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.
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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.
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GAY KRIS KRINGLE / STYROFOAM WATERFALL / MRS. ROPER IS SOMEHOW ALSO YOKO ONO 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.
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Whales careening
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.
No commentsMarilyn Manson at Kichijoji
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.
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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.
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