Tuesday and Wednesday, Aug. 15 and 16, 2023

My dreams from Tuesday, 2023–08–15:

First dream. A family of scientist apocalypse survivors is traveling in a camping vehicle across the desert. Before the smash, there was broadcast power, and it’s still on, but erratic and breaking down. They’ve found a way to shut it off for just a second at a time by remote, and they’re using that to locate the source so they can fix it right.

Elsewhere a little boy and girl are living in a miniature-golf-course-like small house fake neighborhood inside an empty warehouse. There’s a sinister lord machine system represented by a mutable moving shape in the air — sometimes it’s a part-question-mark, sometimes a teevee-screen shape, sometimes a simplified little animal. The lord-thing and other vague machine parts (the lord thing’s minions) all have shut off for a moment. The lord-thing is alerted by this to bring the kids along to find and crush the human resistance to its power. It makes sandwiches for the kids and gives them all sorts of things to carry (it can’t carry anything). The little boy gets a big bag of like a hundred pounds of food and water and machines. I take over for him, become him, and pick up the bag.

We’re on a dirt road next to a fence like the one around the perimeter of the sound-stage in the 1940s movie version of /Our Town/. The shape-thing is plotting murder and communicating silently with other machines everywhere. I hope the scientist family gets to the power first and shuts them all off in time, but it’ll be close. A worry is, the scientists don’t even know about the sinister machines.

Next dream. In nice fall weather in like the Sacramento Valley, I walk to a giant metal warehouse that has wide walkways in it between rows of synthesizers and musical keyboards. I’m attracted to a big-desk-size keyboard with smooth white flat old-electronic-organ-stop-like toggle keys in sections across the top control surface, beyond the piano keyboard, all labeled with different combinations of three letters. A calm rich man comes to show me how to turn the machine on and shakes out latex gloves for me to wear to handle it, to protect it from skin oil, like protecting cheese from the enzyme on your hands that makes it go bad.

Two happy, friendly big black dogs, one more border collie-like, one more Lab-like come around and run back and forth under the tables. I play with them, ignoring the man’s rapid instructions about the machine. He has to go away for awhile; he says, “Any questions?” Sure, I have some questions: 1. Where’s the restroom in case I need it later? 2. Can I walk away from the machine with it on and come back to it, and have it still work, and no-one else will have taken over? 3. Where is it okay for me to sleep? I know that the man will provide food later; I’m not worried about that. Also I plot to magically just understand how to use the keyboard and produce some amazing musical composition and impress the man with it when he comes back later.

I woke up with a jumble of Emerson Lake and Palmer and Electric Light Orchestra music playing in my head, especially the plinky piano part at the end of /The Sheriff/ by Emerson Lake and Palmer.

My dreams from Wednesday, 2023–08–16:

First dream. I’m young, in a strange college class. I say, “Oh, no!” and the other kids are annoyed that I don’t explain what upset me, so a girl says, “Who hates this guy?” (meaning, who else besides her). What happened was, I just remembered that after a vague earlier part of the dream of going through LP records and boxes of tapes and all, Juanita and I didn’t move them from the giant top floor of the loft place we moved out of, that other people were already moving around in, to move in? to find something they wanted for themselves? to clear it out and throw it all away? So all of those things are lost now. I don’t mind about the records, but the tapes were my old music projects. /Fuck./

Somewhere near the college I’m in an old, bleak, dim metal warehouse that feels like the back rooms of an army surplus store in the 1970s. I find a cage-closet of things I and other people I know made long ago. I say to a tech guy behind me, “Do you want this?” (It’s a small radio-project enclosure with a pile of things on it: old metal-magnet crackly-paper speakers, small parts.) He surprises me by taking it. I’m like, whatever — what was /I/ going to do with it?

In another, newer, more modern college, a woman like Mary Aigner, who used to be program director of KZYX, is talking with a man just inside glass doors. It’s late at night; there’s nobody else around. I go out into the doorway niche of moss-grass. A door to the next wing of the building has no knob or lever outside but a crash bar inside; it’s open. I shut it — it springs open an inch. I kick and smash at it, but it won’t latch. I go back and tell the woman, “That door needs to be locked from the inside.” She looks at me, annoyed, continues talking with the man. I tell her again. She looks at me, annoyed again. I tell her /again/.

Next dream. In an old brick-and-rusty-iron building in the factory part of a deserted, defunct big city I’m browsing through rows of tables of antique metal and wood art things. Here’s a long box whose function is for all the cut-out key-shapes and other thick and thin metal strips hanging across the front to fall off, revealing inside metal hardware shapes inside that represent famous people and movie stars of the early 1900s up to John Wayne. It’s clever. Would Juanita like this for her birthday? (And where would we put it?) Juanita comes near. I say, “Do you like this?” She’s like, /meh/.

Juanita vanishes. I’m in another part of these old buildings. It’s night now and weird beatnik squatters are having a 1960s drug party. How do I get out of here? A gay fake-vampire guy wants me to follow him through a narrow room to get out. I’m not going in there with him — but what if that really is the way out? Well, I have acquired an antique metal toy sword that would actually be useful as a little sword. I brandish it for effect and follow the guy. Also I have stolen a valuable painted tapestry. As I go I clumsily roll it up with one hand and try to stuff it inside my shirt and pants to get away with it. Vampire guy vanishes. I get to the place where the art box was, and here’s the way out. Thanks.

Outside it’s daytime now. The whole city is ancient buick buildings and ashes and rusty metal. People are picking through a dumpster area in a dry dirt yard. /Here are Juanita’s and my LP records/, but all the good ones are gone. That’s okay, we never played them anymore anyway. But the tapes of my music projects, tch, even if they’re here I’ll never find them.

Now I’m in a big old Victorian house that hasn’t been lived in (nor cleaned) in probably fifty years. I vacuum around one room with a hose vacuum. The metal hose end ruins an intricate old sideways-catenary-thread bead curtain, but I get the disgusting clumped dust out of it. I’m thinking, /Can Juanita and I live here?/ The paint is probably all lead paint; the crumbling wallboard is probably all asbestos. There’s a wide ditch of dirt, dust and wall crumbs along the wall edges of this filthy old carpet… Maybe if we only live here for a little while it won’t hurt us. Maybe if we live wearing breathing masks.

In another room, that feels like the very front part of my grandparents’ Italian restaurant when I was little, I show a strange supercilious woman the vacuum cleaner’s collector box, which is inside another box. It’s a terrarium diorama of mountains of dust and paint chips and purple beads.

Later I’m driving in San Francisco in the 1950s, measuring time by the other cars, though I have a car like the 1963 three-on-the-tree Rambler that I had in real life in 1981. It runs great. Every part of it is loose and rattles, but it’s responsive to the pedals, it feels /reliable/, and I understand it; I know how every part of it works.

The steering wheel is creased over so it’s too close to my chest. I bend it back straight. There, good.

I come to a modified middle-1960s Ford Mustang that an artist has attached plastic plate body parts to, to pad it out into a the shape of a 1950s car. That’s interesting enough to slow way down for, to look at it.

I’m just enjoying driving around, up and down hills. If I see a pawn shop I’ll stop and buy an electric guitar amp, or a banjo, or a .22 pistol, or whatever attracts me. An oboe, maybe; I’ve always wanted to try to play an oboe and have never in my life had one in my hands.

The song playing in my head when I woke up was /Smile/. “Smile though your heart is aching. Smile though your will is breaking. Though there be clouds in the sky, we’ll get by…”