Dreams October 2009

I had to keep a short Spanish man from raiding the bedrooms and bathrooms for smelly underclothes. I was embarrassed. He wasn’t being overtly creepy, more jovial and misgeveious. He’d giggle, and dart around unpredictably. I keep catching him partying with the guests someone had given him a glass of wine, someone had their arm around him. He seemed relaxed. Then I would loose track of him and run into a bedroom frantically and catch him sweeping some sort of instrument over a nightgown or pair of underwear. The instrument grossed me out, but it seemed to be a very humble, scientific thing. He didn’t seem sexually interested in the underwear at all, and that was way weirder to me. Then, when I was yelling at him to knock it off, a huge woman in a flowered dress came up behind me and yelled, “He’s mine!”

Then a girl from the party with a fucked up face who was still kind of cute and I went looking for a giant flag with a triangle and a marmot on it, and we left the party, which turned out to be in a large corporate headquarters type building, and we went to an upper floor, which was completely abandoned and poked around n large office rooms dimly lit, with furniture still in the wrapping, and we chased each other and laughed and fell down amongst to copiers and conference desks. Then on another floor, in the middle of one of the offices, there appeared to be a French restaurant in full tilt. Its sides were made of window glass, with warm candlelight and clinking glass sounds emanating from within. My friend appeared to want to leave; she was agitated by the sudden presence of this French restaurant, which made sense to me. We walked right up to it, and through the glass I saw a girl I recognized from some other meeting. A thin birdlike girl with a quick smile and a penchant for brown clothes and earthy tones. I suddenly remembered the calming effect of her low measured voice and the confidence it had inspired in the past.  And something else, something I was forgetting about our previous meeting. She sees me before my other friend can get me away, leaves her table and comes to the door to talk to me. I was worried she wouldn’t remember me. Oh yes, that’s what it was I couldn’t remember, she had a habit of sinking colored pins under her right eye. There were two or three of them and they were very cute and not disgusting at all. They worked as very normal jewelry, and you had to stare at them hard to realize they were sunk into her flesh. This was probably why she could still be allowed to eat in such a sophisticated fine dining establishment, from what I could see over her shoulder. She smiled and we caught up, while my other friend waited impatiently of to the side, making little pissed off noises. 

I wound up on the grounds of an old college. They had a chapel that sat in a spare and dirty corner of the otherwise spiffy college grounds that sprawled over many acres. The chapel was next to the graveyard. The inside of the old stone chapel had been renovated and this was where the meeting was held. Inside it had a community center rec room vibe and there were folding tables and trays set out with paper tablecloths and a soda station set up in the corner with cups and ice and you were supposed to help yourself. It was getting off to a lazy start, and I slowly realized I didn’t much care for whatever our organization did and figured the others appreciated our meetings more for the social camaraderie. We didn’t appear to be getting anything done. My mother and father were there, and I was chatting with them.
Just then, two men entered, dragging kegs of beer. They were dressed like plumber-gnomes in blue uniforms and had large beards and pointy green hats. The beer kegs themselves were gnome themed, with ornate gnome sculpture handles and gnome scenes painted around the keg belly. The coming of these men was hailed as a great wonder and was much appreciated by the lazy meeting. I turned to give a “what the fuck” look to my parents, but that made me miss the gnome-beer introduction. I could only hear the outline which went something like: “ladies and gentlemen good tidings to you, the great gnome-beer company bla bla bla honored guests bla bla bla this night blab la we give you and the performing arts center sundries sub-committee a gift of this keg of our finest-gnome ale with hints of wood and fruit, and these little fig cakes we baked ourselves!” the little cakes were a shock. The promotion of their beer I could understand, but why bother to include little homemade cakes? Surely the delicious gnome-beer was impressive enough (everyone seemed to be loving it) what was their angle? I looked coldly at the two gnomes. One was fat and wore his bear well, seemed the right age and disposition to actually be a gnome, as I looked at him he laughed in a shared joke with someone at the party, passing them a beer. The other gnome was skinny, his stringy beard was obviously fake and he poured the beer quickly glancing around suspiciously. When the fig things came out to much fanfair he walked around quickly and methodically making sure everyone got one. “Won’t you try a special fig cake I made myself?” he said to me slopping undue emphasis on the words. He said this to everyone and seemed very pleased in a secret compact with himself when the fig cakes were taken. For some reason I automatically took it and put it in my mouth, breaking it apart carefully and inspecting the pieces with my tongue. Something was up. After a few seconds there appeared a wave in my body. Starting from the mouth and receding to the back of my head. My arms felt only slightly different. It was very subtle. I stood up. “Come here for a second.” I said to the skinny gnome, who had pretty much finished passing out his precious fig cakes. “He blinked and looked at me dimly, but followed me when I motioned to a side room with a sliding plastic door. I closed the door behind me grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the faux-wood wall. “WHAT DID YOU PUT IN THE FIG CAKES?!!” I roared. “What are you talking about what? Nothing, nothing at all, ha ha, are you crazy, their just fig cakes, delicious fig cakes to go with you beer, what? Ha ha, fig cakes, fig cakes” he was insane. I punched him on the nose and he stated crying. “There was something in those cakes, I can feel it in my body!” “Ha ha ha!” he cried “you’ll pay, you’ll all pay for what you did to me!”. I slammed his head into the wall a few more times, and let him go. He slumped down on the floor bleeding and giggling. It was fine if he didn’t want to tell me, I could tell by now, the cold metallic tinge of far off omens, the leaden after effect of every motion I made, it was LSD. He had dosed the whole party. It seemed like revenge, but I couldn’t remember anything the sundries committee had ever done to the little gnome-beer company worker. I went back to the party to tell my mother.

I was involved in a great race for some entertaining television show. I was the lone male cast member, and every woman on my team was a super aggressive TV kind of caricature, they all knew what they “wanted” and were going to tell you every second. They all were wearing khaki cargo shorts, and they all liked to drink around campfires and use clunky sexual entandres, punctuating the ends of each other’s sentences with puerile whining and a tip of a half empty cocktail. The actual substance of the race involved straddling what looked like an elongated toy train car and riding it on a little track across America. I seemed to be bad at it but they weren’t kicking me off the show. Spirits were high.

I was walking past a large stone building with my friend ric. I knew the building was a school. From the street, we could hear and see a man with large black hair and black glasses on an excited and angry phone call. “Look” I said as we walked past. “Its that actor, Henry Winkler”.

We were all lying on marble planks that stuck out over a small pit of soft dirt next to a dirt road. We were all watching TV. An actress kept asking me to “explain geology and math” to a bunch of adults dressed up like kids. My friend jogged by in a ridiculous yellow track outfit and said I had “corpse eyes”.

I was the subject of a children’s book with a little boy who had been hired for the occasion by a Swedish company. I looked young but was actually an adult, and was glad to have a job. They were going to take pictures of us playing in something they kept referring to as ‘the old Racism museum’. It was an incredibly long brick building in a grassy field and we drove up to it in a special hummer with the producers. They were supposed to shoot pictures us playing with buckeyes and chasing each other through the old racism museum. The pictures, I understood, were to be turned into careful wispy charcoal drawings in a highly realistic style. I was instructed to pretend the opened shell of the buckeyes were lobster claws. I was supposed to hike up my shirtsleeves over them slightly, and savage my young opponent. “You can break his skin.” They said. I thought this was hilarious, and I really tried to hurt him. But he only found good fun in it, and ran away from me giggling and screaming. Then we came to a special room, which was referred to as “the most racist room”. It was here we would shoot the final scene of the book. My opponent began to wine and shuffle erratically as we entered, but the producers looked relieved. They each held large bags of groceries. The most racist room turned out to be an old pool that dominated the massive room. Very small catwalks big enough for a man to dive from jutted out at regular intervals all along the long sides of the pool. There were inclines that led into the middle at each ends and the producers ushered us forward. My little friend ran ahead of me, and the producers put the bags down. One of them turned to me, “ok this is it.” He said, pulling a bunch of bananas and a jar of jam from the bag. “Just take these and cram them in his mouth. I don’t care how you do it.” I was aghast. This was the final scene? “Try to get as much on his face and head as you can. Really, cover him.” I stared out vacantly into the gloom of the massive room, its pool yellowed with age. I could hear the little idiot chirping to himself and falling down. He was just running back and forth. I knew he deserved it.  “Look, try sitting on his chest and pinning his arms with your legs,” another one of the producers said. I took one of the bags and walked slowly into the pool.   

I was going to meet with a wise old friend. I was in a terrible hurry. There was something epic and clandestine up with the world at this point. “This should be a new named feeling,” I thought. As I approached the windowless concrete bunker where he lived, I had the feeling of doing something bad, running from some authority, of disgust, of relief and that I would be soon in the presence of a kindred spirit. On the end of the dark industrial street sat his building, looking like nothing, one could barely see it. I walked carefully toward it, and I felt the back of my head for the wound I hadn’t been able to inspect yet. I would get my friend to look at it. Why was I so scared? Right before I knocked on the door, as my fist hung in the air I remembered in a flood of fear; the world had been taken over by aliens, and I was on the run. The horrible invaders looked essentially like large floating cat heads with a diffusion of tendrils that ran in a line from one ear under their chins to the other ear. Each large cat head looked very different as normal cats do, with different markings, fur color, and head shape; they all seem to know each other personally. There were only about ten thousand of them, and their “ships” were just huge electrified clouds in the sky. They preferred to take a human host, and one would see the cat head floating above the host’s head, two of its lowest tendrils snaking into the back of the head. The host did the talking and the person’s demeanor became harsh and given to religious exaggeration and fits of ecstasy and wide-eyed enthusiasm. The parasitic relationship was hard on the human host, and you could see blood dripping down behind the ears sometimes, and generally the hosts face and clothes appeared moist with some horrid ooze. The cat heads were always huge and floated above the hosts own head, a huge furry sphere dipping and rotating, taking in the surroundings with a malicious feline glare. They were semi intangible, the host would walk from room to room and the giant alien heads would simply move through the walls and ceilings as necessary, keeping their attention on what the host was perpetrating by their command. All this I remembered with a shudder before knocking, and I felt the wound on my head throb again. I had barely escaped being taken. I must tell my friend. My fist landed heavy on the steel door and I waited. I knew he watched me from unseen cameras. The door automatically opened and I entered the dark interior. It stank of chemicals and murk, the inky blackness before the distant inner door enveloped me. I stumbled, reached the door and opened it, letting me into an inner metal staircase attached to the side of a very large workroom, full of metal stamping and filing equipment. I saw my friend waiting for me in the middle of the room, waiting patiently, wearing long robes that cascaded over his girth to the floor. The machines and the room were beset with gloom. I called out “they almost got me! Have you been up close to a man that’s been nippled by those cats? It’s disgusting! Is your bathroom fixed?” I was getting frantic as I walked toward him. “Its complicated!” he bellowed. “The process will only become more ordered.” I stopped a few yards ahead of him, sick to my stomach. Oh no, Oh please no. A giant purple furred head swung into view, its eyes gleaming. It had jewelry on its ears, it was hissing. “It’ll never make anymore sense to you,” my friend muttered. The cat purred hard, deeply and its entire face turned into a deep vortex as its purple tentacles reached out to me, teeming with slime. My body felt wet as a massive ray of purple light hit me from inside the cat’s face vortex. Its tendrils slipped gently into my skull through my wound. I was crying.  

It seems I had befriended Barbra Streisand. I had a great time with this, it seemed like a big deal to anyone I told this to, but for me it was just another person of importance. She was working on some movie with Anthony Hopkins, but Anthony wasn’t so much acting as he was running some kind of criminal enterprise selling defective medical equipment to the third world. Everyone involved seemed very pleased with how successful and evil it was. She invited me over and gave me a key that had “S1” written on it. When I got to her address it appeared  “S1” stood for “suite one” of a massive skyscraper in the swanky downtown area. I went in and opened her giant wooden door next to her gold mail slot, and plopped my bag down in what looked like a huge foyer that opened up at one end to a staircase and hallway. I knew more riches awaited me, but I decided to go shoplift organic food from the market I saw on the way in. It was in the basement. I had money, but it seemed to please me to rip them off. I was reading a comic book series that went through the complete work of Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, and I was impatient to get the next one in the series, (the last one left of on an excruciating philosophical cliffhanger.) I entered the market there appeared to be some kind of feminist poetry reading going on, and I saw someone eating plain yogurt with his hands out of the bulk yogurt bin. He was lauging and smiling and getting yogurt on his shirt and shoes. He was slightly behind the crowd, which was an eclectic mix of sweater wearing white boys in glasses, tiny women in jeans wearing bike chains, grey haired ladies wearing linen and sitting together around salads. The place looked nicely distracted and the reading promoted a festive air that told me it was ok to take the books I wanted. I looked for the grocery’s book section, which I found in the back next to the nuts. Unfortunately, they only seemed to have teen novels about vampires in high school and books about “pets feelings”.  I was about to steal something and was singing “Got caught stealing” in my head, when behind me came the same song and melody, and I whirled and saw a little librarian lady who was eating a bowl of granola walking away, and I was sure she saw me, but I didn’t care about any of these books anyway, so I said “fuck it”.

Then I went back upstairs to Barbra’s apartment.

I was driving a car fast along a windy mountain highway in Italy. I was being chased. I knew I had just beaten someone to death. I had a beard.
I wasn’t driving well, every time I took a turn, and I almost bought it, skidding just up to the edge. I didn’t know how many cars were behind me; I could only hear them, the road was too convoluted to see behind, with long right and left turns every second. I had a long green silk scarf around my neck and I couldn’t close the windows so it was blowing everywhere. I looked out over the cliff to my right and realized the only way I was going to get out of this was to jump the cliff and plunge the car into the sea. I needed just a little straightaway and then a hard left or right turn. As the mountain road twisted up ahead of me, I saw what I needed far ahead. I looked out into the sea to where I was going to jump the car and saw a huge road sign floating in the air above the ocean. It had a large Bird on it, in that international street sign style, simple shapes, black, with curved edges. There were real birds flying in a ring around it and there were little boats and big ships in the water and they had people on them and they all seemed happy. I could see some boats had people out on their decks, and they appeared to be cheering me on, some of them held picket signs that just had a picture of my car on them, anyway, the ocean looked like the place for me. But before I could jump the car I had to secure the steering wheel somehow, and I decided to try the scarf because I hated it and it gave me nothing but trouble. So it was flying around in the wind and I tried to grab it and keep my hand on the wheel and my eye on the road but it was hard. I finally got it and then had to tie it around the headrest of my seat for some reason, which was even harder to do while driving. I could hear the other cars closing in behind me and I could hear the people from the boats cheering and yelling and chanting “Car! Car! Car!” and the birds were yelling  “C’mon! DO IT! DO IT!” and I finally got the scarf tied around the headrest and the other end around the steering wheel and then I looked over in the passengers seat and saw a huge bowling ball, so I put that down on the gas pedal and got ready to open the door and jump when I realized that whatever prompted me to beat that man to death had something to do with this green silk scarf and this bowling ball, and I was relieved and assured of my moral rightness. Then the edge of the cliff came up and the car and I went over it into the air, and a great cheer came up from the boats and the birds and I was out the door as the car arched into the air over the water and I executed a tall graceful dive into the giant yawning sea. The water came at me and covered me in a rush and I went limp and blacked out. Then someone was pulling me onto boat, and I felt my face in the sun. I had no more beard.  

I was performing on the roof of a warehouse in an industrial district. The audience was milling around the street below, and we seemed to be performing an amalgamation of music and dance, with the dancers just filling huge glass jugs with red water. I was playing tapes, sitting cross leg on the ground. People seemed to be paying attention and not, and there were food carts and tables selling second hand stuff, and the entire area was taken over with a festive air. I couldn’t hear the music, but things seemed to be going well. On another roof of a brick building was a similar band, playing simultaneously, made up of African men in bright yellow costumes. There were a few Irish guys in the band too; they were just there to turn huge cranks attached to pillars. They seemed to be friends with our water jug guys, and I kept seeing them wave and give the thumbs up and flash some sort of crank-turner-red-water-jug-guy hand code. Amidst all these festivities, a gigantic plate shaped UFO burst through the clouds, causing great alarm. We stopped playing and people on the ground were running and knocking stalls over. The other band didn’t seem to care, and I watched them play while hiding behind a short wall. The UFO floated over their roof, and they picked up the pace, cranks turning and tubas blaring. I caught the eye of the lead singer and he grinned at me. Just then a huge swooping sound like a giant throat clearing cracked across the sky and the entire brick building the other band was on just fell into the ground, sliding right down into a hole just made for it like it was supposed to all along. “Hooray!” they all yelled while everyone was screaming in the streets. I could tell that down that hole, there was a beautiful blue sky with fluffy white clouds and it seemed very pleasant. I was staring down the hole, caught in a rapturous devotion to the hole, when my body felt light and there was a horrible tingling wave starting in my feet and spreading upward. When I looked up I was in a room with high windows. The room was leather brown and an orange light, desert light, fell softly through the glass, I could feel the heat from the sand. On the floor was a hole the size of a large rug filled with the same blue sky and clouds as the whole outside that the band had fallen into. There was a large tiger pacing in one corner and I stared at him. There was a sense of dignity and knowledge about him, he seemed very regal, and I knew he was going to challenge me. And he said, “If you have come here, then figure out my riddle.” I stared at the light coming from the sky on the floor. “I will go there, and I will be seen as a god, I will trick them but it will not be my fault. I will take one child and raise him, turn him into a tiger. Then when I am old, I will give him back to them. What is the answer?” I stared into the hole once more, thinking. If he were going to do this, it would have terrible consequences down the line of history. I could see the tiger child growing to maturity, doing bad deeds that seemed like good deeds and taking the worship of the commoners as divine right, his gigantic tiger father looming over him in the sky. I could see the child disguising himself as a homeless man and wandering America, eating horrible fast food in alleyways stretched out on the ground, telling riddles to whoever passed by, those riddles and their answers destroying their lives once they opened like a puzzle in the mind over the ensuing weeks. A mind catalyst, he would ruin people for their own good. This would speed up human evolution a thousandfold, whole cities would fall into a dark plague of insanity, the streets echoing with screams and the sane hiding in barricaded homes until they could no longer keep the savage lunatics at bay. It seemed necessary and horrible. What was the answer? I heard a sound behind me and without hesitation I turned and grabbed a rifle from a small dark haired woman standing behind me. I cocked it and shot the tiger twice. He seemed pleased. He fell to the floor and lay there bleeding and purring softly until he died. I turned and kissed the woman for a long slow moment, she had very tan skin and smelled like the great outdoors. “Your lips taste amazing” I said, and she nodded.