Very long, mish-mash dream. it started out with me in our car. I was driving The Child to a class or appointment or camp. Oddly enough, we started out from my folks' house in Corvallis, looking down off of their hill at Corvallis in the valley.
Right away I took a wrong turn. "Oh well," I said, "I can take this road and it will join up further along." My sense in waking was that I had mashed together Oak Creek Drive, Walnut Drive, and 9th Street and Walnut in Corvallis with Highway 99 and 53rd Street (In Corvallis) with the Pacific Expressway and parts of 6th Street and Perl in Eugene. I came to the intersection (sort of like Walnut and 28th) where I wanted to turn, but the road was closed for construction (I'm reminded in waking life of the work they were doing that closed 24th off of Willamette in Eugene).
"Darn," I said. "Well, I guess we'll just have to go downtown a slightly longer way." The Child was fairly passive during this drive, and continued to sit in the back seat. I don't remember if we had a conversation or not.
I finally got around town (which felt like 9th street beyond the Corvallis Bi-Mart), and I turned down a one-way street... which was blocked by a white and orange barricade, around which were walking a zillion girl-scouts. It was some sort of walk-a-thon, and most of the streets were closed so they could do it.
"What!?" I was furious. I eased the car forward to where there was an opening in the barricade; it was too small for our car, and in any case, a bevy of girl scouts kept streaming through it (in waking life I'm reminded of when particularly clueless undergraduates stroll through the parking lot where I work, wearing white headphones, in the middle of the lanes, s-l-o-w-l-y, and completely oblivious to the fact that there's someone in a 5 ton metal machine behind them who wants to try to squeeze into the compact car stall that's between two undeserving SUV's taking up the compact car stalls on either side.).
There was a narrow turn-around on the right, and I turned into it so I could make a T-turn and go the other way. Immediately, girl scouts swarmed behind the car, I was annoyed and worried that I'd back over one.
There's a break in the recall. A bunch of us, (Mark might have been there) were walking along a sunny concrete promenade. It was like the concrete walkway above the beach at Seaside, Oregon... except I don't recall a beach. We walked along; I don't recall who was in the group -- it might have been Wordos, it might have be Arcosanti folks. I was near the lead and I started to go down some steps. The steps became thinner and thinner. I or someone yelled, "Hey, don't retract the steps," but they kept retracting. The stairs became narrower, and the stairway steeper until the edge of the bottom-most step was flush with the others, and we stumbled off of a concrete cube. Everyone else was about sixteen feet above us.
"Look out for the tines," a construction circus worker said (who definitely felt like an Arco Resident). I hadn't noticed it (since I was busy sort of not-falling) but I'd landed on either side of forklift tines, which rose up the edge of the concrete cube stairs. There may have been warning beeps.
We were in a kind of open pit. The ground was sandy, and everything felt like it was made of sandstone.
There is another recall / continuity break.
I was in a large crowd at the base of a stage. It was a kind of rock crowd, but there was only one man on the stage, and he was a kind of prophet. The stage was shallow and very broad, and the man was was walking in front of dioramas of anxiety and guilt. I don't recall his face other that it was clean-shaven. He had a mane of shaggy brown hair. My sense was that he wore a motley coat of brown patchwork.
The people in the crowd were drawn to whatever part of the diorama drew them. I only remember the part that was dark trees and plastic bits and the man said something about environmental sins. I thought the scene was distasteful, with too much emphasis on sin and not enough on fixing stuff. But everyone else seemed to be eating it up.
Another break.
Somehow, I'd gotten invited to the Brown Patchwork Man's house or domicile. The room was dark. There was a metal branch object d'art on the wall. In the corner was a kind of stringed psaltery, the metal strings over a kind of star zillij pattern.
There was a walking stick insect in the room, except it didn't look like a typical walking stick. Its legs were much wider and flatter, sort of like a Christmas cactus's, and in waking life it reminded me more of a relation of the sea horse called a sea dragon. It scurried around more quickly than I think walking sticks do (I always think of them as moving slowly).
Somehow, instead of travelling with Mark or The Child, I was now in charge of a boy and a girl, brother and sister. They were very much like the kids in "The Cat in the Hat."
They were working with Brown Patchwork Man, who was helping them to paint ceramic objects with various canned latex-based paints with widish paint brushes. I think the boy was painting a white ceramic car with red paint. (The Wordos are painting their new white ceramic piggy bank, which is replacing the one they've had since before I joined in 2002, but which has a broken and sharp ear.
What I remember better was that the Brown Patchwork Man was helping the little girl to paint a mask. This was also white ceramic, but as they added a purple coat to it, the mask became like a grinning theatre balloon mask. It also became animated and scurried backward and forward around the contents of the dark room. I'm trying to remember if it said anything... I'm afraid my recall is not so good. My sense was that there was a mild sense of menace from the Brown Patchwork Man, more so than if I were the Fish and he were the Cat in the Hat... more like he wasn't quite safe, and beginning to slide into The Joker territory (in real life, The Child has an obsession with The Joker that I wish he didn't have).
There was an interlude with the walking stick and a white cat, which I suspect may have been prompted by our cat playing with something in the house.
And then things took a really dark Tim Burton type of twist. I think the purple mask started spitting green glowing clay at people, and I don't recall exactly how, but we were in a dark, day-glow conveyor room of clay. Some of it was figures (like the mask), some of it was more squishy blobs, and all of it was spitting green glowing clay everywhere. The Brown Patchwork Man was now in much darker clothing (and more Joker-like). He sang a song and walked along the glowing purple clay and dodged (mostly) the glowing green stuff.
There's a bit more, but I've forgotten it. I managed to scoop up the brother and sister, announced, "Time for your piano lessons!" and we got out of there.
There was another break and I was skateboarding along a mashed-up Corvallis; first I was on something like Polk and 20th Street, near the old Harding Elementary School, and then I was on top of the hill where my folks live and I skateboarded into a torrent of water cascading down the hill. Insert electrical hum and electrocution anxiety here...
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