dream!
the flip side of reality
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robot godzillas
I'm planning a weekend road trip with the guys from Heart-N-Soul. It'll be a great reunion, just like the old days. By Friday afternoon we still haven't worked out where we are going to go, and I haven't even packed, but there's no need to stress about it.
I'm living in the dorms of a university and since I have just moved in I'm not sure if the clothing and gear I need for the trip is here or back at my old place. We'll be taking bicycles with us, but I think to myself that bicycling will have to be limited to day trips, since I don't have the necessary saddle bags to do an overnight trip.
The car is parked out front; none of us have cars but someone was able to borrow or buy it for cheap. Unfortunately there is a strange problem and some black parts have fallen out of the vehicle. They are slippery blow-molded black ABS plastic parts and we cannot figure out what the problem is. I examine all the parts (there are about half a dozen) and try to guess their function, in hopes that this discovery will lead to the more important information of how to fix the problem. A few of the parts look like big old rudimentary cell phones, with holes for speaker and microphone, and one of them even lights up with yellow lights down the sides. Freaking strange. Did these parts even COME from this car?
I head back into the dorm room to take a shower. Everyone in this place is a freshman, and I find myself in the shower room with dozens of gruff naked 18-year-old boys. It's intimidating, and I'm shy. I wait my turn for a free shower and it's one with a curtain so I have some privacy.
While I am showering (it's warm and steamy) I look out the head-high window and can see for miles to the horizon. Beyond the university is farmland, and then far-off a small town, and then mountains. It looks like there is a significant fire between the town and the mountains, as a thick plume of smoke rises to the sky, and helicopters are racing around it. I see some sort of large figure marching around on the far edge of town, and I imagine it's some sort of robot that the fire fighters are using to help with the fire (by moving earth for fire breaks, etc.). I take a closer look; it's almost as if I have a zoom implanted in my eyes, and see that there are actually several of these creatures pounding around town and they are alive, not robots. Or at least they look alive. They look like godzillas. Anyway, they certainly don't seem to be helping out. I figure that these 20-ft-tall creatures are running rampant in the town and perhaps that's what caused the fire.
But then a guy with a short beard comes right into the shower, and I forget about the chaos in the neighboring village. What the hell?! I almost ask him to kindly leave but it turns out he has come to give me information about the car. He holds a few of those slippery black parts in his hands and tells me he's certain they didn't come from the car and if I think about the problem in those terms I'll probably be able to figure out the problem very easily. When we talk, he has his forehead against mine, as if we are conspiring in low voices and this is the only place in the building that isn't bugged.
He leaves and when I finish the shower I throw on a bath robe and head out to check out the car again. Now there is steam shooting straight up out of the carburetor. It's getting dark now and I use the small flashlight on my keychain to investigate. I see a large orange butterfly hovering at the intersection of my light beam and the steam shaft, and I figure THAT must be the problem. But the butterfly sees me and flies off; I chase it into the bushes. It lands a few times before I finally catch up to it, and it flies right to my flashlight. So the butterfly wasn't the problem after all; it was just attracted to my light!
But knowing that those black plastic parts weren't part of the problem makes it all simpler and fixing the steam jet is just a matter of adjusting a few bolts in the carburetor. Voila!
********
A few small tidbits of dreams:
-- Although I'm busy at work I attend a 2-hour meeting with a new program manager that needs my assistance. The meeting was only supposed to be an hour long but I feel a reluctant sense of duty to stay and help him out. It turns out that I will be taking over several of Nancy's duties while she is away. That sucks; I was hoping to work part-time this month!
-- Erica and I are engaged in a strange sort of Twilight Zone-style travel where we continually visit a certain house, and every time we get there it has been inhabited by new occupants. On the very first visit we really enjoy ourselves with an extended family (including little kids and grandparents). Their rec room downstairs is full of games and books, and great music. We spend the whole evening there, but when we return the next day everything is different. The nice furnishings are replaced by tattered couches and TVs, and the pool in back is full of leaves. The kitchen is a mess; the place has been rented to a group of young college boys. We return several times and on our third return we find a family of women. Daughter, mom, grandma. They are nice enough and the rec room at least looks okay, but the back yard has been neglected. They are clearly indoors people, and all the shades are drawn. The pool clearly hasn't' been used in months and the patio is bare concrete with no plants or furniture or decor. Lining the back edge of the patio is a giant grocery store-sized refrigerator and freezer, with a year's worth of bulk food. Eggs, water, mayonnaise, frozen dinners, frozen vegetables, and ice cream. But furthering our general disapproval of these tenants is that fact that none of this ice cream is Ben and Jerry's.
--I'm wearing Erica's tattered pair of black shoes. They barely fit me. I show up at someone's house (mom and teenage daughter?) and they tell me that the shoes actually smell quite fragrant. (In real life they certainly don't.)
- - -
hmm, rock climbing, looking for a way home? coordinating my big plan.
score one for seafaring boy
Pat and I are with a group of boys our age at a seaside town. Everyone is getting ready to assemble and leave that evening and Pat and I decide to get out and enjoy the surf one more time. It's not really surfable so we head out in a single small raft to get past the break and just enjoy bobbing up and down on the incoming waves. It's fun since the waves are huge (double overhead at least) but and even larger waves comes through, breaks over us, and deposits us on the shore. It's not so terrible; rather, it's kind of fun so we head out and do it again. That's when I discover my cell phone can take a quick dunking without being ruined.
We head back to the old wooden building where the boys are gathering and most of them are sleeping on the floor. One of the boys is very feverish and I Think to myself that when you are sick and sleeping in an unfamiliar area, it must seem like everyone is sick and be hard to understand what's going on. We gather our gear and head on.
I end up going to a big auditorium (I think it's at my old high school) for a free movie. It's crowded (very popular) so I find a seat fairly far back. But actually, I should say fairly far forward, since they are showing the movie in the back of the auditorium, and everyone must twist their neck around to see behind them in order to catch the movie. But since the seats slant upward in that direction it is especially difficult to see anything on the screen.
A majority of the folk in the audience are elderly.
Before the movie starts I find a seat next to John Liponi and talk to him for a while. He has a few DVDs with him, checked out from the local library. One is about whatever we are going to watch now, and the other is about big brick buildings and architecture from the 1920s. I never knew he was into architecture and we chat about it for a while. I tell him about Danika's apartment complex in Atlanta which is a converted high school from 1922 and he says that he is familiar with this practice and enjoys it.
After the movie I head to the side of the school (remember it's my old high school we watched it in), just east of the MDI building, and watch people walking back to their cars. I intend to interview them about what they thought of the film. The crowd is strangely segregated. The middle class people (mostly white folk) are parked on the other side by the gym and the poorer ones (mostly Mexican immigrants) are on my side here. It feels like Golden Hill on a Sunday evening.
John finds me and sits next to me, gazing over the fence. There is a souped-up pickup truck parked in front of us. It's a tan convertible with leather-covered doors and some flashy chrome. John is obviously very excited about it, and I have no interest whatsoever. HE tells me he is Jeff's mechanic in San Francisco and when Jeff found the windows broken and those condoms inside he took it to John's shop to get repaired and cleaned. So if that's Jeff's car, I ask John, why is it not a Volvo, and what is it doing here while he's still in San Francisco? If his car is any of these, isn't it the blue Volvo parked in front of this truck?
You're right, John says, he was talking about that Volvo in front and the truck is actually his. Again, I doubt him; he had no reason to lie in the first place so I suspect he is still lying. Sure enough some cowboy hat-clad Mexican guys get in the truck and drive off, and John doesn't even chase after them. John immediately fesses up that his truck is way down the row, the unextraordinary blond one. I don't fault him for lying; he was obviously excited about the fancy truck was playing out the fantasy of actually owning it.
Now I watch a movie or am an omniscient observer in another dream. A young teenager, maybe 14 years old, is traveling the earth on his own. His skin is tanned from the sun and he wears a long beard and moustache which make him look closer to 50 than 14. He has the look of being from another century that reminds me of Chris, the guy who got two of Mama's kitten back in my UCSD days. Since the disappearance of his parents well over a year ago he has been hitching rides in sailboats to see the islands and ports of the world.
When I first see him, he is in a schoolyard with kids his age. Despite his beard, they look older than him since he is frail and small. Some of the boys pick on him because he looks different; they don't understand that he has a far greater mind and infinitely more experience than their petty juvenile lives. The grab him and rub him on a patch of ground that is like sandpaper. He struggles and protests and they call him a wuss since they did this to a turkey and even the turkey didn't cry out. Well, the was long dead and cooked at the time they did that. He points it out and they are embarrassed for being caught in that bit of logic. Score one for seafaring boy.
An onlooking girl, actually a well-respected and popular one at that, saves our salty young lad from the mob and comforts him. She is very attracted to him and kisses him on the lips. As he goes on her way she asks if she'll see him again. He says that she most certainly will.
As the camera pans out I learn that this schoolyard is on Catalina or some other island off the coast of Southern California. We follow our hero to his ship and now I am on a boat, in a dream:
I am in the hull of the boat with two men and a woman. The woman and one man (who reminds me of Stan Aguilar) are my age, the other is the captain and maybe in his 40s. The boat looks very old, all made of dark wood, and in the hull (which is no bigger than my bedroom) is a laboratory of sorts, full of glass beakers and test tubes.
Stan is fascinated by a fish he has found. It is swimming about in the room, which is full of water (we are all submerged). It is an ancient-looking fish, about three feet long, with eight stubby teeth that protrude out of his mouth. This is a find on the order of the Coelacanth, which was believed to be extinct for 80 million years when a specimen was found in 1938. Stan notes that this is like being in the 15th century (okay, this particular fish has only been thought extinct for a few hundred years rather than 80 million) and I note that our ship itself certainly does seem older than the hills.
Since we are all new to working underwater, we all realise to our dismay and amusement that farting has serious consequences. It rises to the ceiling and stays there; eventually someone is going to breathe it and be grosses out. I try to catch mine in a glass. Nice end to the story, eh?
against the back wall of the universe
Alan Rosenblum is showing a movie series... all movies shot on digital video. He will be showing them all day; Mm dad and I show up for the first few in the afternoon and I start to live the movie:
It's the future, and space travel is common, and something is up at the far edge of the universe. I must venture out there to find out what the deal is, but it's dangerous. There is a 1.5 mile band of these creatures that are too be avoided, and I must go beyond them on my mission.
As I quickly pass through the cloud of odd creatures, I discover why they are to be avoided. One of them makes its way onto my ship. Just one. It's tiny; about 8 inches long and looks like a black zip tie. It's got some velcro-ey surface and sticks easily to the hull. Looks harmless, but within a minute of me discovering it, it has multiplied into two. They still seem harmless, but since I have been warned about the danger I grab them both and stuff them in a ziploc bag. They shake in agitation, and since the bag won't seal properly it is hard to contain them and before I know it there are half a dozen of them in there. Yikes. I'm still unaware of their danger but the are reproducing at an alarming rate and I know that soon the ship will be full of them.
Then one gets out of the bulging bag and sticks to my skin. Itchy! Red rash! Ack! That is their danger.. they reproduce and cover humans with itchy velcro, and it's either just annoying or pure torture.
My dad and I arrive at our destination with our uninvited passengers and are amazed to find that, living out here against the back wall of the universe, are humans just like us, speaking English, dressed in late-20th-century or early-21st-century clothing. Their representative is a calm man who gives us greetings and asks us if we passed unhindered through the creatures. -Um, no, not quite, and can you help us out here?
He tells us how his people had to outwit the zip ties to come live here at the edge of the universe and they aren't quite sure how to defeat them, but my dad has the conclusive idea that just the right chemical will neutralise them. So we search frantically for any chemical we can find; paint, cream, medicine, oil, solvent... with only a glimmer of a hope that one of these will help us purge the plague.
I know this is a bit anticlimatic but we do happen upon the right chemical and it's over as quickly as it started.
When dad and I return to Earth, Alan is still showing movies and it's late in the afternoon. The place is packed now, all sorts of Woodbury students and associates I haven't met before. We find our way into some seats only to find that he is replaying the first film that we have already seen; heck, we even lived it. Oh well, it ends early and he shows some other shorts that we haven't seen before.
Strangely, there are huge yellow school buses parked among the audience.
marketing scam
I drive to UCLA with Pat and we check in as grad students. I find parking a few blocks away from the center of campus and we head in to check it out. Somehow I find myself immediately checking into some social activity while Pat bums around. It’s an international volunteer program, where we will be placed overseas as part of a science teaching program or something along those lines. All the volunteers are men, and I am the only one from California. Most are from the east coast, having been attracted to UCLA for its fame and international repute.
I fill out their comprehensive volunteer survey and almost immediately start getting tons of terrible email with popup ads and sleazy slogans. I start to suspect that the whole volunteer program is bogus and I go down to their main office to complain about it. Sure enough, the program is run by communications, marketing, and business students, and the international program was just a front for them to gather data on a group of people in order to be a marketing test group. Sure enough, their main office is a little sundry store, where undergraduates are just beginning to explore how to suck money out of their peers. Snacks, pool table, video rental, magazines.
Now I head up to my hotel, which I am sharing with Karen. There is some confusion on the elevator, which is an old-style rickety thing with a sliding metal cage door, and get up to our room.
I head down to the bar in the lobby to gaze at the campus and meet with Dr. Mo. We sit and have a drink together. In the meantime a semi-hippie-looking woman about 40 seems to be waiting for someone across the bar. I can tell she is a corporate traveler like us who longs to meet someone to hang out with other than the typical corporate drones. Eventually she waves goodbye and leaves.
Now it is Erica who is staying with me at the hotel and we are in London. She comes downstairs with a football helmet. She has an important game tomorrow and asks me to get it painted for her and have it shipped overnight since she is leaving on a plane immediately. I take it to the front desk and drop it off, but the next day I realize I forgot to tell them that they are supposed to paint it in the colors of my old high school, blue and yellow. Instead they have painted it like the Raiders, silver and black, and added a cowboy hat on top of it. Ack. No worries, the teenage guy at the desk says he can have it repainted and sure enough he gets it done. It’s sloppy, but will look much better on the field (amongst the other players) then with Raiders colors. Attached to the front of the helmet are giant plastic eyes, the size of tennis balls, with feminine eyelashes. They bobble around when you move the helmet, like a doll whose eyes are weighted to open and close. There is also some sort of pink surgeon’s mask where the mouth should be. I point these out to Erica and she says no worries… those are removable, and they are just put on the helmet so the helmet sizers know they are working on a helmet for a woman’s head.
Erica catches her flight and now I take Karen and my mother for a drive around London. I realise halfway through the drive that I am driving my Honda… how did I get it out on this trip? Shipping it by sea would have taken too long; they must have flown it on the plane for me. I discover this when I notice that I am on the left side of my car while all the other drivers are on the right side. (I only realize now that I am awake that we were also driving on the right side of the road).
We are driving through dense city and then almost immediately are in a more low sprawling area. We see on our left a huge shopping mall that must be London’s first American-style shopping experience. The road then takes us straight out into the countryside but I know we will loop back into the city, since this is a freeway that forms a huge loop around the whole city.
Traffic is regulated by electronic signs that determine your speed. There are stoplights along the way (for cross traffic since there are no overpasses) and the signs will tell drivers how many cars are permitted to continue at any given point. As each new car drives past the sign, the numbers count back down to zero. Everything is precise and computerized.
But it’s not so smooth when it comes to train crossings, and I find myself stopped in traffic near some train tracks. A train comes, and suddenly all the people in front of me who are parked on the tracks are scrambling for cover. The train passes safely, but only barely. Whew. I watch the train as it passes. The cars are red and black, and sloped such as they get taller as you move from the front to the back of each car. Because of this geometry, there is a strange optical illusion akin to the Doppler effect such that the train looks as though it’s moving very slowly.
We then board the train and get a tour. It’s fancy. Dining cars, shopping cars, couch cars. On every other car or so I see a train employee (who are mostly college students on summer vacation) playing with a passenger’s little dog.
bottom bulls
I'm in a sailboat in a bay or inlet, and below the water lie sculptures or formations or old buildings. I grab a snorkel and mask and head down to check it out and see manatees cruising around in the water. It's fascinating and I'd like to get a closer look but in the waves and wind and turbulence from the manatees I can't seem to get far enough away from the boat to get a good view. I'm even a little nervous the boat will hit me so I dive deep.
At the bottom I find dozens of seals, or should I say they find me and are immensely curious. As I hover at the floor of the bay dozens of seals come in rows to check me out and rub their noses in my face. Then the males come; we call them bulls, and do the same. Their faces look like little pugs or pit bulls and I realise that their curiosity is more of the threatening kind and I heed warnings from my companions in the boat above to not make sudden or threatening moves. t all works out okay in the end.
The next dream is a bit cryptic. A white American man has an Asian girlfriend. She has a 10-year old boy that is her son, and for some reason they don't want the boy to know they are seeing each other. The setting is in a Sahara-like desert with countless tall dunes. Every time the boy states a time and date that he wants to see his mother, the man and woman shout to each other over the dunes when they can meet, based on that time. They try to do it in code but it's so transparent that the kid must know what is going on and just doesn't let on. With every encoded call from a man or woman comes a gliding/sliding action, diagonally down a dune. Don't ask me to explain that last bit; it made perfect sense in the logic and mechanisms of the dream.
aquatic taipei
Stefan takes me to Taiwan to compete in a race. It's going to be what he calls a marathon but which is actually a triathlon of sorts. I thought it was going to be just like the one we had raced in before but the day before the race I realise that it is actually one that is TWICE as long, and I suddenly fear that I can't take it on, and start looking for lame excuses to get out of it.
Despite that glitch, Taiwan is really incredible. The people in the city of Taipei are very aquatic, and everyone gets around by swimming. Where we would normally have roads, they have canals. Where we would have sidewalks and alleyways, they have elevated tanks that serve as swimming corridors. It can get difficult to navigate in the crowded areas since often times merchants have set up bar stools where people sit in the corridors and snack on food and drink while sitting right in the tank. In the areas where there are food vendors on either side you must squeeze between large people's asses to starboard and port.
Just like the free public-use bicycles all over certain Scandinavian cities, the city has provided floatation devices called "spiders" that you strap around your middle to assist in getting around easily and efficiently. One design flaw that I see is that you must remove a nut while you strap it on, and then replace the nut. If you drop the nut, it sinks to the bottom and you can't retrieve it. Nobody seems to complain about this or see it as a problem.
I'm hanging out with a few people after we have swum to our destination and a few men show up, declaring that they are looking for something. I immediately pull a nut out of my pocket and hand it to them. Everyone is impressed and amazed by my foresight but really it was the most obvious thing I could think of for which anybody would be seeking a spare.
***
I find out that a friend has died and I must plan a funeral for her. Unfortunately I don't know any of her friends or family and therefore don't know who to invite so I gather my own friends and family. Relatives (like Aunt Betty) fly in from Michigan and all over.
At the last minute, however, I learn that she hasn't actually died (what a relief) but since all these people came out from the corners of the earth, I can't disappoint them (and besides don't know how to tell them) so I decide to go through with the ceremony since none of them know her anyway.
I for some reason am running late and my clothes are filthy. Dust and dirt from caving in the desert. There is a green suit waiting for me that I have to quickly change into before starting the ceremony, at which I will be giving a eulogy. But somehow I get held up in the front room playing pinball or something of that sort, and don't even realise what time it is until 9:29!