Sunday through Tuesday, early June 2022

My dreams from Sunday, 2022–06–05: Buckminster Fuller balloon. Medical paperwork and Great War souvenirs. Space escape. Weird dick problem. Helpful honey-smoky-voiced 1940s L.A. woman.

First dream. I’m lying on the floor in an office-furnished section of a vast thin-metal-wall building — it’s so big that the faint warmth in it makes it float in the air like a balloon. I can’t see out. When will it come down? Probably never. Another person is somewhere else in the building, a military officer criminal, and that’s why I’m hiding on the floor, in case he starts shooting.

It’s years after the building has come down and I see a man from it — the man hiding on the floor? — walking down a dirt track through green California hills from the prison camp where everyone who survived the apocalypse lives anymore. He intends to escape. He has a thin, flat-sided automatic pistol in his side jacket pocket. A sadistic Danny-Trejo-like guard comes after him with an invisible but overwhelming punishment power weapon; he’ll kill this guy like he killed the last one who tried to get away.

I become the escapee and fight Danny Trejo in a sheetrock office cabin room, punching and jumping and kicking around and over a rectangular meeting table. It’s like a teevee fight, where nothing seems to hurt us so we just keep fighting. Things become vague.

Next dream. I’m still escaping but from something else, and part of the escape is passing a martial arts test of placid masters, men and women, scattered over a dim football field at night. I throw metal junk, like from the metal recycle pile at the dump, to weaken those ahead of me before I finish with each one I’m fighting now. I’m confident here; I’m not getting tired. The person escaping in the previous dream is my brother in this dream; he’s watching my progress from behind me and to my right. Every once in awhile he says something. I want to tell him to keep his mouth shut, but maybe they can’t perceive him and if I address him they’ll be able to, so I keep /my/ mouth shut.

After all the fighting, I wake from sleep (still in the dream) in a Grass Valley-like place that’s an indoor (?) grass hillside. I sit up and talk with a sympathetic military woman, the actress who played a soldier trying to protect her fellow women soldiers from a bad officer in the second episode of the first year of /Lie To Me/.

I find a boy soldier/experimentee’s medical test paperwork. The other military guy from before, from the flying building, is still out there somewhere pursuing me (or the boy). The folder of paperwork becomes a brown suitcase. The paperwork becomes envelopes of old pictures of strange people and a small child’s writing schoolwork.

And then, now that there are many more people on the hillside, the suitcase becomes a four-foot-by-ten-foot one foot deep wooden open-top box of weapons and World War 1 war souvenirs, and the box is lined along the edges with heavy old timbers. /How will I get this away from here?/ I lift one end and pull it aside a few feet. Underneath are layers of old cracked blue-and-white tiles like from ancient Rome.

Next dream. The pursuit by the criminal military guy is still going on in the future in outer space. I am (the other soldier boy is) fleeing through a city-size ship. The boy, in a space suit, pushes off to float away, hoping to be found by another good guy coming here soon. Now I’m fully the person. I’m flying farther and farther away from the ship/city. I pushed off too hard. Do I have anything I can throw to go back or even slow down? No.

A generic boxy metal spaceship comes here. There’s a ghostly graphic superimposed on all this of the direction-shape of going out, getting rescued (without being taken into the rescue ship) and going back to the city/ship with another space-suited astronaut.

Next dream. In a grocery store the back room of the meat case place is a fleamarket/thrift-store of all kinds of different goods as well as food. Juanita and I are conducting a tour of the area for her friends, who are a cross between Annie (dead) and Ghereg and another taller couple who are a bit like people in an episode of /The Outer Limits/ from the early 1960s — their faces are caked with makeup to be smooth and flawless for sharp closeups. The shop is trying to close, but Ghereg wants to quibble over the contents and price of a big party tray of sliced meat and cheese and little brightly-colored plastic toys. He abruptly leaves off that, apologizes, and goes /farther/ into the back to use the toilet. Everyone’s waiting around politely. The shop girl is okay with staying late. I say /Sorry/ anyway. I’ll just pay for this; he clearly wants it.

I’m alone now in a place that’s a dim cross between the fleamarket shop, a YMCA shower room and the indoor grass hillside from before. I’m standing naked and my dick is rigid though pointed downward not upward, much bigger than usual and bent in the shape of a rifle with the stock coming from my crotch. A cartilage-like spur is on the back (forward) part of it, and another, smaller, but equally hard dick, this one the size of a Polish hotdog, is held on by that spur, aimed at my face (the other way from the first dick), and looking like it’s meant to be the scope on the rifle, if this were a child’s sketch.

I’d like to cut the scope-dick part off, but /what if the blood direction goes out the spur, circulates through the scope-dick and goes back in the spur to finish filling the regular dick?/ If I cut that, the whole thing would never pressurize again. I think they must have special doctors somewhere who know how to fix something like this. I’ll just wait. (How long has it been like this? I mean, you’d think I would have noticed it getting this way before now.)

Next dream. Juanita and I are in a ground floor apartment in a busy, hot, sunny Sunset-Strip-in-L.A. 1960s place, boxing things up, getting ready to take a load to the Goodwill. Also we’ll be going to where I have to [buy a car? a computer? survival equipment? a musical instrument?] Juanita’s friend Ward has offered to help me, using his expertise to haggle with the seller. Juanita phones him and he immediately screeches to a stop, parallel-parked, out front in his hot rod yellow-and-chrome VW bug. I’m in a hurry to carry things out to him. (Now he’s helping us move, too.) I trip; boxes and bags of things fly out into the busy street and to the nearby intersection. A lot of it goes under a woman’s convertible 1940s car. She’s sweet and pretty and nice; she jumps out, helps me gather up bags of CDs in cases and get everything back into the bags and all put on the corner gas station’s apron. I say, “I’m so sorry.” She says, “It’s no trouble. Don’t worry about it.” I say, “I love your voice. So warm and rich.” She likes this compliment. She gets back into her car, now somehow not in the intersection but parked, waits for an opening in traffic, and drives away.

(The song playing in my head when I woke up was a 1970s ad for over-the-counter cold medicine. The verse is, “A summer cold is a different animal, a lonely animal, oooh. He’d like to share your summer fun but you don’t want him to…) (I remember in the ad the summer cold was represented by a sleazy man-size pixilated hairy bug puppet creature that pesters people in the park and at the beach and makes them sneeze.)

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My dreams from Monday, 2022–06–06: He’s alive. Hippie bed and breakfast in exchange for electrical work. Volcanic floodplain swamp.

First dream. I wake from sleep (in the dream) in a strange version of the house where I lived in 7th grade. Firesign-Theater-like newspeople are braying from a teevee somewhere. My dead stepfather Roland, here alive, is asleep in the next room. I find the teevee and turn it off.

Now the house is in a green wet forest and it’s days or weeks later. Roland is asleep on his side on a couch near a den’s sliding glass door. He’s not moving. Is he dead again? I think about what’s required of me if he is. Should I shake him? Should I call the police before I shake him, in case somebody thinks I killed him?

I sight along him from across the room, looking for breathing. I can’t tell. Finally his fingers move a little. Oh. Okay, then. /Unless he’s dying and the only thing he can move is his fingers to call for help./ …I’m overthinking this. “Hey!” I say, and he looks at me and says, “Mm?” Funny.

Next dream. I’ve been staying with a young hippie couple like Laughing Bear and What’s-her-name (from the 1980s) in their gray-dry redwood cabin out near Comptche, that I went to once with Swift. The woman is cooking something in the kitchen area behind a wooden partition. The man suggests I start soon if I’m going to get to that thing (?) in Southern California on time. I tell him I can fix up my old motorcycle to go there, but the last time I tried I incompetently screwed up the electrical wiring. He says I should look up the manual on the web. /Yes, I thought of that. Of course that’s what I’ll do./ He jokes that he won’t give me /this/ to do (replace the light switch with a dimmer). I’ll do that. That’s easy.

I get out of bed naked, paw through a pile of clothes, find jeans and a sweater that will fit me and put them on.

Next dream. It’s night. I’m with other rebels/revolutionaries/escaped-prisoners sneaking north to cross Big River near Mendocino, but there’s no Mendocino, the bridge is long, across a wide floodplain, and it’s collapsed in places. We climb down to travel below it, carrying [a tech weapon? something else we stole? evidence of a harmless but punishable-by-death prank?]

One of our guys has a servant who’s also an ex-British policeman so his loyalty to us is in question. He goes to the left of the bridge and teases the edge of a runnel in the grass swamp, poking at it with a fifteen-foot-long invisible spear made of a stripped peckerpole. Volcanic water starts boiling up from the cracks revealed and from cracks that start everywhere. We need to get up on the bridge, out of this…

Now I and some others are in little wooden boats, navigating inward from the sea up new runnels in the swamp because of all the upheaval, headed in zig-zag fashion east toward the bridge. It’s years later. A detective woman is with us, trying to trip us up about our criminal activity, including murder. She becomes her assistant looking into /her/ murder, which we didn’t do (she caused her own death by being the man who poked the swamp into chaotic activity). I say, “She was three feet away from her foot last night,” meaning she was /standing right next to the volcanic water trigger event years ago/ (I’m not giving away that she (he, then) was with /us/ when he poked it into catastrophe. (I’m trying to spare the assistant’s feelings as much as keep us out of prison.)

(I woke up with a cross between /The Sheriff/ by Emerson, Lake and Palmer and a part in Frank Zappa’s /Thing Fish/ album where the character Thing Fish says something about the Galoot Calogne (pronounced cuh-LOG-nuh) “berlin’ and boilin’ up” playing in my head.)

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My dreams from Tuesday, 2022–06–07: Asylum. Albion yard-care adventure. Gazebos.

First dream. Tyranny in government has resulted in revolution in a space colony on some planet somewhere. We rebels and refugees are holed up in a giant crashed spaceship that’s mostly catwalks and stairways and stairwells inside. It’s dim night, but it’s always dim here.

Actor Jason Momoa, some others and I climb down four or five flights of stairs and go outside for some reason. When we’re a few hundred yards away from the ship and have left the relative safety of a ridge of rocks, a blinding, noisy but somehow not buffeting fog and dirt storm blows in. This indicates that the enemy government is coming in their ship, or ships. Jason Momoa and I have ray guns; the others don’t. I remember that we’re supposed to find someone who went nuts and ran out here…

Now Jason Momoa is the bad guy and I’m running after him back toward the ship, trying to stop him getting in there and causing trouble. My ray gun doesn’t work. He gets in.

Later we’re all lying around on the steps and catwalks trying to get some rest before we’re overrun by government soldiers and have to hopelessly fight again. Jason Momoa isn’t in the story anymore but my cousin Mimi /was/ here, and was sabotaged by someone. We suspect a particular spy-person. I cleverly ask the spy if she /put some poison or something on the blanket where Mimi was asleep/. She says, “No, why?” (Well, that didn’t work.)

It’s much later. We’ve all been captured and are drugged and in a mental institution that’s a soundstage-size metal cavern deep in the crashed ship. There’s the feeling that we’re coming out of being drugged and have a chance to break out. I get to my feet to try to get to a sliding metal door, but standing up I’m wafted, upright, sideways across the floor by a silent wind or maybe by magnets. (This is a feature of the drug.) Others who came out of the drug before me, including my cousin Mimi, alive again, come near and grab my outstretched hand just before I would have stopped against the wall anyway. That’s okay. There’s the feeling that this is how it always is. We can get out of here and overthrow the government again now.

Next dream. It’s night but there’s light. The Albion Grocery parking lot is here a field of grass, an overgrown lawn, and part of it is cut because I guess I cut it earlier with my employer Tim’s new electric lawnmower, which is half-hidden in the line of the not-yet-cut part, where it stopped when the battery was exhausted.

I think of putting the lawnmower away in a shed where in real life is the Albion post office. I have a key to the padlock but there’s an electronic keypad to disable the alarm and I don’t know the combination for that, so…

The grocery store’s lights are on inside but the door and all the windows are mostly boarded up. Here are other sheds, but they don’t even have doors, so putting the lawnmower there and then just going home wouldn’t be right. It’s too heavy to push all the way home, and it’s too big to put it in my car (the rustbucket 1977 Toyota Corolla I had in the early middle 1990s).

Now it’s gray daylight. There are lots of people around, camping here. I’m sitting on the grass (still only half-cut) with Juanita and some others. Juanita’s bored with me. It occurs to me that all these years I misunderstood the tone of a Lynda Barry comic strip from the 1980s that we both like, where a human woman is telling the comic-erotic story of her love affair with a Venusian man with too many eyes and arms. I say the text of the cartoon, intoning sexily for the cartoon woman, “…his arms, arms, arms…” Juanita says, “I told you that years ago.” Did she? I say, “/I/ knew that.” Now she’s stiff and purse-lipped. I say, “Why are you mad at me.” She says, “You’re such a liar.” (!)

She goes to talk business with a strange homeless-looking man and that makes me jealous. They go to the farthest-downhill shed, past where the grocery should be, but isn’t. I go there because my car is there. I’m ready to just drive away and leave Juanita here, see how she likes that. I’m sitting on the floor in the hollowed-out car (no seats, no glass in the windows), driving by reaching up above my head to the steering wheel, which is on the right side. The car sounds and rides like a lawnmower-engine go-kart. Most of the way up the grass-field parking lot to the ridge road I stop and call back, “I don’t know what the problem is we’re having, but please come with me.” She’s right behind the car as if she was running after, or as if I backed down to her, it’s not clear.

Now it’s a bright day with a Maxfield-Parrish-blue sky. It’s a community cleanup day. People are everywhere, cleaning up the yard, picking up garbage, like a cleanup day at the old Mendocino Community School. Kay Rudin is here, annoying me with chatter. She becomes a manager-type guy, asks where to get more trash bags. I point to a far shed so he’ll go there and leave me alone.

And now most of the people are gone. Juanita and I are sitting on the grass again, where we were before. I imagine and visualize telekinetically shutting a stupefied/hypnotized Kay in a truck-size bluish Tupperware rectangle on it’s side and send it sailing away up into the sky over the ocean to the west. I point to it, get Juanita’s attention before it’s out of sight, say, “You know what that is?” She says, “What?” I say, “That’s Kay. And you know where she’s going?” She says, “Where,” like someone says, “Who’s there,” when you say, “Knock knock.” I say, “The Sierra Nevadas.” Juanita doesn’t think that’s funny or nice. I say (trying not to whine), “I put holes in it, she’s not gonna suffocate. She’ll be fine.”

Next dream. I’m at the Mendocino post office in the 2030s. I walk east to where the Seagull restaurant and bar was in real life and turn north to where it is in the dream, where I work here, in the street, filling dishes with food from different tubs in a pushcart. I make a tray of crab salad on lettuce in fluted glass bowls, wave at the air without looking up, and point at it, not caring who it’s for or who comes to get it. This might be a wedding or a corporate event.

Now I’m at the corner of Lansing where Little Lake Street goes up to the highway. It’s getting dark and starting to rain. I’m supposed to already be finished building these two redwood gazebo roofs up on two thick metal poles each, like gas station pump roofs. I climb up and start brushing Varathane into slots at the end of the ridge where the rafters of a part of the roof to be added later will hook on. A friend of my employer Tim, a retired government man from Oregon, comes here, looks things over without speaking, sees that I’m doing the right thing, and gathers materials to hand up to me and help. It’s raining more now but nothing’s getting wet, so, okay. It’s dark now but I can still see to work. I might as well finish. (The government man is the Better Business Bureau agent who came to my aid when a mechanic tried to charge me twice what he quoted for a job. That was well over forty years ago, but that agent’s quiet competence and clear confident authority really impressed me.)

(I woke up with Paul Simon’s song /When Something Goes Right/ playing in my head, the same as yesterday but this time without /Thing Fish/ mixed in.)

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