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Amsterdam Short Story

An unexpected scene on Prinsengracht, told in words and pictures.

April 22, 2023  3:00 am

Went to sleep at 11:00 pm. Woke up from this dream four hours later. I was
walking along a shady city street in summer on the way to visit my friends James
and Terry at work in a shop. At their corner I stepped into the space and there
was a woman cutting hair in the area between the corner windows. She said she
was busy and couldn't take me. I told her that I wasn't there for a haircut,
just to see my friends. She told me they weren't there (which was obvious). I
turned and left and continued down the street in the direction I'd been going,
wondering where I should stop next, but then I realized that I was completely
naked. I covered my privates with one hand, but people coming my way up the
sidewalk were quite shocked. I thought to myself, "I'm a fat furry old man. Why
am I naked on the street?" One woman tried to hide her child's eyes as they
passed by. Then I woke up with a start. Terry and James both died within a year
of one another over 30 years ago. It took half an hour to get back to sleep.

August 11, 2022  11:30 pm

Went to sleep at 9:30 pm. Woke up from this dream two hours later. I was walking
along a hillside up to a nondescript house, and I knew that inside, just behind
the windows was a group of people who were all like me. I was thinking about how
to explain our situation, and knowing that the gathering of so many of us meant
my time in this body was coming to an end. I rehearsed the story as though I had
to explain it to a stranger who didn't know anything about us. Immortals here on
Earth had been around for thousands of years but they'd learned not to let
themselves wander the corridors of time with that knowledge so they only
awakened those memories in an individual when they met as a group when one of
them was about to tranisition from one body to another. I tried to put together
an explanation about how we were a force for good, that we were helpful,
protective, and in the long long view, a positive factor, but as I got closer
and closer to the house I knew that it didn't matter much since shortly after I
entered the house and met up with my kind, I'd once again shortly forget about
our situation and sink into a fresh life among mortals. I was excited to see
everyone again, albeit for a brief visit, resigned to starting a new chapter,
and relieved to review the arc of my lives through the deep history we shared on
Earth. It took an hour to get back to sleep.

December 22, 2021  3:30 am

Caught in an endless dream loop, the same event with different people, over and
over and over again. I'm sitting across the table from a guy and explaining how
he has to pay this fee becuase the last name of something to do with him is the
same as name about which there's a rule. He's mystified, I think it's a bit
funny but mostly just wrong that we have to deal with this, and then there's
another person across the desk and the scene repeats. After far too many
repetitions I woke up and took about half an hour to get back to sleep.

October 31, 2021  4:30 am

Earlier in this dream I'd been sitting with my back to my car which was parked
on the east side of Castro up near 19th street in San Francisco, and suddenly I
turned around and the car was gone. I thought perhaps I'd dozed off, but it made
no sense, so, in a panic, I set off to try and find it. I was walking up Castro
Street with someone I've never known, and in the dream I never even see him. We
pass a tall slender silver-haired and bearded man just under the marquee of the
Castro Theater and I tell my companion, "I know him...well". But no part of that
statement was true. Yes, I recognized him (in the dream, but not in real life),
but I had no idea what his name was, and I knew I was lying when I spoke, and
immediately entered a fugue state wondering why I'd lie to this guy for no
reason. Shortly, I woke up confused and took almost an hour to get back to
sleep.

May 18, 2021  5:30 am

I finally was given the key to when I'd meet up with the two people who welcomed
me to self consciousness when I was between two and three years old. I was
asking why I hadn't met up with any of them and the people I was talking to said
I wouldn't see them "Until the last that went out are back." In the dream it
made great sense, and was repeated over and over in layer after layer of waking
and remembering, going back to sleep, experiencing another version of the same
conversation, waking up, remembering, going back to sleep, for most of the
night. It felt good but I wasn't going to record it, and now, before going to
bed tonight, I decided to briefly record it.

December 6, 2020  2:30 am

I went out to Lake Michigan to see the high waves. When I got there, the beach
was gone and all that remained was a broad steep sandy slope which is not an
accurate representation of the actual lake. The monster waves rolling in were as
epic as the huge false dune leading down to the water. I carefully walked down
toward the shore and stopped to setup my camera. A wave managed to nearly reach
my spot so I moved back up the slope a ways and began to settle the camera into
a good position. A bunch of people came along and all stood right in front of
me. It wasn't as though they needed to be right there, and it wasn't as though
it wasn't clear that I was going to take pictures. It wasn't as though there was
nowhere else to stand, the slope was as wide as the beaches had been before the
lake rose to record levels. Somehow, as I tried to imagine why they'd block my
view, it occurred to me that it fit into the current political climate where
almost half the voters in our once great nation voted for a science denying,
truth-allergic, racist, billionaire, criminal, dictator for president, so I
wasn't surprised, although, the ever-growing size and reach of the waves toward
my new position managed to wake me up.

November 9, 2020  4:30 am

Sitting at sushi bar counter for the first time in a very long time, I'm
suddenly unable to remember the Japanese names of the fish we're having. The
silvery skin one that is horse mackerel is called aji, but I can't retrieve it
from memory. The white tender one we call yellowtail, but hamachi escapes me
completely. Someone sitting next to me says something about how good this the
food is and I struggle to emit, "Yes, good sashimi." which I know is utterly
wrong since we're having nigiri sushi. And then I'm struggling not to cough, and
thinking I can't possibly be in a restaurant about to cough all over this fresh
fish. The sashimi error apparently goes unnoticed, but my efforts not to sneeze
overwhelm my senses and I wake up.

October 9, 2020  5:00 am

I'm driving north on a freeway that feels like Wisconsin. I'm behind a lady
driving a bit slow, so I accelerate and pass her on the left. But in the process
I miss my exit. The road quickly turns into a construction project with more
sand everywhere. We have to slow down and get off the freeway. The road remains
sandy and leads into a small town. I get to a parking lot, get out, and hike up
a sandy path to a station along train tracks. Inside the station I ask a guy,
"What town is this?" and get no reply. I check my pockets and find that I have
no keys, no wallet, nothing. I try asking how to get to where I'm going, but I
ask them how far it is to Sacramento. Someone says, "That's hours and hours
away." I correct myself, and say, "I meant San Mateo, I used to live in San
Mateo." and they say the same thing. Then I realize I meant to say Burlington,
or Milwaukee, and that doesn't help either. For some reason I can't say Chicago.
Knowing that I won't be going anywhere without my keys, ID, and money, getting
more and more frustrated and confused, I wake up.

August 14, 2020  8:05 am

I step into the kitchen and the door to the back steps is wide open and I'm sure
I didn't leave it that way because I know that I've just woken up, and yet I
also know that I was awake at 5:30 AM, so I also instantly know this must be
dream and I've overslept and then I wake up.

August 2, 2020  4:30 am

It's raining here in the apartment. The windows in the dining area are open, and
when I go to close them, I see that the screen has also been raised, which is
very odd. Just as I reach for the bottom of the screen to close it, a bird flies
in. It's a rather wet parakeet with ruffled feathers. I reach for it and it hops
onto my finger and from there walks up my arm to my neck. I was around parakeets
many years ago, and I know they love to explore people they're comfortable with.
Fine. But I really think it ought to be let back outside. It stops raining later
and I go to open the window. There's another parakeet outside, and the one I
have hanging around with me, hops down to the windowsill and flies to meet the
other. And they begin talking, apparently they know one another, and are
speaking English. That's it for me, and I wake up. It's almost six o'clock
before I get back to sleep.

June 2, 2020  5:45 am

We're in a building on Mars. The room is white and one wall has carved in
shelves that run up about 10 feet. The shelves are spaced eight to ten inches
apart. Bas relief sculptures fill all the shelves. There are human figures,
buildings, objects, and vehicles. There's no question in my mind as I scan row
after row on the wall that this changes history even though I have absolutely no
idea how any of it is possible.

May 13, 2020  4:30 am

Part One: I'm with Lowell Detweiler who's got a boar's head (I'd watched an
episode of "The Durrells in Corfu" that featured a failed boar hunt) that he
intends to butcher.

Part Two: I've got a sketchbook that belongs to Ed (who never kept a sketchbook
as long as I knew him) and while he's packing up stuff to leave town, I leaf
through it. All the sketches are nudes of him in various poses out in the woods.
There's a note on one that says, "Better to lose the ass?", but in fact all the
drawings (some colored, some monochrome) are quite good, utterly lifelike, well
composed, and skillfully rendered. I feel as though I'm trespassing upon his
privacy, but also wonder how he could be so talented without my knowing it.

Part Three: I'm with Lowell who now has two very large blocks of meat which he
tells me are hog jowls. The phrase "hog jowls" gets stuck on a loop in my dream
brain that won't stop.

April 18, 2020  4:20 am

Part One: I'm reading three listings from separate emails about properties for
sale from a real estate agent. The houses are less interesting than the lots
which are all very steep hillsides.

Part Two: Cut to us at the location of the last email. We start walking up the
hillside and back around the right side of the lot and into the hills. It is
open California countryside, spring green grass, live oak, pines and rocky soil.
We get to a crest and I turn to you (the guy with me) and say, "We've been here
before, you and I." but I can't place this familiar fellow who's with me. It's
not Mark, the spirit muffin guy, and it's strange that I feel so comfortable
with him but can't put a name to his face. Is it Dan Billings? A guy from Land's
End? I can't say. The hill extends much higher on the left into what feels like
foothills. We walk over the rise on the right and into a field that widens into
a shallow valley surrounded by forest.

Part Three: Cut to me in the car with the same guy. There's a steady rain
falling, and I'm double parked on the right side of the road heading northwest,
away from what looks to be the edge of a small rural California town. The guy
with me gets out of the car and heads up into a nearby building. In my rearview
mirror, through the rain, I can see cars behind me are leaving their parking
spots and other cars wedge in the moment the spaces are free. I think to myself
that I ought to do the same thing, but I can't get the timing right. I pull
ahead, thinking to make a couple U-turns so I can approach those parking spaces
from behind, but cars coming up behind me won't let me make the turns so I speed
up the road just past the edge of town to where the woods line both sides of the
highway. There's no outlet on the right, so I cross the road at the first
driveway on the left. That dumps me into a field heading back to town below the
grade of the road. I quickly realize I'm trespassing on someone's property and I
try to turn back. The car gets stuck. I get out and see that the way back is
blocked by a high fence. I climb it and fall to the other side. Not hurt, but
surprised to have fallen. I head back up toward the drive and then, a moment
later, I turn back and see myself on lying my side on the ground and that odd
out-of-body perspective punctuates the dream.

April 8,  2020

The same dream fragment from the night before showed up again last night. My
sister Laura and I are walking past several brick houses. There's a middle-aged
guy with frizzy dirty blond hair ahead of us. He's walking up to a house on the
left, headed for the front door. We pass him and veer off into the yard between
the house he's going into and the one next door. I say, "Ken", meaning Ken lived
here, as though this was Dobson Street, but it clearly isn't. We continue on
through the yard and around to the back of the house next to the one the man
entered, and I'm thinking, "He's gonna to wonder who we are wandering through
his yard." At the back there's a window open to the yard, and a woman our age is
wiping down a counter and we ask her if a woman whose name I can't remember is
there and she looks up and smiles and says, "No".

March 29,  2020

We're ten days into a shelter-in-place order from the Governor of Illinois which
is meant to try and stem the spread of the novel coronavirus Covid-19.

I dreamed last night that I was at 18th and Castro Streets in San Francisco. It
was a bright warm sunny day. I was standing on the southeast corner about to
cross 18th Street heading up toward Market. I wore nothing but a pair of tight
black nylon boxer briefs and a pair of sandals. The whole neighborhood had been
cleaned up, painted, polished, perfected to the same standard you'd expect from
Disneyland so it all looks much tidier, much fancier, and much more sparkling
than the real location has ever been. I walked up the street marveling at each
improvement along the way. No one seemed to notice that I was, shall we say,
underdressed, for the occasion. I noted the clean white awnings and colorful
improvements that had been made to all the storefronts. Up several stores past
the location where the Welcome Home restaurant used to be was a pancake house
which was completely open to the sidewalk. I went in and talked to the server
about their offerings and lemon pancakes seemed to be on my mind. Then I woke up
thinking to myself, what exactly was that all about?

March 10,  2020

Recipe for a dream. A Night school class. Fifteen guys are in attendance; there
are no girls, but a female instructor is giving us homework. Our assignment
includes an essay which is due in a week, and us singing in French. Add half a
dozen dirty Oriental carpets. Plus one large leafless tree. Finish with five or
six goats. Mix all the ingredients well, and hope for the best. The carpets and
goats need to be arranged on the branches of the tree. Where the singing comes
in, not to mention the essay, wasn't clear to me at all. The dream went on,
seemingly for hours, the way night classes feel like they'll never end, like you
could fall asleep for hours and wake up in the middle of the same session. For
some reason I thought I had the singing in French part nailed (which is terribly
unlikely). I debated with myself about how practical it would be to have the
goats stomping on the carpets to get them clean. Everyone seemed oddly confident
that they could complete the assignment, but in all the time we spent talking
about it and visualizing the results, no real progress was made.

March 6,  2020

I woke up about 5:00 AM from a dream of walking up the slope of a narrow street
to see if my car had been repaired. There was barely room for a vehicle to pass
between all the shop displays that were out in front of the stores. Lots of
people were out going uphill with me and coming downhill to get back into town.
As I walked through a big group of people I spotted a guy from a previous dream.
He was tall, good looking, but his white hair caught my eye when I first
recognized him. He saw me, and came over to say hello and joined me walking up
the street. He was happy to see me, very friendly and way out of my league. But
after walking just a short ways, I turned to look at him and his hair was dark
brown. Just over his shoulder there was a guy who looked much like him with
white hair. My dream brain asked itself if I was getting confused or what. Did I
start to talk to one guy who was then replaced by another? Where they together
when I saw them? I couldn't resolve the issue, and didn't ask the guy with me
about it. We got to where the shell of my car was (the body of my old gold 1984
Toyota Supra) and knew immediately that it wasn't taking anyone anywhere. We
sauntered up the street until it crested and turned to the right where it opened
into a street along a park. It felt like we'd known each other for a long time,
but my only recollection of him was from a dream some months ago. We walked and
talked and I marveled that I was getting attention from such a nice attractive
man. And before long, I woke up.

February 7,  2020

I woke up about 3:30 AM from a dream that began inside Stuart's beautiful
Victorian home at twilight where I had gone to steal his supply of an unnamed
leafy drug. The odd thing was that I have neither a friend named Stuart nor do I
know a guy who has drugs in his house, so this house, and the landscape it was
in, and the ostensible owner/occupier of said house were all entirely fictional.
At best, these were drawn from composite bits my mind harvested and reassembled
at random, but with dream logic and convincing purpose, from multiple memories.
The entire time I was in his house there was a debate going on in my mind. Why
did I think it was OK to take something that didn't belong to me? Why did I
think I knew where it was? Why did I think I'd recognize it? Why wasn't I
worried that I'd get caught? What did I think I'd do with it that was better
than what he would do? By the time I got to the kitchen and found what I was
looking for, a bag of flour with a very tiny admixture of green leafy bits, and
had picked it up, I had realized that what I was doing wasn't OK, it was luck
that I found it, I would most likely get caught, and I had absolutely no idea
what to do with it. Even so, in spite of everything going through my mind, I
picked up the nearly full bag and took it with me out the back door, which, to
my surprise, was unlocked. I stepped out onto the concrete back stoop and went
down the steps into the back yard which sloped steeply back toward the street
front of the house. The ground was sandy, mostly covered with hummocks of ice
plants. Knowing that my knees and ankles were in injured, I carefully followed a
small sand path that was damp from rains running off the hillside. There were no
more houses on either side of the street to my right so I turned left and went
back up the road toward town. I went in the entrance to an airy galleria some
ways up the street, still carrying the bag of flour and drugs. The first shop
space was huge, all bright white, and filled with colorful three dimensional
artworks that were displayed on carefully arranged stacks of white blocks and on
white shelves lining the white walls. There was, however, no one inside. The
room glowed with light and air. The detail and exuberance of the art throughout
the gallery was impressive. Still pondering what I was doing and why, I left the
bag on a display and wandered out of the building. I woke up feeling guilty and
all but overwhelmed by the creativity of my sleeping mind that had casually
threwn together such a complex, vivid, haunting world all to point out and
bracket what seemed even within the dream like such a terrible decision.

January 25,  2020

I woke up just after 4:00 AM from a dream that began in a wide plain looking
west toward the horizon where, beyond a distant line of trees, banks of the tops
of white cumulus clouds appeared like a wall. Above the clouds, just blue sky
with the sun at our back. Atmospheric perspective turned the distant forest into
a dark haze of blue and green. After a while I asked my companion—who never
appears in the visual field of this dream, he's only spoken to and never heard
from—if he saw a change in the clouds. In just a matter of seconds I came to
feel that they were moving too fast to be at such great distance and that they
were not high clouds, but perhaps signs of a terrible disturbance. I asked my
companion if he was seeing what I was and got no reply. Before long we moved
beyond the forest and were confronted by the wall of roiling clouds. Two huge
openings appeared to reveal a city being destroyed by invisible forces. The
first cloud into which we could see contained a skyline of buildings whose top
floors were exploding, burying the ground in debris. Within the second cloud it
was clear that the city was San Francisco, and the western section of the Bay
Bridge was collapsing in total ruin. My companion and I again moved much closer,
too much closer for my taste. In my mind I knew he wanted to go across that
bridge even though there was little chance it would be standing long enough for
anyone or anything to cross it. I yelled out to him, "Can't you see that there's
no way through?", but he persisted and we approached the on-ramps to the bridge
which were already broken into piecemeal outlines of the multilane, multistory,
multilevel freeway that had been there before this destruction began. From our
viewpoint miles away at the beginning of the dream, up to our standing looking
up at the broken towers and loosened cables over the crumbled road, there had
been two of those movie jump cuts that felt like mental short circuits
propelling us from a distant emotional stance directly into life threatening
jeopardy in less than a blink of an eye.

November 4,  2019

Woke at 12:00 AM this morning from a dream set in a huge park in London. My
mother and my sister Julia and I are walking through the gardens, and upon
noticing the top of a stadium in the distance I mention that of course,
Wimbledon is held there. And I think to myself wouldn't Julia love to see it?
So, we head up a long slope from which we can see the venue. There's a huge dry
waterslide that runs from our station several stories up above the trees down
toward the grounds of the tennis stadium. The prospect of an uncontrolled slide
deters us from our target and both a bit confused and disappointed, I wake up.

October 24,  2019

Dream fragment:

This is the middle and end of a longer dream. There was a backstory to my
arrival at the point where these events occur, but it's lost.

Coming back to a motel room. I walk into the room with its two twin beds, an
open shower room, and a water closet around the corner beyond the beds, both of
which are covered with clothes that spill onto the floor and open luggage. I
turn on a light switch and a jet of water shoots out of a fixture in the shower
room. I go into the shower room and try to make sense of the ultra complicated
piping. Then, in an instant, I'm talking to someone about how the controls work
and they say they'll come check it out, but then I finally find all three
switches in the twists and turned of the plumbing that have to be turned off to
make the water stop. I step back into the main room and watch a animal that
looks like a scorpion navigating a spider silk thread across the entrance to the
water closet. It's too large to be an actual scorpion, and way too big to try
and capture so I set about thinking up ways to exterminate it. I walk back
around the beds to the center of the room and notice that the ceiling is only a
couple inches above my head. Knowing how short I am, it strikes me that this is
a very cramped space. There's a step down to the shower room, so there's a bit
more headroom there, but it's still far from the normal height.

I step out into the parking area and walk away into a meadow. As I pass a house
set down a slope to the right, I see my eldest cousin and his wife at a table
near the window. He comes out, grunts a garbled version of my name and walks
around toward the other side of the house. He's not looking good, his neck is
canted off to one side, and he's having spasms that jerk his head and shoulders
around. His wife gets up from the table but doesn't come out of the house.
Turning away from that scene I walk up a path through the meadow. Two very
small, very playful golden retrievers pups come running up to me and busy
themselves leaning into my ankles and looking up at me as I keep moving. I'm
about to bend down and pet them when I see a couple very flat creatures
scurrying up a path to the right that joins the path I'm on. They appear to be
tiny flat badger/hedgehogs, built like little furry flounders with eyes on the
top of their bodies and tiny little noses. They are soon joined by a couple
smaller pale otters that come down the same path. I lean over to pet the lead
otter toward the middle of his back, wondering if I'm at risk of being bitten,
but it lets me give it a nice scratch, and all I can think is that my niece
would love this strange place with these very cute and unusual tame critters
everywhere before I wake up.

October 4,  2019

Dream fragment:

I'm walking in the woods in the wintertime. There's fresh snow on the ground,
the trees are bare, and it's very cold. As I follow a track downhill, I see two
people approaching, and there's a dog with them. I want to avoid them since I'm
afraid the dog will attack. I set off over a frozen pool next to the road and
get stuck against the opposite bank which, when I get close to it, turns out to
be much too steep and slippery for me to climb. Although I'm wary about my
footing, I manage to get across the snow covered ice, but I am unable to climb
up the bank. My right foot siezes up in a painful cramp in my boot, just as the
dog comes toward me and I wake up with a cramp in my right foot.

September 27,  2019

Lucid dream fragment:

I'm with a group of friends and someone mentions the color of my hair (currently
white in real life, but with some late additions of brown since changing my
diet). I look in a mirror and am surprised to see that it's entirely brown,
there's no white hair in my beard or anywhere. I'm quite taken aback for a
moment, but then it occurs to me, "Oh, of course, I'm dreaming." In bed, I rouse
from the dream for a just moment but quickly slip back into sleep.

September 12,  2019

Woke at 4:00 AM this morning from a dream set in San Francisco which had the
vertical relief factor scaled up more than twice what it is in real life. I'm
with three friends laughing at one of them because he admitted he was having sex
up on top of the hill at 20th and Castro Streets. Which is where we are, but the
hill in the dream is more of a steep alpine slope than the admittedly steep San
Francisco city streets and the scene looks more like the view from 25th and
Grandview, but that's the dream world for you. We go into a unit (I feel like
it's my place) in a dark blue building (that I've never seen) and step out into
the steepest backyard of all time. It's one of those, take a step and careful,
oops, you slipped and are sliding all the way down the hill, places. My friends
give up trying to work their way down the slope and go back into the house. I go
down toward the bottom of the thicket under the canopy of tall bayberry shrubs.
There's no one there. I head back up the slope and hear something behind me.
When I look back downhill, I see a freaking lion prowling around. It notices me
and doesn't wait long before coming up the slope toward me. It has trouble
getting through the dense thicket where I am, but reaches out a paw with its
claws out to try and catch me. And I wake up, heart racing, unable to sleep for
sometime.

August 14,  2019

Then there was this dream I will always remember from back in 1995. I found
myself, my young self, at the nursery school in a church basement in Verona
where my mother would drop off my little sister and I. There'd be some play time
and later maybe a cookie and glass of milk. Then we'd lay down on blankets on
the floor for a nap. I fall asleep and dream about a young Polish boy playing
with his friends. I don't understand anything being said but after I while I
realize that he's actually a friend of mine who had died almost ten years prior.
The realization woke me up from the dream, and woke me up from dreaming about
dreaming. It was an interesting, unexpected, and satisfying continuation of his
life, a life that had offered him no satisfaction when I had known him.

August 9,  2019

The tub

I'm naked in a just more than waist high porcelain on steel tub that is about
six feet long by three feet wide, shaped vaguely like a kidney pool from
Hollywood in the 1960s. It's just under half full of water. There is a jet at
the head of the tub and a drain at the foot. The jet is on, the water is warm
and some chemical process or treatment is taking place. The whine of the water
in the plumbing is all I hear. I play with the controls for the drain and the
jet, letting most of the water out until there's just a few inches flowing
across the bottom. The controls are unlike anything I've ever seen and yet I
know how they work. But the tub is not in a bathroom, it is set in the middle
of...

a cathedral

of soft grey stone which towers overhead. I feel a surge of energy pulsing
through my torso and spreading up through my hands. I raise my right arm and see
my hand swell and change color with a sudden flux of blood and power that
quickly expands out to affect the building. A wash of color flows up the
interior walls that tower hundreds of feet overhead. Everything suddenly appears
sharper and more detailed, and the colors match the deep dark red and venous
blue that have taken over my hand. The pulsing energy in my hand continues, and
fills the space, beating everywhere in the vast reaches overhead solidifying the
pillars, arches, and tracery in the ornate glass windows.

I realize I'm with two other people, a woman who is leading the three of us, and
another man. We know one another and are here with a purpose although all I can
think is that I need some clothes. Small matters like that resolve of their own
accord so with a couple words I'm dressed and we leave the area of the tub and
go down what feels like a darker indoor marketplace corridor to...

an art gallery

filled with dozens of deep green, highly detailed, polished sculptures, of
groups of people, objects, buildings, and all, I realize in a moment, made of
the same thing. I ask the woman, "Are they really made of spinach?" She says
yes, and suddenly I feel and "Alice in Wonderland" moment arrive and pass by
with the thought that I, and in fact we, should choose and eat some of the art,
but instead we walk around a corner into the middle of a glittering...

gift shop

which is an almost elliptical space filled with waist to shoulder high shelves
displaying a profusion of objects I don't recognize. We have a few quick words
with the proprietor before leaving.

I wake up with the feeling that if I go back to sleep, I'll forget this dream in
its entirety. Mentally, I outline the sections of the dream, and then go wash my
face and sit down at the computer to record this gloss of what I can recall.

August 2,  2019

I was sitting with and listening to Taylor Swift talking to Ron Wood about the
music she'd been making. She told us that it had been more free form, more
random, more spontaneous than the studio work she'd done in the past. She was
energized by telling the story and took us on a walk from the balcony where we'd
been sitting down through a hilly town and out into a park, narrating the story
of her new music the whole way. At one point she starts talking about having the
sound of young people's voices in the background and I realize she's referring
to the thirty or forty people nearby. We can hear them all talking, and in a
Glenn Gould moment they suddenly sound musical. Taylor starts to sing, Ron
begins playing the guitar, and they perform a track which is (at least in my
mind) being recorded somehow. After several minutes, a young girl comes over to
where we're sitting, looms over Taylor, bends over and leans in over Taylor's
shoulder, and asks us, "Is there anything you want?" Taylor smiles and answers
her, but I forget what her answer was. Ron stops playing. Taylor and Ron go on
to debate whether or not that track is done. Taylor thinks it is, and Ron
suggests that it could be tweaked some more. Taylor finally says it's perfect
just the way it is, and I agree saying that the part where the girl came over
and interrupted them was amazing. They ask me about what I was doing before and
I tell them about building the sound stage in California and how the role of
Cassandra (the accurate seer in Greek mythology who was cursed to have no one
believe her prophesies) feels to me. For whatever reason, they are encouraging
about what I could do. They ask if it's still a going concern and I tell them it
is. We all get up and leave the park, heading back up into town. Before long
Taylor is well ahead of us, she's visible far up a long, narrow, very steep
stairway. I tell Ron that when they talk about climbing a set of stairs, this
comes to mind. The passage narrows quickly and it comes to feel more like a
ladder. I'm pulling myself up by the handrail, and after a short while, the
walls converge to the point where I can't fit between them. The stairway we
could see from lower down appears to be an optical illusion, it's now just a
painted vertical surface in front of us; Taylor is nowhere to be seen, and I
tell Ron that I can't go any further. He's a step behind me, and agrees. I wake
up.

July 22,  2019

I'm roaming, seeking an address in a landscape of steep wooded cliffs, dense
with summer houses that emerge from the damp rocks, dark windows under deep
eaves, shaded by trees, trees, and more trees. It's a strange endlessly deep
summer resort, the likes of which I've never imagined before. Narrow winding
paths ran in every direction, with all but vertical stairways leading up to
houses that I sensed were up there somewhere, but couldn't make out through the
trees, shrubs, and undergrowth. I'm lost and apparently, so is everyone dragging
themselves through the maze of rocky paths trying to find the tiny signs that
yield little in the way of clues to locations. I meet a couple coming down the
path of one declivity and they beg me for directions but our words sound like
robots speaking foreign numbers and codes which have no meaning and we end up
going our seperate ways even more frustrated than when we met. The longer my
trek goes on, climbing up the stairways that pretend to be streets, past more
and more empty houses perched on impossible hillsides of dark forest, the more
desperate I become. I recite a number like 3897 Jinea as though I could conjure
it to appear right in front of me along the myriad knots of twisted steps.
Eventually I become completely baffled as to why I thought I could ever find
anyplace familiar much less the place I imagined I was headed back to, and at
that moment I wake up, exhasuted, and quickly fall back to sleep.

July 3,  2019

I only remember the last part of a much longer dream. I was wandering through a
huge ancient stone building that felt like it had been retrofitted to be a
prison. I wandered from room to room and felt as though I knew that somewhere
I'd come across an animal. I came to a room setup with a row of half a dozen
outsize metal bathroom stall doors. I tapped the last door in the row open, and
it slowly swung into the space it concealed. Inside was nothing but a tall blue
furry alien shaped like a cross between a giraffe, a horse, and a very sad faced
tapir. It had high shoulders, but wasn't more than five feet long from nose to
tail. It looked directly at me but didn't move. I left that room and found
myself in a vast open atrium filled with piles of hundreds of roughly four by
eight foot slabs of stone that could have been quarried in place from the drock
the building was built with and constructed upon. The blocks all had grids of
raised icons carved on the surface. Three other young men were walked around on
the jumble of stones. They said that the stones worked like telephones, they
could be used to communicate with the alien gods of the religions that were
represented by the icons. I joked with them, "So you mean you could dial up
Catholicism and its guilt, just like that?" The guy I spoke to said, "Yes,
exactly". End scene.

June 22,  2019

Last night's dream sonata was all about not having it together when nothing else
mattered. I was driving through what looked like a hilly coastal town in New
England, on my way to my first day on a job, or was it an interview for a job?
In any case I keep reciting the address which is like 7280 V-something street,
and suddenly I'm almost at the end of the street that's supposed to get me
there, and V-something road is nowhere to be found. Instead I'm at 100 Somewhere
Else Street, and can't get the GPS to search for the proper address, which it
was supposed to already be programmed with, and I can't believe I've somehow let
this get out of hand. I look at my watch and realize I have just over 10 minutes
until I'm supposed to arrive, and I have no idea where I'm going. That sinking
feeling that this is neither going well, nor going to end well, resonates for a
long while before I wake up.

May 26,  2019

I remember the end of a long dream from last night. I was outside on a rocky
hillside. Think off the slickensides at Red Rock Hill in San Francisco. They are
deeply weathered orange cherts that break up into rough cubes ranging from a
couple inches down to gravels and sands. I needed to get down the hill and
followed a track that appeared to trend down. The problem was that when it
passed through a v-shaped declivity it turned sharply back up and and down the
hillside without getting me down onto the road into the valley. I thought to
myself that there was no way that would work, so I turned directly downhill,
even though I couldn't see my way to get from the cliff down onto the path
below. Since I didn't want to backtrack and start over, I worked my way down to
a point that dropped off straight down onto the path, but when I got there I
realized that I'd been tricked by an optical illusion. It wasn't a ten foot drop
off the overhanging rock that it had appeared to be from up on higher ground.
Instead, it was a short step which I'd misread as a perilous escarpement.
Relieved, I stepped onto the path and woke up.

May 21,  2019

Last night I woke up at 4:00 AM from a dream about rockets. We were in an oddly
small hangar prior to boarding a rocket plane. I hesitated getting on the craft
and after my companions had boarded, the pilot maneuvered it out through the far
side of the building toward the launch field. I felt certain that it was going
to be a disaster, and worried that even if I wasn't on the flight, I still might
be part of an explosive failure near the ground. Instead, as I walked toward the
open hangar door on the opposite side of the facility my flight had just left
from, another launch began around a corner behind my location. Enormous sprays
of sparks and burning yellow and blue light competed with a deafening roar that
signified the takeoff of a 25 foot cube (which looked to have been purloined
from an oil drilling rig) and turned out to be a flying platform powered by two
rocket engines. The exhausts bellowed and flamed and carried the platform past
me as it headed up into the sky. At 100 feet up, its flight halted and hovered
on two cones of flame. Then it quickly descended to a soft landing back on the
field directly in front of me. The engines cut out and surprisingly, I could
hear the pilot, standing in the middle of this improbable contraption (which was
clearly made airworthy only through computer flight controls) a lab coat his
only flight gear, as he looked at me and said, "How about that?" Relieved that a
disaster with my flight wasn't involved, mystified about what could possibly be
going on, I woke up and didn't pretend, even just to myself, that sleep would
come easily again.

April 23,  2019

I dreamed that I was in a rental car heading north in hilly California on a
freeway late at night. I pulled off into a lane that led into a huge parking
structure. Deep inside the building, the road split. The left fork went back to
the freeway, the right brought me up a gated ramp. In front of it were four or
five men. I got out of the car to talk to them. The closer I got to them, the
clearer it became that they were patchwork chimeras, produced in some dark
experiment. None of them had two eyes that matched, and their faces looked like
a merger of too many soft plastic parts held together by unnatural forces. They
spoke in tones that made it clear they had practiced lying and persuasion and
little else. My instinct was to buy time, asking nonsense questions, trying to
focus on my chances of escape, trying to see around their twitches and grimaces
as they pushed and plied me with a need to move past the gate. Seeing only
deadly danger lay that way, and with no other way to go ahead, I went back to
the car, and escaped into wakefullness, no longer interested in the rewards of
sleep.

April 22,  2019

I dreamed that I was standing behind a seated Pete Buttigieg and started giving
him a neck and shoulder rub. He seemed OK with it until I got to his left
shoulder at which point he said, "New tattoo." I said, "So it hurts." I took my
hands off him and then had to wonder what I was thinking of. I mean, really,
what led me to touching him in the first place, and how could it possibly have
been appropriate? The dreaming brain sure works overtime. I woke up feeling
guilty about behavior that I enjoyed but didn't actually do. It makes me wonder
if some forms of infectious Catholicism can be airborne.

April 21,  2019

I woke up from a dream that had Ed (my ex) and I trying to get someplace in a
hurry in present day Chicago at rush hour. He was driving us south along a
street that ran along the freeway which was some thirty feet below us on the
right. I commented that traffic (which was dense stop and go in both directions
at best) was really moving well. And immediately felt bad for saying it. It
wasn't as though he hadn't noticed that it was going to be slow going. We
eventually came to a point where there was construction and no way forward so we
got out of the car and tried to get across the construction area on foot. We
found ourselves in a shed with an opening on the far wall inside that opened
onto a single lane of traffic that we needed to cross. The oddly shaped shed
made it a blind crossing so cars would race by seemingly at random. We debated
how to proceed but finally stepped out to cross the lane. It turned out the lane
had been blocked off so there were no more cars coming through. It was a both a
relief and a letdown. And oddly, it was quite clear that the lane wasn't wide
enough to accomodate the cars that had been speeding by. I suppose that's a
pretty typical dream brain conundrum, where actual facts are construed to be as
fungible as the forever lying Republican operative Sarah Sanders and miserable
dummkopf-in-chief Donald Trump would have us believe.

April 14,  2019

I'd love to know how many of our top 10% of wealthy folk also collecting Social
Security, and taking advantage of Medicare. C'mon. There's gotta be a statistic
out there somewhere. I mean, there was a report the other day that that the
richest man around, Jeff Bezos, only takes $84,000 a year in salary, but that
also means he only pays into Social Security on that tiny bit of money. It looks
like yet more tax avoidance to me, from someone who can well afford to chip in
his share.

February 2,  2017

Six things worth changing in America, the sooner the better.

All State and Federal employees and elected officials should rely upon Medicare
and Social Security. There's no reason for them to get special treatment. It
isn't as though they are unpaid volunteers.

Gerrymandering should end. Software that knows nothing about politics should be
used to move us toward equal representation at the State and Federal level.
Gerrymandering is a bad faith attempt to grab power by undermining the ideal of
one man one vote representation.

The Electoral College should end. It has yet to serve a purpose and it is even
more inequitable than most gerrymandering.

Single payer health care is the only fair approach for this country.

End Citizen's United, corporations are not people.

Reset the Social Security deduction limit to tax the first $5,000,000 of income
and index it to the CPI every year. You'll never see a problem funding Social
Security if this is done.



November 3, 2016

New York Dream Journal 1975

Fade in to the dream time.

It is a clear quiet night on the outskirts of a North African coastal town. Dry
sparks of white stars and a sliver of the crescent moon add their glow to the
deep blue black sky. It's still warm, but much cooler than it was during the
day. Two of my best friends and I are climbing the exterior steps that lead up
to the roof of an adobe covered house. We're wearing dark robes, talking softly,
laughing, and happy to be able to cool off and take our ease in the comfort of
the night. I recognize my friend Ritchie, but the other, who seems to know us
both just as well as Ritchie and I know one another is someone I can't name. We
laugh and talk and our faces shine in the glow of the moon and the stars. The
moment fades to black.

Several years later, back in real time.

It's a beautiful sunny summer day. I'm sitting on a log along a path that winds
around the southern side of the hill that is Buena Vista Park in San Francisco.
The unknown young man who seemed to be such a friend in that New York dream of
North Africa, comes walking down the path in shorts and a T-shirt. We greet one
another without any sign there's a connection. But when the conversation turns
to the East Coast, where we'd both spent time, it turns out he was good friends
with Ritchie too. His last name? Pentecost.

I got to know him, for at least the second time, or so it seemed to me. I had a
powerful crush on him. Eventually we spent an affectionate but chaste night
together. He understood that I wanted him badly, but this time around I wasn't
his type. He was mine though. He was so compact, attractive, familiar, and sure
of himself, all I could do was long for him and let him pursue the men he
desired.

October 29, 2016

An open letter to every web designer on earth, and their clients.

Please, I clicked on your pop up request on your site's home page to sign up for
your newsletter solely in order to close the pop up. No, I don't want your
newsletter. And NO, I don't want to ever see that pop up again. C'mon. Use the
cookie you dropped on my system to remember that. And, for fun, how about
putting an easy-to-find link to subscribe to your site's newsletter in case I
finally wake up one morning and realize that I can't go on living a happy life
without getting daily pitches from the folks at
"___fill__in__your__site's__name". Is it really asking too much of you to show
that much consideration? Or should I write a script that signs up with a dead
end email address, or 500,000 dead email addresses to annoy you and your client
as much as you're bothering me?

October 24, 2016

Djawana know what I think?

No?

Well I'll tell you anyhow!

I've just got to say!

If I was the moderator of those 2016 presidential debates, I'd have had a cutoff
switch for the candidates microphones, and I would have used it. And I'd have
rehearsed that with them beforehand so they had a clear understanding of what
they were facing. Not only that, I'd have a clock on screen that they could see
to know when their freaking time was up.