Dog Turds and Space Invasions
By admin | July 2, 2008
I was running up stairs thinking about how I was going to tell K what I knew. I mean, how do you break something like this?
I was privileged to take part in a meeting of people who were discussing a mass of space ships that had been noticed (with high-power telescopes) coming toward earth. They looked very like blood platelets and it was unclear if we were seeing what we thought we were seeing so we had to wait to be sure. I remember going into the meeting by a left-hand door that was like going into a back conference room at a hotel. When I went in, we all were in a very narrow room with an immensely long table with people sitting around all sides. There was a door straight ahead of me that I went through, turned to my right, and then went to another door to the same room further down the wall (which would be further down the table). As I walked toward the door I looked down and noticed that the floor was littered with large dog turds. I remember thinking about RT and saying to myself, “Oh, he hasn’t cleaned up after his dog again.” When I came back into the room (entered through another door) I was at a garage party. The table was still long and there were lots of people, but everyone was drinking beer. The atmosphere and purpose had changed.
Topics: Beer Parties, Conference Rooms, Dog Turds, Garage, Space Ships | No Comments »
Bill Belichick Mopped my Bathroom
By admin | June 27, 2008
I received a call on the answering machine from NM that he would be flying in to town to visit AS and then he would be driving south. He told me to look around in the paper for something interesting to do and give him a call so we could meet up. I cleared the message and then watched a “bar indicator” move as a new message was downloaded. A message popped on the screen–very like an iPod–telling me that K had sent a movie. I watched a little girl with black hair in a sort of cheerleader outfit dancing and kicking and…well, cheering.
I went into the other room and found K mopping the floor. Outside it was raining and cold, even though I knew it was summer. She said something to the effect that, ‘it’s too bad NM is coming as we’re all tied up.’
I felt the urge to defecate and so walked down the hall to the bathroom. It was immense. I went inside and laid down on a sofa, as if waiting for the right time to use the toilet. I looked at the door while laying, which had a square window in it, and I saw his face in the window and groaned, “Not him.” It was Bill Belichick. He came in with a mop and was mopping the floor and I knew he wanted the room to himself. He asked, “What did you do today?” It was very familiar and I got the impression that he was my father or uncle or a very close relation. “We went to the park.” He said, “Good news about the kicker’s elbow.” And I knew he was referring to the place kicker, but couldn’t figure out why the kicker’s elbow mattered. Instead, I talked about the weather and said that in Fredericktown there had been hail that was “this big” I made and “OK” sign to show the size of the hail.
Later I was walking around the house and all the kids were asleep. I went to one of the “adult” bedrooms and saw MG laying on the bed almost asleep. I woke him up so that we could talk about a play we were working on.
Topics: Dark Sky, Football, Hail, Rain, Uncategorized | No Comments »
20-foot Polar Bear and a Tanker of Vaseline
By admin | June 26, 2008
My dream occupied multiple points of view. I was in car with some other guys and we were speeding down the road. Someone was after us and wanted to stop us, I knew that someone was before us as well.
Next I was at the place up the road that was preparing to stop the car. I knew that there were a bunch of crooks in it, but I don’t know what they’d done. I just knew we had to stop them and the roadblock would do the trick.
Then I was in the car again. Up ahead, in the middle fo the road a gi-normous polar bear laid across the road. He must have been 20 feet tall and hugely wide. He covered the road completely and we all in the car knew we were going to hit it. Which we did.
Then I was inside the “polar bear” which looked strangely like a control room or inside a space ship or something. The three men from the car filed into the room, they were under arrest. We explained to them that they’d run their car into a tanker truck filled with Vaseline which had just plummeted into the lake below and that we’d be pulling their company’s license..?
Topics: Car Chase, Eighteen Wheeler, Polar Bear | No Comments »
Defending the Factory
By admin | June 23, 2008
Choppy memories from last night. I was in the country: large fields and dirt/gravel roads for miles. Large farms. There was a threat of invasion of some sort so everyone holed up in a large, abandoned factory.
Then the place became a sort of conference, and yet, due to my relationship with theatres it was also like a production, not just a conference. I was handed a packet of materials that had been folded up. The page I was given was open to 47, I think. I was to present. When I looked up the woman who was presenting currently was at slide 36 or something so I knew I had 11 slides to figure out what the hell I was going to talk about. It was supposed to be PowerPoint. On the first slide there were descriptions of font sizes and positions, etc. I was very bored by the whole thing.
I flipped through the folded up materials. Page 1 had an introduction to the conference on it. I flipped some more. There were instructions for luggage and suitcases. The were instructions for table layout and who was at each table, etc.
I bumped into JB and convinced him to give the talk. He was taking control when I met the person running the show who was surprised I wasn’t talking. I told her what I had done and just then we heard JB tell his first joke and get a tremendous laugh.
The fun ended with the invasion. We were over run. I had a supply bag and plenty of weapons, but not nearly enough. I had a vision within my dream (sort of like a flashback) of the enemy preparing. There were massive birds (eagles) whose feathers were darts that could be removed and thrown. Some of our people had arrows. I had a gun, but my ammunition was limited. There were certain areas of the factory that had to be remembered: this floor had first aid, etc.
I don’t know what happened, but I was outside coming toward the factory. Time had passed. The factory had been overrun. I was coming up some stairs, slowly, with two other people. When I hit a landing my little girl ran out to me. She was all dirty and poorly dressed but she seemed happy. I picked her up and we went into a central room. There were three bums dressed something like Harlequins standing around a barrel fire. To the right was a vast cauldron, probably 30 feet in diameter–it was low, though, like a fountain in a park. The contents were boiling and in the firelight I could see parts of people floating in it. People were being dragged up to it and thrown in. Some people were voluntarily jumping in. I remember something about PH jumping in, and it became more comic. I wondered why anyone of us was sitting as close to the thing as we were. For some reason M was there, too.
There were other smaller dreams, of course, but I can’t recall them. I remember something about a truck and driving in traffic–I think there was a lot of snow or slush and heavy traffic. Then I was in a line of chairs in a classroom waiting to be called or rewarded or graded or something.
Topics: Action Sequences, Conference, Factories, Guns, Opposing Forces, Presence, Presentation, Traffic | No Comments »
Driving Bed
By admin | June 22, 2008
Again I dream of “presence.” Something there in the dark. I am sleeping in a narrow bed in the way upper part of a house. Somehow, I think it may be the house where I did a significant portion of my growing up; but, of course, the details of the interior have changed substantially: for instance, it now has more floors/levels. I am sleeping in the apex of the attic. I am comparing, somehow, the proximity of my nose to the ceiling in this place with a previous place, possibly another room below. The ceiling in the apex room is painted orange, or a ghastly tan color. I can’t remember the color of the other room. All I know is that when I sit up in the bed my head is very close to touching the ceiling. I lie down and wrap myself in blankets, afraid not to be completely covered. Conscious of my cowardice, I scold myself for being afraid.
Then, it is as if the whole bed is in the backseat of a car driving down the road. I am still cramped and held close. It is my aunt JK driving. An emotionally distant woman often as not, with a droll wit. She is driving and I am in the bed. I don’t want to leave the bed but now I know that I will have to, as I see through the window buildings that are strange to me and yet represent landmarks that I somehow know. A city that is close to home: I will have to get out and drive the rest of the way myself.
When I am out, I am stuck. At first, it is as if I need gas, and then later as if I have no car at all and need some other form of transport. Without gas, I go to pay a large, old black man on the street. He has a pad of paper and a large hand. I reach into my pocket and pull out strange old coins: some very big with antique heads on them. The units of measure are strange but I recognize those that have a 1 on them and know them to be larger units than some of the rest. Every time I pile the coins, the man loses track and then we have to re-count. I take the paper and write everything down as we go: placing the coins one-by-one in his hand. The coins disappear, presumably into his pocket, but we still disagree on the count and when I look at the tally on the paper it is unfamiliar to me, as if I have written in a language that I cannot understand, or lost my understanding of the units in which things are measured. Angry, I attempt to take my coins back but cannot.
I am then in an airport or a train station. It is my only way home, but I have no fare and no ticket. I am outside in an open area near a fence. There is a clear security presence and I know that in order to gain access to the travel I seek I must get inside, but that by doing so I risk much. Somehow, soon after this, I have a machine gun. I monitor the situation near then fence and see a train car or tram go past. It is visibly marked as a security vehicle with various jack-booted types gleefully riding past inside. As they pass, I make my move: I go through an opening in the fence. The tram stops and I am spotted almost immediately. I fire and then run into a building. Inside there are sundry pieces of machinery: massive vehicles with tracks for moving earth, etc. I jumped on a small vehicle and rode directly toward my pursuers, somehow bursting through their ranks and racing toward the train or plane I needed.
Next, I was on the plane or train and I was arriving at my destination. I was quite content with only an inkling of fear concerning how I had gained my passage: as if it were a incident in the distant past.
Topics: Action Sequences, Attic, Car, Driving Bed, Guns, Opposing Forces, Otherness, Planes, Presence, Station, Strange Coins, Trains | No Comments »
Strange Village
By admin | June 21, 2008
I was a tourist in what I would characterize as a village in the Northeast: somewhere in Massachusetts or New Hampshire or Maine. It was a period village, meaning that it was somewhat like a Colonial Williamsburg, etc.
The village was empty except for we who were visiting and I am unsure even of the numbers. I was conscious of perhaps two others making up the party.
We stopped by an old, white clapboard house. I’m not sure of the direction of things, but if I were to take a stab I would say that the narrow road ran north and south and the house was on the right (east) side of the road and an old, white clapboard barn was on the left (west) side of the road. There was a small gravel drive that led up to the right side of the house, where it dropped into a lowered patio of sorts surrounded by a dry-stone wall of slate. The patio was covered by a bower of white lattice with vegetation all over. A walk ran in a circle around the house running both left and right from the front door: to the right connecting with this recessed patio area.
The house once belonged to a notorious coterie of black witches and warlocks. They were known by the fact that they carried in their pockets dead bats. They weren’t, of course, just openly carrying around dead bats with open wings. The bats had been carefully mummified and wrapped: each in an individual manner.
I was standing at the end of the gravel drive closest to the road that ran by the old house kicking rocks or tossing them or something. In retrospect I feel that I was younger in the dream. When I started gazing at the barn. On the side of it were huge posters (converted photographs) of the various people who had made up the group that once lived there. But one poster was by far the largest. It was of a woman. As expected she looked the part of the period: her hair up in bun, a shirt with high collar, but it was her eyes that caught me: she had the wildest look on her face and her eyes were wide and fixed. As I looked at the other posters I noticed that all of the members had that wild look about them. But it was the woman’s constant, inflexible gaze that made me uncomfortable.
Finally, I picked up a clod of earth with some grass growing from it and threw it at the poster. I missed, sort of, as I was aiming for her face. I wanted to blot it out. I felt, somehow, that I was being watched though—and not just by the posters. I threw another clod and came closer to the mark. But the eyes still stared, and the observed feeling grew.
Then I heard a noise to my left and turned. There, under the bower of lattice, was a woman in period dress carrying a basket under her left arm. She was surrounded by bees and was wearing a beekeeper’s hat—she walked away across the patio and descended to the east. I felt somehow that she was both real and not. And that I should follow at my own risk.
Topics: Bats (Mammal), Bees, Confrontation, Empty Places, Menace, Observed, Opposing Forces, Otherness, Presence, Tourist | No Comments »
Abandoned Church Flea Markets
By admin | November 27, 2007
BH showed me a song he’d written that had been published in a Catholic Missal.
I was hanging out with some big guy who kept fixing my truck every time something went wrong with it.
His father was a big man who ran a flea market out of his house, which was connected to an abandon church where all the swag was stored. I went through the church to get out of his place and found the back door had been kicked in: the door jamb was busted.
There was some testing service for students in the newspaper that had serious errors and all of these students were pissed. There was a meeting about the failure that I, for some reason, was observing. The man in charge of testing was getting a blistering from all these students and the “camera angle” in my mind kept changing and the faces of all the students involved kept distorting and getting stranger and stranger and I just knew the “man in charge” of the testing was going to blow his lid.
Topics: Abandoned Churches, Catholic Missals, Flea Markets, Testing (Educational) | No Comments »
Keeping up with the Joneses
By admin | November 26, 2007
In my dream our houses were compressed, such that it was like we were living in brownstone apartments or tenements or something that were pressed side-by-side against one another. There were two neighbors on either side of us but somehow they represented the whole of society, and yet remained as they are now: identifiable to me personally: M & L, and P & A.
The houses had a main front window that overlooked the street, with an entrance to the side. If you’re facing the apartments, standing in the street, the large window, which I will only now describe as being a display window for the two neighbors was on the left side, with an entrance on the right; while the display window for our apartment was on the right with a side entrance on the left.
Now, there was some set of objects that were very particularly set up in each of the neighbor’s windows that are somewhat hard to describe. They seemed Asian in character and design, and yet, we all are not of Asian origin or descent. If the object I’m going to describe can be imagined as one object it would look thus: at center is a tall bamboo scroll with some scenery painted on it: perhaps it is three to five feet in height; on the sides—well, the thing may have been framed; to the right and left of the scroll was something. I cannot for the life of me remember what, now, though. I am, at this moment, inclined to say that the bamboo scroll was to the front of a table, and on either side of the scroll (and table) were tall-backed chairs—as if the dining room of each apartment had been set up in the store-front windows. But part of me says that it was not a table and chairs, but something less social and more decorative. The whole of the ‘display’ was brightly lit and made to covetous design. And that is precisely the point, for you see, we did not have one. Our store front was bare, or at least, wanting.
This is where I have tied in my other idea of the Expressionist play regarding an emerald dress: now I think it will be a vase. And the vase will be what is desired. As if the vase will save the world for the wife in this play. The husband of course, isn’t so sure. If only they could get that vase and put it in the window…
Topics: Apartments or Tenements, Covetousness, Neighbors, Play Idea, Storefront | No Comments »
Trunks, Artifacts, and Rodan
By admin | August 27, 2007
JB had returned and I was walking down the hallway with a student; when I turned into a classroom and there he was giving a full blown slide show of his trip. There were tons of trunks and artifacts and people gathered, including GD and several other Africans. Jared at one point started communicating with GD in one of the languages of Cameroon.
Later, from a classroom, I stared out the glass windows and saw, in the far distance, a two-headed monster. I called it Rodan, but I don’t think that is the one; it is actually Ghidorah–but the one I saw only had two heads; whereas Ghidorah has three.
Topics: Classrooms, Rodan | No Comments »
The Return of the House that Haunts Me
By admin | June 21, 2007
Again, I was in the house. The house that always haunts me; or the house that I perpetually haunt in my dreams. The house that has a presence and seeks me out. The uniqueness in this dream is that I wasn’t drawn to the basement. I wasn’t drawn to some dingy cellar, dark and musty with an old furnace. Or drawn down some set of back stair cases into a godforsaken lower portion of the house. This time it was the attic. The house took on an upward dimension that seems staggering to recall it. And up all the flights of stairs I still wasn’t to the room. I had to take out a ladder and climb up to a trap door in the ceiling. It was a paneled trap door, as though put together in slats and then painted white.
The house was still in disrepair. This time, the roof was leaking and falling in and water was coming through all the ceilings of the rooms it seemed. It was another moment of “oh, shit, we don’t have the money for this.” The oppression of house repairs lay heavy on K and I. And yet, this wasn’t the sum total of it. Soon there was the old familiar malevolence in the house. The house was watching me. A malice followed me around. I was tripped. Pieces of plaster fell from the highest portions of the house and hit me, or fell near to hitting me. I walked into rooms and had visions of people who had committed suicide in the house before: throwing themselves off upper floors, over banisters and onto the main landing or entry way. Suicides in shut-off rooms. Why? What was it about this house? How had this house been sold to us in this state? With no warnings? Finally, it was all I could stand. I resolved to leave. We all were leaving. Moving out. The house be damned. The loss be damned. It was too much and now I thought of K and E.
Strangely, I had conceded defeat to the house. I even asked aloud permission to leave. The house granted it. It granted it by not attempting to harm us anymore. The sense of malevolence moderated. It was as though the house were simply satisfied that we were leaving.
I was up in the top attic gathering things. Pulling clothes from an upper shelf of the closet. There was more stuff in the house than I could imagine. Strangely, there was a cord running from the top of the closet, out the door, over the lintel, and up into the ceiling. It was a modem or a cable run for the internet. I remembered all my computers up in the space. I was moving everything. It was then that I felt the offer. The house wanted me to stay. It was fine with K and E leaving, but it wanted me to stay. There was a tremendous flash of light and I looked to the window on my left (I was standing on a step ladder). I could see out the window. The sunlight was as brilliant as I had ever seen it. The sky was yellow and golden light fell on green grass and green trees outside. There was a lake not too far off and all sorts of wild animals and livestock were around the lake and off into the distance on the hillsides. I was flooded with a sense of permanence and well-being: hope and satisfaction. Belonging. I knew that it was an offer from the house; or whatever spirit occupied the house, that this was my home; this is what it offered me. Equally quickly, I saw a vision of E growing. I saw her at all the stages of her life. I saw here flash before my eyes in stage after stage, growing up, turning into a young woman. I was being told that she would be safe without me. Her life would be good.
I made no decision. I could not sense what would happen if I said “no” to the request. Would my family be harmed, for instance? I could sense no malice, but I could sense no assurance either. I was befuddled. I knew for some reason that the offer before me was fair and good. But I knew I would never see my family again. It was as if the house were asking me to commit suicide and remain.
I woke up before anything came of it.
Topics: Attic, Destruction or Disrepair, Future, Haunted House, Haunting, Ladder, Leaking Roof, Malevolence, Menace, Our House, Trap Doors | No Comments »
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