dream!
LADYTRAP, INC.
the flip side of reality
previous week back to index following week
- - -
---
misc
It's my birthday and the whole family comes into town. I think I may have some really young half-siblings in the mix there.
Someone tells me the story of a play (a musical?) that takes place in medieval times; in the end someone reluctantly marries a duke. That night I dream about that play, or at least I remember dreaming about it at my birthday party.
The party is in what looks like an art museum... in a tower with white white walls, and big glass windows.
A young university professor runs out of gas along the road (I think this is in South Africa). A creepy older guy who turns out to be a member of the faculty offers to take her to work, but he is very forceful and she gets a bad vibe from him. So she lies and says that she has to stay with her own car since she'll be driving somewhere else that night.
surf's up in michigan?
My grandmother is collecting surfboards from everyone she knows; she will have them for three weeks and Ojay is documenting a specific account of how to use each one. My board is orange and clue, and Ojay says "you weren't kidding when you said you just stand up on it and cruise!" My mother tries to give directions to Aunt Betty to get from my Grandmother's place into Muskegon, by driving over the river. She insists the map I lent her must be new, but while I agree and seem to remember it was from 2000, the date says 1993.
He stands in the center of the circle of Chinese men.
I watched Fantastic Planet last night. It is an amazing film that left me with symbolic and emotional dreams all night of technology, politics, life, humanity, history, art... wow, it is pretty incredible. You should stop what you are doing right now and borrow it from me since I own it.
Fantastic Planet is an animated film from 1973, produced in Prague during the socialist era. I can't stress how brilliant and beautiful it is.
transcontinental parakeet show
I am on a sort of expedition with three friends. We gather. Again, Andy Lieberman (dream character of the month) and someone who is associated with snakes (Dave Carta) and maybe Mike Sullivan?
Our hike takes us across a vast continent that looks like Africa but we end up in Mexico, in the blue-water areas near Cancun.
There is a huge (football-field-sized?) map of Africa with 3-D elevation and I check it out. Several very straight dirt roads span the continent vertically, all parallel. The British built these.
During the hike, Dave Carta and I get held up by an adversary... a silver snake has entangled his own serpentine self and I stay behind while the others go ahead. We will lag by a few days, I fear we may not even catch up until the end of the trip.
We go out to a bar before? after? the trip and Erica decides to come with us. But at the last minute she opts out after realising she really has too much work to do that night for studio.
So our hike ends with us moving east along a southern shore of Mexico with tan dirt and blue blue water. I think it is supposed to be Cancun. Where is that? As we approach civilization we see hordes of white people, American tourists, clogging the beach.
At the east end of the tour we pause for a map check and we are greeted by a kid (12?) with a map of the town. HE want to compare it to ours to verify for his family his location. We help him out.
We are sitting outside a cool dark adobe house and as we fiddle with maps we move out of the way to allow an old lady to get in. IT is the home she shares with a dozen old ladies. It is a rare moment in my dreams when my Spanish fails and I can only mutter something like como esta usted and maybe something else with ustedes.
The last part of the dream we are rewarded for
our journey with a cool bird show. WE sit in a round circus-style tent and
two giant man-sized parakeets do a sort of performance art. One has paper
wings that fold out to look like a round sunburst. HE has a blue tube
attached to the top of his head. The platform he is dancing on has a
horizontal sunburst to match his own, and the other end of blue tube disappears
into the hole in the center. At the end of the show he dives down into the
hole and disappears. This is followed up with bursts of orange light,
which is Erica's visual alarm clock in the waking world. I note the
perfect timing as I awake.
More details:
We know about the snake attack by prophecy before it happens. It sneaks behind a tree.
Before the hike when we go out we call a taxi. The man is very nice and is on his way. We later decide we don't need a taxi but we tell him to come anyway so we can tip him for being so accommodating.
********
The following images correlate to a vision I had last night. Erica was explaining to me a project she had done for studio wherein she was to visualize "the space of sleep". I myself was falling asleep at this moment and I imagined the following object, approximately three meters high and about as wide. The bottom disk was connected to a pillar (rounded on top). These were still blue. A second disk spun rapidly parallel to the first, and the blue neon light on the edge formed a solid ring of light. This second disk was grey-green.
stray cats
I listen on a school bus to a natural gas lecture given by a young woman who is a conservation specialist. We then drive the bus a bit on mountain roads that look like Joshua Tree (but it's really Australia... seems from this dream and yesterday's that the whole world looks like joshua tree).
Our whole group stops at a university with big green sports fields and plenty of buildings. This is in Asia, somewhere in Japan. A man comes to snap our photo and the huge group of us poses. but Nobody can sit still and her gets frustrated and eventually takes his fancy camera and leaves. A Younger woman takes over and she can't get us to sit still either but she is more patient.
Then she is a squirrel and a n old black cat jumps out of the bushes and attacks her, but we scare it off before it can do any harm. Since the rest of the group are crazy italians i am a bit afraid they will kill the cat, but she is able to jump onto a roof to safety and they all leave.
I then scope out the old black cat and find that she has kittens. Cool. They are friendly and eventually the all run up to play with me and be petted. They are stray cats and had a skin problem during birth, so someone took then to a low-cost clinic for stray cats. The doctors removed shaved the affected areas, removed the bad skin, and replaced wit with bandanas, so these cats had huge patches of bandana instead of skin and hair., But is seems to be doing the trick just fine.
suspicious old mom eventually cautiously makes her way out to supervise the cats and get some provisional petting. Pat is with me and he starts to arrange the cats in a row on the grass in front of us. HE has a plan that will be a sort of practical joke. One cat is sucking on my entire hand (thinking it's nursing?) and it's tongue is actually soft instead of rough. One cat he sticks to the ground with ten poles through the harness t is wearing (but it's not going anywhere and doesn't notice), I forget what he does with the other ones but one of them is grey and is supposed to look like a newspaper. He then draws some gradiated lines in front of the mother , marked with times. I think he is going to do something to make her sprint, and then time her across the lines.
And speaking of timing, time to go do the dream experiment with pat.
missouri is very rocky
Andy Lieberman comes to visit me at the old house in Bonita. I thought I was the only one home (I am upstairs) but it turns out that Karen and Richard are downstairs in the living room and they answer the door. Despite the fact that he was a fixture of my late childhood, she fails to recognize Andrew and even his name doesn't ring any bells!
Andrew wants to go surfing so we head down to the water. We take a boat out into the bay, which is beautiful, like the Puget Sound. High green hills on either side with houses dotted amongst thick woods. Pat is with us and mentions that he'd like to buy one of these houses. Maybe if it WASN'T San Diego, someone with a reasonable income could have such a dream.
By the way, I swear I was at this scene in a dream at least three years ago. I occasionally have flashbacks to dreams from long long ago, dreams which I have no waking memory of until they are revisited in dream. That is incredible; how much unremembered data is still locked away somewhere in the brain?
We step off the boat onto the friendly docks of a nature reserve and the ranger who greets us points out some of the wildlife. Predominant are alligators, hippos, and the first sea turtles I've ever seen in the wild. Excellent! (Sea turtles in this dream have spots and spend some time on land.)
Unfortunately the animals here have been fed by humans for years. A turtle approaches me and won't unfix his gave from my face. The ranger asks Pat's assistance is helping to train it out of this behaviour. Since Pat has marine animal experience he happily helps out. He gets in the water and taps the surface with a round white piece of foam at the end of a white pole. "The trick is to get it thinking the foam is a boy" and sure enough the turtle diverts its attention back to the water.
We end up at the backyard party of Andrew's family. I sit at a table with Erica, Andy, Richard, Karen, and Mom, who actually has us say a prayer before eating! Andrew is looking to do some painting and I go looking for them in the garage. I'm sure I saw some around. I notice some framed photographs on the walls of the garage, historic monochromatic prints of Andrew's parents' hometown in Missouri. It is a one-road town with just a few simple dark wooden buildings. The photos were taken during a St. Patrick's Day festival (or similar event) and the few people visible are cheering and wear festive hats. The one road is lonely, long and desolate, and disappears at the horizon without more signs of civilization. One photo shows one side of the street, the next shows the opposite and a third looks like it was taken from the air or a tower.
Missouri is very rocky; just endless piles of light brown boulders, very similar to Joshua Tree. I never knew.
eggiweg
I made eggs all morning. Or attempted to, with several failures.
I am staying in a hostel of some sort, and do some grocery shopping (as does everyone else) in order to cook eggs. I toast some bread and then fry 5 or six eggs just perfectly. I am cooking for Erica. Then I stack the eggs on the toast and add them to the pan, to cook just a little bit more.
There are some folks I want to talk to, maybe visiting relatives, or old friends. Many of them adults. (ha! I mean over 50.) And sure enough, I forget about the eggs. When I remember I rush back into the kitchen to sort that out (they should still be okay to eat) and they are gone! And the kitchen is a terrible mess; trash everywhere, half-eaten sandwiches and leftover meat sitting on chairs and couches, dirty pots and pans on every surface, hiding even the burners of the stove. Those filthy bastards! Trashing the kitchen, eating my food, behaving like beasts!
I run to check out the other kitchens of the house (there are a total of about five) just to make sure my eggs aren't somewhere else. Every kitchen is in the same terrible state, and the third time around checking the original kitchen I find the pan I cooked everything in, totally empty with remains of eggs, proving that someone did indeed eat or otherwise dispose of them.
In despair I start over, but all my raw eggs are gone. No longer having any regard for the codes of the kitchen, I steal the eggs of others (who knows how long they have been sitting out) and pull of mostly-uneaten pieces of bread from derelict cheese sandwiches. But I lack the salt and pepper and parsley to season them properly and don't have any butter or oil to cook in, so the eggs are very plain and come out stuck to the pan. And in my haste to get out of that terrible kitchen-state I thoroughly undercook to eggs.
Erica is such a saint, though, and says they are the best eggs she's ever eaten!
*********
This dream directly springs from a few distinct events from the weekend.
1) While writing about my lucid dream on Saturday I was really on a roll so when, unable to keep my hunger at bay, I dashed into the kitchen to make some eggs, I returned to the computer a few times to continue writing between flipping of the eggs and toasting of the bread. I knew very well that it would be easy to get on a roll while writing and totally forget the eggs.
2) We moved Erica into a new apartment yesterday, and it faces the IYHA hostel in the Gaslamp.
3) I cooked dinner last night, friend mushrooms in butter with salt, pepper, parsley. Same ingredients I needed for the dream eggs. I also used Erica's pan that appeared in the dream.
previous week back to index following week