Some dreams from late-Feb. and early March 2022

My dream from Thursday, 2022–02–24: Big soft elephant.

There’s an important modern feudal-society contest with lots of different, linked events. One of the events is to catch and maybe kill a little fox, using tools and materials and opportunities that are set out ahead of you on the course. I walk down a wide dim hallway, where the right-hand partly-open wall is the outside wall of the building. There’s a park. It’s night-time.

Here’s a heraldic horse waiting patiently with its eyes closed. I put a halter rope on it to get ready to ride after the fox, but just a little farther on is an elephant. I release the horse, go to the elephant, hug its big squishy head, and it snuggles against me. My eye is directly up against its eye. We’re both crying because this is so nice.

Farther ahead where the hallway turns to the left the fox comes back this way to see what the holdup is. I wave and gesture to it to just go back to wherever it wants to be and wait for the next person who comes to chase it. I don’t care about the contest. I’m going to get the elephant out of here, through the park.

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My dreams from Monday, 2022–02–28: Window job. How to flick a cigaret.

Next dream. I’m in bed in a strange version of Juanita’s mother’s apartment before she moved to Sacramento. In the dream the apartment is being rented by a family of black women, and I’m here over the course of several days replacing the windows with modern double-pane windows. The women are all out in the other part of the apartment, talking. I get up to get dressed, but I’m uncoordinated and the clothes keep tangling around my arms and legs and sticking to my skin. Just getting the pants on takes forever, like the window job. The rental management company told the women it would only take a day. I feel that they’re angry not at the landlords for promising; they’re mad at me, but only as mad as you can be when you have to keep it under control or you might be kicked out.

I’m dressed. There was something wrong with each window installation; I don’t know what will be wrong this time, with the last window I have to do — what part will be missing and have to be sent for or that I’ll have to make, or the screen will be ruined in the box — but I go out there to face the music and try to finish the job /today/.

Next dream. I’m at my house, though there’s a deck along the front and the doors are switched around so the hinged door is in front and the sliding door is in back. Also there’s the feeling of being invaded by other people who can come here any time they want to and just walk in. I look around outside. This is somewhere in Wyoming, like where I worked for awhile in 1979 for Petroleum Geophysical. Back inside I push the button on the knob to lock it, wonder if that’s /un/locking it. Open it and, with it open, push the button in again, try it. Locked. Okay, shut the door. Did shutting it just unlock it?

Now I’m in bed, but this end of the house is now open to the outside. A guy like Kyle of /Tenacious D/ but just a generic criminal character walks out of the dry grass, past me, not seeing me, to the front door, and comes right in. Another criminal is sitting at a park bench in the kitchen, now also open to the outdoors and the sky. This one is a big quietly dangerous Irish-type hippie character smoking a cigaret. I wonder if I can just tell them all to get the fuck out of here and they’ll have to leave. Probably not.

I’m worried about fire danger. I fake polite conversation with the hippie guy, where I lie that I saw a hitchhiker flick a cigaret into the dry grass on the side of the road. He nods, yeah, he’s seen it done. I say, “How does that work?” meaning: why do people throw burning trash into dry grass? He thinks I’m asking how to flick a cigaret away. He comes over to my bed and shows me close up how to load the cigaret butt between the back of your index finger and the side of your thumb, so snapping outward would fling the butt away. “Ah,” I say. “I see. Thank you.” He goes back to the park bench.

I don’t know what the plot is, but I feel like if I just get up and get dressed it’ll gradually come to me, and then I’ll know what to do next. Maybe these guys are not so bad; maybe this isn’t my house but a halfway house or something, and I’m an equal. At least I have a place to stay.

I woke up with the song /Fernando/ by Abba playing in my head, mainly the part about there being “something in the air that night”, but it goes into the part in /Quizas, Quizas, Quizas/ (/Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps/) where the word /encanto/ is stretched out at the end of the line: en-cahhn-toh. (Except I wasn’t sure about that, so I just looked it up, and there’s no /encanto/ but rather one line ending in cuándo, one in desesperando, and one in contestando.)

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My dream from Tuesday, 2022–03–01: Two V-8s.

In the dream I have a vaguely-defined job with the school district where I lived when I was in seventh and eighth grade, or rather I had a job that evaporated, and I ended up with a school bus to drive around in. If they’re still paying me I don’t want them to notice that I’m not doing anything, so I probably should drive a bus route, pick kids up and bring them to school. My watch says random times, all of them way too late. I decide to just go to the bus barn and give them their bus back, but the one I’m thinking of, the one in Mendocino, is hundreds of miles away from here.

Two old white women are sitting in a kitchen somewhere, drinking coffee, talking about things, expecting me to screw up further no matter what I do.

I and someone else are driving through dry mountains. The road crosses a canal or chute made of shiny metal fence gate beams. This feels like the situation in the science fiction book I’m reading in real life: aliens are colonizing the planet and humans are third-class citizens. The metal slot through the mountains (in the dream) is a guide for forced migration. Can we fly? because if we didn’t fly over the metal we would have to have gone right through it. Flying seems more likely.

Lindy Peters, at the age he was at KMFB in the 1980s, leads his small skinny girlfriend into a soundstage-size school bus barn, to a vehicle that’s like an open metal box with an awning over it, a Flintstones dune buggy made of wheelbarrow metal overlapped like shingles and riveted. It has two motors in it, side by side. Lindy sees where I’m up in the air and says, “Is this cool, or what!” I agree: “Two V-8s? Very cool.”

Juanita and I are in a kitchen. The dishwasher is making a bad grinding noise. I pull out the dish racks and pull a ceramic cookpot out from where it’s down in the bottom, stuck in the drain, blocking a mechanical arm from turning. Put it all back together, shut it, and it’s still making that noise. Pull it all apart again. Another cooking thing is stuck in the bottom. /Where are these things coming from?/

And now I’m in the seaside house of the two old white women from before. I’ve been staying here for days and probably should leave. I want to take a shower and put on clean clothes. I’ll wash my clothes. The women chortle about how funny I look carrying a giant bundle of towels and jeans and sweaters in front of me so I have to feel where I’m going. One woman says, “It’s okay; his elbows are perfectly opposed.” (One arm over the top of the bundle, one under the bottom.)

The laundry room is the biggest room in the house. Here’s a washing machine that has no sides or bottom, just eight-foot-long racks for clothes (or dishes), like a wire-frame 3-D drawing of a carnival skee-ball game. Other parts of the machine and other machines are leaning against the window-wall. And here’s one that’s intact, but it’s more like a kitchen oven than a washing machine, and the inside is too small for all my clothes. Two loads, then.

Everyone’s gone now. I get the idea to use magic to replace this whole incredibly messy house with the same house but spotlessly clean, with all new furniture and everything, and then maybe they’d let me stay here longer.

I woke up with a garage-band rock and roll song playing in my head, about a /”Trump meme! It’s a Trump meme!” yadda yadda, some more and then, again, “Trump meme!”/ They sound like the Steve Miller Band.

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