

First dream. I and some others are stranded in a shallow-seeming but endless calm sea without a boat. It’s dark but we can see. There’s a chance to do surgery on and and rescue the two main characters of the story, who are on the bottom of the sea (!) by using technological green-plant straws for breathing and for replenishing the air in the children’s crashed spaceship, which is the alien treasure we got stranded here trying to find in the first place, so, good, but these two giraffe-masked higher-ranking teammates want to follow command advice and /not/ go down there.

I and another try to go down anyway. The tension between what we want to do and what the others want to do churns the water, makes things stormy, and causes a current, so as I swim downward we’re moving away from where we need to be. Trailing the plant-straws back up to the surface will not mark our place in the water. I give up.

Anyway, the current is now into like an English countryside river between fields of trees and green grass.

We’ve been here before, on a previous expedition. I direct the rumpled raft we have now to a bank where there’s a cache in the grass of a paper bag of fried chicken and a head of iceberg lettuce in a paper bowl. These things are still fresh enough to eat, from when we left them here before, six weeks ago (!), and they weren’t eaten by a bear or smaller wildlife. Weird.

The raft has become less an inflatable one and more made of flotsam tied together with the breathing straws. We’ll never find the place in the water back in the sea where the alien children and ship are. We won’t be allowed by the giraffe-masked teammates’ bosses to return. But we have chicken to eat, and if there’s oil and vinegar anywhere in here we can have salad.

Next dream. I’m who I am, at my real age, but I live in Caspar (CA) and I’m supposed to go to school in Mendocino, four miles south. I run barefoot on railroad tracks in the snow, fast, tirelessly, with no damage to my feet, but it’ll be strange to go to school barefoot,

Where you turn off on Lansing to go into town (railroad tracks become a gravel road), where in real life cliffs go down to the ocean, here is a flat plain of headlands with inexpensive old gray-paint flat-roof houses scattered around. Here’s one with a kind of parking lot, and the door is open, so this must be the thrift store I’ve heard about. I go in past women sitting on a couch and a chair talking, walk around looking for shoes. Here’s a pair of old slippers under a coffee table.

I go back to the two women and sit on a hassock to wait till they notice me so I can ask where the shoes are. They stop talking. One looks at me and says harshly, “We are having a private conversation.” I say I need some shoes. She says this isn’t a store. It isn’t? I jump up, embarrassed, stutter about how somebody told me it was, and scramble to get out. They think I’m crazy. (In real life people have walked right into places where I lived, and I thought they were crazy, and funny. The women in the dream don’t think it’s funny.)

Next dream. I’m a springtime-but-bleak-feeling Mendocino-or-Albion-in-the-1970s environment with little hippie-built scrapwood and recycled-window houses on gravel paths lined with redwood slash up and down little hills. In the back-story of the dream I’ve pissed off a person who’se a jumble of all my landlords ever, and I’m going to his house to apologize, so I don’t get evicted, though I don’t know where I live anyway. The apology session goes okay, it’s smoothed over, though I don’t know what my transgression was. On my way back up the slot between a row of these little shack-houses and the steep side of a hill, some grownup former Whale School kids are in one of the house with the window open, having a meeting about something. Nathan looks up as I go past. He doesn’t recognize me.

Later, or earlier, in a rather /more/ bleak McCabe and Mrs. Miller like world, but still in this hippie-time Mendocino place, I finish making a toy electrical catapult with a powerful solenoid, a heavy Transformer, nuts and bolts, a switch box, little indicator lights, all parts from my dream-only shop, which is a covered bridge full of electrical junk. The actual throwing arm of the catapult iis a big nylon kitchen serving spoon with a sling of soft leather fastened with nuts and bolts around the end, like a hood.This is very like one I made in real life, just one of the things I made for the Whale School science museum project in, I think, 1987 or ‘88., but way more whimsically artistically complicated.

I take it to a little commune downhill at the edge of this village of hippie houses, to show it to Pam. A woman like Mary Mellon, but unsure of herself, is here. She’s interested in seeing the catapult work. I say it needs something small to throw; she and I look around. There are lots of little schizophrenic art-pieces everywhere. Here’s a wooden planterbox with a shrine in it made of a shard of hard but somehow incorruptible French bread and a spiral on its side of tiny live snails and seashell things that somehow aren’t shells but little bits of semi-hard food. I say, How about this? She nods, okay. I pick out one of the little shell-food nautilus things (size of a grape), put it in the catapult cup. The woman goes around the side of the house and far away past the fence to watch it fly.. I press the switch and /SNAP!/, with the sound of a pistol shot it throws the thing in nearly a straight line at the woman until air slows it down and it curves up (or down) off to the left, maybe over the fence, maybe into the dirt and shrubs near the fence, but it’s gone.

The woman goes frantic: “Where did it go? Where did it go?” It turns out that was very important to her, very valuable. The spiral progression of these little things in the art was not only spiritually significant to her, but it’s the culmination of a marine biology class she took, and without that one little thing it’s all ruined.

I want to pick up my toy and go, but I try to find her precious thing. I get down in the dirt with my glasses off and hunt all around with my face a foot from the ground. She says she thinks it went over those trees. I go around the fence and look at the trees, thinking, /Why hasn’t a forest animal eaten the food out of the artwork itself? This is pointless. She agrees to let me use the thing; it’s as much her fault it’s lost as it is mine. So unfair.

Now a looney version of Chris from /Northern Exposure/ has replaced the woman. He was the teacher who taught her marine biology course. As we walk back around the house, he’s calmly muttering all the things I’ll have to do to make this right, after the terrible thing I did, destroying a scientific record and all. I’ll have to go with him on another travel-class with him and learn all the marine biology involved. He gives a long list of place names all over the world. I take the easy way out and tell him, “Keep it,” meaning, keep the catapult project. I say, “Just throw it away,” meaning, destroy this thin /I/ care about to make us even, like he destroyed his precious motorcycle in /Northern Exposure/ to make up for having accidentally killed his girlfriend’s pets.

I go away up the path bu have a conscience-pang and come back. I stand outside of a slightly ajar window where Chris is now inside talking with someone. He comes to the window but won’t open it. I say I’m afraid one of the smaller children will put a hand in the wrong place, playing with the catapult, and get hurt. I say, “Really, throw it away.” He scoffs, dismissing my concerns. Now I know he’s going to keep it and play with it himself and /himself/. I say, “It’s little but it could take your hand off.” He’s sure I’m wrong, and he’s proud of having got my precious thing away from me. He’s not going to throw it away. He’s sure to hurt himself with it. At this point I’m like, “Okay, I tried,” and I leave again, for good, musing that this is the /second/ electrical catapult I’ve given away that I wish I still had, like other things I gave away or loaned away and lost contact with the people and so will never get back: a couple of radio transmitter projects, a guitar, a keyboard…

Somewhere in the above I’m inside one of these hippie houses, in a kitchen, with Juanita and somebody else, maybe her Faire friend Liss. I’m holding the landline speaker phone up. Juanita is across the kitchen from me, standing leaning against the sink. She’s having a conversation on the speaker phone with her new employer (I don’t know where, or what the job is), and the woman on the phone is away from the phone for a minute getting paperwork or something. Juanita quietly explains to me how the woman paid her /but didn’t pay her nearly enough./ The woman is suddenly back in full force on the phone, which indicates that she’s been listening the whole time, but Juanita doesn’t startle or anything; she expected that. It’s part of the negotiation.

Next dream. I’m moving through a long big-city upscale shopping-mall-like environment where the corridor goes right through the shops and big quiet liquor bars and restaurant kitchens. This is the future of a place like Mendocino, where it’s all covered over and cleaned up, but it’s gone through its retirement community for rich people phase and into a rich people’s grandkids’ college-town phase. I’m wearing my regular jeans but have red and black cowboy boots and a big puffy jacket made of two colors of leather, black and red, paisleyed together. I’m trying to find the analog, in this world, of the place I can stay when I’m traveling in time on a job.

A kindly but efficient security woman follows me, asks me questions without asking, is satisfied that I’m no threat to her employers, and waves me off.

I find a kind of familiar place, go in, take off my clothes to take a shower. The walls between this big-closet size space and a shower stall are thick glass. College girls go into there from another door and settle down to talk and drink and sprawl on the floor to sleep. My method of fitting in to a strange time and place is to just continue doing what I’m doing as if I belong here. I get in the shower, wash my hair, notice that I didn’t take my jacket off, wash my crotch and legs, towel off, get dressed again, and somehow magically high-speed organize everything in the room to look neat and pack /all my things/ in a single shoulder bag, to leave, because this place is too advanced and weird and jangly-nervous-making to ever come back to. The girls in the apartment will soon say something about my being there and the dorm authorities will look into it and discover that the shower and closet are really part of the apartment they’re paying for, anyway. I have a sense for these things.

— — -

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–10–25:

First dream. I see from the sidewalk that the storefront at the southwest corner of Franklin and Laurel has somebody sitting inside the window at a formica table with 1980s audio equipment from the old community school, and more things on a table behind him (or her). There the pro cassette deck that Bob Blick modified to record at double speed. There’s a VHS video editing deck. It’s wonderful. It’s like a candy store. Now I’m telling a woman reporter about this. I lead her through what’s now one long building from Main Street to Laurel, to that room, talking about the Community School, giving her material for her story about it.

The reporter vanishes and things change so I’m on the sidewalk again but in a Dust science-fiction kind of horror short subject where I work for an agency that punishes thieves, cheats and generally mean people by converging on them. You touch them and they morph into old homeless decrepit lunatics — their clothes become old and their hair and skin and brains are old and they’re just wrecked (not as badly as when a Wraith gets you in Stargate Atlantis, but the full ravages of age.

The man working with me doing this justice work looks like Hugh Laurie. He gets to the criminal/victim first, touches him; the man becomes an old helpless homeless man. There’s somebody off to my left watching this and trying to sidle away unnoticed. Hugh Laurie looks like he’s thinking of it decrepiting that man too, though we have nothing against him; it’s just the Hugh Laurie /likes doing it and can’t stop now./ I move into the way to protect the person and Hugh Laurie turns toward me. Uh-oh.

I try to get away but I can’t go fast enough. He’s powerful because of the life he took out of the first man. I go around the corner, south on Franklin, jump up into the air backward and start taking long strokes with my arms and frog-kicking. This is the fastest way to swim and it’s always worked for me before to get away flying but he’s catching up to me!

Next dream. I’m in a wide big-city street between maybe-eight-story-high slabs of buildings. Each floor of the building has a solid line of windows. The world feels deserted. I fly slowly by these windows looking for anybody who might be in there. Some of the windows are painted black from the inside. I should go in there and see what they thought was worth hiding. Or maybe someone’s living there…

Things change so the city is alive again and busy. There are people at work in offices in all the windows. I’m who I am, at my real age, but somehow I’m attractive and charming enough for the people in the windows to be happy to see me. I wave and smile and the different people take their turn waving and smiling back, the way you wave and smile back at a child in another car on the freeway who waves at you. One at a time, wave, smile, a human connection.

Down on the ground farther up the street where there are smaller buildings like the downtown buildings in Fort Bragg (CA) I go into a restaurant that’s like storefront restaurants used to be when I was little in LA, just bare walls, and a table running from one side of the door to the kitchen in the back. That’s the sideways front counter. There are bar stools bolted to the floor at a lunch counter going around in a u-shape somehow through and up the other side of the business counter. The room is pretty big, so it’s not crowded even though all the stools are taken. I look over the things on the counter. This is an Italian place with special bread, hard, real, thick-cut salami, things like that.

A busy old Italian man in an apron steps around the woman he’s working with and says to me, “How can I help you?” I say, “Do you have pastrami?” He smiles with one side of his mouth; of course he has pastrami. I say, “Okay, Medium size pastrami sandwich, please,” and I point to a salami sandwich to indicate the kind of bread that that sandwich has. I know it’ll take a bit for him to get to it because they’re so busy. I go back out into the street to wander around and wait.

Now I’m in another similar business, but a bakery, on the other side of the big slab building part of town. There’s a guy here who looks like the 1978 Superman mixed with Lance who used to work with me for Tim — kind of like Ray (The Atom) in Legends of Tomorrow. I say, “I have an idea for a story. Come with me, I’ll tell you about it.” We go outside and walk up the street while I tell him my idea…

Somewhere in the above, maybe at the end of the smiling and waving, a tiny, light toy drone the size of my hand, that looks like it weighs nothing at all, flies into a restaurant like the Italian one but smaller and without the table up the middle and with just one woman working the counter. People look up at it from their lunch and they’re amused. Nobody’s seen anything like that here before. It goes all the way to the back, to the serving window into the kitchen, zips back out the door to the street. /This is my idea./ I tell Ray that I while I was flying around before, smiling and waving, I was plotting a show about that, but we’d need someone who people would smile /really/ happily at, looking up from their work to see them outside the window. I explain that we’d get a cute little Italian girl actor, like the one in /Pauly/, to be the image projected there, flying. It would just be a drone and some kind of 3D projector, but they’d see this happy little girl out there… And this show would run every day for like, you know, two or three or four hours. It would be an instant national sensation. The little girl in the projected picture would be a huge star. And everybody would hope that she would come outside /their/ window when /they/ were at work. Everyone would be happy that others would associate /them/ with that happiness.

Oh, shit, I forgot about the sandwich. I say to Ray, “Think about it.” I run back toward the Italian restaurant place. It’ll be okay, they won’t have thrown the sandwich away. I wonder if my money will work in this place. If I even have some money. I have my wallet. I’m not opening it while I’m running.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–10–27:

First dream. A new play is having its dress rehearsal tonight in a theater like Cotton Auditorium. There are maybe twenty people, not in it, here to observe, but the whole middle section of the front row is filled. I’m in like the last row before the transverse aisle halfway back.

The stage is empty. The people in the front row are talking with each other. Time passes. I fall asleep in my seat.

I wake from sleep, still in the dream, in the same place. Everybody’s still here. Everything’s quiet, except two women very middle of the front row are talking quietly. I can’t hear what they’re saying. One of them puts her head down, sobs, crying. The other does this. And it’s like dominoes falling, so on both sides of them everyone, all women now, put their heads down and cry about whatever it is that they heard.

A man comes from backstage, hurries out into the theater, up the right-hand aisle, calls to someone in the audience to ask if that’s all okay with him or her, the playwright, and apparently it is. I get that the whole play was what was going on in the front row. I don’t know if the part before, just waiting and waiting, was before the play or the actual first act. But that’s it. Okay, whatever.

Next dream. I’m learning a design program. The exercise is a black-and-white 2D field of layers of parts of the picture. A shape inside in a picture frame suggests to me that it might look neat if I split it in half and kind of explode it outward, out of the frame, in jagged shards. I’m imagining it, and seeing that in slow, minute animation, but I can’t figure out how to make it really do it.

This goes on for a long time, into waking up recognizing that the back pain I went to bed with, from the plumbing work I did yesterday, is not cured by sleeping but still there. A little better, but not much.

— — -

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–10–29:

First dream. It’s getting dark. I come to an open-air cafe around a kitchen trailer, atop a bleak mountain ridge. People are standing around drinking coffee and smoking, like a break in an AA meeting, waiting for the place to open. I ask around, about the person I’m looking for (?). Nobody knows. I start evaluating how attracting the people are. This old-cowgirl-like woman, for example. Attractive? Eh. This crackhead Asian woman. Attractive. Maybe. I dunno.

I go through the yard to the other side, fly off the edge and to the right. It full dark now. I go higher to at least be able to fly in a straight line by using the sky glow on the edge of the next ridge. It’s hard to get high enough to go over it, though.

Next dream. After a vague time of living in a place like Albion but not exactly, I’m taking inventory of water heater parts, and tools, and plumbing things. This place like my work place but it’s a village of refugees from, what, space alien invasion? Evangelical tyranny? We’re supposed to travel to a new camp-compound in a city somewhere available by bus. I have everything I need to bring but pipe thread compound, and that’s something I can figure out how to make out of just about anything.

We’ve made the move. I walk out onto a suburb/town street and go to the left, to get to an imagined side street to Tim’s other property (?) for something to cannibalize to make a generator and pump work. A woman drives by slowly, stops, peers suspiciously at me. This isn’t Tim’s place; it’s more like Rohnert Park or Sacramento. Still, I lie smoothly to the woman about why I’m here and where I’m going and what I’m doing. She’s satisfied; she drives away. I’m still in a very wrong place, without resources, tools, or friends, unless you count things I can steal and friends I can make, but I’m not young anymore. Every time I have to start all over again every is just so much harder.

Next dream. A long, high-ceiling modern college cafeteria. I work here in exchange for living in a garden shed. I’m clearing tables and taking vegetable deliveries. Here are some tomato trays on a table, and a big complicated hamburger on a plate. I’m not sure if this is meant for the kitchen, or if someone just left to use the toilet and will be back for it. The people at the next table urge me to just take it all.

I pile up the tomato trays, put the hamburger on top and start away to the kitchen. Wait. I go back, put the hamburger back, and the tomatoes are all gone. Things have changed so I don’t even have the living trade arrangement but am an urchin living in the cracks of a vast institution. I go the long way through the entire building, to the kitchen area. Others faking belonging here are cleaning tables and carrying food things, probably to steal them. Actor Daniel Radcliffe (sp?) is here at like 50 years old, clearly mutating into a Fagin character.

Things change again, so I /do/ belong here. I’m an agent of some sort, chasing someone. I go to a escalator that goes far down to the main cafeteria floor. A fat man is blocking it, sitting at a table propped across the handrails, which are wood and thick as railroad ties. He’s eating breakfast and ready a newspaper. He and the table are sliding down the rails very slightly, and will eventually get to the bottom and out of the way. I can’t wait that long. With the handful of screws I came for (?), I use the other hand to pull myself up a rope and swing down over the man, down just above the steps of the escalator, and the rope is the perfect length for me to let go and run to a stop exactly at the bottom. Now what.

Next dream. I’m in a scrambled version of Fort Bragg (California). I cross Redwood Street to the north, near Main Street, but here’s the grassy lot that they paved for a parking lot at the corner of Redwood and Franklin, but it’s not paved here, probably because it doesn’t belong here; Coast Hardware does. In the field is a fifteen-foot-high plywood sign hand-painted in black-outlined blue script letters, telling of a woman’s medical problem that came from eating at [Name?] cafe or restaurant. I don’t have my phone. I wish could take a photo of that sign and send it to the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

A crazy wild boy tears into the lot in a truck, from the alley. I try to get out of the way but he panic-swerves the same direction I run. He swings around just in time to miss me and continues on to bump down onto the pavement of Main and race away north.

I don’t know what year this is or where I live. Maybe the newspaper office is still there. I’ll go there and see.

—

My dream from Tuesday, 2023–10–31:

It’s World War Two. A ten-year-old boy is living in a big two-story house that itself is an island in a dim South Sea, with his mother and some other lady. The father is away in his like B-17 seaplane fighting in the war. He comes back to visit every once in awhile and the boy looks forward to this so much because /he loves the airplane/.

There it is, floating in the water, so the father must have come back the night before, but he’s not here. The women are downstairs in the kitchen conferring about something. The boy is up on the second-floor roof, looking down at the plane.

I become the boy, jump down from roof to roof, including jumping across like twenty feet and twenty feet down to the island of a garage roof. Close up the airplane’s skin and wings are complicated with busy shapes of small machines and battlement parts like a science-fiction spaceship.

Now the boy is grown up. He looks like actor Ed Norton. He’s in a psychology session with a government worker. They’re sitting side-by-side on a couch. The psychologist reaches to get a sample (?) from Ed Norton’s crotch but only symbolically, as his hand stops at the outside of his hip and comes back with an imaginary test tube, that anguishes Ed Norton. This is something about his father. He puts his head down and cries, or pretends to cry.

This all has feels like the medical coverage paperwork I filled out last night. The government psychologist works in the place like the one I imagine will get the mail, and in real life I’m worried they’ll open it and find fault with it.

— — —

My dreams from Monday, 2023–11–06: Sandpaper monolith. Mermaids. The ridiculous ICE. Future of education.

First dream. I’m riding in a car down to a concrete L.A. River-like declivity that’s flooded over where the road goes through. Someone’s coming from the other side in a white SUV truck. They drive right into the water and plow through. It’s about axle deep.

Juanita’s driving the car I’m in. She wants to go across. I think it’s a bad idea. I can’t stop her. I tell her to go fast but not too fast. She waits to watch another person come across from the other side. They go too fast and the car veers off the road into a deeper place.

Now I’m across the river and over a low ridge, alone, no car, no Juanita. This is still L.A. but there aren’t any houses here, so it’s either in the past or the future. A stereotypical homeless-looking man sits with his back to a high curb. Here’s a sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey terra cotta monolith slab. The man is trying to figure it out by looking at it. I tell him a killing-clever story about how that’s sandpaper magnified, the other side has the sand grains but they’re the size of baseballs, and space aliens put it here on their way to [Place Name]. He appreciates this as fun but he gets up to go around the other side of it and look at the /giant sand/. I start away down into the next valley.

Next dream. I’m with a combination-person of Juanita and Lance in the far future, in a soundstage-like concrete room that’s painted the light blue of artificial rivers in theme park rides. Someone opens up a vertical wooden crate/armoire into hamburger stand or news stand with portrait-mode hand-painted poster signs all over the inside showing what they have for sale there to eat and how much it costs.

A line forms instantly because people in the future have never seen anything like this. Juanita goes of to find a bathroom. I let a little black girl get in front of me in line; I don’t want to get to the front of the line before Juanita comes back. Other people go in front of us; the girl and I take turns being in front of each other, and this turns into a dancing, skating game. The little girl and I move all over the space, around augmented-reality projections of animals and mermaids swimming in the concrete floor and on half-finished building-corner-like bench bus stops. When I get back to the historical hamburger stand there’s hardly anybody in the line, but Juanita isn’t here. I go to the where stairs go down to the bathroom. Nobody’s on the stairs or at the bottom. I don’t want to go in the bathroom looking for her because that would be embarrassing. She probably already came out looking for /me/ and I wasn’t at the stand and so she left, and that’s it. I’ll never see her again. /This always happens./

Next dream. I’m driving a big dog-nose-type school bus full of kids in a forest valley. I turn onto a narrow dirt road carved into the side of the hills to the left. Sharp curves. The bus is too big and long for this but I keep it on the road. I’m thinking about the explosions in the motor and how stupid internal combustion engines are. The idea that we’re still using them. It’s ridiculous.

Next dream. Now I’m in a kind of carnival gondola car on a cable, except it’s not on a cable. I’m driving, then I’m riding in, this small, tall car on a one-car road in the previous dream’s forest. There are three children crammed into the small back seat. I say to them, “I’ll show you something.” Events mix with a historical exhibit near the food stand in the blue soundstage theme park dream, where I became/become insubstantial, pass backward through my seat, through the children, through the back seat. Spirit-like parts of them come back with and after me down and down into a place where all kinds of histories and history media flow and mix.

Back up on the surface, back in the car, everybody’s fully corporeal again. I tell the children that they’ll notice, after that treatment, that they’re much smarter, especially the one on the left, in math, and the one on the right in [something else]. I tell them to go to sleep until we get where we’re going, so they won’t be exhausted when we get where we’re going, and their parents won’t be pissed off at me for wearing them out. They’re so smart now that they look at each other, concur, and fall asleep instantly.

Now Sage, at the age he was in the Killer In Our Midst film project, is driving the car. It’s a mid-1960s station wagon. The road becomes a loading dock along railroad tracks. The tracks become a country road with a house across the street. Sage expertly negotiates so the wheels all miss deep holes in the concrete. He’s about to bounce the car down off the end of the dock. I say, “Take it easy. I’ll let you down slowly. Go ahead.” When the car goes over the edge I give it some flying power to very slowly /phump/ down onto the ground. The kids all get out, go to an exhibit hall — this is all still in the theme park, but near the entrance. I fly inside. They’re already signing out, getting ready to go home. Their mother is at a little computer kiosk paying for this field trip.

I fly higher inside the hall, and tour different things happening in this place. Chinese acrobat/actors are practicing for a play that involves a Chinese Princess lying on a mattress hanging from cables up close to the ceiling, next to an upstairs place to the left. I join in the practicing, fake being involved. I have a long scarf that I pretend is a robe of flight-speed vapor; I zoom around with the robe dangling along behind me.

Outside, on another level of world in the sky, I’m moving with some others through a waterscape with clear windblown waterfalls pouring off of things that aren’t there and shallow hump-rounded islands that are only just barely out of the water, that have facades of modern car dealerships (with no cars). Everything that isn’t water is new and metal and concrete and nice, but there’s water everywhere all the way to the horizon.

This becomes partly the story of a young man who got to my real age and is not quite bitterly, but clearly unhappily reminiscing on how the family told him that he had to stay behind and take care of the business instead of going off on adventures, and now he’s old and all that’s left of the business is a building facade sticking up out of the water, that has a moving sign on it for spools of thin steel wire family’s factory made. Aww.

Now it’s just me. Nobody else is around. I fly between these building facades that have moving advertisements on them, each with a different kind of musical jingle, all going at once, so the people in the ads can’t be understood. One ad is for Mister [Somthing] [Kind Of Car] dealership, but the picture is sour-faced wart-faced old Indian or Pakistani man with a head shaped like a melon. As I go past him I say sarcastically, “Would it kill ya to smile.”

Some children somewhere are telling a story about how their new teacher this year, Mrs. [Teacher Name], a Mary Tyler Moor-like character, I imaging, /is rich/. I fly up behind the false-front of one of these buildings, up to the roof of the real building behind it, which is the porch in front of Mrs. Teacher’s apartment. The porch-roof place place is loaded with a big pile of old wooden furniture, all painted shiny goldish-brown. This must be what rich means in the future: having things made out of real wood.

— — -

My dreams from Wednesday 2023–11–22:

(I should start by telling you that this night was when Juanita was working in San Francisco, living in her friend’s travel trailer, and her friend’s husband was taking care of her pet bird Melody, that she’s had for 25 years. He fed the bird in the morning, and when he got there to feed it in the evening it was dead. They called me. I called Juanita. She was planning to go back home and get Melody that night, she’d been away for like three weeks. She went there. I went there from three hours in the other direction. Juanita was curled up on the floor in the kitchen, weeping. I made her go to bed, sure that she’d never fall asleep after this, but the second she was on her side under the blankets and I had my arms around her I heard her sleep-breathing. And then right after that I was asleep too.)

First dream. Earth, or rather this farm-country part of Earth, standing for all of Earth, the way in a science fiction story everything seems to happen in one city, or in the desert, has been occupied by men in big-chested feathered chicken suits. They have regular hands and human heads.

I walk down into the center of a valley where just four or five chickenmen aliens are directing every to work in a rectangular farm field. I walk along one furrow to where a man has had enough of this, so he attacks the nearest chickenman. I’m afraid he won’t be able to win, so I take over for him and kick the chickenman down. There’s more to do. I’ll finish this. I walk around the other corner of the field, and something my fellow humans were inspired to do by my action causes a gigantic robot made of two-foot-diameter pipes to lose consciousness, fold, and collapse.

Surely the other chickenmen, who are right here, will have noticed this. I casually walk away between farm buildings, to a college where Juanita and I are already lying on a couch in a reading room with a two-story high wall of windows. College kids move around on their tasks. They ignore us. We’re living in the college as if we belong here, a common dream scenario for me.

Next dream. I’m in an Eastern European rural area to find and write a magazine article about a German/Ukrainian artist/engineer. Here’s his studio at night. It’s an old dancehall or skating rink. I and the person with me (?) are invited to ride on his latest art, which is two thirty-foot-long, thick plaster bird wings spreading out from the machinery in the center. You ride in a railed metal platform on the very end of a wing as the wings slowly spin around the center and just as slowly go up and down. It’s cold and quiet in here.

The person with me is Juanita. We wander around in a calm, night-time, deserted old city, but we’re somehow also still back on the couch in the college. I tell her about the dream I had before the dream of the chickenman occupation, and as I tell it, it all happens /for the first time/:

The beach at Ten Mile, but also like the water’s edge in the Stargate SGI episode where they go under the water and are experimented on by an aquatic alien. A great Dane dog goes steps into the sea, walks down and down, to where other dogs are confined in a basketball court size boxing ring, watched over by man-size stereotypical angel characters “who walk by and look at you like /this/.” (Here I turn my nose away from Juanita and look sideways at her, like a donkey did in a dream I had decades ago that’s still fresh.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was the one where Mark Knopfler sings, “…Just the way that her hair falls down around her face…” I looked it up later. It’s called /Lady Writer/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QMBELh1zyo

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–11–23: The Kimmy Innie problem.

First dream. I’m driving a car with one or two others in it, on an increasingly muddy one-car-wide dirt road uphill. After almost not getting through a sticky spot, I declare: “This is stupid. I’m going back down to go around the mountain on the /real/ road “ Someone says, “Agreed!” I have to back down through the worst part to get to where I can turn around. This is going to work because it’s downhill. I’m pretty confidents.

Next dream. A lot of people, at loose ends after the end of society, collect in a clearing in the mountains. I propose that we put on a musical show, and my plan is, we’ll all move around until we find a good place to stop, think about what might happen here, and someone will be reminded of a song about that and start singing. Everyone will join in. Then we’ll move somewhere else. It doesn’t matter what the songs are from, just that they fit..

Now we’re high up on a rock mountain that curves around a cold volcano place. The musical becomes about starting a country, like Peru. More and more people come up the path to join us. This is perfect. Okay, we’ve got enough people, let’s start that country. It’s a country about /food/. I list salad ingredients, suggest spaghetti after that. Everybody’s thinking about what song we should sing here.

Far in the future from that, the country is old, it’s been a real country for hundreds of years and people don’t really care that it began as musical comedy. The Asian warlord king’s daughter’s boyfriend has been staying with her apartment carved out of the mountain rock. She’s gone off somewhere, but the boyfriend and his freind are still in the apartment. The friend detects the king and his advisers coming to visit the girl. I become her Ensign Kim of Voyager-like boyfriend here, and have trouble getting all the right lids on the shampoo bottles on the bed. I give up, push them all into the crack between the bed and the wall. My friend (?) and I look around frantically for places to hide. The king will kill us. We go through the place and out the back door on the other side of the ridge. There’s a rock-paved porch that goes along other apartment backs. My friend rigs up a bell to ring when the authorities knock on the girl’s front door.

Why wait around for that. Let’s get outta here. Hide in another apartment? Okay. The next one over… no. Next, no. Next: At this one, people are sitting around in there watching teevee. We go inside. It’s not a family anymore, but a cafe. I stutter an unneeded explanation for why we just came right in, which — now they all know something’s up and they’ll remember us. The authorities will catch the king’s daughter’s boyfriend and execute him (me).

Across a rock-paved court, we go to hide in a crude luthier shop. I become fascinated with an old piece of equipment made of bricks and heavy timbers, to press-bend and cut wood for the sides of guitars. There’s only pine shelf wood here, though. Do they use that? Can you make a guitar out of that? People are working at different benches with the air of people in a letterpress print shop.

My friend is gone. The workers seem uncomfortable that I’m here. A man who’s a combination of Jack O’Neill of Stargate and John Chamberlain the guitar player /uh-huhs/ me along past a sliding shelf to eject me. He’s just moving along behind me saying /uh-huh, uh-huh/. The shelf slides to block the top corner of door out from opening. I push it back. Jack says, /Uh-huh/, meaning, that’s right, you’re going in the right direction, leave.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /The Gypsy, the Acid Queen/ from the /Tommy/ album by The Who. I think it was playing within the dream, too.

—

My dreams from Friday, November 24, 2023:

I’m driving in a simplified old tall city, then walking quickly with my (dream-only) family. We’re like the Addams Family in that there’s something weird about all of us, but it’s not traditionally weird like morbid fascination or traditional monster people, but quirky, random A.I.-like weird. For example my testicles have been removed for the purpose playing this part in the show, they’re the size of apples, and they and their intact, soft original ball-sack are hanging on my chest from a string around my neck, like decorative truck balls. This is embarrassing, but I have clothes on over it, so if anybody says something about how it looks like I have high, little breasts I can lie that it’s a medical device in there.

My dream sister and her boyfriend are composites of people I’ve known and liked who were a little bit older than I was. We’re all going to a holiday movie about vampires, through what’s become a whole theme park of theater lobbies, or rather a shopping mall of one big carpeted theater lobby with wide places of theater doors to go into. A boy like Eliot (from /The Magicians) and I go out into the night to drive around in the city in a perfectly preserved, and somehow pumped up even rounder, 1940s Dodge-like car that I either won in a contest or stole earlier. I’m driving but Eliot is the boss, so I’m relieved when he agrees we’ve been gone long enough, so I can turn around on the gray, empty aerial freeway and go back.

Somewhere in here is an episode of my dream-sister and her hapless but nice boyfriend and I climbing around in big hollow spaces of a /very/ old rather vertically-stacked theater complex in like Ohio. We’re trying to catch up with the others who’ve already gone into the right theater. We can’t get there the way we started going, so we’re finding another way around. We end up climbing between a floor and a wall of dark windows and heavy screens. We’ll get out and start again from the front. My sister both goes out a window and down, and stays in here directing her boyfriend to do that. He closes his eyes, gets his feet and legs out through the slot of the angled window. My sister says, “Go on, ya big baby.” But he doesn’t turn around and climb down; he thinks we’re only like four feet up, and slips out to jump down. It’s twenty feet! But he’s okay. My sister’s already down there with him. My turn. I climb down.

Now Eliot and I have left a little living room of our weird family, that’s somewhere inside the building the theaters are all in, maybe a secret squat. We both have to piss, after Eliot got little brandy snifters of like an ounce of flavorless tea for us. We find a bathroom. I’m gleeful that it’s only got one toilet in it, so I don’t have to pee with somebody right there next to me, which is always hard to do. I’m first. I shut the door, check the lock. The adventure of peeing here is long and complicated. The position and shape of things keeps changing around, and by the time I’m actually peeing in the actual toilet and not standing puzzled in front of something else, the door wasn’t actually locked, Eliot has gotten impatient and pushed it open. I say, “Hey!,” push it closed, use /both/ the door handle lock and the bolt lock, give up on finding the toilet again, and finish pissing, using a trash basket full of wads of toilet paper. This’ll be fine. If they didn’t want people to do this they should have put normal bathroom fixtures here that stay being what they are.

— — -

My dream from Monday, 2023–11–27:

There’s a trail or road or corridor in both a modern college cafeteria and a bleak depopulated Fresno field. People are fleeing persecution and have to turn and fight back against ghost people who appear out of nowhere. This has something to do with, I’m trying to get my show on KZYX and there’s new management, but each new set of managers is like the cabal of left-wing fascist women like in the Mendocino Environment center. The place changes to be more like my grandparents’ Italian restaurant but whose cafe booths have no backs on the benches. They don’t seem to see me, so they’re unguarded on the phone, and I catch them dealing crookedly, and make a snide comment. The main new manager woman pokes at me with a pencil. I kick out at her hand, my foot brushes her bare dug. I remember reading that she had cancer and had her breast deflated, and now they all can say that I attacked a poor fragile cancer woman.

Next dream. Juanita and I are in bed in a clean big uncluttered version of my house. Something rattles outside along the dream-only carport/sunroom-like space that goes around the east and south corner of the house. I go to the sliding door, yank it open and shout out into the darkness, “What are you doing there!” A Trumpish salesman-like young man with a pencil and clipboard jumps at me. I kick him backward, slam the door shut and push the lock down, but the other side of the sliding door slides open and three young men swarm in. They’re all around me, poking at me and talking like a team of bullies to each other. I’m fighting and calling out, “Help me! Help me! Help me! Help me!” but it comes out slurred and faint. I don’t know who I’m calling for help from, because Juanita isn’t here anymore. This fighting goes on and on.

Next dream. This is a story about a group of 1950s-gangster-like grammar school age boys and girls who are following and chasing and persecuting a smaller group of teenagers. The gangster children find and capture me. In the story, which I’m only watching now, the girl playing me gets away in the dark and weaves through shrubs and trees to another street where she climbs under a big empty metal lumber shed place into a squarish concrete sewer space that’s like where military boot camp people crawl under barbed wire. This crawlspace goes all the way under the /next/ street. She surfaces. They’re coming with flash lights, calling to each other, closing in. I take over from her; I have an overview and will have a better chance. I get out of the neighborhood to other places, keep running, keep hiding, the girl is [I am] only ever just a little bit ahead of the people chasing her. I think maybe they’re doing it on purpose, not catching her, just wearing her out.

I woke up feeling paranoid about every detail of my real life and every person in it, seeing ulterior motives in everything. I got up to pee, and there was a matchbook on the corner of the bed. I don’t remember using or having matches in the house since the power went out all the way last winter and I used them for candles and the lamp, and here, in waking life, my dream-carryover irrational feeling was that the social worker who helps my mother had gone to my house when she knew I wouldn’t be there to put things in the wrong place, move something a little bit to one side or the other to tweak my nose, or that someone had come in and unplugged my refrigerator and that was why I found it that way when I came home that time and attributed it to stumbling around looking for something myself, or maybe a rat fell on it. You know, like Philip K Dick became increasingly paranoid about things as he got older.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–11–29:

First dream. I’m with others fleeing an invasion, running down through wild California hills. The farther we go, the more I’m the senior in charge. We find a place to hide on a ridge where the road below goes around the end of it. Behind us, but also ahead of us, farther back in the hills, there’s furious shooting. Enemy soldiers who got past our people go by on the road below and my Ohio cousins, in their 20s here, shoot down at them. I have a revolver pistol whose bullets are the size of grains of rice, loaded in tiny holes in the spin-barrel. I shoot at the enemy, but my gun is so low-power that the only hit I get just makes the soldier brush at his shoulder, like at a bug bite. I’m young again, here, grateful that they let me have a gun but wishing for a better one.

The hiding place changes from shrubs and rocks to a low concrete wall and a one-car garage. We’ll wait here for any stragglers, both enemies and friends, and continue, not fleeing, but going back down to Ohio from the lake in Pennsylvania.

Next dream. I’m in Fort Bragg (CA) to talk to somebody about a video job I did. The person is a lawyer and lives in an apartment in part of the bicycle shop that went out of business, but it’s a really nice apartment, I can see through the glass door at the top of the stairs. I knock and call out, “Hi! Hello!” Suddenly there’s a breakfast table inside and the lawyer’s haughty tall wife is sitting there. She looks at me with loathing because 1. it’s 9am, what kind of /poor person/ knocks on your door at 9am? — and 2. she hates me because she read something I wrote that she didn’t like.

—

My dream from Thursday, 2023–11–30:

There’s the feel of a sort of A Child’s Big Book of Something, and as a conversation about politics goes on around me I daydream, within the dream, of a part of a machine being replaced by different orders of technology to try them out. They’re all about the size and shape of a two-foot-long football, they all fit between two other parts of a spinning shaft, and they all smear as they turn, like motion-smear, but some are more angular than others, faceted, with hard edges.

Now I’m at a kitchen counter with a restaurant serving window in front of me. This is in an apartment in the middle of the Safeway parking lot. I’ve put fruit and cottage cheese in a small plastic dish/tub for myself. Some people in the outer room look this way. I get that a familiar-seeming forty-something professional woman, maybe a theater administrator, wants what I just made. I have another dish with cut up strawberries in it. I say, “Do you like strawberries?” She won’t say. I ask again, assume she does, and spoon-spill cottage cheese over them. a small slice of celery with oil salad dressing goes along with the cottage cheese, from being in the cottage cheese container. The woman is upset about this. /Oh, Marco!/ she says, chiding, disappointed.

The song playing in my head as I woke up was /Sweet Evening Breeze/.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-lZqjTtyxI

— — -

My dreams from Monday, 2023–12–04: Electricity.

I’m with a group of others, not family, maybe a school group, in a busy, claustrophobic cafe. The others get up and leave, but a host man tells me to wait because the waitress hasn’t brought me my [drink name] yet. She shows up, gives me a black (coffee?) drink in a transparent plastic soft-drink cup.

Outside, the others, including Juanita now, are gone. I wander away through an increasingly less theme-park-like and more run-down suburb town-like, and darker, environment. It occurs to me that I can call Juanita on the phone. My phone’s not in my pocket (oh, no!). But there it is on the pack-like box of things on the ground next to me, with my coat. The phone is dead.

Things change to daylight, so all of this is under a sky-high, miles-long carport roof. I show off for the theme-park people around me by flying up into the sky, around the edge of the roof, and then to orbital height, a whole country landscape of snowy mountains and rivers and towns below. Bright clouds and wonderful cold clean air (even up this high). I get the flying power under control to go back down again, and as usual when something like this happens I’m in another world entirely. I fly slowly along the ground and then walk to where this version of Juanita has established a farm with a long curved fence on this side of it. There’s electricity that an Asian/Mexican man put in for her, from three widely separated high-tension cables only like fifteen feet up, snaking through trees along the fence line. /I’m jealous that the man is providing for her. I don’t want her to be grateful to him./ But this electricity method is dangerous. I can’t undo it without looking like it’s just out of jealousy.

Whatever, this isn’t my Juanita anyway. It’s /this world’s/ version of her. If they all get shocked to death, um… But maybe they won’t. Maybe it’ll be okay.

Next dream. I a prisoner (trusty) of Nazis in a world like the set of a French town they used in the episode of Sanctuary where they went back in time to World War Two to stop a German plot to release a prehistoric weather monster and destroy the allied forces coming in after D-Day. Rustic, with timbers visible through the plaster, where there’s plaster.

The open-top motorcade goes through a horse barn. I’m somehow inside, in a car, and outside. Afterward, there’s been an attempt on Hitler’s life, which I, the captive technician, am called back to investigate, plus I’m being blamed. I see where a mechanical device has fired a single bullet across the path of the cars going through the barn, and it went straight into a copper rod, making a perfect hole, making it a cylinder only a hair’s thickness bigger than the bullet itself. This is /really interesting/ to me. I’m not in trouble anymore. I have all the time in the world to examine this marvel.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–12–08: Homeless college. Folding flying toy.

First dream. I’m on a secret mission, that I don’t know anything about, in a vast, low, modern college. My high-school friends Randy and Mark are with me in a library/cafeteria place.

It’s time to go to work on the mission. Randy and Mark jump up and hurry away. I hurry after them and can’t catch up. The take a side trip through another cafeteria, this one’s busy; they run to the back wall and somehow travel up through the chow line behind a rope, through the whole line, at running speed, without disturbing anyone. By the rules I can’t just wait by the door for them while they do this; I have to follow the way they went, but I’m /impeded/ by the people in the line, so by the time I get back out into the concourse Randy and Mark are gone.

It’s late at night. Everything’s closing up. I go out the end of this building just in time to jump through a motorized gate just before it closes. I end up with quiet homeless people who are camped against the classrooms lining a street through more collegeland space. It occurs to me I can call them on the phone and ask where to go, but my phone is bright and fancy, making me self-conscious amid all these people trying to sleep in their trashbags in the cold, and also I can’t figure it out. The phone’s operation is a baffling puzzle, and I don’t know anyone’s phone number, nor why I’m even here, nor really who I’m supposed to be in this particular world.

Next dream. A stationery/toy store on Main Street in Fort Bragg (CA) about where For The Shell Of It used to be. I’m placeholding for the person who works here until they get back. I either read a magazine or remember reading a magazine about new tech toys, and I watch a short video about an inventor’s toy that never caught on, but should have. It’s a flexible airplane made of a nearly weightless computer fan hanging from a honeycomb box wing kite shape that accordions down to hang the fan at the bottom. When you’re finished playing, I guess you’d put it on the floor and it would flatten out again.

One of these toys appears in the door of the shop, barely able to fly, like a tired mosquito the size of a cardboard box. I run to catch it, examine it and adjust its paper angles, marvel at how hard the little fan can blow, and experiment by turning it loose. It flops a bit, but balances and flies around so well that I have trouble catching it again. I go back to the door to be a goalie so it won’t get out and be lost, but it’s content to circle around inside now, demonstrating itself, like the toy train they have in the Village Toy Store in Mendocino.

People come in and talk about things, like in any slow store. The man on the next hospital bed from me, still in the store, is also interested in toy flight. He’s made lots of radio-controlled airplane projects. Every third or fifth word he says to me is my name, like some of the people who call me at the radio station do. I don’t know why, but they seem to like to.

The store is now one street over, on Franklin, and a block north. Fort Bragg is a newer, cleaner, emptier place than in real life. The person I am in the dream is part of a big, world-scattered family who expected more of me than working in a stationery store. I wander around town while reverby Christmas-music-like pop songs play from the church tower. It feels bleak and weird but /not so bad/. I’m very old here. (It’s odd, but nowhere in any of those dreams did I think of Juanita even once. That’s not usual.).

— — -

My dream from Sunday, 2023–12–10:

I’m in a ground-level loft-like apartment in like San Francisco with Juanita. It’s cluttered but not with little things, with big theater flats and tall furniture and things mostly leaning against walls. I find where newspapers are draped over the edge of a high shelf and I pull out lots of wrapper Sunday comics pages of a big city newspaper to take back to bed and read, but metal framed panel of big windows at the street side of this room is tilted, hinged out at the top and somehow also the bottom, but only on the left side. I ask Juanita if she has duct tape. She doesn’t want me to fix something with duct tape. I say, I just want to hold it shut while I find something to screw it shut with.

I find heavy black good duct tape, bend the window in flat and fasten it with layer after layer, the way the headlight of my care is taped down around the edge.

Everything turns 90 degrees to the right and we’re in a much bigger more open place like Stockton. The building across a little parking lot is part of Juanita’s place. One of the hanging-panel garage doors is down on the ground leaning against another door, so the place is open. Inside, to the left, people are working at various jobs. I go in and look around for a ladder, thinking that can re-hang the door, so it can close.

Now there are more people here. The ceiling is much higher, and I can fly. I waft past people, asking if anybody’s seen a ladder, gotta be a ladder around here somewhere. Nobody can understand me. I fly very close by an office girl with long blonde hair, and I say, /You can’t understand anything I’m saying, can you. She says something to me that sounds like English but I can’t make sense of it.

Time has passed. I’ve been outside and I’m going in again. There are more hanging sliding garage doors across the whole front of the uilding, and they’re open. All the buildings /inside/ this building are much bigger, like the size of a Costco each, and they’re pushed together at angles, making trapezoidal corridors between them. Technician are painting things and constructing things. One of the building/rooms is lined with not-yet-painted two-story movie-set storefronts, to be a town. So they’re making movies here. I fly low through a corridor, avoiding people, and brush a freshly painted wallpaper-pattern wall with my shoulder. This man painting can’t see me wrecking his work any more than anyone can understand what I’m saying when I try to talk to them. I think that now I might as well be invisible to them because I’m a crazy person you know better than to look at.

Somehow I get out into a car-less new-car-showroom-like place with lots of glass but it’s still not outside. I find an old man who is a five or six foot tall dark wood floor-stand sign for like next to the door of a shop. I ask him if he wants to get out of here. He gestures, Sure. /He can understand me! I get in front of him and lean down and pull him across my back. I get his arms around my chest and tell him to hang on, and I have no trouble flying up into the air with him there. I fly around through all the rooms from before and get to a corner office in the empty car dealership, that has the doors taped shut with masking tape. A salesman boy is sitting here, who can understand me. We commiserate about how everything’s taped shut anymore.

Somewhere back before, when I was discovering about the movie projects, I was trying to figure out how to get power to one part of one of the big rooms through power strips and appliances on the floor at the bottom of an open inside wall. I rewire things, ending up wrecking the power to a woman’s white series of desks, where she’s either doing office work or sewing something. Also in another place a smaller, quiet, Eastern European woman was trying to use a sewing machine half-stuffed into ridge of piled up machines. I tried to bring power to it from another machine stuck in near it, but just bumping it made it lurch into self-motion. Instead of being pleased that I got it working for her, she’s frightened and angry.

I finally get near a row of big open sliding doors for loading docks for trucks outside the last layer of buildings and room. The old man made of flat wood and I are finally going to get away and into the open air. I ask him where he wants to go. He says something that I interpret to mean /far away from anybody/. I fly us up into the sky, look around, think about where to go. /Where can we get food? Somebody’s always getting married somewhere, and there’s always lots of free food when they do that. Keep your eyes open, and we’ll zoom around the Central Valley until we see catering tables.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–12–13:

First dream. A skinny golden retriever-mix dog is happily dashing around on the unfinished plywood floor of the big upper story of a squatter commune in a city. The dog has a missing eye. When it comes to me I hug it and tell everybody what a wonderful dog this is!

Next dream. A man who’s like a Norman Rockwell character works in a grocery store at one of the checkout counters. He has written a book. He’s happy about being finished with it, but he’s still thinking hard about it, still editing it in his head, so he’s absent-minded and making mistakes checking people’s groceries through.

He might be in the book /I’ve/ been writing in a hippie-built cabin where the office at Mendo Micro should be. It’s so cold. I have to use a toilet, but the toilet is all the way out on the other side of the pumphouse garden. I felt like I had lots of time left and could go to sleep for awhile before I went to work for Tim, but it’s getting light already and my watch says 5:30. I’m going out there with only my socks on, rather than look around for shoes. If the socks get wet, fine, I’ll take them off.

Next dream. I’m in the alley behind Main Street in Fort Bragg (CA) but it’s neater and narrower and there’s a high flat corrugated metal roof in places across from the buildings on Main to the buildings on Franklin. Osha is walking here. She’s in her twenties, and she’s small and light-on-her-feet, mixed with the actress who played Adam’s wife in /Northern Exposure/. She’s dressed up really nice in a soft-looking red dress to work in one of these stores. I walk past her and across to go through one of the buildings to Main Street, and I say to her, “You look so pretty.” She stops, talks happily to me about something, but I can’t understand anything she’s saying.

Next dream. A man has a project where he’s dug trenches in the road where we lived on 10th Street in Fresno when I was in fifth grade. He’s making a pneumatic message-canister-pumping system out of heavy white PVC plumbing pipe. He’s running a test of pressurizing the system and he lets me put a PVC pipe-and-pipe-cap pill about eight inches long into a vertical pipe. It /zoops/ down, across and comes up in another pipe that’s transparent and, as the man depressurizes the system, the pill doesn’t come out the top but slowly floats downward to where the pipe meets a pipe the other way across, under an intersection. I exclaim happily to the man about how wonderful his project is. This is like being happy about the dog, see above.

The pipes and street and everything somehow morph into a competent old woman’s project to provide a water system for herself and her neighbors in a wet green place like my cousins’ hunting cabin in Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. The plastic pneumatic pipes are all metal water pipes now. There’s a collapsed rusty car grown through with shrubs and tall grass. She’s using the motor in that car for a water pump. The motor sounds like a refrigerator compressor. There’s water squirting out of places where the pipes are weak. She turns off the pump, the man turning off the air pressure before, and gradually the sprays of water from different places settle down. There’s a creek of the wastted water through the pressed-down grass where she dug a ditch around a clump of blackberry bushes. This creek curves leftward and leads to the ditch beside the street. It’s not really wasted water. This place is saturated with water.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was a 1940s or 1950s cowboy ballad that goes, /Zady, Zay-dee, Zady with the beautiful eyes./

— — —

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–12–19:

First dream. I’m flying ten feet above the sidewalk in a clean nice daytime version of the theme park suburb from a dream two weeks ago. Everyone’s walking home in and along this street from the last day of their high school. I fly by over the head of a tall, athletic trans girl who’s walking proudly, head high.

Now I’m lying on the air at bed height between a twin bed and wide hallway wall in the house where the girl has come home after a long time away, to parents who didn’t know that she had become a girl. It’s confusing because her parents remember her as a girl and don’t want her to be a boy, and at the same time remember her as a boy and don’t want her to be a girl. The mother slightly maternally/hypnotically persuades her to lie down on the bed and wait till /tomorrow/ to go out again, to give her a chance to change her mind about staying or changing to the wrong thing, whichever that is.

Next dream. I’m driving a car like the 1963 Rambler Classic I had in real life in 1980. The road goes through mountain desert. It’s a modern four-lane highway but it’s paved with packed dirt. The car’s speed keeps creeping up. I go wide on a right curve and the car almost leaves the road, but I use flying power to keeping down and going the right way.

A complicated bargaining process ends in my selling the car to a Star Trek Deep Space Nine peripheral character actor. I walk to Caspar (CA), in the dream a gambling-city strip development. Juanita and I go into a casino where the pink house should be. Inside, it’s a combination office-suite mall/hotel and a place like the big cluttered novelty store in Japantown in San Francisco. Juanita wanders off. I end up waiting for a gangster boss to finish chatting self-importantly with his underling and a guest, to propose fixing the old plumbing and wiring before it really needs it and costs way more.

Next dream. Juanita and I are riding a bus through a Midwest town run by 1950s gangsters, that feels like the town of the high school and the trans girl, see above. Also we’re in a car and I’m driving. We go past a big three-story brick courthouse that looks like a nice place to live if it was a house.

Now we’re in a strange apartment. I explain, and sketch a diagram of, something I’ve been puzzling over: The courthouse had a mountain-range-like ridge of concrete stairs going up to a door on one end, on the top floor. The door had glass with crisscrossed wire in in a window at the top. I say, pointing at the diagram: “I know the wires are there to keep people from breaking in, but what stops someone from hitting the window with a sledgehammer and having it just pop out of its frame? Is the wire attached deep into the wood around the window, or does it stop at the edge of the glass?

Juanita thinks I’m being silly. To her, people don’t break in, because of some psychic quality of that kind of door and glass that /inhibits/ them from being so brash as to /try/ to get in when it’s locked.

We’re fooling around getting ready to have sex. It’s been a long time but I want to and it seems like she wants to, but she has to go to work or something. I pick her up and both of us fall on the bed. I have costume mad scientist goggles dangling around my neck. I pull them up and put them on, but she doesn’t like it, so I take them off and toss them aside onto a table. Okay, she wants to, she just didn’t like the goggles. We’re both young here, but I feel a twinge in my back from having picked her up, lifting and twisting at the same time. I hope it won’t hurt later.

—

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–12–20:

First dream. A complicated mess of a puzzle to solve, either to be hired to work in a secret science-fiction time-travel agency that’s also a big city newspaper in both the 1950s and the 1800s, or to write the story for the same newspaper about the puzzle itself. Nothing will settled because the puzzle, and the story, act on each other, changing places about which is the mechanism of the machine and which is the machine. Either way, it’s not frustrating; It’s poetic and wistful, like Emily Dickinson in big but tight stiff clothes writing with a quill pen in candlelight.

Next dream. I’m on Ukiah Street in Mendocino, by the faded red building across the street from Corners of the Mouth, but Corners isn’t there, and red building is two much older buildings, one of them missing its whole front wall, so it’s like a big single-car garage. I’m here in the 1997 four-door Mercury I used to have. I park it, get out and start for the garage.

A gang of rotten, violent boys, led by the mean small boy in the movie version of Ender’s Game. In the dream he has a problem with me; he hates me. There’s menace and the threat of violence right now or later or both. I get away from them and somehow have already been in the garage, so I have a coil of heavy coaxial radio cable. I swing the nine-foot-long loose end of this to /thwack/ the boy on the side of his head and then on his hip. Outmaneuvered, the boys flee, growling hatred at me. /This isn’t over./

Now I’m in the garage for the first time, getting the cable. Shoppers in front of whatever kind of shop is next door are all surprised by something that just happened outside. I know what happened: the horrible boys have done something to my car.

It looks okay on this side. On the street side, they’ve kicked the back fender and door to crease them in deeply and they’re gone. /Those cowardly goddamn kids!/. But at the same time: /Oh, well./ It’s not so bad. I can still drive it. I’ll just stay ready for the next time they see me and try something.

—

My dreams from Friday, 2023–12–22:

First dream. I and some others are staying in an old frame house in the middle of nowhere. We’re hiding from not the law but pursuit by /creatures/ of the law — maybe aliens, maybe robots. The woman whose house this is is outside by the garage hanging clothes to dry with another woman who’s like Jill Taylor. I practice in my head to ask them if I can take a shower, if I go fast and use cold water. Is there enough water for that?

Next dream. There’s a wet-climate environment and smaller and older versions of houses set the way they were where we lived when I was 11. Out in the backyard in tall wet luminous green gras there’s a conference of a woman and a man at a table, and others on Zoom with them. It’s to discuss a space trip we took to another star. The Jill-Taylor-like, but also Katherine-Keener-like woman from the previous dream reports calmly, but /pleased/, on how much faster we got there then we thought we would and how we brought back [some number] of gigabytes of information. There’s a general murmur of /good, good/ from the group. I need to tell them something, but I don’t remember exactly what, so I’m wandering around the yard, climbing on things, waiting, in case it comes to me.

Next dream. I’m in a sprawling two-story version of the little pink house where Juanita and I used to live in Caspar. The other people in our dream-only college-staff company are in other rooms or out. I’m in the northeast front room, curtains pulled shut, using a computer with a big old rounded-corners CRT teevee for a monitor. I skip around different files and chapters of a video project that we’ve been doing to interview competent old handymen about details of their lives. In one video, one of them tells about when he was a railroad worker in the 1950s.

A similar competent old handyman, who is part of the college organization, comes in and tells me that he needs the room to meet with somebody important about the next part of the project. He suggests I should log /completely/ off. I think just switching off the computer will accomplish that, but maybe it won’t. I’m confused about how to log off properly. And I’m a little worried about it because of the login still having access to the walnut-size atomic bomb from the dream before.

Right, the dream before: A rich Bob-Santos-like man has invited other rich people to his place in the desert for a political kind of party, both business and pleasure. I’m the technician getting his trick carnival ride ready. It’s a round goldish-brown thick-shelled plaster, plastic and metal fair-ride car on a track that’s set into the ground in a concrete slot in a dim warehouse-size garage. /This/ is where the walnut-size atomic bomb is open, plastic shell off, technically armed and ready to fire, because bump of the grenade pin is part of the removed shell.

Bob Santos greets his important rich old-1960s-hippie guest. They trade good-natured but fraught drug bluffs. Bob Santos offers the man a drug: gray gummy guck you paint on your gums with an art paintbrush — but also it’s the other way around, the man paints /Bob’s/ gums with the drugs. It’s not clear who’s doing this to whom. But whoever had his gums painted with the drug jokingly pushes tiny lentil-like LSD pill on the other, who is obligated to swallow it to be sociable.

While they play their game I’m sitting in the bomb-like ride car with the tiny bomb’s parts spread out on my right leg. I imagine neutralizing the bomb by simply crushing it, but that might set it off… I need to get the boss and his friend out of here so I can look around on the floor, find /all/ the parts of the little bomb, put it back together and shut it off right.

So now I’m at the part where I’m in the house trying to log out of computer, worried about the bomb, because — where even /is/ it now?

Just before I woke up someone I couldn’t see said, like narrating a film, “As we continue in our travel we find Milwaukee taken by the Undertaker toad.

— — -

My dream from Saturday, 2023–12–23:

A gang of rich college boys have it in for me. In an empty, abandoned shop like a Kinko’s, with a line-less parking lot outside, and child’s-drawing green tree-shaped trees around it, three of the boys find me and start walking at me, not like zombies but like bored mob enforcers. I kick and fight and rush around defending myself. I can knock them down and stomp on them, but I don’t seem to be able to hurt them. Each one I knock down gets up when I have to deal with another one.

I woke up with a feeling of hopeful hopelessness. Like: I can’t win, but I can keep fighting until something changes so I can win.

—

My dreams from Sunday, 2023–12–24:

First dream. I’m in place like it used to be up Albion Ridge Road, when it was wet most of the time and trees and vegetation were thick. There a complex of cabins and garages, all made of bare pine two-by-fours and planks. You can’t see one from the other because of all the plants and trees.

I’m running and hiding from pursuit by an organized group. I find a place between trees and a garage to hide in, but the people are right behind me and they’ll see where I went, so I float up to be able to hide on the roof, from where I can fly to another roof, or anywhere. They can’t see up here.

Next dream. I’m in a theater like the Arena Theater but it’s a restaurant too; random sections of the seat areas have tables and chairs instead. It’s daytime but theater-dim inside. I’m walking back and forth from the lobby to the mid-seat section, gathering up the video equipment and microphone wires and everything. I go by where a man is sitting at a table, reading a newspaper and eating breakfast. The big beer-glass-like coffee mug I have slips from my fingers and shatters. I say sorry and look around for some cardboard or something to use for a dustpan. The man reaches down next to and under his table to pick glass up with his fingers. I tell him, /Don’t cut yourself. I’ll get it,/ but he just keeps carelessly pick up shards of glass and collecting it what’s left of his plate of eggs.

—

My dreams from Monday, Xmas 2023:

First dream. After a wry adventure of a good-natured conflict/quest outdoors game that feels like the MCN Announce listserv but with all reasonably people and no trolls, I reach the part of a dream college that signals the calm end of it. People not from the game are standing around on a concrete patio outside a glass-wall cafeteria/movie-theater building. Judging of the game will come sooner or later, but who cares?

It’s like ten at night. Well-dressed people are coming out of the movie theater in couples. This is the end of several things at once: the game, the movie, a charity food event. I go into the cafeteria and step seamlessly into pretending to serve the last of the event people. I bring a ramen meal on a wide flat salad dish to a surfer-type college teacher guy sitting at a big white formica table where he’s talking with friends. I say, “Do you need a spoon or fork? Of course you do.” I walk to where the last of these things are, get a spoon, three types of fork, a butter knife, bring them back, plop them down next to surfer dude’s soup, saying, “There ya go.”

Another table is mobbed with college boys getting free desserts that didn’t sell. I ask if these are free now. Yup. I get a doubled small clean paper plate from under where someone has piled lots of used plates, come back to the deserts: jello, cake, cheesecake with candy cherries, etc., but some college-kid workers are spraying insecticide at the table, along the top of it, directly toward the desserts. I’m all confidence-and-air-of-authority now, to perfectly pass for belonging here; I say, “What are you thinking! /Wait/ to do that.”

Next dream. I’m sitting in my car, looking through the covers of books in my phone, in a place like Cleone, where there’s a convenience store, a bait and tackle shop, and something else — a power company office? — in low, flat-roof shacks. Tourists stand around in the little parking lot. Modern middle-aged but tough, quiet, mean-looking white gangster men and their flat-affect henchmen walk toward me. There’s menace. I get out of the car, walk toward them, tap at the phone to try to call 911 but there’s no service. Have the gangsters blocked phone use? I continue right through the group and out the other side, still messing with my phone.

The scene turns 90-degrees counterclockwise and now is on an unfamiliar highway. This is a night school. I push a wheelchair man along the row of buildings from /his/ car, into a small classroom in concrete rather dog-pound architecture (but no cages), where the teenage kids in the class are all dressed in blue-and-black Starfleet uniform shirts. I go back outside and stand in the pleasant night air, wondering where this is, what I’m supposed to do now, where I live, whether I can fly, where Juanita is, the usual.

—

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–12–26:

First dream. I’m in a wild field at a corner bound by ragged tall hedges. it’s getting dark and there’s fog. I piss on the ground. Children’s voices come nearer on a road beyond the hedge. I’m naked; I run away in the dimness, as the field becomes the grass yard of a big 1960s-modern house. One child says, behind me, “It’s a man,” so I guess they saw me. Oh, well.

I run around the garage just off this end of the house, jump and climb up the lower roof of the house. I slide an aluminum-frame upstairs window open and climb in. The teenage boy of the rich family that lives here looks up from the first floor of the biggest room, sees me climbing in the window, doesn’t care.

I’ve been staying here, housesitting/babysitting. I’m clothed now. Others are here. Voices rise outside. A crazy squat gray-skin, gray-brillo-haired woman with a long sword chases a shovel-wielding gardener man around the house the other way, from the front to the back, and in through the patio sliding door. I get the metal carpenter’s level I use at Tim’s, swing it out like a sword, it extends to nine feet long, and I use it to lock their weapons together with a pretzel of red jagged solid-not-wiggling electric arcs, like red braided rope with coat-hanger wires inside.

The man declares he’s putting his weapon (his shovel) down, and he puts it down. The crazy woman puts her sword down. Everyone separates to different couches in the big room. I tell the crazy woman alone behind the corner couch to stay there and wait for the police to come. I shouldn’t look away, but I do, then I kick myself for doing it, look back, and I’m surprised she’s still there and hasn’t bolted. Good.

The song playing in my head as I woke up was Tom Petty, /American Girl/, the part where he sings, “…and for one desp’rate moment there…”

Next dream. This is like Escondido out where my grandparents lived for a couple of years, but also like the compound of buildings where I work. I fill out pages of test forms for an important school thing, but I remember we’re all supposed to have special white cards to transfer the data to. I need to get cards. I run out to the two-lane highway and run toward town. Here’s a night-lit library with grass around it on a hill. I’m running up the hill. A Down syndrome boy’s parents bring him in their car, and he’s running up behind me. My feet slip on the grass and on roots of trees that stick up through the grass, so the boy gets ahead of me. I’m happy for him.

The library is a giant big-box store. I run clockwise around the perimeter of the store to where the school supplies should be. It’s 2:30pm, dim because of having shifted to be far north. The test shouldn’t be over yet. I should be able to get the cards and run back to where I left my test pages, which — /why did I leave them there?/ I’ve gone completely around the huge inside of the library and I come to the counter in front of the offices. It’s really late at night. Things change so I have the test papers. I give them to the librarian lady, and hope that’ll discharge my obligation. The other librarian lady gives me a big children’s coffee-table that I recognize from when I was little, that had beautiful map paintings like the view from orbit of whole countries with important landmarks magnified in place. I say, “I used to have this.” Lady number two says, “Everyone did.” I pick it up and another one with it, about cowboys, take them take them to a couch with a coffee table, put my feet up on the edge of the table and leaf through the map book. It’s not the book I remember. Here’s a map of England on its side showing the whole middle part of the country being nothing but forest, and the country over the Channel is a desert. Other pages have other things that aren’t right. The entire last half of the book is upside down and backward with questions from the test, before, in red mixed in with the text of the book.

Things change back so I both didn’t get the special cards /and/ didn’t bring the test pages with me. I feel frantic and like everything is bleak. I won’t graduate. And I guess I live in the library now, which would be okay except of course they’ll kick me out.

Next dream. I’m driving on a strange rural road. When I push the brakes it pulls to the right, and pulls harder the slower the car is going. I turn left onto a downhill dirt driveway, test the brakes again. Right when I get to almost a stop it locks up entirely on the right side and the car swings to block the whole space between fences. But the people at the repair shop told me not to worry about the brakes when I was there for what I thought was a problem of them grabbing evenly but was only that I wasn’t used to the ABS system working, which they fixed. I don’t want to bug them by going back again and telling them about this, but this is a real problem now. It’s unsafe.

The song playing in my head when I woke up this time was Needles and Pins but more like an angry but still playful later-era Beatles song.

Asleep again. Next dream. I have my video camera on a tripod much spindlier than it needs. I walk across a plaza like the one in Japantown in San Francisco, into a mall hallway of stores. There’s the feeling that nobody comes here to buy anything anymore. Some people are in the hallway, waiting for something. A woman in a store begins singing and running and dancing around. I unlatch the tripod legs, /shake/ them out straight, fumble with latching them again, get the camera on and running, but the woman has already danced out past me, kind of belly-danced for the people out here, finished, finished singing, and she’s walking back into the store, side-eyeing me.

Next dream. My point of view is moving around a flat expanse of wet smooth-packed sand. My view expands, or the horizon details close in, so there are green mountains all around. Scattered people wander here and there, and there’s a river over to the left. A good looking black haired Western-but-anime like teenage boy walks toward the river. My point of view is from the boy’s brother on a loud motor vehicle he’s sittin atop and over the front of. Now I’m driving. I pull up next to the anime boy, tell him to get on. This is a spindly small tube-frame car with a motorcycle handlebar for a steering wheel. I race at high speed over the wet sand, into a city in dry sand, which becomes a regular old failed California desert military-base city with pavement and curbs and old buildings, some of them falling down. I go too fast through what little traffic there is, around obstacles, and up on the curb, and I jump the car up into the air off obstructions.

We end up stopped at the corner of a rubble field of wrecked concrete buildings. Now I’m on my side on the floor on the passenger side, and the cab is enclosed with a roof and sides, but no glass. The driver is an old mole-rat-like pink-flesh slug-creature man with a very tall bald head like an inflated dildo. His eyes are small and one of them is not swollen-closed but seemingly grown-closed. He’s really old. He tells me we need to get inoculation shots so we can go to the next place. He says archly, “But it’s not really a /place/.” I say, “It’s time travel.” He smiles at how clever I am to have figured that out so fast. I say, “And you’re my brother.” He puts his head down against my side and we both sob happily.

—

My dream from Wednesday, 2023–12–27:

It’s the lawn backyard of a ranch house somewhere. This is a little like where Juanita and I went once for her friend Ghereg’s birthday party in hills south of San Francisco, but with a fence along the back, and no creek. Big trees of all kinds line the edge. There’s an end-of-Whale-School-like production/play event happening. I and other adults are lying down on the roofed, pebbled concrete patio of an outbuilding to one side. Children of ages seven to sixteen swing crazily down from branches over the yard as part of the, pirate movie they’re pretending to make, in the play. Three kids strung in a trapeze-artist chain from the end of one rope slide along the grass and the big teenage girl on the end bumps her head. The next one up lets her legs go so she flops down. It’s soft ground but she hit her head pretty hard. She starts to get up. I and someone else on the patio call to her, “Stay down. Stay there.” I go to and through the house to the back room they’re using a catering kitchen, for a bag of crushed ice for the girl’s head. Two women are here, one of them red-haired Rita from the Caspar Inn in the early 1980s at the age she was then, but she’s also got some of Nicole Hollander’s Gypsy Bohemian Aunt Sylvia cartoon character in her. The women understand immediately about the ice. I look around find a bread bag, just as both women come back from different directions outside with better bags. I hold a bag open and Rita scoops ice into it.

I send them to the girl on the lawn, and go out into the /other/ back yard on the /this/ side of the house. This place is more like an American Fellini movie crowd of old good-natured interesting slightly creepy movie people but it all still with the kids’ graduation project flavor to it. I go uphill away from the house and test how light I can make myself, by jumping and falling slowly. /I can probably fly here/, and then, what, fly over the house and do stuff in the movie-play? But life-size cartoon elephants come around the house and gambol about, so I know I’m probably not flying but only crazy or drugged or dreaming; it’s too bad. Still, I fly up and ride on one of the elephants, and scratch its neck the way they like you to do.

Back at the house, the back door is blocked. I slide a window open and start putting drink glasses and little potted plants aside on the sill, to climb in. Someone tells me they’re making a movie in there, so stop. This is a real movie being made. There’s Robin Williamson with some other men, chortling about something on a row of chairs on the other side of the kitchen counter. I quietly, quickly put the potted plants and things exactly back where they were, slide the window shut and move aside, in case the camera turns this way.

The party/school-event/movie-shoot has wound down. The whole place is more like a big cabin in the woods that’s been made into a restaurant, or like the log-cabin event buildings at /The Woodlands/ camp. It’s getting dim outside. I’m sitting in a booth in a row of booths. The man with his back to the wall in the next booth feels like Juanita’s old Ren Faire friend Keith (who just died on Christmas day). Here he has a deep voice like Thurl Ravenscroft. He’s singing kind of a Monty Python-ish version of Gray Grinning Ghosts Go Out To Socialize, but he doesn’t remember all the words. I try to help without interfering, but it’s not really that song but a parody of it, so I don’t know the words either; it’s like a happy-sad Catholic hymn/dirge. Another man comes in, hears a line, begins to sing a whole other part and verse of the song. The first man gracefully adapts. A third man comes in, tries to sing, doesn’t know any of the words. Still, it’s nice. These are all Juanita’s and my old friends; the last man is like John Paul the accordionist, and they all sound like Thurl Ravenscroft.

The song is over. All kinds of people are coming in to relax, tired from the movie work. All lounge around as if the booths are couches. I’m on my back on the bench seat, propped up. Rita comes here from the kitchen, sees me, climbs over all the booths (and people) in the row, wondering aloud if I can make a /diamond wallet/ for a client of hers. I say, “I wouldn’t know where to start, but Juanita could.” I ask if by /diamond wallet/ she means a pouch for a merchant to carry diamonds in or a normal wallet but studded with diamonds. She doesn’t understand the question. Now she’s lying on and curled around me, her red poofy hair in my face, snuggling and showing me the multicolored business card of her woman client who wants the wallet. I say, “I’ll give it to Juanita when I see her. They can work out what to do.”

Things go back to when all of us were on the concrete on the patio, but the pirate-play kids are gone and the trees are smaller. We’re watching a trailer for the movie that eventually ended up being made. Our point of view moves even farther into the past of the yard, but it’s not the same house. I say, “I know that house. My mother and I lived there when she was selling it for Forest E. Olson. It’s way nicer than I remember.” The view swoops leftward, goes in close on the wall at the corner, where the reddish-brown paint is faded and the wood has rotted away. I say, “Maybe /not/ so nice… It needs a little work.”

Now I see that I never lived there. Despite its rot, it’s a way nicer place than we had. The house I thought it was, was the one on Riverside Drive, where it came with a tiny horse pen and stable, and once in real life when I was seven and home alone, and the five-year-old girl from down the street was over, playing, I used the fence for a ladder, got the giant horse (Little John) bridled and ready to ride, got us both up on him on the blanket, no saddle, and rode all the way to the L.A. River and back, across that giant four-lane road that went to a park with sycamores. I don’t remember if we got down to the dry concrete river or not; my memory is not good on that, but we were gone until it was getting dark. When we got back, my mother was there. She took the girl home while I put the horse away. She came back and impressed on me how frantic and upset the little girl’s mother was, wondering where she went, and that I should never do that again. (Okay, fair enough.) But it was over, and on to the next thing to get an idea to do and do it, whatever it would be.

Anyway, the dream broke up soon after we all saw the rotted wall, with a businessman/gangster voice telling me, or rather teling the person in the dream, “Gideon, Gideon, let’s not be fascinating to the old men,” which morphed into the song playing in my head as I woke up: Nellie McKay — /Please Don’t Chop Another Christmas Tree/, the part where she sings, “Spare each little flower, like you didn’t spare my heart…”

—

My dreams from Thursday, 2023–12–28:

First dream. A compound of hippie-built shack buildings in a dry-red-dirt forest place is a whole tech-development project site. One of the projects is a rocket-jet engine upright on a test stand in a high carport. It’s a frame of tubes around a sheet metal cylinder with cables to it and between metal and plastic boxes bolted all over it. It’s ten or twelve feet tall. I see this from far up a dirt driveway between ragged weedlike fuchsia trees. In the dream I’m imagining the /story/ of the dream, which becomes that the engine’s innovation is shapeable force fields to form the air path and, I guess, the virtual compression turbine. Also it somehow might magically produce reaction mass from /the Other World/ for its space rocket phase. I’ll hold back secrets of developing it further so I can bargain to go on the space trip that will result, rather than be left behind. It’s my genius motor. I should get to go.

Next dream. A river is too wild for safety but hundreds of people float down it on innertubes and homemade rafts every year at this time for a religious/political festival event. I and someone else ride on a raft/canoe/mattress-thing. The water gets crazier and whiter as we all approach rocky falls.

Now I’m on a river on the other side of the rocky falls, going the other way. The bad place is now the confluence of the two rivers, leading to another /really high/ waterfall the left. I and the other person, who might be Juanita and might be my mother, are either arrested or rescued by being lifted up by the arms from behind by giants.

Now I’m at my day job, daydreaming about rivers and innertubes and being young in summer, while walking between outside or inside jobs, I don’t know. A woman calls me on the phone to ask me to fix her computer. She says something about a floppy disk. I ask her what the operating system is. She says she thinks it’s Windows 96. That would be Windows 95, so pretty old.

I say, “Okay, you can get a pretty nice computer for a hundred dollars now and just replace it. What is it not doing?” She says it’s not working. I say, “If you need the data from your broken one, I need to see it to figure out how to do that.” She doesn’t understand this. She says, as if repeating something to someone stupid, that she just wants to know how much it will cost to fix her computer. I say, “One hundred dollars.”

— — -