Tuesday Night Dream

Dream

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...

Dream: Between The Magic Shop and the Prisoner's Craft Fair

This morning I had a highly  visual dream.

The cat woke me up, and after I threw him outside, I went back to sleep.

The first part of the dream was muddled and involved giant magical snow creatures.  They glowed with purple light. Some of them had gotten boulder-sized holes blown through them by an errant snowball.  This was more surprising in a Warner Brothers cartoon sort of way than it was painful for them.  

Each snow creature was a different story that followed people home.  In one case, a couple got pulled into a ghost dimension.  I think they were named Rachel and Bill. 

I was in their apartment for some reason (I was staying with them?).  They were there as ghosts (they may have been ghosted by the snow creature that followed them home), but I couldn't see them.  They were a little confused about what was going on.  There was an old wooden cabinet radio on, and when I poked a counter top with a silver arrow,  Rachel said, "ouch" over the radio as if I were poking her.   I switched to feathers, trying to figure out where they were, but feathers weren't that much more pleasant for them because they tickled too much.  

I had a sense of simultaneously being in the dream and controlling it, and I didn't want it to turn into a dark poke-fest where I was harming Rachel unwittingly.

There was a break; I tried to demonstrated the effect for A.B. and the dream turned into a talking dream about high drama people who fake drama.  

There was another break and I was driving my old Chevy Impala station wagon along Corvallis.  I was trying to get to work (at my current job in Eugene), and navigating heavy traffic on 4th Street.  (Waking I realize the traffic was from West Amazon and 35th, and the subsequent wrong turn I made was like the too early turn I made off of the Pacific Express Way onto North Park instead of Park).)  I turned right, realized I'd turned too early, and turned up a kind of wooden ramp.  There was a moment of not being able to make the break work, and worrying that I would crash into the cars ahead, but I managed to get the car out of control.

The car ramp went up about fifteen feet and I was looking over the square walls of a penitentiary.  The wooden road went around the prison, and I could see the wide, flat roof surrounding a large square courtyard.  (It feels very "Four of Pentacles" to me in waking life.)

Then I was in an administrative office of the penitentiary above the enclosed square courtyard below.  An inmate was firing something (marshmallow bullets? or maybe real bullets) at us -- "us" being me and two officers.  (I guess this was a prison riot of one?)  The inmate somehow climbed up the wall and tackled one of the officers.  I managed to hold down a stray arm and after a struggle, we handcuffed him and the crisis was over. 

Then I was walking with my parents and their friends in a park or outdoor mall.  I think there were fountains, and everything was green in the bright sunlight.  I was in my grey and green cloak.  We came up to a kind of Norwegian stave church, or pyramid, or hill.  (In waking life it was like the Enchanted Forrest meets a Viking Gift Shop meets the old Geological Museum at Oregon State University's Gill Coliseum.   The building was an odd mixture of old oak, concrete, and ski chalet.   The steeply sloped roof met at a sharp peak, and there were dormers opening up the very top floor.

We wanted to visit,.  There were two women inside, an older one with longish grey hair and a middle-aged one.  They were sort of unkempt, with lose brown robes and fly-away hair.    "Come in, come in," they crooned.  

It wasn't clear how to enter.  I climbed up some stairs; it seemed to enter you had to climb over the base of the building and half-way up the side.  The two women were in an upper loft, and I made it to a funny kind of dutch door with  a glass window set into it.  

"How do I get in?" I asked,

"Just push the door open," they said.  "Yes that's right, push, just push."

There wasn't a knob that I remember, but I pushed the door forward and it slid forward on a kind of track. I walked into the building along a narrow wooden walkway.  It was like walking though book shelves.  They walked backwards until we were all in a kind of wooden loft with me on one side of the door and they on the other.  They started talking about the history of the building and its contents.

I realized that I was standing on a kind of a plank, and that I was suspended in air somehow.  As long as I held onto the door, I didn't have to worry about falling off.  The plank moved around the shadowy interior of the shop while the lecture continued.  I was sort of flying around the inside.

At some point the middle-aged woman noticed my cloak, and commented on how soft it was.

I think the theme of tour was "Myths and Gemstones of the Norse" or something.  I hovered over a gift display of small gemstones, still standing on the plank and holding onto the edge of the door.  One of the women gave me a very small magnifying lens to look at them, but the platform lifted away on the tour before I was through. 

I was swinging around the shop, over the heads of the other customers.  

The final stop was day-glow rocks under a black light.  One of the displays was a kind of glowing crystal geode which was a haunted light-house diorama that had a toy car (with working headlights!) come out of a tunnel, and the car skidded out of control and drove off the cliff.  I couldn't exactly see the metal rod moving the car, but it zoomed behind the glowing crystal outcropping and came out of the tunnel again.  The whole set-up had a "spooky 1950's" vibe to it.

There was a break, and I was walking in a kind of park.  I may have been trying to get back to Rachel and Bill's apartment.  A kind of shabby Saturday market was in my way, and I tried to go around it.  It seemed like it was the prisoners' craft fair, with various craftsmen in dusty, shabby, over-sized grey coveralls.  (Now that I think about it, they looked like a Maurice Sendak drawing)   And the outdoor booths set up felt extra sketchy.  More and more booths seemed to be in my way, and I became more and more hemmed in as I continued. 

I walked past some young people playing a version of street baseball.  Something brushed against my cloak (which may have turned into my black and purple cloak), and I kept walking.  

Shouts of "Hey! He stole our ball!" sounded behind me, but I kept walking.  Then there was a gaunt, dark, dirty 20-something confronting me.  He had sort of dread-locked hair, was clean-shaven, and he was wearing baggy clothes; for a cloak he had tied a long, dusty grey blanket around his neck.  He might have had a stick or rod.  

I said that I didn't have his ball, but I shook out my cloak on the off-chance the ball had gotten caught up in the folds.  I was worried that the ball had been planted on me, and that I was being set up for a mugging or something.  

The ball player said something vaguely threatening, and followed me as I walked.  The way became more labyrinthine, with doors opening up on hallways of doors and difficulties opening one door blocking another.  Somehow I got away from the man and ended up in the Norwegian Magic Rock Shop.

The middle-aged woman, out of her frumpy witch outfit and in a kind of knee-length sheath dress with some sort of piping or plaiting on the front, came out from another door and we started talking about imagination and magic.  A large flat-screen (which I don't recall from the earlier scene) lit up and she started singing a song about how the early Disney movies and the fairy tales first sparked her imagination.  The screen became like Fantasia, and the woman sang about watching a country western, and sure enough there'd be the spirits of the people and land in the mesa.  On the screen the rocks and cacti became whirlwind spirits of horses and cowboys and cowgirls and danced a hoe-down.  There was more cartoon pantheist imagery of objects and spirits turning into each other.   Her song felt like one of those 1970's After School Specials; she didn't have the best voice and the tune was kind of hokey.

And then I woke up with one of my arms asleep.

===

Commentary:

Last night Mark and I had a discussion about houses, finances, and writing spaces -- which I think may be driving the dream.

Dreaming about prisons is something unusual.  There was a lot of square imagery which makes me think it was a dream symbol about being constrained by boundaries.

The dusty, dark, shadowy ball player seems like a shadow self or guardian figure.  The more I look at Maurice Sendak pictures, the more the ball player seems like a more thuggy Max from "Where the Wild Things Are"

I wonder if "prisoner craft fair" is a symbol for the writing and marketing process.  You can Google them... and coincidentally, the Spring Street Fair started on campus today (I had no idea...)

The Labyrinth of Doors seems a fairly straight-forward, "If you want to do something, you've got to do something else first" message.

I have no idea what the two witch figures in the Norwegian Magic Rock Shop were doing, unless they were the opposite end of "Prisoner Craft Fair."  No, I have not been listening to Varttina lately.

  

Strange Dreams

Lately my dreams have been more memorable and vivid, and I should make an attempt to wrtie them down.

In the one Monday morning, I started out as a re-enactor in a Roman campaign or documentary.  As the dream progressed it became more like I was flipping back and forth between two alternate realities; one where I was a Roman centurion arrayed for a battle along a river, and another where I was house-sitting for my parents and helping one of their (non-reality-based) older neighbors.  

As a Roman, I remember wading through a river and we had a convict or slave or captured soldier tied up in a small boat/canoe that we were going to sacrifice to Mars (or something).  There was a scene where we had children in our ranks, and there were three squads of them playing horns:  the oldest did a proper "it's time to sleep" horn call, the next, kids around eight, did a simplified version.  I forget what the third squad did.  I remember being given permission to go on leave, and I did, but somehow I knew that we had our marching orders, so I was dragging out returning as much as I could. 

I'm thinking the house-sitting segments of the dream happened when I was "off site" from the Roman campaign.  As the dream progressed, the re-enactment parts became more real and less acting.  At one point I remember telling her (the neighbor) that I would get back to her (she was moving or packing out of her largish house) but that if I got my marching orders, I'd be unavailable. 

Tuesday morning.  I remember I was in a medieval setting.  I want to say I was a minstrel or a Robin Hood figure.  There was a very large castle set on top of a craggy green hill.  The recall isn't so good on this dream.  There was a Queen in White, who wanted to support her Lord, but he wasn't very nice.  There was a Young Princess of the Meadow, who was the love interest in the dream.  There was a older Tyranical King, who wanted to lock me (the Minstrel) up but I'm not sure if it was because the Princess was going to marry me or someone else I was helping, or because I was really the ruler of the Land and he only ruled the Castle.  There was a lot of musical numbers, with me singing to the Princess in the wooded meadow below the hill... and there was a scene climbing up the outside of the castle in order to hide among the chimneys (?from the King?).  

Then it turned into a trying to walk through a labyrinthine neighborhood dream (or possibly a college campus), only I could fly.  This did not stop me from accidentally trespassing into somebody's yard while they were trying to trim trees or build a bridge between two stone arch things while they worked from three ladders lashed together.

Wednesday morning.  All I remember was that I was at an outdoor craft faire, which may or may not have been renaissance themed.  There was an awkward extended family problem, like someone's great-uncle had died, or someone's young little-girl cousin was having Issues, or something (I suspect the soap-opera family relations from Agents of SHIELD affected my dreams.)  I was flirting with someone, and what really sticks out from this dream was that he touched the back of my hand (maybe the cat wanted something and was batting my hand?).

Working Out:  Tuesday.  200 cal in just under 20 minutes on the rowing machine.  3x8 at 15, 14, 13 on the chin/dip assist.  3x12x50lbs on the pec fly.  3x12x80lbs on the lat pull-down.  3x13 curls.  2x12x12lbs  overhead triceps curls