ill o' dreams

We're all at the lake. A lake. The lake. Off of a wooden dock, there are people canoeing back and forth, plus swimming. I'm in the water, with them and there's a dark form moving menacingly through the murky cedar water. People start talking about it, that it must be a small shark.

It turns out to be a baby dolphin, and it swims to me. I pet it and we play some sort of game. It's great, really great to play with a dolphin.

We had to get out of the water, and I felt a terrible loss. All I wanted to do was get back in the water, and when I woke all I wanted to do was go back to sleep, so I could be back in the water.

Note: in the sense of "knowing" something inside a dream that isn't part of the narrative, I "knew" that the dolphin was Tsuki.

I'm working for MacTemps again, and working in Washington D.C./New York City, which are apparently the same place. I have a hiuge conference table for a desk with hundreds of piles of paper on it. All I remember is sitting at the table, doing nothing, and staring at the piles. I think "I was never that good at this job before, but now I'm doing good work."

Rick offers to help me get all of my baggage (which of course is an unimaginable pile of bags of all types, from suitcases to piles of LPs wrapped in plastic bags) into the car, which is several blocks away. I offer to go get the car and bring it to the things, but he says it's just as easy to walk to the car. This begins to take forever.

I'm carrying a stepladder across a huge highway, it's bulky and hard to carry. Suddenly there is a huge black bear in fornt of me. It becomes angry, and I realize that I'm near a dumpster that it considers it's food source. I begin backing away, holding the stepladder in front of me like a shield. I keep backing into more dumpsters. There are an impossible number of dumpsters out on these streets.

The bear is chasing me, taking swipes at me with it's huge paws -- claws out. It's roaring with it's tongue out, and I keep thinking that there's no way I can outrun a black bear... even if I was running forwards.

I've fallen on the sidewalk, and I'm waiting for the bear to kill me, or whatever. But then he's gone. I get up and look around and am pulled out of the way of a man walking briskly by with a face that has feline characteristics. Someone I can't see tells me to watch it--he's a lion. I realize that many of the pedestrians walking the street around me are lions, and I'm in the lion part of town.

The lions have changed into people, and they walk the streets and live people lives, but they're still lions. They're very dangerous, they will eat you up.

I start walking, looking to get out of this neighboorhood. The lions seem to get more and more numerous. It's getting dire, and I duck into a doorway. Looking around, trying to get my bearings I realize that everyone in the place has lionish features. A surly tawny man playing slots, a couple mean looking people playing poker. A scantily clad lioness lady serving drinks. I'm in a lion casino, and I'm in a lot of trouble. Anything could happen in here.

I get the hell out of there by unspecified means.

Back at the MacTemps bar or party, I'm talking to a cocktail waitress or co-worker, I'm not sure. I'm telling her about how freaked out I was by all the lions.

She gets sad, and angry. She can't believe I don't understand how it is for the lions, having to live here and how horrible it is. I realize that she's a tiger, living incognito in the world, working for a temp agency. She's so beautiful and fragile and tragic, I just want to talk to her, to know her. But I have to go outside.

Kathy and I are outside. "Where are the dogs?" she says. Jen Ford is smoking a cigarette and says to us, "Oh don't worry, I got them a walk" and gestures over to a parking lot.

I see Yoshi and Tsuki run by, chasing something. They'e pulling another dog behind them who is holding their leashes, and riding a skateboard. We run franticallly after them, yelling their names.

I tell Kathy that I don't have any treats. She doesn't have any either. How can we get them to come back? I realize I have a flashlight in my pocket, which I pull out and turn on, to get them to chase the beam.

Yoshi immediately runs toward me from across the street, nearly getting hit by a few cars, which all slow down. I grab his collar. Tsuki is not as interested in the beam, so she starts running in circles in the street, almost being hit a few times.

I yell her name, and she comes to me. She jumps into my arms and want's to be held like a baby, like she does when she's scared.

Everybody's safe.

We're all ( in that all sense that is somehow everyone I know) in the house--this is to say my house which is all of the houses I've ever lived in--and a snow storm is coming.

But not a snow storm. More like a snow volcano that has erupted and sent an avalanche of snow heading our way.

We're doomed, we'll be crushed under the weight of all the snow. I'm begging Kat and Yoshi to get under the dining room table with me. We might be safe there, if the house collapses.

Yoshi won't come under the table. Kat keeps getting up because she has other things to do.

I look out the window, and see the wall coming towards us. I run upstairs to find them.

Both of them are dawdling around and I scream for them to come down, no one is listening.

From an incredibly large order of fries, I grab a french fry the size of a baton and wave it under Yoshi's nose. "Come on Yoshi!" I yell.

The snow hits the house, everything goes to slow motion. Yoshi and I float down the stairs. There is the crinkling of snow, like christmas tinsel amplified crashing into the house.

Yoshi and I lay under the table, freezing as snow envelops the house. The house does not collapse. It's freezing.

[unremembered transition]

I wake, and I'm above the covers. Yoshi is rolled in a ball, pressed tightly against my legs. I'm freezing.

Scott and I are walking down a street, a really hilly street, like in San Francisco. We start making frisbees out of trash blowing along side us, it's really windy. Gusty, like a hurricane.

Our frisbees go really far.

A frisbee goes flying and lands in a small park set back from the road, about a half mile away.

"Wow," says Scott, "that one went almost 2400 feet. That's impossible"

"Well, that's how far you have to shoot when you're an archer," I reply.

Kathy and I are driving around an abandoned suburbia housing development, on impossibly pretzel like roads. We're discussing the houses, which are all falling apart, but have impeccably groomed yards.

I comment casually that we're in the area of the development that people can't live in, because of all the radiation. "I've been thinking we should get one of those geiger detectors," I say absentmindedly.

"Yeah, we should really try to get one of those," Kathy replies flatly, as if we we're talking about a loaf of bread or a new universal remote.

Kathy and I are driving cross country in an RV. She'd driving, sitting on my lap. I remark that it's a lot more fun to drive like this, because I can make faces at the drivers that she's pissing off.

She's driving like a crazy-woman.

We take a Jersey-style loop exit, where your vehicle is at 45 degree angle while you go around loop, and cut off another RV wile we're doing it... it's not really our fault, they're being ambivalent about whether they're taking the exit, continuing on the highway, or on the shoulder.

I think the driver makes a mean face at me, and think about it.

Unremembered transition.

Kathy and I have left the RV on the shoulder, and we're walking Yoshi by the side of the road. Kathy has trained him with a new command, where she sweeps her arms like a baseball umpire and yells "SAFE," to which Yoshi will curl up in a little ball on the side of the road, like he's sleeping. Even though she's doing this to get him off the road when cars go by, it makes me nervous.

And that RV that we cut off is behind us.

Impossibly, we keep ahead of the RV for miles, somehow each yelling of the word "SAFE" propels us forward, leaving our pursuers in the dust. We duck into a multi-story concrete parking lot.

In here, the jig is up. The pursuing RV pulls behind us with screech.

A man jumps out, he has a chalky white dot on his forehead, but other otherwise looks like a normal, if irate, skinny white guy on an RV vacation.

"If I get one more bonk on the head from my mirror I'm gonna kill someone!" he yells, with great frustration. "Does your RV have one of these mirrors that bonks you in the face?"

We talk to him for a while. I'm agitated, because I can't believe all he wanted was this conversation. They begin to start their RV, and I too nervously tell Kat we have to go. We go outside, but they're coming out, I make Kat go back in to the parking lot.

But then they're gone. We go back to the RV.

Kat sits in the RV with her legs spread, and I try to have sex with her. She screams like a little girl and hits me on the head and says "eeeewwww gross! I'm sick, that's gross," etc. and I look up, and the RV is hurtling down the dusky highway, slowly veering towards a lane of oncoming traffic. Very annoying.

"Oh crap, I forgot to stop the RV," I say.

We are all sitting around (all of us, every one, I suppose), it's a party at least a television event, there is popcorn and soda. Everyone is there, the atmosphere is cheerful and giddy.

There is an old man, hovering on the periphery... a jewish grandfather type, wearing a seesucker suit and mopping his face periodically with a handkerchief. He is a bluer shade of celebration, bitersweet. We talk for a while. He makes unrememberable jokes, which make me laugh gently.

[unremembered transition]

Outside, I'm walking to the door coming back in. I reach for the door, and see that it is ajar. Peeking from behind it is a gray, rubbery statue of the old man. Intrigued and slightly frightened, I reach for the staute to probe it with my hands, when the old man callls from behind it.

He is a cancerous wound of a face. There is nothing human about his features, except perhaps the almond shaped slits that I recognize from out earlier conversations. His skin is pink and smooth, bulbous in all the wrong places. He tells me about the circumstances of his disfigurement, and how the full body mask is a reasonable alternative to being shut away all the time, but he gets so hot.

I reassure him that it looks good. It looks good on him.

[unremembered transition]

We are walking around the city, (a foriegn city? Frankfurt?), taking Irving on his first walk through the city.

A fat man, he has a fishtank. In the fishtank is a tiny mermaid, the size of his palm. He keeps reaching his palm into the fishtank, to reassure he and give her comfort.

She is terrified of me, and retreats to his palm when I get near the fishtank.

He coos to her, trying to reassure her that I'm nice and that she should say "hi."

I'm at the old squat, Hell Squat, with a still camera and a video camera, taking footage, documenting, mostly shitty walls. I go for this sort of thing.

I'm leaving and there's a black guy, really looking roughed up by life on the street; one eye squinting, jeans so faded they'd be white if they weren't so grey, ashen dirt all over him. He's trying to get my attention, he wants something. I'm trying to ignore him.

He sees my camera. I panic, thinking he's going to try to take my camera, which is a heavy box of unlikely gears and levers with an insanely complicated 6-lens telescoping assembly, looking like some sort of fractal cannon.

He doesn't want money or the camera, he wants help, help dragging the bags out of the basement.

I never went in the basement.

He's dragging some now, I hadn't noticed before. Thick, black contractor bags, with something sticking at odd angle out of the central mass, like 2x4s or branches.

"What's in the bags?" I ask.

He opens the bag to show me the bodies. Rotting, desiccated, legs are all I can really get a good look at, yellow skin, oozing sores.

I run.

[unremembered transition]

A policewoman is questioning me. She's beautiful and black, like a TV show cop on a show about models who quit modeling and become cops. She has hair braids, island style, like Bo Derek in 10.

I'm the prime suspect, but she's pretending that maybe I can give her some clues as to who really did it.

I'm trying to remember anything, any clue and then I remember... it was Bob! I start shouting at her, "Bob, bob... he lived in the front room, he had a computer and this is like 1984." I look over at Kat, who's on an incongruous bunk-bed off to the side... "was it 1984?"

"More like 1987, hun," she says. She is bored out of her mind.

"Okay it's more like 1987, but come on! Nobody had a computer then. And this guy had a computer, and he was a programmer, and he had money, but what was he doing at the squat? What was he doing there?"

The policewoman seems amused, but helpless.

"How am I going to find this guy?" she asks finally.

"I don't know, but I see him around. I've seen him on the trolley... he's around. He's in Philly! His name is Bob!"

[unremembered transition]

I wake, later and I remember: his name wasn't Bob.

In my head I hear a sound, more of a distant memory of a sound... a [whee! whee!] sound, like a bat screech mixed with a squealing tire, staccato, repeated once.

[whee! whee!]

"Vince," I mumble.

His name was Vince.

I'm walking in a rural area, along a road....think New England versus Mississippi. The road seen from a helicopter is a huge imperfect circle. I'm walking home, by way of the antique shops.

All the shops are doing badly, what with the economy the way it is and all... I spend quite a bit of time looking over various eccentric antique instruments that are all priced in the $100-300 range. I really want this strange radio-organ that can be best described as a 1940's style console radio mixed with a hammond organ.

I'm not sure if I can afford it though. I also feel like I'm insulting my neighbors, like buying the thing would be some bizarre act of charity.

I don't buy it. Some other things happen. Something about a little boy who lives in the store.

I'm sitting with a bunch of women, my co-workers. We're all talking about our diets, and laughing about how much water we are all drinking. When we get up there's interminable chatter about nobody forgetting their water.

It's a good time.