updated 4/29\05

 

 

4/25PIRATE DREAM

I had insomnia until like 5 am, and went to sleep at which point I had the following dream, consisting of 5 vignettes that appear to be telling the same story in 5 different ways.

ok, so I am a Pirate (finally!!). I have just been recruited for my first pirate voyage. The scene opens with a super helicopter-long-shot of the port city, with many strange and fanciful buildings in shades of teak and gold. The camera soars in a gentle arc, slowly zooming in to a particular pirate ship, the biggest, baddest ship in the area. The pirate captain is giving a speech to the new recruits. . .part corporate recruiter and part drill instructor. He is speaking from the very top of the crow's nest, but it sounds like he is standing right next to me. It is a fine day but the wind is fierce and as he talks the ship rocks back and forth, but the captain, like a gyroscope, always remains vertical on top of the Crow's Nest. At times the ship pitches almost 90 degrees, so the pirate captain is standing on the SIDE of the crow's nest, and he is maybe 100 feet inland?the mast is so tall that it literally hangs over various saloons and inns of the town. But never once does he get afraid or interrupt his terrible speech.

'christ, why doesn't he just deliver the speech on land, where we are?' says a voice next to me. It is eric idle, from monty python. He is here both as an investor of the pirate voyage and hawking his latest python ripoff, a boxed set of kids' activity books. As the captain drones on about the life at sea, I get bored and start reading mr Idle's box set. But inside the box are nothing but smaller boxes, and they are all weird rhomboid shapes so once I take them out, it is impossible to get them back in the main box, and the more I try the more it becomes this kind of horrible Rubik's cube type deal where it gets more and more awry.

I give up and open the biggest book, which unfolds into a meter-wide map. 'HELP THE PIRATES FIND THE TREASURE!' says the caption. Apparently this game is based upon the real-life mission we are about to undertake. The rules are, The treasure is inside a giant squid at the bottom of the ocean, and you have to guide the ship to it. the board is covered with these small and seemingly blank transparent sheets, but when you warm them in your hand, and then press them down at certain trigger points on the board, a message appears magically in black ink, presenting you with a word problem or logic problem. If you solve it within a certain period of time, you advance to the next problem, and your pirate ship moves forward a space.

The card I drew reads, 'TRUE OR FALSE: the pirate ship has to pass through over 12 of the squid's stomachs in order to get to the treasure.' Although the squid on the map DOES have a large number of stomachs, (each with its own challenge one would assume) right away I suspect this is a trick question and there must be a secret way in. just then, my pal Padu from art school says, 'oh god I remember this game. It took me months to find the back way into the squid. I was so addicted to this. My parents were hippies so they would let me stay up all night playing, and in the morning they would come down to find this emaciated, pale figure whose back was all fucked up from hovering over the board all night.'

There follows a short vignette about a jelly-fish chiropractic clinic which I can not recall properly, aside from it looked painful.

3. jellyfish.

Meanwhile Eric Idle is taking me on a tour of a huge, zeppelin-sized silo in the pirate town. Inside is?suspended from the roof -- a 100 foot tall model of a giant jellyfish. It is huge and magnificient!! We are on a catwalk near the top, slowly circling it, while slowly descending. The model is just insanely realistic with millions of tiny tentacles and such, the closer I get, the more I realize that it is not totally solid. In fact, it seems to be constructed as a lattice of finely textured strips. So from the side it seems solid, but the lower you get, the more of the intersitial space between the strips you can see. We continue going down, and the jellyfrish, while retaining its totally intricate shape, begins to be less-and-less texture and more-and-more interstitial space. . . and the light filtering down through the roof of the silo is now shining through these millions of interstices, and the jellyfish is gently rotating back and forth in the wind, causing these totally hypnotic spiral patterns to imprint themselves on my retina. We are now almost at the bottom of the silo now, looking directly up through the epicenter of the spiral and I am totally mesmerized.

This whole gradual descent is accompanied by a monolog from Mr. Idle, saying that basically, as an investor, people think he must be rich but in fact he has been losing money for years and in fact spent the last of his money on this pirate expidition. But, he sighs, the fact is, the writing is on the wall. The age of pirates is basically over. Sure, it might hang on a few more years but we are the last of our generation. Even though I own this mighty jellyfish it cannot save me.

4. kiss my ass

I am minding my own business, when a fellow crew-member tells me to turn on the tv. On tv it is the 'sea-faring-fellows weekly news show.' Pictured is a huge huge cargo boat of the very modern variety. On it is what looks like an airplane hanger the entire width of the boat, protruding from which are not one but two giant fish tails maybe half a mile long each. Accompanying this strange footage is the voice of some sailor-guy in a 'Man-in-the-street interview' saying, 'Yeah, Schultz is the reason this industry is failing now. He is a disgrace to us.' Suddenly I am yelling back at the TV, hey buddy, you see that red flashing light on top of the boat? Near the captain's quarters? That is no warning beacon. That is my red, red ass mooning you. Kiss my ass, and your momma can too.' I look down, and there in my lap is an issue of SEA-FARING-FELLOWS-THE-MAGAZINE which already has my quote printed in it. I think, oh boy, the guys at work are going to kick my ass for starting some more shit again.

As penance for dissing that guy's momma, I have to single-handedly unload the giant fish from the cargo boat. Which is not as huge a problem as it sounds, since I have somehow grown to 1,000 foot tall. But the fish are still twice as big as me, and I REALLY do not like the slimey feel of their dead scales as I drag them off the deck and whip them over my head in a judo-like motion.

5. sink or swim

now I am a pirate recruit again. All us recruits are on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a mile-wide inlet at midnight. The pirate captain, still as irate as ever, is still giving his endless speech, this time while standing on a fucking 50-foot-long great white shark, while crossing the lake towards us. He is like, 'OK MATEYS, YOU KNOW I DON'T WANT NO PUNKS ON MY CREW SO AFORE YOU SET SAIL, THERE IS ONE LAST TEST YOU HAVE TO PASS. IF YOU HAVE THE BALLS, YOU WILL JUMP ON THE BACK OF A GIANT MUTANT SHARK, AND RIDE, LIKE ME, CLEAR TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE! ARE YE MAN ENOUGH???'

naturally we all jump on. But midway through the lake, the captain, a maniacal gleam in his one good eye says, 'AYE, LADDIES, BUT I DID NOT SAY YOU AND I WOULD RIDE THE SAME SHARK! YE MUST TAME AND RIDE YER OWN!!! SINK OR SWIM, MATEYS, HAARRHARHARHARHAR!!' and with that, the giant shark bucks like a bronco, throwing us into the brackish water, in front of us is a whirlpool, out of which are coming dozens and dozens of huge huge sharks, mouths open wider than we ever thought possible.

 

 

 

6. bonus vignette! whale band

imagine a band whose stage-show was basically a life-size blue whale with a giant-oversized-novelty zipper in its belly, unzipped to reveal the band, and all its gear, in the belly of the whale, facing the audience. This is the concept of my new band. I am trying to describe this to some japanese guy at a bar. He says, jesus man, how do you afford a freaking whale? I, embarassed to admit that I just happen to have a whale handy, make up some lie about, 'well, funny story! You know the big famous maritime research university on the edge of town? The one whose mascot is a giant whale? Well, our drummer is the son of the principal, and he was like, dad can I borrow the whale tonight? And his dad was like ok son. How's that for lucky!' and the guy was like, um, what famous maritime research university? And I was like, um you know, the one next to, uh. . .all the less-famous maritime research universities?? Cmon you are japanese you should know this stuff.

 

 

 

MONDAY 25 SURREALIST VAMPIRE

As may have been apparent from my recent posts, I have been suffering from crippling insomnia for the past month or so. The good news is, yesterday night I finally got caught up on sleep!! Had this fucking amazing dream to celebrate. It was this sort of combination of American Idol and Anne Rice and Gladiator and Art Forum.

And Iron Chef. Always Iron Chef.

The dream operns in this city at night, where a group of hipster vamipres are competing to be the next Surrealist/Dada art superstar. But, not famous yet, they have to work cliche day jobs in bars and bohemian cafes to make a living?but unlike cliche Struggling Artists, they don't have to work there to make money. . . .they work there to kill and eat the horrible greasy-haired thrift store hipsters who patronize those places.

Oddly enough the main character, a lady cohabiting with a human male boyfriend, is never seen. She is just off the side of the frame the whole movie. Anyway she lives in a cliche glamorous loft space. the cops kind of know she is behind a series of bizarre disappearances, so they put cameras in her apartment . . . but she is a vampire so she does not need light, so the cameras can't see anything. However, the human male boyfriend is a neat-freak, and has this super advanced 'sharper image'-style vacuum cleaner with lots of little lights built into it. So the cops can only eavesdrop when he is vaccuming. Why do I dream this kind of stuff??? You tell me.

Anyway, long story short, the cops found out that she keeps files of totally incriminating information on the city's rich and famous elite of art critics, and the cops are so greedy for this dirt that they just turn a blind eye to her cannibal antics.

Anyway some malevolent power challenges her. At first the interruptions to her perfect life are subtle, coincidental-seeming. But then the harassment escalates-- break-ins, the kidnapping of her daughter. . .. until finally she breaks down --the unseen surrealist vampire heroine does -- and shrieks, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??? And at last the malevolent power announces its true intentions. . . . to battle her in an Iron Chef-style freestyle Dada art battle . . . . to the death!

The malevolent power is ALSO never seen. It seems to be a shadowy cabal of Great Old Ones, or something. But they chose an earthling for their champion, -- a BAD surrealist vamipire artist hipster -- and the earthling is kind of their spokesperson. As the bad artist explains, the duel will be fought in a giant circular room which evokes both the roman colluseum and the guggenheim museum. Both artists will have 6 hours to 'freestyle' some surrealist art, using only the materials provided, after which the judges will pick the best art. the losing surrealist vampire of course dies horribly; the winning surrealist vampire becomes an art-world superstar.

So as soon as the heroine agrees to the death duel, the bitch-ass villain starts changing the terms and conditions. 'Oh, did I mention it is from midnight to 6 am?' (Knowing full well that the heroine's custom is to work from 6 PM until 2 AM and she becomes totally exhausted thereafter). . . and, 'oh did I mention that this is a tag-team fight?' So the heroine has to go find a partner, and there ensues a scene of such cliches I am embarassed to have even dreamed it.

She has to find the now-disgraced-art-world-ex-champ (NDAWEC) who has retired in disgrace and is now drinking himself to death, and only he can save her. . . IF she can re-motivate him. Anyway he is a white guy with a beard in a biker bar, playing some drinking game. Some big biker guy ? the gang leader - suddenly shows up and tosses a playing card to the man seated next to the NDAWEC. . .and that man suddenly comes to life, jumping up as if he was a zombie assassin who has just been activated ('Manchurian Candidate'-style) by a magic card to execute a hit, and starts stabbing some random guy in the face, while the biker king just smiles.

So the NDAWEC is like, 'Say buddy, I don't care if you ARE the biker king, you can't use card-triggered zombie assassins in HERE. This is a classy place.' And then the big biker says, 'ok, I can hang with that. How about I stab you my damn self??' And plunges a dagger into the guy's arm. It barely goes in. the biker, frustrated and with everyone watching, starts using both hands to try cutting the arm but the blade barely draws blood. 'Ha ha, little did you know that I am a . . . vamipire! And a surrealist!'

See what I mean?? Totally cliche. Anyway that event ? where he stood up for what is right and decent ? is kind of a turning-point for the NDAWEC and so he agrees to be the tag-team partner of the heroine. At that pont, the asshole villain promptly selects the NDAWEC 's Japanese ex-girlfriend as HIS partner, knowing full well that he (NDAWEC) still has a thing for her and even thinking about her crushes his self-esteem, plunging him back into alcoholism and mediocre art, etc. WHAT A JERK IS THIS VILLAIN.

The very day of the Iron Chef Death Match, everyone shows up to the Guggenheim/Colluseum. And the villain ? having not yet totally crushed the spirit of the heroes ? unleashes his most perfidous treachery yet! New rule; ONLY OIL PAINTING . I should mention that the Unseen Heroine's chosen medium is cloth sculpture. Cue fog horn.

At this point, the dream totally ceases to be narrative. Time stops. What has happened?? The heroine and the now-rehabilitated NDAWEC (who is a painter) have teamed up to create a masterpiece, a work of surreal art so powerful that it breaks out of the narrative and destroys all preconcieved notions of space time and aesthetics.

From now on, the dream is just one long drawn-out camera zoom into this magnificent painting.

(Naturally the painting won the contest, and presumably the villain and the horrible ex-girlfriend were put to ritual death, with stakes and garlic never to suck the blood of the living or have shitty exhibits in coffehouses again. But at this point, that is no longer even important!! All that is important is the painting. )

See, normally the heroine tries to do the biggest cloth-sculptures possible. Kind of like Christo but instead of wrapping things she just piles cloth on the ground in pyramidal stacks and waist-high walls. She is fascinated by the folds, and by making the colors as intense and deep as possible, but I digress. Anyway she never had the money to do a sculpture more than 600 feet long, but now, thanks to the magic of painting, she has achieved her dream ? a WHOLE PLANET COVERED IN A MAZE OF CLOTH WALLS. Or rather, A painting of that planet which is so realistic and Dalilike that somehow it IS a whole planet. Imagine, like, choirs on the soundtrack.

The walls zigzag over the surface in all different colors, most of the time the walls curve back and forth, so that , when seen from above, they seem to be spelling out letters and secret messages of drastic, life-altering enlightenment, in a language I cannot read. So the remainder of the dream is devoted to zooming into the painting, from the big scale (whole planet) slowly zooming in on a particular wall, then to a particular cloth, then a particular fold on that cloth, never losing detail. There is a certain fractal quality to it where no matter how far down you go the patterns just repeat.

 

Anyway i swear to god i really dreamed that, and was so happy when i woke up, i almost forgot how hungover i was!

 

 

FRUSTRATION DREAM

Me and Pantsalot are in front of the safeway at like 1 at night. He says, 'why don't we go to the studio and play rock music?' 'But Pantsalot, that studio is so far away!' 'That's ok, safeway sells bikes now.' And sure enough, out front of the main Safeway building, surrounded by a transparent plastic awning, is a sort of vestibule bike-shop. We are walking around. It is the middle of the night so there is no clerks. He says, 'hell, I am just going to steal this one.' I say, 'but stealing is wrong.' He replies, 'C'mon, no one is ever going to buy THIS. . . just look at it.' And sure enough, the bike is totally rediculous. It looks like one of those tiny, squat motorized tricycles that obese people ride nowadays, but you have to pedal it, and the wheels are maybe 5 inches tall. I say, 'OK, steal it if you must but wait for me to stand over there in case you get caught. I will buy one and catch up to you, ok?' 'OK'

I find a cheap bike for 38 bucks. Rock on! I get the manager to help me ring it up. He is a big guy and right away starts giving me shit. He is like, 'Sit down here, sir. We have to fill out some forms for you to get your bike licence.' What?? Well ok. Then he asks my name. I tell him. He doesn't believe me. 'That is your family name? Normal people, that is their FIRST name. Are you telling me the truth, sir? Because when I see someone who is trying to buy a bike at 1 AM, I think that person must be trying to escape from something bad they did. I will need to see some ID.' Then 3 middleaged Taiwanese tourists come wandering through and he totally blows me off to go help them. He is totally nice and servile to them. I am like, what the FUCK??? I get all up in his face, but just then this totally cool, blonde, cute nice girl Safway clerk steps in to help me finish filling out the super-important government-regulated bike-licence. After what seems like an hour of paperwork, we are done.

I'm like, so can I get the bike? 'Well actually no. number one, that is just a display model. The real bikes are self-assembly' and she points to a ziplog plastic bag full of parts, none over 6 inches long. Just as I am reacting to this bullshit, she adds, 'Plus I am not authorized to issue the Official Bike Licence. You will have to talk to the Manager again.' I am almost ready to flip out by this point, but as it happens the manager just finished with the taiwanese people. So he can ring me up fast. 'One hundred 29 dollars' he says. 'WHAT?? THE PRICE TAG SAYS 38!!' 'yes sir, that is the Safeway price. But when you add the government fees for the Bike Licence, the Licence Tax, the Processing Fee, the Homeland Security National Bike User Database premium, and the Self-Assembly Authorization Code surcharge, it comes to 129 altogether.' This after spending like 2 hours trying to buy the fucking thing -- !! I just say, 'dude, fuck YOU.' And start walking.

Then, somehow, I am in a big lecture class in Stanford University. In the center of class there is a panel discussion on international economics. The panelists, as well as the students, are all members of ethnic groups that normally get left out of discussions on race: no blacks or whites, but plenty of indians, pakistanians, arabs, natve americans, Peruvians, and so on. The discussion is very fast-pace and intillectual. Then the teacher, a sort of Jenny Jones / Operah type, opens the floor up for dicussion. Unexpectedly she sticks the microphone in my face and says, 'so, the ads in the back of this WIRED magazine are for a bunch of weird PDAs and they all say the PDAs are easy to use. Don't you think they are actually hard to use?' I am totally WTF?? First of all, I am white so I don't even belong in this discussion, AND I don't even go to stanford in the first place, plus the question is totally off-topic AND slightly patronizing, as if I could not possibly talk about economics!

Nonetheless I start to answer. I notice that the audotorium is really big so I ask, 'Am I talking loud enough? Can everyone hear me?' then, from the back, the only other white student in the room, this horrible nasty sorority girl, says, 'Actually no I can't hear you! But, my take on the issue is blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblahv blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah blahblahblahblah'

And so on without letup. To make matters worse, SHE is not talking loud enough either, and we can't even hear her moronic opinion, just the grating whah-whah-whah Charlie Brown's teacher sound of her nasal valley girl voice. I am so angry!! My friends are sitting next to me and whispering agitatedly that it is my turn, but nobody does anything including the teacher.

Suddenly I realize, 'Holy crap, Pantsalot is still waiting for me! I had better get a move on!!' and bolt out of class, running for the exit of campus. . . which is super far away on the other side. I run past an exciting array of buildings, ramps, and sidewalks, all various shades of beige and tilting slightly at various odd angles, but I have no time to stop and admire the architecture. I make quick progress at first because I left class early, but soon, as classes end, the sidewalk becomes more and more crowded with students. I weave around and past them but it just keeps getting more crowded, and then I notice that at the same time the architecture has become more and more gnarled, until it is twisted in on itself like that famous MC Escher painting of the endless stairway.

Regardless, I manage to make it to an old, American style payphone on the side of the cafeteria. But the phone only takes Japanese 500 Yen coins. Fine. Next to the phone is a dry-erase board, and sure enough, Pantsalot has written a message on the dry-erase board, to the effect of, 'dear Steve, I am waiting at Burnt Ramen studios. But I will only wait for you until 6:30, because after that my girlfriend is coming over.' Holy crap, it must be almost 6:30 now!!

I dial the number so fast that I mess up. There is now 2 students behind me in line for the phone. Then I have to put in another 500 yen, and I screw up again. It seems like my fingers are made of lead. Then the phone starts demanding shreds of cardboard be forced into the coin slot in lieu of coins, which I have to do, in a frenzy. Also right about now, there is a crowd of like 20 people pressing in on me on all sides, waiting to use the phone and visibly pissed that I cannot dial a simple number. By now I am a nervous wreck, sweating and trembling and about to lose it. I spot a nice blonde girl ? sort of like the one that helped me in Safeway ? and ask her to please dial for me, and she smiles and says yes. But right then some asshole who looks like Wil Wheaton from star trek, wearing a green polo shirt, grabs me by the ear ? the ear! Like some evil teacher, and says in this improbable Edward G. Robinson voice, 'Say buddy, there is a lot of us folks wants to use the phone, too. Maybe If you can't do it you should make way, see?' I am about to just go buckwild on the gangster/nerd guy when I realize that the mob of students has become so huge and dense that they rubbed the fucking phone number off the dry erase board, so neither I nor the nice blonde lady can call Pantsalot at all ever.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!

And that's when I wake up.

]]]

 

 

 

12/7/04 UTOPIAN DREAM

I'm in some Ivy League University, standing in a large dark auditorium. Facing the large auditorium is a small brightly-lit room full of graduate students, studying different radical Utopian movements. I'm impressed with what they're doing but I hold up a small obscure pamphlet on some kind of Reich-ish sex discipline, and tell them 'The work you are doing is impressive but you won't really understand unless you read from primary sources and get out in the field.'

Next they are on a field trip to a museum about some kind of failed cult. A life-sized black-and-white photo of hippies is on the right wall, curling around to the rear wall, depicting a row of people in a Last Supper-like tableau. A big caption scrawled next to the guy on the extreme right: 'he's our former student-body treasurer!' They all have these totally vacuous spaced out expressions, but something about the way their mouths are subtly downturned makes me want to crack a joke about 'these are the most un-blissed-out psychedelic hippies I've seen'. But then I realize that their bodies end just above the heart. All their legs and bowels and even the lower half of their ribcages are totally gone, leaving a stump of a torso and things leaking out of it.

The other graduate students continue walking around, exploring, as if this were not surprising or horrifying. Looking away from the other students, I turn my attention back to the room we're in. Somehow the museum-about-the-cult has turned into the actual cult-house just hours after everybody died. The picture has come to life and it's even more shocking in color. There is no sound or smell. Everyone is dead, except one young man towards the entranceway, who is on his knees, silently and mechanically organ-fucking a corpse. I can not look at him directly.

I gaze instead down at the floor but there is no relief. The floor has become paved in ribs. Like tile, the floor is divided into one-foot squares. Each square is a part of a human ribcage. No flesh but still reddish-grey tissue holding the ribs together. Alternating squares of ribs face in opposite directions, like a checkerboard pattern. As we continue to walk silently around the room, Something else begins to happen. The floor becomes brittle as pie-crust. As I (the others too?) walk, my feet sink slightly through the ribs into a red goo below. Not more than a half-inch (but getting gradually deeper?). I finally, calmly, ask one of the other students to help me walk outside. I ask her to take me by the hand and lead me so I don't have to see the blank-faced young man by the entrance who is still pumping in and out of the corpse. She says ok, and in the end a bunch of us all join hands and walk out of the room. Which is odd because (unlike me) they did not appear scared or surprised of the contents.

But once into the slightly-run-down-but-sunny green-painted entryroom, the other student brightens up and says, 'Hey, let's go exploring upstairs now!' And the rest vigorously nod yes and grin. I'm like, 'ummmm, I'll just stay here if it's ok.' But as soon as I'm alone, I'm finally overcome with panic. I don't want to risk going out the front door for some reason, so I go out through the window. The only witness to my retreat is a grey-and-white-and- black-striped cat walking along a low wall outside. As I'm going over the wall to the curb of the street, I notice that it's a very lush friendly suburb we are in. everything is very sunny and trees are green and verdant. A plump Southern lady in her '50s is outside. She's been sent by someone in response to the slaughter in the cult-house, but it's not clear who sent her. She has an official uniform and a matching white van and tools. She's preparing to cut the wrist-thick bundle of phone-and-electricial cables leading from the house to the outside world (does she know there are students still inside?), but she stops and gives me a sympathetic smile, then adds, 'I'll give you mine if you give me yours!'

I wake up feeling kind of nauseous but not with a rapid gasp, or wildly beating heart, or the other usual ways one awakes from a nightmare.

 

 


12\03/04 ORGANS DREAM 

I'm watching a documentary on tv. It's the story of a very sick girl who lost her legs to some disease. She is wearing a dark blue, rubbery bodysuit with just nubs below her crotch. But the doctors have built mechanical legs for her. The footage shows her walking around the hospital, the myriad little machines in the legs whizzing and purring; the tiny hydraulics compressing and expanding. The voice-over is her describing her life and how she is dealing with it. Her face is innocent, her hairstyle frizzy and unfashionable. After that, the program moves on to an even MORE sick, even YOUNGER girl, this one just a human head attached to a small foot-long bulb of flesh for a torso, again encased in blue rubbery material, whose face is even MORE apple-cheeked and naiive. The doctors have built an entire robot body for her of course. But I am disturbed by this. Where are her organs?

The scene changes. I'm in an 'image club' (a sort of brothel where all the rooms are decorated with different themes for sexual roleplaying (school-room, office room, commuter train, etc)). I am in a fake doctor's office. The prostitute with me isn't wearing a doctor's uniform for some reason, but rather a black Chinese dress. She is holding up a life-sized beige plastic colon. I'm sitting on the examining table in my pajamas, while she explains the function of the colon. Then she picks up a big beaker full of some kind of orange goop ?possibly Indian Dal soup??and pours it in the colon, filling it up to the top, to illustrate how colons work. Next, she grabs a life-size plastic small intestine, and snaps it on to the colon, and then repeats the whole lecture and once again fills up the small intestine with this orange goop. I've moved off the table and am now sitting on the floor, and I'm really turned on by this, my erection visible through a rip in the pajamas. She bends over to get another plastic model, and I can see a tattoo on her butt, through the slit of her skirt: a sakura (cherry blossom), but very poorly done, and almost invisible against her dark brown skin. Then does the whole thing again, with a lecture about the stomach: snapping it to the small intestine, pouring in the dal soup.

Then, abruptly, she breaks character. She gets all tired and collapses into an easy chair, fingers still dripping with the orange goop, and starts talking in a normal voice about how difficult it is to have this job, and her friend is on drugs, and problems with her family, etc. I nod sympathetically, like a therapist.

 

JESUS WTC DREAM

11/21/04, 2 weeks before election time.
I dreamed that jesus came back. In the rubble of the twin towers, just hours after the 9/11 attacks. The soundtrack is this amazing, lush and passionate gospel choir. Everything was charred and burning but he was bathed in a radiant glow. Slowly rising above the rubble with palms outwards and bliss on his face. This slow rising is accompanied by a creschendo in the soundtrack. The gospel choir takes the fear and horror of the tragedy and turns it into uplifting musical passion. It's just the most loud and lovely, inspiring high-budget gospel choir ever, and then I start paying attention to the words. The singers, hundreds of them, are singing in gruesome detail about the mutilated bodies, and urging the violent death of all arabs. Even though Jesus is in the dream, he is totally overshadowed by the music. I can't explain in writing how bizarre the contrast was between the uplifting music and the barbaric lyrics. I kept wondering how someone could convince such a talented and devout and expensive group of people to sing such un-christian things, but then I realized I was looking at some kind of political advertisement.

 


KICHIJOJI DREAM 11/28/04
so anyway I'm Marlyin Manson again. And I'm in some kind of otherworldly realm where everything is going wrong. Nothing goes my way, strangers assault me on the street with chopsticks, all the bad luck. So I consult some oracle or something and the oracle says I've pissed off one of the people/gods who run this realm, and I have to meet him/them and make amends. So I go meet this guy, and he is kind of this evil combination of Willy Wonka and Snidey Whiplash, with the spikey moustache, tall and gaunt with a black suit, leading me into this evil dark amusement park, always off to the side of me where I can't see him but whispering menacingly in my ear, taking me to this impossibly steep skinny rollercoaster where the track the car is tottering on basically nothing more than a rusty razorblade. It is moving slowly because of the rust and all but still very scary.

Here, in the scariest part of the ride, he finally tells me why he is mad at me. I had (in the dream) had sex with some lady and then left her and she was heartbroken about it. The way to lift the curse he placed (he explained) was to go back in time and fall in love with her. Next thing I know, I'm on top of this woman, naked, and I have no idea who she even is. I swear I never saw her before in my life. A chubby white lady with wavy hair, looking kind of like a young Molly Ivins??

Anyway I'm stroking her tenderly and telling her I love her and all this bullshit. Time is speeding up, as if I'm hurtling forward, losing control. But either way it made it incredibly difficult to concentrate on making love to this strange, plain woman, especially as we both noticed I was totally limp, sort of sloppily dry-humping her. I was all like, ' I . . . love . . . you . . . You . . .are . . so.. special, I can't live without you, I love you I love you god youarewonderful youarespecial I loveyouiloveyouiloveyou ILOVEYOUILOVEYOULOVEYOULOVELOVE. .. aw, who am I kidding? This will never work.' And as I said those magic words, the sudden speedup of time reached a climax, a sort of reverse-orgasm if you will, and the 'camera' of the dream was also speeding forward, zooming in and in with the same onrush of speed, so it looked as if it was going forward at a million miles and hour, and the colors got exponentially brighter, and the emotions of the dream similarly became exponentially increased, all culminating in one still image possessed of a frightening intensity: this woman's expression, shock horror and almost infinite outrage staring at me from beneath huge layers of bright makeup. I awoke with a start, my heart pounding.

 

 

WHALES DREAM 11/10/04

I'm standing by the ocean, looking out at a small bay which is separated from the regular ocean by a man-made rock wall, an image which on waking I realize came from the movie Free Willy, a move I have never seen. Sure enough, there is a whale in it, frolicking. Then another, then another. I realize gradually this bay, although next to the beach, is almost impossibly deep. Also, even though it is only the size of a football field, it is full of all kinds of whales. Smaller orcas, gray whales all breaching the surface, and hints of even huger shapes below. The more I look, the more the water seems to boil with their motion. The more I look, the more crowded the bay grows, until it seems that there is more whales than water in there. Which does not stop them from moving with surprising, frightening speed, over and under one another. What once seemed playful cavorting now seems desperate and deranged; it's just a matter of time before they collide and blow guts everywhere. I'm scared of the speed, scared of the unknowably vast and shadowy forms lurking beneath the surface, scared of the frenzy which all this ultimately seems to be building to, frightened by the overcrowding, and so on. . . when I realize that somehow without becoming aware of it, I am now in the middle of the tiny bay, struggling to stay afloat, while these giants careen all around me.

 

STYROFOAM WATERFALL / GAY SANTA / YOKO ONO IS MRS. ROPER FROM 'THREE'S COMPANY' DREAM

Today I dreamed about a female artist in her late fifties. I was in the room while she was being interviewed for the New Yorker. During the 60s she was married to an equally successful male artist, the kind who only does the same exact painting over and over again. But he'd since passed away, and now she was married to some really old tycoon whose identity she didn't want to reveal. She was very eccentric, affected in her mannerisms, and quite short. Her hair was stuck in this mid seventies auburn perm-afro thing, and her garments were kind of draped around her in layers.

She was trying to explain that she wasn't really that rich, despite the fact that she owned AN ENTIRE FLOOR OF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING. Kept talking about all the people that ripped her off, people she owed money to. Although most of her art was poetic and /or personal, such as ex-friends' signatures written in neon and sealed inside giant plexiglass cubes, her most famous work was a 'real estate biography.'

She'd become concerned about the high rents in NYC and how poverty can destroy one's health in slow and gradual ways. So she took her apartment and subdivided it into dozens of small tenement rooms, which ran around the entire perimeter of that floor of the Empire State Building. Each room represented a year in the life of a composite character based on interviews with poor black grandfathers in Harlem. So as you walked down the corridor, you would pass a baby's room, a boy's room, a man's room, and an old man's room, etc. the older he got, the more medical equipment was in the room to help him sustain his life. The more broken down the room itself was because he no longer had the strength to clean it. A lot of the medical equipment was to fight diseases which could have been prevented easily if he was middle-class. A lot of the equipment was to fight infections that were themselves the product of shoddy surgery at poor peoples' clinics. It was a mammoth artwork, the only one of its kind.

It was totally brilliant, but I was put off by her apparent insistence that she actually lived in each room for the entire year. If that were true she'd be over 120 years old, and it would now be like 2030. what the hell was she TALKING ABOUT?? Was she, like, speaking metaphorically or was she just nuts?

As she talked about her magnum opus, she recalled that she created a legal identity for this fictional character, and filled out legal rent documents, in order to further demonstrate how hard it was for a poor person of color to get an apartment, etc. and thus when the fictional character couldn't pay his fictional rent, the banks charged her, the artist, with 'between one and eight million' dollars in back-rent for the tenement rooms which she herself created! 'that's when we took all our money out of the banks and invested it in Woolworth's stock.' She recalls.

But then during the 80's, when AIDS and queer politics dominated the political / artistic left in NYC, she'd said something that apparently got her blacklisted. Actually it wasn't the comment itself (whatever that was), but her refusal to apologize, and her insistence on confronting acquaintances who were giving her the cold shoulder at parties, and asking 'why are you putting more faith in gossip and ignoring my long history of p.c. art?' and essentially demanding that they take sides.

Her new piece was another work of 'real estate art,' installed in the empire state stairwell. Some Japanese father-and-son team was helping her install it. I peek at it, and it's just a small Styrofoam block on a pedestal. How lame! There seems to be something odd about the ceiling though, some kind of tiny, evenly spaced white squares have been glued there? but it's so subtle I figure it must just be the insulation or soundproofing or whatever. I go back inside, to the kitchen. The Japanese-american dad is talking about his work with youth groups in Cali, and gives me his card. It's wrapped in like 3 layers of plastic. I'm like, whatever, dude, all rolling my eyes at him. He's boring; his art is boring; his card is boring.

By then I was also bored with this never-ending interview piece, so bored that I went back to the boring old installation in the stairway. . . only to discover that it had undergone a wonderful metamorphosis. Those tiny, evenly spaced white squares in the roof had somehow expanded and turned into huge overlapping slabs of white styrafoam. The entire roof AND WALLS of the stairwell (both the part going up from here, and the part going down from here) were covered with angular , parallel styrafoam ridges. If you've ever been to Zellerbach hall in UC Berkeley and seen the sound-baffling material on the walls, it was like that. Not only that, but the lighting was blue now, and, looking upstairs I noticed that there was a WATERFALL running down the roof, in defiance of gravity!

The entire roof was covered with a sheen of rapidly descending water, not a drop of which fell to the floor. Turning back down, I saw that the downstairs part had changed AGAIN! For one thing, the stairwell had quadrupled in size, and there was now a HUGE waterfall, (on the bottom side this time) as well as tons of water flowing down the side walls. The blue lighting had deepened, increasing the shadows, and there seemed to be some kind of magical luminescence coming from inside the waterfall itself. As I watched, the waterfall was eroding the Styrofoam. Great hunks of it were breaking off, washing downstairs and out of sight. The texture of the walls changed as they eroded, becoming even more convoluted and weirdly angular. It looked like it would all be gone in a matter of minutes.

Suddenly I realized that this was the most beautiful artwork I'd ever seen, and I might be the only person who would ever see it! I fumbled around my backpack and got my camera, my hands shaking with excitement. The camera seemed to be taking forever to focus. Then the zoom didn't work. Finally I got one blurry picture, and as the shutter snapped I felt meaty hands grabbing me. The artist's security guards had captured me for taking 'unathorized pictures', and the ejected me from the building. Why would she make the best art ever and not want anyone to see it?

After that, next thing I know I was in California. I'd just hiked a really long time and I could finally see my destination down the road: a tiny beach town. Even though I was almost there, I wondered, should I stop at this beach? I stopped and was immediately so glad that I did. A wonderful little beach. Although I was at the top of the cliff and not on the sand. I started reading a book. A Frisbee landed at my feet. some gay 'bear' couple on the beach had accidentally threw it up here. The guy next to me nudged it with his foot, but it didn't fall down the cliff. So I picked it up to throw it back to the gay couple. The dark haired man is wearing a bright blue-and-red motorcycle outfit and he's backing up to the older white-haired man, who reaches out to gently grasp him. I am witnessing the exact instant that they go from friends to lovers.

As I am throwing the Frisbee, I realized that, not only is the white-haired bear Santa Claus, but that the book I was reading was actually written by his boyfriend, the guy in the motorcycle suit!! Even though I'm seeing the beginning of the relationship, the book (which has already been written, somehow) details the middle and end of it! I kept reading, and at this point the dream is entirely in text. The guy says that him and santa only dated a few months. It was just too weird to be dating a celebrity. Too much pressure to be 'nice' all the time, to match is moral perfection. Also, not only was santa nice to everyone, but he had an almost psychotic refusal to even acknowledge conflict. He would insist that jews and muslims weren't really fighting, etc. he was, like, UNHINGED.

 

 

DANGER DREAM

I'm in my parents' house. It's a part of the house I've never before been in a dream: the corner of the living room next to their stereo. I'm with two women, who claim to be sisters. And lesbians. And are both named after primary colors (blue and red? Red and green? Something like that). One is morbidly obese with messy stringy hair and horrible self-esteem. She also used to be Madonna, somehow. But she's forgotten who she was. The other lesbian is thin and wiry, with leathery skin, and hates men. They're sitting on the fireplace.

The fat lady is so desperate for attention she is trying to get me to have sex with her. She's on all fours, facing away from me, presenting me with her huge, pulpy ass. I'm fascinated by her anus ? despite her huge size, the sphincter is almost microscopic in size, perhaps only the diamater of a ballpoint pen. I'm trying to wedge myself in but of course it's impossible. I settle for just dry humping her between her large cushiony buttocks. Also I reach over to the stereo and fumble around with one hand, trying to find my parents' 80's hits compilation tape. I put it on the Madonna song, as an experiment. I'm wondering if this will make her remember who she was, and if she does remember, she will see how far she has fallen, and the results will be hilarious. However, she just wearily tells me to skip to the next song.

The other sister has been quietly seething and finally threatens to stab me. She's got a knife. She says something about how heterosexual sex is a crime against women. I blithely concoct a huge lie about how I'm just fucking her sister in order to validate her self-esteem which has been crushed by our looks-ist society, and express my solidarity with the other-appearing. But not, like, for FUN. She thinks about this, and nods. Then she takes off her pants and lies down next to her sister on the floor by my parents' stereo. She seems to be saying, as long as it's no fun, id' better do her too. But she still has the knife, as if to add, 'but if you DO start having fun, I'll cut your sexist ass in half, you male bastard!' she doesn't have to worry about that because she won't open her legs and just lies there stiffly. I wind up having to dry-hump her too. I wonder to myself if it's worth it just for the danger-thrill.

Next thing I remember I'm walking through Manhattan's times square in the 80s, when everyone there was some sketchy loon or street person. It's bright daylight and crowded. I'm approached by a third woman, who claims to be the sister of the first two. Her name is some other color. . purple? Yellow? She's heard that I'm headed back to California and begs me to take her with me. I'm like, 'hell no! I've had enough of you crazy sisters.' She begs some more. We're being approached by some latin kid who is busking, trying to sell newspapers. I'm like, 'ok, you can come with me but only if you don't mention sex, lesbians, or primary colors.' Then I add, '. . . or if you can get my wallet back because that kid just stole it.' She immediately runs off after the kid.

I turn around and literally bump into my old friend Jonny. He's like, 'long time no see! what have you been up to?' I proceed to narrarate the whole dream so far, pausing to add, 'see that latin kid over there? He stole my wallet. Boy, is he gonna be in trouble when she catches him.' Then I ask what HE's been up to. He pulls out some flyers. Every year he has a huge music festival in his west coast warehouse. All of his old bands have a reunion. I look at the flyers, each of which has a photo collage. In each collage the biggest picture is a photo that I took. How did he get the photos, and why didn't he ask my permission?

Next thing I know we're in the warehouse. But it's not because of a music festival. The mood has changed. We're locked in an epic struggle against some kind of evil dictator back east. There's a lot I don't remember about this epic struggle, but apparently in order to defeat him (them? Her?) we have to use these huge flying machines he and his plucky crew of rebels have been constructing in secret, in this warehouse, for which the rock shows were only a 'cover.' The flying machines have been disassembled and wrapped in black tarpaulins. We'll take them on foot most of the way, and then assemble them at the last minute prior to our sneak attack.

We're walking down the nearby West Coast beach in a procession, about 20 of us plucky rebels, carrying our machine parts in the tarps. It's a beautiful sunny day and I'm looking at the ocean. Suddenly, from around the cliff, I see clouds coming. These clouds are impossibly dense and black, like the smoke from a fire, but more so. They're also sitting directly on top of the ocean, and they're no more than 5 feet high. But they are moving towards us with terrifying speed; their insides roiling like they've been filmed in fast-motion. They are very discrete clouds. Maybe 4 or 5 of them, in different locations. I yell, 'everyone look! We're in trouble!'

the others seem to know what these clouds mean, and immediately spring into action. They scream, 'everyone go face-down on the sand, and pull the tarps over you. We try to cover ourselves as best we can, and then peek out from under the tarps at the ocean. The mysterious clouds have disappeared, but the ocean has gone TOTALLY MAD. Impossibly huge waves are coming at us. But not tsunami-style, with a big crest. These waves are more like sine waves ? giant, and swollen but not breaking. Nearly vertical walls, giant swollen tops, and then huge impossibly deep valleys inbetween, extending back to the horizon. There is no way this could happen, I remember thinking. Because this close to shore, the ocean simply isn't that deep. But here they come.

And yet, when we get hit with the wave, it's not deadly or even painful. Just kind of cold and inconvenient. I have no time to ponder the weirdness of this, because as I look up again, lots of refugees have suddenly materialized. Singly or in pairs, they are walking, wet and bedraggled, towards our little tarp-hut. They are mostly Latino. I guess they were using the beach too, but hid when the waves came, and are now seeking shelter. Our leader is like, 'hell no. every man for himself. This is OUR tarpulin.' They just lie down on top of us. Next to me is this little boy, a sort of UNICEF poster child. I bury my head in the sand as I hear him shout, 'it's coming! It's coming!!' the wave hits and he's carried off. After the water recedes I see that some other man has caught him and is holding him tenderly.

If anything the waves have only gotten bigger. It would be spectacular to see if it weren't so deeply terrifying. These waves are just miles high, and the valleys are miles deep. The color is this blue-grey, the same color as the sky. Everything shimmers with what seems like electric current.

Our leader addresses the refugees: 'you can't go under our tarp, but why don't you instead go to this wall which faces against the oncoming sea, and which we all somehow overlooked until now?' so they all go there and are presumably saved.

Next thing I remember, I'm back in the warehouse by myself. It's totally dilapidated now, but has somehow gotten bigger, as if it's been broken up and the parts have been scattered over a wide area. It's an MC Escher-ish maze of corriugated iron and fire escapes, broken skylights, and girders. I'm joined by some kind of wise older man, whose face I can't really see. I'm asking about a mutant goat-boy who is rumored to live in these here ruins. 'is it true that he really doesn't have a moustache?' I ask. 'yes,' he replies, 'but that should not be surprising, considering that his mouth is on the top of his head.'

Just then we see him, clambering over some rubble in the distance. His head is shaped like a nail ? just a huge 'T' shape, and the very wide top of the skull opens up like a hinged trash can?just one huge 18 inch wide circular maw full of rows and rows of sharklike teeth. Just terrifying. I'm like, 'It's him! The mutant goat-boy! He's real! Let's run!' but my older and wiser, almost Gandalf-like mentor doesn't run. He goes up to the goat boy and says hello. He shows no reaction to either the grotesqueness OR the danger of the boys' hideous deformity, and just treats him like a normal 14 year old. I run away though, and go exploring in the ruins.

Next time I see them, they are in a Hot Topic store in a shopping mall which is somehow also in the ruins. Gandalf (or whoever) is buying the mutant goat-boy some normal, eager-to-fit-in teenage mall rat clothes. It's a sort of dream montage; the older man teaching the kid to adapt to society and building his self-esteem. I lose interest and keep exploring. I go up dusty staircases, crawl through broken windows, wander around great shifting slabs of debris in impossibly large dark storage spaces, through mazelike warrens of pre-fab walls, and finally quite by accident I find Goat-boy's room.

I immediately somehow know that this is his room. Also I realize that there is Something Very Important here. Some object that, if I find it and take it back east, will accomplish Jonny's mission to overthrow the tyrant. I'm about to ransack his room, when I hear people coming. It's goat boy, and some of his friends. He's got friends now! He's wearing cool, mall-rat clothing, some stupid baggy shorts and Korn t-shirt or whatever, wallet chain, big huge goofy hat covering his mutation, and he's persuaded some of his new, hip friends to come over to his house for the first time. I'm outraged that they are arriving mere seconds before I can achieve my goal of finding the Very Important Thing. And I lose control and start acting like a petulant 8-year-old. I yell through the crack in the wall, 'hey, guys! Your new friend is a mutant! A freak! He has a mouth on top of his head!! He's not cool at all!!' then I run like hell.

I hear behind me, first the gasps of horror of the friends, then the taunts, and jeers, and finally the threats, and lastly, the unmistakable sound of huge shark-like jaws snapping into human flesh. I keep running until I'm back on the beach where the epic storm happened earlier. Only this time I'm on TOP of the cliff rather than at the beach on the bottom. I'm looking up at the post-industrial warehouse ruins. As I turn around for one last look at the ruins, I notice that they are slightly brighter and in better shape. I walk a little farther and then turn around again. Somehow mideval spires have poked through the top of the warehouse ruins. It seems that the farther I go from them, the more they morph into this beautiful Avalon-like fairy castle.

On the good side, the hideous mutant goat-boy can't live in such a beautiful castle, so I'm safe from him. But on the bad side, the Very Important Thing in the goat-boy's bedroom can't exist in such a castle either, so I'll never be able to find it now. But what if the reverse is true? What if the pretty castle turns BACK to the apocalyptic ruins if I go closer to it? I'm trying to decide if I should go back to the ugliness and danger, in order to get the salvation, or stay in a pretty place and never accomplish anything great, when I wake up.

 

 

SPIDER FACTORY

 

I'm a reporter trying to investigate some kind of military scandal. My search leads me above the arctic circle (where for some reason, in the dream, the water is not cold). Some grizzled old sea captain takes me out in a small boat. He's afraid for his life, defying the government like this, but he is just so angry at what they've done. The coast is all super steep, super tall, rocky gray cliffs. We set sail from this tiny cove - the cliffs on either side make it seem like an alleyway more than a beach.

I still don't really know what it is I'm investigating.

Apparently it involves the a) illegal manufacture of , b) illegal disposal of or c) selling to extraterrestrials of, nuclear waste. Or all three. Some kind of x-filesy thing.


So we take this little fishing boat out into the waters and soon - still within sight of land - I see and enormous blue-grey pole jutting out of the waters, vanishing up into the fog. We keep going and I see another pole. Then the clouds part and - LO! -- there's a WHOLE BUNCH of poles and they all come together in the center, which is some kind of nuclear factory. THE WHOLE BUILDING IS IN THE SHAPE OF A GIANT SPIDER. It's ominous and huge and yet graceful and slightly curved, and all festooned with little Jack Kirby devices. Having seen what we came to see, we turn around and go back to shore. But no sooner have we turned around than, predictably, shit starts getting hectic. I'm not sure of the sequence at this point, but a) the seas start getting super turbulent, b) the HUGE SPIDER factory starts to quake and possibly fall down, and c) it dawns on me that the HUGE SPIDER factory is ITSELF dwarfed by an EVEN HUGER SPIDER FACTORY the size of Los Angeles, and whose body is directly over the original factory, but a couple of miles up.

Then our little boat capsizes and I'm thrown into the water. For some reason it isn't cold. It isn't warm either; it's more like the 'temprature simulator' part of the dream wasn't even connected. (perhaps to save bandwidth). Anyway I swim back to shore, and run into an office building. I'm at the top of the building, and it's crammed full of terrified workers. We're all scrambling to get to the elevator which will take us downwards to safety. I'm looking out the office windows which face the ocean. The waves are terrifyingly choppy and huge. Then in the distance, I see that the HUGE HUGE spider factory is crashing to earth. It's several miles off, but it's SO DAMN BIG that the body nonetheless fills THE ENTIRE WINDOW as it comes down in slow motion. The tidal wave of death is sure to follow. I start shoving people out of the way to get to the elevator. I suddenly see my best friend and his wife standing there in the office. If I stay and wait for them all three of us might die. I say, every man for himself! And jump in the elevator without them, leaving them behind.


 

 

 

JAMES BROWN

First I dream that I'm james brown and I'm in a play with a hundred singers and dancers which I'm leading in a series of real time matthew barney like improvisations. Like 'CREMASTER I' or something. . . but I'm running around, singing and gyrating like crazy, and directing this huge cast at the same time. They're pretty frantic, running around trying to line up in these elaborate formations which I cue, J.B.-style,with a subtle flick of my wrist. It's totally manic!!

Then I wake up

Go back to sleep and I'm sitting in the front row of a Black Muslim class. I'm the only white guy there, and Louis Farrakhan is teaching, but I think I should be OK because I'm reading a book which has pictures of him on every page. But when he sees me reading it, he asks to see it and gets really disturbed because he has never heard of it before. I become totally scared that he hates me now - not because of my race, but because I'm reading a bootleg, unauthorized fake- N.O.I. book!!

Then the scene changes. I'm with some white comedian who is telling a joke with the aid of an overhead projector. Something about a cow masturbating and some farmer nonchalantly watching, and he sidles up to her and says something innocent, and then the cow says something like 'VIRUS? NO!' which the comedian writes down on the projector, with a little 'black sambo' face and insists that this is a pun on farrakhan's name, which it is totally NOT, and then looks at me expectantly.

Then I'm some light skinned black man in a dressing room trailer which is on the huge stage in front of a million cheering soul fans. The camera angle of the dream is 'third person'-so I can see me AND the other characters talking. I'm with an older man, my mentor or something, and some crooked, sinister, don king-like manager. He thrusts a mike at me and whispers 'please' in my ear. . . . as the whole side of the trailer lifts up, exposing me to the audience, which is in a set of infinitely tall bleachers. Suddenly I am expected to sing 'please please please', a song I have never heard before.

But to my surprise, I excel! Even my quavering voice and wrong notes don't seem to be mistakes so much as evidence that I, the singer, am really choked up with emotion. Afterwards I'm covered with sweat. The don king like guy re-enters the trailer, congratulates me prefunctorly and heads to the trailer bathroom. As he comes out, just to rib him a little, I joke that I saw the construction workers assembling the trailer say that they installed a see-thru wall in the bathroom. He laughs a patronizing little laugh, but I can see that he's secretly worried-I've tapped into some real paranoia he has. He's like, 'naw, naw they didn't.' and I'm like, 'oh, sure, and - oh! What's that? Some kind of bug?'

And my older mentor guy is looking at me all nervous like, 'don't provoke him.' And the mood is really changing, getting ugly, and no one is sure if I'm kidding anymore, not even me. Someone starts pointing at a little bump in the wall over the door, and I'm not even sure who is pointing anymore, me or him. . . because the dream is now in the 'first person' camera angle again, with a black hand reaching for the bump, and the voice is now very distorted, as if it's being heard not by the people in the room but being heard through a bug, and as the hand reaches towards the bug the scene jump cuts to this office where uniformed security men are watching a TV, FROM THE BUG'S POINT OF VIEW as this hand reaches up and unplugs it.

Now I'm some white woman in an office somewhere, who is ripping an identical bug out of the wall. Everyone said I was crazy, said I was paranoid, but finally I'm right!! I have proof! As I rip it out I see there's a little tiny wire that goes into the wall. I keep tugging the wire and find out it's joined to another, slightly thicker wire, which in turn is joined to several other wires, and so on. I keep tugging on it, until I'm tugging on a huge batch of electrical cables, as if I'm going to drag the entire state security apparatus through the wall or something. Even in the dream I'm thinking that this is a bit of a cliche!!

Now I'm the lightskinned black guy again, in a totally expensive rental chalet, far from civilization, some luxury 'getaway' or something. I'm tugging wires out of the wall, in a state of total, sweaty hysteria-exactly the same feeling as performing in front of a crowd, but negative. The wires lead to the TV which is mounted on the wall by the ceiling, Best Western Style. I keep tugging on them until I drag the TV all the way across the room VIA THE ROOF. Just as I'm ripping all the wires out of the back of it (and there's DOZENS of them , way more than there needs to be, suspiciously!) from somewhere inside the massive pile of cables on the floor a phone is ringing. I can't get to it even if I wanted to. the message machine catches the call. . . .it's my father, asking me to come home, worried about my 'paranoia' as he calls it, the fool!! I keep yanking the wires out of the back of the giant TV.

I'VE NEVER DIED IN A DREAM BEFORE. . .

I'm once again dropped into the middle of an epic movie, the plot of which hasn't been explained to me. Hundreds of citizens sit in outdoor bleachers, while a phalanx of vaguely Roman-looking soldiers prepare to shoot arrows into them from 20 feet away. but only I - and a few other hipsters- know the secret. The secret is that the soldiers are NOT killing random citizens. They're going to kill only those people targeted by the snitches, and they're going to 'miss' when they fire at the snitches themselves. That way no one will suspect who the real snitches are. . . after all, the soldiers TRIED to kill the snitch too, right?

I'm not going to let the brutal soldiers get away with their fiendish plot. I recognize a snitch in the front row-a plain-looking middle-aged woman with chin length curly black hair, and I start yelling 'SHE'S A SNITCH! SHE'S A SNITCH! admit it! ' and I take an arrow from the ground and I start pressing it against her jugular vein. She's scared to die, but she's apparently EVEN MORE SCARED of being exposed as a snitch, because she doesn't admit it. so I slowly push the arrow into her neck, killing her.

 

then, some centurion comes up to me!He's got a huge, unkempt beard and his breastplate is so festooned with medals it looks like it's mossy. also, for some reason he's got modern-day engineer's goggles. He's pointing a flintlock pistol at me. my rage is out of control. I pull that old 'WHO YOU GONNA SHOOT WITH THAT, PUNK? I dare ya!" gesture that Ice Cube did in BOYZ N THA HOOD. He's a foot from my face. Abruptly he turns and fires into the crowd. Then -psyche- he turns again and shoots me 3 times right in the chest. There's no blood, and no pain but I collapse to the ground, dead.

 

He leaves, and some friends of mine from the Underground Resistance come up, to see my corpse. Suddenly I rise again, but then I stumble and fall and am still.

Then the scene shifts. I'm in a boarding house run by a middle aged woman. She's just had the whole place renovated, and I'm the first tenant to move in. I've got a small clean white room, and there's a large sparkling bathroom. I'm chilling in my room and hear the other tenants moving in. The other tenants' stuff overflows into the halls. The bathroom especially. Apparently the other tenants require specialized toilets. . . every time I go there, there's more pipes and tubes and dials and cords. Eventually it's so crowded with plubming that I literally can't fit in the bathroom anymore!

 

we have large communal dinners, and I stand up at one such dinner and accuse this other tenant of making the mess (another older lady). Then I run outside and poop in my car. To do this I run a transparent plastic hose from the bathroom to the driver's seat of my car and then sit on the hose. I'm trying to squeeze out a turd, when I see there's something wrong with the plumbing: the hose is transparent, so I can see the sewage moving. . . TOWARD my butt, not away from it. That can't be right! I yank the hose out of me, spraying liquid poo around the car. . .and it gets into my mouth. It's a lot saltier than I'd imagined.

The scene shifts yet again:

 


Now I'm a disembodied observer. There's an overhead tracking shot of a scenic river surrounded by beautiful green hills. The river is shallow, full of rocks, and gravel. There's dozens of naked men crawling upstream on hands and knees. Apparently this is some sort of field trip for the 'MEN WHO HAVE A SEXUAL FETISH FOR CRAWLING THROUGH A GRAVELLY RIVER' club. Everyone's naked. All different body shapes and sizes, crawling and grunting and being masculine as hell.

 

Now the camera angle is on the ground, on the side of the river. I'm watching the guys go by. One guy is a long-haired blonde hippy. He's got some grotesque hairy root in his mouth, he's sucking on it as he crawls. I can't tell if it's his giant hairy dick or his dreadlocked hippy beard. Some other guys in the crowd also have odd sexual deformities. As the guys round a bend in the river, they come to a massive lake! The camera slowly pans across the lake. . . In the middle of the lake are two small islands (maybe 30 meters wide) with nearly vertical sides. The larger island has a huge rock formation sprouting from its top. This natural rock formation, as you might guess, is shaped like a huge penis . . . it even has a big oak tree growing at its base for pubic hair!

One particularly heroic, muscley guy gets off his knees and looks right at the cock. (Camera angle: medium shot, worms-eye-view, looking up at him. He's backlit and the water drips off his muscles) he's going to get up to the top of Cock Island if it kills him!Even though it's a mile away and the walls are vertical!! Luckily for him, the lake is changing, slowly beiming more industrialized. On top of the nearer, smaller island, there is now some sort of mini-hydroelectric power plant. There are chains and wires running from the shore to the island.

 

With a surge of power, he leaps up and grabs a cable with both hands. Through some heroically nimble gymnastics, he manages to slide along the cable all the way to the first island. Meanwhile, the lake, once pristine and natural, has continued to change. Now there's smog, and clanking noises. A SECOND hydroelectric plant has appeared on Cock Island, and luckily there's now cables and chains connecting the two islands. It looks like our hero might succeed! He motions to us other guys to follow him! It can be done! We all make a mad dash for the cables . . . .

 

. . . but meanwhile the tiny hydroelectric plant on the first island has ALSO been growing. Now it's this HUGE, factory-sized monster. . full of gears that are pulling the chains inside of it. and pulling us, along with the chains!! We're all being sucked into its huge mouth, where we'll certainly be ground into hamburger by its gears. There's no way to let go either, since it's now easily a mile high. Letting go would mean falling to our death. We pass inside its huge mouth, into a vast cavernous space full of clanking and piston noises… we see the giant gears growing closer and closer . . . just as I'm about to get ground up, I awake.

I mean, damn!! I've already been shot and killed, and eaten shit, that's enough for one night!! I don't need to be ground into paste too!!!!

 

 

 

CRUCIFIXION NIGHTMARE

I'm in a hotel room somewhere, watching a tv that's suspended near the roof. It's a movie set in the Italian countryside.

Mummified corpses are hanging from wires that stretch across roads and village squares, as a message to the terrified populace. Sometimes the corpses are single, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes in vast numbers, with limbs turned in impossible directions or limbs missing. They are swaddled in linen bandages to hide the gore.

Then they start showing the torture chambers that produce these mummies, and I wrap my OWN head in pajamas to avoid seeing it. eventually I become too curious and peek out over the pajamas. I see a naked teenage boy with a shaved head on a table in a black room. Muscular men in the shadows hold him down while one guy drives a 8 inch nail through his knee into the table. The kid starts screaming in this hoarse voice. Then they put a second spike into his crotch. Then they drive a third spike into his chest HEADFIRST!

The movie goes into a montage of such crucifixions. Close-up Shots of small children of various races with spikes poised above their faces. Mummified bodies dangling from wires in various agonistic poses.

 

Then we enter a huge black room echoing with screams. A dozen of the smallest, most helpless prisoners are getting nailed to the floor by people kneeling above them. But the second-tier prisoners are getting spikes pounded into their backs by third-tier prisoners sitting on raised stools above THEM, and so forth. The higher a prisoner is, the less people are pounding nails into him. Then everybody breaks for lunch. They go wait in line at a cafeteria offscreen to the left. When they come back they discover that their chairs are all lower, pulling them down one tier. I'm inside the movie, sitting at a chair now. In front of me is a table full of greasy food. In the center of the table is a small black and white plastic hook of some sort. I pull on it, and it is held to the table by elastic wire that goes under the table and connects to some kind of apparatus.

I realize that this is the machine that lowers the chairs whenever someone gets up to eat, or get 'seconds'. Because of this machine, no prisoner will ever be able to get to the top and escape the omnipresent spikes in the back. then the scene shifts.

We're outdoors in the woods. A man has a little horse-drawn cart and he's selling pizza out the back of it. a peasant woman is eating a slice and sharing a chat with the man. Up walks a portly, pissed off, balding guy wearing a wife-beater shirt totally stained with blood: he's one of the torturers, coming home from a long day of work. He walks up and wordlessly grabs a slice of pizza, staring at the other two in a hostile way. They don't make eye contact- the civilians are clearly terrified but scared to even show the terror. This goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time.

 

WHO GOT THEIR SEVERED LIMBS IN MY COCAINE?

I was in a clearing in the South American jungle. There was a HUGE, complex machine, maybe 40 feet by 20 by 20, in a clearing in the jungle. It was like a giant cube made out of pistons and levers and tubes and such. The machine made coca-cola. The foreman walked up to me and complained that the machine didn't work right now because of all the human limbs clogging it up. he shows me a table with a bunch of arms and legs that have been apparently yanked out of the machine like jammed paper yanked out of a Xerox. The funny thing is, they're not limbs of workers that just accidentally got caught in the machine. These are limbs of very old people who have been dead for months. They're gray, wrinkled and puffy, and seeping with some unmentionable fluid. Almost spongy in texture- so how did they get in there?

So me and some workers start bagging the limbs, wrapping them up in hefty bags and taping them, (mafia hide-the-bodies style). Then there's this NEW machine in the jungle, a conveyer belt. As we continue bagging the limbs, the conveyer belt grows and sprouts new machines, until there's a whole FACTORY here now. We're putting the packaged limbs on the conveyer belt, which takes them god knows where. A really odd thing happens then: synesthesia!! The touch turns into taste! Instead of just touching the limbs, now I'm tasting them. This is pretty unprecedented in my dreams, though I've heard about it happening. The taste is a slightly viscous liquid, with little sharp chunks of bone floating around.

The scene abruptly shifts. I'm back in the jungle, this time at night, overlooking a beach. I'm in some 'Great White Hunter'-type film. You know-the old fashioned type of film where white guys in pith helmets run around the jungle trying to score treasure and running from angry jungle black dudes. I can't see the angry jungle dudes either, they're just like this omnipresent fearful feeling. Everywhere yet nowhere, and about to pounce. I don't see my pith-helmeted friends either, but it's up to me to save my friends in the dream, . . . . but how?

I have to run down to the ocean - with no cover-and start swimming before they can catch me. I will cross the ocean to some magical island where I can find some magical thing (a spell? An object? A helpful person??) who can save me and my friends back in the jungle.

So, steeling my courage, I bolt down out of the jungle, down to the beach, and then reach the ocean. Suddenly I'm going a million miles per hour. but instead of swimming, I'm FLYING, maybe 3 feet above the ocean surface, like a warp-speed hydrofoil. My mood goes from fearful to exhilarated. Shit, this is amazing!! Pretty soon the ocean starts to put on a lightshow like the end of 2001. the lighter parts of the waves stay the same but the shadows become windows into another world, of kalidescopic intensely bright, geometric patterns that shift rapidly, and the 'windows' shift rapidly also (because they're part of the waves), and above the ocean, I am moving rapidly on this THIRD level.

 

Then the 'windows' stop showing kalidescopic patterns, and start showing picture frames. beneath the ocean are millions of giant picture frames, hanging vertically, extending out to infinity in all directions. I'm flying perpendicular to the frames, and the front of one frame will be maybe 6 inches from the back of the next frame. But the frames are so close together, I can't see what's in them.

Eventually I get to the magical island. Something on this island can save my friends on the jungle. The island is very small and the weather is very light and breezy. There is an INCREDIBLY BRIGHT WHITE, almost luminous Victorian house there that takes up half the island. I sneak in the house. I'm happy to be here because salvation is here. But also if I'm caught, I will be punished, so it's very scary. It looks like an ordinary house but it is the locus of incredibly strong supernatural forces that will rip me apart if I'm not careful. I'm sneaking around and I hear noises. There's a nice older white-person couple puttering around in the kitchen. But I know they're secretly these super-powerful mystical beings. They have something I need but I can't ask them, or something terrible will happen. I keep sneaking around, and then the dream ends.

HUGE CASTRATION DREAM

Me and some unseen friend are in a dark room somewhere, watching a videotape. The 'camera' looks directly down onto dusty ground. There's a castrated young boy's pre-pubescent penis lying in the dirt, and from the left comes this huge brown rattlesnake, who crawls over it, and off the frame right. Then a pause. Then it comes crawling over it again in the opposite direction. This happens a few more times and each time the penis moves a bit more in the direction of the snake. Also the ground under the snake starts to liquefy (like the patterns you make when you stir melted chocolate into your drink, or like the snake has a viscous slug trail or something). The ground sort of smears out in the direction of the snake's movement too. the snake is always very slow and menacing, like a feeling of power barely leashed or something.

My friend who I never see (as I'm staring transfixed at the video), tells me the plot: the young castrated boy has an important herpetology meeting in some other state. He can either bring the penis or the snake. If he brings the penis he's no longer castrated. Or if he brings the snake he can participate in the herpetology meeting (and probably win a prize of some sort too). but he can't do both.


HARRY POTTER INCEST

I'm seeing the harry potter movie for the first time. Except I'm in high school for some reason, and i'm watching the film with my parents during winter vacation. . .

It's in japanese.

Harry -the opposite of the real plot- is a normal person adopted by a magic family

The whole film, from it's big-bang-esque creation scene, to its finale of volcanic violence, is constantly changing and morphing(characters , scenery, and all) The colors are super-over-saturated, and it looks like some insane editor has applied PHOTOSHOP PINCH AND BLOAT FILTERS TO EVERYTHING. it's on a screen huger than IMAX.. so big i can't look away from the screen even if the horror grows too intense! The visuals are as beautiful as they are terrifying. Harry/me is constantly trying to escape his family, walk off un-noticed, etc.

The whole plot involves rape. Harry's magical older step-brothers (2 of them) are constantly trying to molest him. One is huge pink and overly muscled= he has no skin! The muscles slip and slide like slugs around his plump body.. The other is dark green and constantly sprouting a spiders-web of knitting hooks and long pins, which he obsessively counts. "Ooh, look, 24!! 25!! Oooh, another hook!! It's coming right fooor youuu!!" Both are slowly changing and morphing and penning harry in with their muscles or hooks. Even harry is moving and oozing, in slow motion, as he squeezes into increasingly tight spaces to elude his unspeakable siblings. .. The entire film seems to involve a squirming, hobbit-sized Harry trying to elude his huge, horrible family.

The final scene takes place inside what looks like a 100 foot high womb, with a bunch of viscous spiders' threads holding a human-shaped figure aloft in the very center. The brothers chase harry inside, and then they stop in horror when they realize that the figure in the center of the womb/room/web is THEIR even older and more unspeakably powerful brother. This brother is perpetually burning to a cinder. . . he's charred black but at the same time he's surrounded by a corona of flame so bright that you can't look directly at him. The fat, skinless stepbrother and the thin, needley one shriek in terror as it becomes evident that they were molested and turned to evil by this older, even more rapacious brother.

At the end, I - the spectator- having spent 2 hours in mortal terror- am involved in the film. The woman next to me in the theatre teaches me a simple spell. I count 3-2-1-go! In japanese, and I am no longer stuck in my seat. I can enter the film and fly around.

After the film, there's some very PC type, short haired, dashikied,African-american-lady-activist type complaining that this film is really not suitable for young children.

As we leave the theater, My real-life parents tell me they have planned an exhaustive regimen of visits to relatives, etc. with no free time. But I've been watching the film with my high school pal/huge crush Shannon York. After it's over, she reminds me she's run away and is squatting in S.F. she says I should run away with her and spend winter vacation in the big city. We do this, pursued this time by my real-life family.

 

EVIL HOSPITAL/RADAR TRAIN RAPE


I'm in some sort of hospital for horribly burned or deformed women. The women are kept swaddled up so they're not horrifying but the hospital itself is totally third world. The doctor is sitting on the bed with some girl; she pulls up her skirt ; he fills this giant-ass needle from a conical pile of crystals that someone just dumped on the bed., and he's plunging it into her lumpy buttocks And there's a cat in the room too.

the cat walks out and I follow it. then I start petting it. it's a black and white kitten. Then the 'camera' pulls back and I'm no longer in the hospital. . . I'm outdoors by some train tracks. Oh, and I'm a woman now. Some mousy asian girl comes up to me and starts talking. But suddenly I am no longer that woman, 'my female self' is now just the main character in a movie I'm watching. The 'main character' girl has been lured off the train by the mousy girl who is travelling on the train with her..

'main girl' has been receiving letters from some cute guy all summer and she feels sorry for the mousy girl so she pulls out the love letters to share with mousy girl. Except that it's a trap!! mousy girl runs off-and BAD GIRL comes up to take her place. Bad girl tackles Main Girl out of jealousy and they roll off the side of the train tracks. I can't see what's going on (it's 'off camera') but it's clearly sexual. I can't tell if they're both just so horny for this letter-writing guy they're just having sex with each other out of sheer frustration. Or if evil girl is totally raping main girl. All three girls are sort of identically dressed, young-looking asian women with grey sleeveless dresses and shoulder length hair.

But suddenly the main girl is me again, and it's dark. The train has started again during the rape or sex or whatever, and I'm running to catch it. it's so dark. I'm trying to outrun BAD GIRL, who I can feel as a monstrous presence behind me. I'm also trying to catch the train and put on my backpack, and not trip on the train tracks. I'm running incredibly fast. We're in a forest, and there's tree limbs that are coming in to grab me too. I can't tell if she is gaining on me. . . turning around would slow me down. Will she catch me in 5 minutes? or 5 seconds??? The forest gives way to a tunnel, and I start yelling. I'm trying to gauge my distance from the train by how much reverb my yell has. Sort of a primitive radar. But in real life, I just start coughing and wake up.

 


HIDEOUS VIOLENCE AND AGONY


My family and I are in some European museum, or possibly outdoors in a cemetery. There's some statues but one in particular is of a man with his arms stretched out - as if to attack or to ward off an attack- and he looks like a very realistic statue. Then I realize he's a human that's been turned to ash like Pompeii. His face has been blasted away and you can see his skull sockets. Also he's got the biggest erection I've ever seen. I'm backing away terrified yet too aroused to look away, and I back into some really Old tall thin queen who tells me, 'it's ok son, I feel it too.' Looking at the mutilated face of the statue-man, I'm filled with the urge to rape and murder.

Then we're at my parent's doorstep. There's a pile of huge oversized Sunday papers at the door, easily 1 by 4 feet long. They're all really obscure, highbrow newspapers compared to which the new york times is like USA today. 'aw no, do I get stuck with the new york times again?'

Dad is reciting to me names of guys I should know, right-wing old white authority figures of some sort. They have some tv show where they go shopping without women. I catch a mental glimpse of the show. The guys are on some sort of vehicle speeding into a wall. I'm onboard somehow and terrified. They slow down at the last second and miss the wall, then disembark the vehicle and go looking for turtleneck sweaters.

Then I'm reading the NYT magazine. It's got an article about some country I've never heard of in north Africa or possibly the mideast, on a high plateau. There's something unspeakably violent going on over there. US troops have been flown in to keep order. Meanwhile, suspicious enclaves of old, rich people from that country are starting to crop up in this one area of the Midwest.

There's a huge number of pictures of this one incredibly wizened old brown lady, wearing this wrinkled pink shawl that covers her whole body, the shawl looks disturbingly like the scrotal skin of an old old man. She's happy to be in USA away from the unspeakable war or genocide or whatever. But she's also totally worried about her children, what kind of monsters they are being turned into back home. She actually wants to get on a plane back and save them, though she knows she'd probably die. There's picture after picture of this woman in incredibly exploitive agony, crying, and beating her breast and turning her head to the heavens.

Then it cuts to this movie of soldiers on these weird motorcycles where 3 people stand up on them. They're flying and then coming in for a fast landing in this foreign country. It's like the US military is allowed there, but they can only have 2 people on a vehicle. These guys are sneaking in a third man hidden in back.-probably some CIA guy who's going to try to solve the problem over here. But in my dream I have x-ray vision and can see 3 skeletons on board, so I know the local troops will try to kill them if they suspect. The first 2 groups get past the checkpoint ok, but the third group are going, 'oh, shit, we fucked up, they're on to us.' And sure enough one of the locals says, stop, stop. And the USA guys just start blasting him with uzis. The local guys fire back.

Then it cuts to the POV of a second flying motorcycle-thingy going screamingly fast behind the first one. They're watching the first one get in a massive firefight with this flatbed truck of local army guys. And saying, don't shoot back, guys. But the army guys return fire, and as a result, the surviving local guys are so mad they just jump off the moving truck and tackle the motorcycle army guys. And this causes the second motorcycle to just crash into the whole dogpile of fighting men. Now everyone's on foot, and totally wounded. Limbs are torn, bullet holes, this one guy's hands are kind of worn down to nubs from sliding along the ground from the accident. we can see they're all just kids, 18 years old at most. Some of the army guys, have the local guys on the ground, shooting them and mocking them. One local guy seems miraculously unharmed, but he's just standing there frozen in shock. Then the army guys start to walk away. Then some other guys are shooting at them, and they get away again but they're so totally wounded now. They're all constantly screaming in pain as they limp along. One army guy they leave behind, he comes hopping up on one leg, his other leg broken in 3 places and sticking out at odd angles. The ball of his femur protrudes through his abdomen. Everyone is embarrassed that he's still alive since they cowardly left him behind. He asks another army guy to hold his wounded leg. The guy replies in agony, "I can't, I don't have any skin on my hands!" and holds up his hands, which are abraded down to the bones. This gets even worse when I force myself to wake up. As I gradually awaken I am aware I have a 'morning boner'-I'm half-aware of my erection even as I'm still seeing the mutilated soldiers.

I force myself to wake up fully at that point, because, jesus Christ, man.

 


SIMPSONS GO BOWLING

The Simpsons open a bowling alley. It's a huge success. Cut to Shelbyville, where the mafia guys are lining up to receive their daily assignments. One guys says, 'i've got an order for a coma at such-and-such bowling alley.' The next guy in line says, 'hey, me too!' (presumably the orders are to beat the customers into a coma, and are placed by rival bowling alleys losing business). Cut back to the bowling alley, were Bart's in the bathroom, pulling up his pants. Then he's pouring a champagne bottle into the urinal. "Priming the pump, heh,heh, heh" he says. I don't get it. the bathroom is incredibly clean and sparkly. You hear someone's voice saying, 'you did such a good job cleaning the men's room' "Yeah! In your face, women's bathroom!" 'but. . . . why don't you clean the rest of the place?' and it cuts to the hallway outside, which is utterly filthy dimly lit, and vaguely industrial in construction, looking like a tenement or a slaughterhouse. I get the impression we're deep in the bowels of the gigantic building but still outside of the bowling alley, itself.

The camera is in a fairly large room, but it's so dim I can't see how dim. It's looking down upon a catwalk which ends abruptly, about fifteen feet above the ground. A group of shabby bowlers is shuffling down the catwalk, and then making a risky leap to this rickety old ladder which takes them down to the ground . On ground level (off to the left) is a big metal door leading to the stairs which take you down to the actual bowling lanes. Somebody is saying, "Hey, Principal Skinner, you won the jumping contest last night." Skinner says, "I have no recollection of that" but he's walking with a severe limp.

Earlier in the dream, I'm coming into this miles-long, miles-wide bowling alley. It's all one room, too. it's so big, the patrons are transported by a sort of monorail that snakes like a roller-coaster through the building. Only instead of riding on top of the monorail, they put a meat-hook in your back and you're dangling under it. This affords you a panoramic view of the giant room. It's pretty dimly lit, mostly metallic browns and greens, more like a dingy factory or power plant than a bowling alley. Huge machines and transformers, other conveyor belts are dimly seen far below. The conveyor belt takes you past a rack of bowling balls. The other patrons know exactly how to spot their personal bowling ball and how to grab it as they pass by. I'm new, so I can't manage to grab one. I keep fumbling for ball after ball, aware that once I pass the ball rack, I can't go back. The balls are lime-green, semi-transparent, and about the size of apples. The holes are far too small to fit one's fingers in, which is why I can't grab them. At this point, the conveyor belt is only fifteen feet off the ground, so I just unhook myself and jump to the ground. The bowling ball case has maybe 100 rows and 200 columns. Like a database. I'm trying to find out what system they're using to determine what ball goes in what row, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Then it cuts to the skyline of New York City. The statue of liberty has been replaced by Homer Simpson, holding a bowling ball aloft. But it's very cold during the night, and the statue freezes. The next morning, Homer's fingers are half-frozen, and half-thawed, and have somehow become too-big to fit inside the bowling ball. The rest of him is still a statue, but the fingers writhe like worms, half-in and half-out of the ball. Then it cuts to newspaper headlines complaining about the drunken debauchery at the bowling alley, which turns into a montage of web-pages complaining about the debauchery, but the webpages are drawn in the Simpsons style, but THEN it cuts to REAL, flashy web-graphics complaining about the debauchery. It's a very excellent, well-done montage.

Then it cuts to fairly realistic 3d animations of some two-headed African boy. He looks like a Rorschach blot. He's got his arms stretched out wide, and his body's contorted so his legs wrap over his shoulders, and his heads stretch out in opposite directions. He's spinning in midair, rotating about the axis of his outstretched arms. As he spins, his huge cock flaps back and forth. Then it cuts to a nest of baby snakes. The 'camera' is in the bottom of the nest, shooting the action through the coils of the snakes. The baby snakes are Siamese twins, joined at the lower lip. Looking from below, we can see that the lower lips have huge holes in them, through which the fangs protrude. The baby snakes are having a silent tug-of-war over the lower lip.

Then the baby snakes morph into a dozen pairs of baby birds, also joined at the beak. They're all struggling and deformed. I'm suddenly a character in the dream again, and ask someone (I don't know who, we're both off-camera) , "Why don't you snip the beaks apart?" and she says, "Because that's what makes this species unique. Without humans, they would die, they couldn't live in the wild." But I'm so grossed out by them, I grab an icepick and attempt to knock 2 of the baby birds apart. But their nest is so precariously balanced on a mountaintop, that my intervention causes it to tip. So the 2 baby birds I 'saved' have to throw themselves off the side in order to restore the balance and save the rest of the birds. I go, "eeeuhhh."

Then it cuts back to the bowling alley; or rather, a warehouse adjunct to the alley. This scene, like the scene preceding it, is 'regular style' (not animated or computer-generated) . The warehouse is full of nothing but alcohol. There's truck after truck making deliveries of what's labeled 'Irish Funeral-Size' beers. They're the size of kegs, stacked on huge palletes. One of the truck drivers spills one of the giant beers, onto the filthy reeking floor. It goes into this special vat, with all the other 'spilled' or 'recycled' beer.

Meanwhile, Spinal Tap have all got day-jobs as loaders in the warehouse. They're back to being animated in the Simpsons style. They're drinking out of the 'recycled' beer vat. It's unclear if they have been 'fooled' into drinking the filthy beer, or if they prefer it. The beer in the vat has obviously undergone some transformation due to the bacteria, fungus, or other fluids poured into the vat. It's all a foamy, mucousy white color now. And Spinal Tap is soaked with the beer, and begin to vomit. Then they dare each other to vomit on each other. It looks like they're coated in semen.

Meanwhile the Shelbyville Mafia guys from the first scene (hired by rival bowling alleys) finally get to the alley to beat someone into a coma. But Spinal Tap is so coated that the mafia guys don't mess with them

 


OTHER CASTRATION DREAM

in the desert there's a row of huge, Frankenstein looking metal tables in the sand. on each table lies a male porn star, who is hooked up to some big iron tubes that run through the sand. all the equipment looks like something from an oil refinery. the porn stars are having some experimental new penis enlarging treatment. their penises are cut off and then stretched out on the burning sand and shish-kebabed on these iron pipes. maybe the original idea was to let the pressure of oil in the pipes inflate the cocks, but what has really happened is that the cocks just dried out and turned into beef jerky. I guess they temporarily removed the guys' cocks so as to hook the machines up to the guys' crotches. . . Somehow in all the confusion of hooking up these big exciting oil-refinery machines, the people forgot to reattach the penises. They're just sitting there in the sand, all in a row. I am really grossed out by this, and start trying to whittle 'replacement cocks' out of carrots. but the first person to come up and demand a carrot cock is a lady, some butch dyke. I feel this is unfair since she didn't just lose a penis.

 

 

THAT DARN BUTCH MECHANIC!

this morning something utterly unique happened. I had a deep sleep dream that gradually turned into a lucid dream, a daydream, and finally into a conscious fantasy, all without breaking continuity!!! I was on my way to a concert. my car breaks. I am rescued by a tall, butch Asian mechanic with greasy overalls, a mesh tank top and a bald head. she tows me to her garage where she explains the problem. 'the wiring isn't touching,...' she says, pointing to frayed cables sottered to the underside of the open hood...'the connection is bad here and here and again here, furthermore....' she goes on and on and on, and I'm freaking out because in her desire to help me she is actually hurting: I am missing my party! and I can't tell her to shut up because she's sort of fixing my car for me, I don't want to piss her off. by this time I'm almost fully awake. I decide to be diplomatic and invite her to the show\party. she drives us there and in the parking garage we park and then she leans over and plants a kiss on my lips. I am not at all aroused. I'm totally angry that she would take advantage of the situation (my car is a hostage) to put the moves on me, and this is made worse because I really would like to kiss her if she weren't such a crap person!!

this is weird... supposedly in dreams you don't control the content but in your daydreams or imagination you do. so, once I and woken up and could 'control' it, why did I 'chose' to put this totally frustrating negative twist to it? so persistently negative that I chose to just get out of bed, rather than struggle in vain to come up with a happy end?? I am sure that this says something about the relation of the conscious to unconscious mind but I'm not sure what.

 

 

PHILADELPHIA GHETTO

I'm in a ghetto in Philadelphia. I drive to a gas station, passing muggings and violence on every block. As soon as I stop, some light-skinned black man with crazy eyes comes in the back door of my car.. He may or may not have a girlfriend standing out side. . . he talks as if he's talking to a third person but he may just be crazy. Realizing that the cops are after my car, I say, 'ok, you win, man. Take my car. It's yours.'

He's mad at me-"What do you think I am? Some kind of mugger?" then he lunges at me screaming. . . "Am I threatening you?"

I say, 'no really, it's on me. go ahead.'

Then he's happy.

But then he somehow crawls over the seat so he's right next to me and pulls out a pen and says 'i'd really be happy if you put this in your butt.'

I don't' say anything.

He says, eerily calm, pressing his face to mine, 'you don't understand. . . I'd be REALLY happy if you put this up your butt."

I say, 'why don't I go to the gas station store and buy you some candy instead?'

This seems to make him happy. I ask the store guy for what the mugger wanted. It's supposedly some lemon drink but it's packaged like a wrapped yellow condom. I am so nervous I leave the candy inside and walk out with my change. He sees that I didn't get his candy/condom thing, so he starts chasing me. . .

So I run to this hotel and check in a room. It's long and so narrow it's only got room for the bed. More of a jail cell with a carpet. But it seems safe. Until some darker, very serious black guy in a suit comes in. He's got a big leather bag. I ask him if he's an assassin. He says maybe, I say, 'because they call me Mr.-Doesn't-Snitch-On-Anyone.' Hoping he won't kill me.

then he goes to the window as if he's looking for targets. Then he opens up the bag and . . . it's full of colorful pinwheels! Then the door opens again-is it the maniac? No it's some old pensioner. And another . and another. It turns out the reason my room was so cheap is, there's a big giant closet (which I didn't notice before) where everyone in the whole building keeps their junk. And now there's this huge-ass line of old people getting crap out of my closet. I'm sure the psycho is in the line, and I can't stand the suspense so I start yelling, 'come on motherfucker, let's go! Where are you?'

As if to answer my question, the dream 'cuts' to the outside of the hotel. Which is right on the ocean. There's a huge mob of people walking out the door, which opens directly into waist-deep water! In the mob, I see the psycho wading out to sea. Right behind him in the crowd is TVs Lou Ferrigno (the man who played the Hulk). Psycho guy seems to be enjoying himself at first. Then he notices Lou so he speeds up a little. Lou speeds up a little. Psycho speeds up a lot. Lou speeds up a lot and starts turning green. Psycho begins to swim as fast as he can. He only gets like 3 feet before the Hulk puts him in a headlock and swims out to sea. He keeps yelling "it's so deep! It's so cold!' and even though I'm not even in the dream anymore I can feel the cold throughout my whole body suddenly. (my dreams have never felt cold before!!) eventually the Hulk drowns the guy. We see the she shadowy form of the body drifting down beneath the waves . then we see a far larger shadowy form coming up very rapidly.

It's an Orca Whale! It breaches the surface with a magnificent, nature-documentary-worthy backflip in slow motion. Suddenly the whole 'film' changes from a weird horror film to a new-age film. The Hulk starts swimming with the whales. Everyone's doing backflips in slow-motion. There's lens flares and exaggerated sparkles coming off of the scintillating water. Plus, soothing new age music. We see the Hulk, with a beatific grimace on his face, emerging slowly from the surf spinning 180 degrees in midair, and plunging back in, while whales cavort around him.

I am filled with a nameless joy.

 


CRAZY COMIC CONVENTION

I'm entering a comic book convention. It's in a small storefront, which has been divided into narrow, crowded alleys by placing bookshelves of comics. There's almost nobody else there. I'm browsing through millions of